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List:       gentoo-dev
Subject:    [gentoo-dev] Re: Fonts project meeting and elections
From:       Duncan <1i5t5.duncan () cox ! net>
Date:       2015-02-28 22:00:42
Message-ID: pan$d44fa$b6b64176$c85e8ca4$7b8f2c20 () cox ! net
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Michael Orlitzky posted on Sat, 28 Feb 2015 06:52:55 -0500 as excerpted:

> (The webfonts might be useful for clients, by the way. If they're not
> installed locally, your browser downloads them on-demand and caches them
> for later use.)

Well, unless the user tells it not to, of course. =:^)

(That's the TL;DR version, too.)

Firefox, RequestPolicy extension, set to disallow connection to domains  
(including fonts.google.com or whatever that common one is) other than 
the one directly browsed to, unless they've been specifically allowed 
from browsed domain to other-domain (or either one has been allowed 
globally).

Rather effective anti-tracker, anti-malware and ad-blocker, altho it does 
take some time to get all your normally needed alloweds set so normally 
browsed-to sites "just work" for the most part.  With youtube now 
switching to html5 video by default, for instance, with quite a few video-
feed domains and with many videos two-levels deep, it took a few hours of 
youtubing to get nearly all the first-level-video-server domains allowed 
from youtube, but I'm still hitting blocks on the first-level-to-second-
level permissions from time to time, and having to allow them as they 
come up.

But all that facebook and twitter tracking due to those nearly ubiquitous 
icons... just doesn't track... since I don't allow it globally and am 
pretty strict about allowing it per-site as well.  (Actually, as I seldom 
use those site and don't have accounts, and have actually followed links 
to say twitter only a few times and facebook possibly never, I basically 
don't allow it at all, but the general person who /does/ use them could 
simply be very selective about permanent alloweds and use temporary 
alloweds only when they actually want to use that functionality.)

Back on-topic, most web-fonts don't get downloaded either, since they're 
from some third party site.  I normally get the broken-character square 
instead, but most of the time functionality is obvious.

Basically like noscript, but for general third-party connections, not 
just scripts, etc.  Tho with both on (plus others like disconnect), a 
user often has to enable a site in multiple places to actually have it 
allowed.  Which is good; defense in depth and all! =:^)  Tho doing 
anything new on the web or browsing to a new site and getting it to work 
does tend to take me a bit longer than most, since I have to figure out 
what I have to turn on to get it to work, and what I can leave off as 
it's just tracking/ads/otherwise-unnecessary, does take a bit longer than 
it would if I were simply running around naked with everything hanging 
out to the world, as so many apparently choose to be, online if not IRL.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman


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