Archive for June 8, 2018

Friday, June 8, 2018

Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0

John Wilander (Hacker News, The Verge):

ITP 2.0, as opposed to earlier versions, immediately partitions cookies for domains determined to have tracking abilities. The previous general cookie access window of 24 hours after user interaction has been removed. Instead, authenticated embeds can get access to their first-party cookies through the Storage Access API. The API requires that the user interacts with the embedded content.

[…]

ITP 2.0 has the ability to detect when a domain is solely used as a “first party bounce tracker,” meaning that it is never used as a third party content provider but tracks the user purely through navigational redirects.

[…]

Through our research, we found that cross-site trackers help each other identify the user. This is basically one tracker telling another tracker that “I think it’s user ABC,” at which point the second tracker tells a third tracker “Hey, Tracker One thinks it’s user ABC and I think it’s user XYZ.” We call this tracker collusion, and ITP 2.0 detects this behavior through a collusion graph and classifies all involved parties as trackers.

[…]

ITP’s purging of website data does not prevent trackers from receiving the so called referrer header which reveals the webpage the user is currently on. In ITP 2.0, the referrer, if there is one, is downgraded to just the page’s origin for third party requests to domains that have been classified as possible trackers by ITP and have not received user interaction.

Previously: Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention.

Yahoo Messenger Will Shut Down After 20 Years

Ingrid Lunden (via Luke Dormehl, Hacker News):

It’s the end of an era for Yahoo Messenger, one of the first instant messaging apps on the market. Today, Oath (which also owns TechCrunch) announced that it would be winding down the service on July 17 as it continues to experiment and consider how and if it can have a relevant place in the messaging landscape amid huge domination from Facebook and others in mobile apps.

“There currently isn’t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger,” the company writes. “We’re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta).” Squirrel is a group messaging app Yahoo started testing last month. You can request access to the beta here.

Previously: AIM Will Shut Down After 20 Years.

Facebook Posts Accidentally Made Public

Heather Kelly (via Dylan Byers):

For a period of four days in May, about 14 million Facebook users around the world had their default sharing setting for all new posts set to public, the company revealed Thursday.

The bug, which affected those users from May 18 to May 22, occurred while Facebook was testing a new feature.

The 2013 Mac Pro, Five Years Later

Stephen Hackett:

On June 10, it will have been five years since Apple first showed off the iteration of the Mac Pro that has come to be known as The Trashcan.

To put that in a little context, it was the same WWDC keynote where iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks were introduced.

[…]

That comment about OpenCL is an important one. Apple had bet big that executing computational tasks on the GPU was going to be a big deal, but it never really took off on the Mac. Maybe that was due to OpenCL itself, or the high cost of entry to the Mac Pro, but the truth is that the CPU remained the heart of most workflows for high-end Mac users.

As this was going on, Mac Pro customers started complaining of GPU failures. In February 2016, Apple opened a Repair Program for the machine, as Joe Rossignol reported[…] Even with the GPU issues, Apple failed to revise the computer in any way.

And now OpenCL is deprecated.

Previously: New Mac Pro Won’t Arrive Until 2019.