mynona wrote:Tom T. wrote:Another edit: Just noticed that your browser version is showing as 3.6.3. That is way out of date. The current version of 3.6 is 3.6.24, which I myself use frequently. There were some critical security patches along the way, so please update to 3.6.24 as soon as possible. Your settings should be preserved after the Update function.
Tell that to the administrators of my high school. They seem to be under the impression that their filter and firewall is protection enough. I haven't used used the 4.x-x.x branch of Firefox since it left beta, and I'd love to for various reasons. Alas.
I'll be happy to tell them. Just point them to this thread.
@ High School Administrators: Updates often fix critical security vulnerabilities that will *not* be caught by firewalls, because the firewall must always allow the browser. So any evil on the Web that gets into the browser will *not* be stopped by the firewall. Filters may block bad sites, but
a good site can be hacked to run bad code. (It's happened to all of them, even the biggest.) The latest versions of Fx and NS are best at preventing that, but older versions might not provide protection against recently-emergent threats. So filtering bad sites isn't enough.
Fundamental principles of computer and Internet safety include obtaining security updates ASAP. The versions of Firefox with the most up-to-date security fixes are presently 3.6.24 and 8.0. Please allow your systems to update. If you choose to update the 3.6.x branch, it should preserve most, if not all, of your settings, so there is not a large chore to reconfigure things. Installing 8.0 fresh would take a bit more time. But please do not set a bad example for your students by running obsolete versions with
known security issues. Thank you.
@ mynona: Let me know how that works out for you ...
If it doesn't, would they let you run
Fx Portable from a flash drive?
mynona wrote:Why are user-agents shown publicly here? It seems the average NoScript user would be more... tin-foil-hatish about information like that being available to everyone
First, please know that every web site on the planet sees your IP (so they know where to send the page), your OS and version (because some pages might need alternate coding for Win, Mac, and *nix, or even for different versions of Windows), and your browser and version (same reason: Pages must code differently for different browsers, especially IE vs. the rest. Also, versions of the same browser may make a difference.)
No IP display here (except available to Moderators for banning spammers, etc.), as that's potentially-personal ID info. Showing the OS and version helps the team if an issue mght be, say, Mac-specific. Knowing the browser version # is crucial, because there are a lot of differences between F3 and F8 (or F10). And SeaMonkey has version #s different from Fx.
As far as display to users:
First, we have several long-time users here who, although not Moderators, are quite knowledgeable, and often contribute answers when none of the unpaid, volunteer (cough) Moderator/Support Team is available, so some questions get answered more quickly. They'd need the same info. Same with the update reminder in my previous post. Also, other readers who are interested in a post may wish to know if it applies to their version or OS. We encourage users to search the forum for answers before posting, so this info helps others.
Secondly, I'm about as privacy-conscious as anyone I know -- virtually tin-hat-tish
-- but I don't see the harm or privacy invasion from someone knowing that I'm using Win XP ATM. For all they know, I may have a multi-boot system, or more than one computer, etc., and use other systems at other times. Same with the browser. In fact, I'll sometimes check something in both versions - F3 and F7 until recently, now F8 - to make sure it works across the board, or that differences are addressed. That reply is more meaningful with the version displayed, although I usually specify in the post which version is in use ATM.
The presence of MS .NET, and version, may play a part in diagnostics.
If you're seriously concerned about browser fingerprinting, get six different versions of Fx on a portable drive, and alternate their use.
Or change your useragent manually -- there's an add-on that makes it easier, but I'm not going to encourage users to get it. Some stuff may break if the UA is changed in certain ways, and having a unique UA makes browser fingerprinting much more precise.
Thirdly, any post from IE is probably spam without even reading it.
A lot of users would probably forget to tell us such critical info as OS and browser, if it weren't displayed.
We'd like them to tell us what version of NS they're using -- see
Forum Rules #10 and #11 -- because we can't see that, without doing some active sniffing (snooping) that would indeed be against the principles of NoScript. Some do, some don't.
In closing, if you are in fact on a school machine, it might be shared by dozens or hundreds of other users, which makes any personal info gleaned rather useless.
