[clug] browser connection question

[csirac2 at gmail.com]

Sent from my android device.

-----Original Message-----
From: Eyal Lebedinsky <eyal at eyal.emu.id.au>
To: list CLUG <linux at lists.samba.org>
Sent: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 12:07
Subject: [clug] browser connection question

> About 3 minutes later I see a connection
"CONNECT duckduckgo.com:443 HTTP/1.1" 200 257620
> The log shows activity without delay and the messages are timestamped anyway.
>
> What is causing this? I expected the closed tab to be done with this site.

Could it be related to the fact that this is selected as your search provider (ctrl+k search thingy?) I'm not saying this is an excuse, but might just be an accident of lazy implementation of some unused/unimportant feature.

> <OT> As an aside, I see a connection to www.eff.org:443 every 5 minutes. And I thought
> I disabled all those pesky features. Sad to see Mozilla diverging so far from the
original manifesto of openness and treating the user as in charge.</OT>

This is why there are whole distro's built around protecting information leakage: it really does take an expert to configure such things these days. Most famous is Tails [1], but I think Whonix [2] is much stronger technically, and they've received funding re recently to do QubesOS integration [3].

You really need to build your browser with WebRTC support disabled, fiddle with config etc. If you really want to stop your PC from being so chatty :/

[1] http://tails.boum.org/
[2] http://whonix.org/
[3] http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/06/04/otf-funding-announcement.html