Does anyone know why Firefox always phones home to:
somerandomserver.compute.amazonaws.com
I have a tool called TCPView (a Microsoft sysinternals tool) that inspects my traffic. I disabled all the Mozilla telemetry and it still phones home to this server. The connection is encrypted going through port 443. It even appears in different forks of Firefox like Waterfox. Is this unique to me, or does anyone else notice this?
My best guess is that it's some sort of telemetry they're collecting. Keep in mind I disabled updates so it's not pinging update servers either. Also: It happens only when I visit a website, and doesn't appear when I start up the browser for the first time. I also have no plugins installed. Since I see some Mozillians in this thread I figured it's the best place to ask!
> Say you are building a site that will make use of very heavy JS code, to the point that the code is critical to your business and you do not want it copied or stolen. How do you protect it? Can you protect it?
There are countless obfuscation tools out there, but in the end if someone wants your code, they can reverse it into more readable code and steal it, using it on their website/webapp. It's the way browser engines are designed that ensures this. JavaScript is there for the taking and is not compiled into machine code. It's interpreted. So no, you can't protect it. No matter how much you abuse the eval() function or mangle the code[1]
> there are just way too many walled gardens between the various parties that hold the data necessary to implement any of the above.
This is changing. If Google had their way, they would be assigning IPV6 addresses to bits of dust lying around in your house and trying to assign semantic meaning to them. If they had their way.
I like to use Otherside to create different lists on different topics[1]. You just pick the person most likely to be following a certain niche of users, and Otherside creates a private list for you. You can make the list public and share it with others if you want.
For a start, don't overthink this. There's a wealth of tools[1] you can use that have all the functionality you're looking for baked in. If you're concerned about copying others work, don't be. Everyone does it. Why re-invent the wheel? Just be careful copying things like images and copy, as you will have to be original there[2]. There's actually not much skill required for this stuff, and this is why basic coding skills should be taught in school, because there's little 'grit' to this. Make something bold, do this: <strong>bold</strong>. Not so hard. The hard part is doing this at scale and this is why you need to simply accept that coding sites is a lot of repetition.
So to answer your question - I started by calmly accepting that as a developer, I would be typing out a lot of the same bits of code over and over, often creating <table> soup in the early days, and have since moved onto <div> soup and then styling accordingly with CSS. Sadly there is this trend of designing sites in reverse and people doing all the CSS and JavaScript first, and only when they're ready they start adding actual content.
It's for educational purposes only. You are right - Nobody should use this for hiding secrets! This is why I enjoy crypto done purely on the frontend, preferably with JS and no leakage to third parties.
I've never seen this happen to a comment before. (Thanks for reposting the links). Did it get downvoted to death or something? I'm not seeing any negative points on it though
The single point of failure was the posteo.de[1] account. Surely doing business over this kind of channel was doomed to fail. Infosec Twitter is alight with conspiracy theories that receiving money was the least of the attacker's concerns. I too believe that they just wanted to cause damage and piss people off in Ukraine, using the ransom functionality of the software as a front. BTW: Instead of using email, what should they be using to offer support and arrange payment? Some sort of encrypted instant messenger system?
I have a tool called TCPView (a Microsoft sysinternals tool) that inspects my traffic. I disabled all the Mozilla telemetry and it still phones home to this server. The connection is encrypted going through port 443. It even appears in different forks of Firefox like Waterfox. Is this unique to me, or does anyone else notice this?
My best guess is that it's some sort of telemetry they're collecting. Keep in mind I disabled updates so it's not pinging update servers either. Also: It happens only when I visit a website, and doesn't appear when I start up the browser for the first time. I also have no plugins installed. Since I see some Mozillians in this thread I figured it's the best place to ask!