On: Support for Hello discontinued in Firefox 49

[Jaruzel]

The first thing I do on any new Firefox install is remove Pocket and Hello off the toolbar. I'm pretty sure most people do the same. In fact, I'm struggling to remember what Hello actually is...

[pmontra → Jaruzel]

And disable WebRTC because of local IP address leakage. Check yours at http://net.ipcalf.com/ :-)

[daurnimator → pmontra]

why is the local ip considered private information?

99% of people are going to be in 192.168.1.0/24 or 10.1.1.0/24. so it only takes 508 guesses.... not to mention that everyone is 127.0.0.1.

[ultramancool → daurnimator]

Local IP will remain consistent across sessions and so can be used to identify you as certain device at a given public IP.

[pmontra → daurnimator]

They also see my IPv6 address and all of that make fingerprinting more accurate. Real world example https://webrtchacks.com/dear-ny-times/

[cpeterso → daurnimator]

A site can very reliably identify you (across browsers, even) if it knows your public and private IP addresses. Your public IP address identifies which organization or network you're in and your private IP address identifies which machine within that organization or network you are using.

[daurnimator → cpeterso]

90% of the time I use IPv6. where I just have a global IP on every device. Identifies me directly (until I grab a new ipv6 address)

[annnnd → pmontra]

Seriously?!? Incompetence... Thanks for writing this, disabled.

EDIT: FF: about:config, media.peerconnection.enabled => false

[pessimizer → annnnd]

Thanks for this.

[pessimizer → pmontra]

Oh, great. Ugh, thanks.

edit: Now my ip is reported as "ifconfig | grep inet | grep -v inet6 | cut -d" " -f2 | tail -n1" which is amusing.

[chme → Jaruzel]

Hmm... I think "Hello" doesn't even show per default, at least on my machine. Or I cannot remember removing it.

I think the problem with "Hello" is more of a marketing and publicity one. Nobody uses it because they aren't being made aware of it.

[chris_wot → chme]

Nobody uses it because nobody asked for it.

[lucb1e → chris_wot]

Nobody asked for a telephone, they asked for faster horses.

[edraferi → lucb1e]

> Nobody asked for an [automobile], they asked for faster horses.

FTFY, assuming you're looking for the Henry Ford reference. People actually DID ask for the telephone. It was a natural extension of the widely deployed telegraph system.

[bnt → edraferi]

Maybe the OP was thinking of this?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express

[lucb1e → edraferi]

That makes sense, I think you're right.

[jhasse → chme]

In my experience the problem with Hello is that it's too buggy. I found appear.in to be a lot more reliable.

[_phaq → Jaruzel]

It's a video-call service which utilizes WebRTC...