The Tor Project is switching to Rust

OT on Tor:

Recently this link was on HN[1]. It ranks your browser on regular tracking and fingerprinting separately. "Tor without JS" was the only option I found to be completely fingerprint resistant. Even Tor "with JS on strict settings" ranked it as only "partly fingerprint resistant". (Interestingly firefox without JS never returns)

Scary stuff.

I'd like to hear other people's experiences/experiments here.

[1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

This tool is deeply flawed. Fingerprinting protection is sometimes done by binning, which this tool rewards, and is sometimes done by randomizing, which this tool harshly punishes. The net result is it generally guides you away from the strongest protection.

The flip side of this, having the complementary flaw of testing only persistence, not uniqueness, is (warning, real tracking link) fingerprinting.com/demo. You can try resetting your ID and seeing if it changes here. Since tracking requires (a degree of) uniqueness AND (a degree of) persistence, the danger signal is only failing both the EFF test and this test.

Failing both is a requirement to derive meaning, not being lax: measuring only uniqueness would fail a random number generator, and measuring only persistence would fail the number 4.

You make an interesting point on binning vs randomization. I'm not an expert but to me your point is consistent with Tor having the "best protection" according to the website, because I know that Tor's strategy is binning. However, this is what actually makes sense for many variables though. For example, font sizes come in integers. If you're trying to be clever by "randomizing" and claiming to use decimal-sized, you might be the only person in the world to do so and immediately fingerprinted. So I think that randomization might indeed be a bad idea in many cases.

Your link doesn't work though. I just get "file not found".