Artificial Intelligence – Fundamental Software, LLC

Are unblockable web trackers truly unblockable?

We saw the following article pass by on a reputable technology news website: “Bad news: ‘Unblockable’ web trackers emerge. Good news: Firefox with uBlock Origin can stop it. Chrome, not so much. Ad-tech arms race continues: DNS system exploited to silently follow folks around the web” (from The Register)

When we read about this, we immediately looked into whether or not these ‘unblockable’ trackers are indeed al they are cracked up to be: unblockable or not?

We performed a variety of tests and can confirm that IvyDNS blocks these so-called unblockables by default and has been blocking them for a while already. IvyDNS was able to do so automatically and independently (i.e. without any need for us to teach it about this scheme), was a pleasant surprise to us, but then again, IvyDNS’ Artificial Intelligence was designed and deployed to anticipate these types of bad actors. It did exactly what it was supposed to: learn, adapt, overcome! And thus, Betteridge’s Law applies to this post.

As an aside: the linked article provides a lot of information and is, mostly, factually correct, after all, The Register is known for quality journalism. However, we think that it is limited in its world-view: it pretends that browsers are the only thing that matter in the world of the Internet.

While it is true that this is how most individuals interact with the Internet, there’s more to the Internet than browsers. In the end, browsers still need to resolve domain names, and that’s where IvyDNS lives: on a deeper, more fundamental, networking level. (And we’ll talk about DoH – DNS-over-HTTP[S] in another blog post.)

Advertisers know exactly who you are… the data is NOT anonymized

Advertisers know who you are, where you go, when you go there and how much time you spend where you are: Advertisers will be able to upload email lists to target customers and similar audiences with ads on search, Gmail and YouTube.

This shows, yet again, that the claims about the data being anonymized, are false. This capability enables advertisers and those buying advertising time/space from (in this case) Google, to say “here’s an individual I want to show my ads to”(*).

What was that about “we don’t know who you are, you’re just an anonymous number to us“, you say? When the number is you, uniquely you, then you’re not anonymized, instead, you’ve been given an (additional) alias which makes it easier to be identified, not harder.

IvyDNS prevents you from ever being recorded as one of these (non-) ‘anonymous numbers’ in the first place. And even if you were recorded in the past, it makes your future footprints melt away before anyone gets a chance to see them. IvyDNS’ Artificial Intelligence contains comprehensive information about the purpose of domains used in tracking you, serves malware, serves advertising, invades your privacy.

(*) Interestingly, this also opens up a mechanism for those using advertising networks as delivery mechanisms for malware, to target very specific individuals for infection with their malware.

Web-of-Trust add-on caught selling out its users

The Web-of-Trust (WoT) add-on for Firefox and/or Chrome has been removed from the add-on repositories for Firefox and Chrome. Some excellent sleuthing(*) by the Norddeutscher Rundfunk revealed that the WoT add-on was selling data which can uniquely identify its users to other parties, without ever asking for consent for this, let alone in a clear and proper way.

On top of this, WoT made claims about anonymizing the data but, as is almost always the case, the data was either not anonymized at all or the anonymization is useless and individual users can be deduced from the data. If the article is correct, then it appears that the latter is the case, that these claims appear to be unsubstantiated and grossly misleading, and that WoT is no different from other privacy-invaders.

This is just another example of the kind of limitations that you face when you try to enhance your privacy through browser add-ons or extensions: they see everything you see and it only takes a single, rogue add-on to compromise you, your privacy and your security. And while most of these tools are valuable and useful, you need a more comprehensive tool to secure you, your on-line safety and your privacy.

This is where IvyDNS comes in: it prevents connections to undesirable domains and it does it on a deeper, more fundamental networking level than browser add-ons. IvyDNS’ Artificial Intelligence contains comprehensive information about the purpose of domains and blocks access to those that are undesirable, whether that is because the domain is used in tracking you, serves malware, serves advertising, invades your privacy, etc.

IvyDNS is also built so that it does not ever receive the kind information that WoT is reselling. This is because IvyDNS receives only DNS requests: ‘What is the IP address for domain X’. It never receives information about which page you are requesting, or even which protocol you will be using to talk to that server. You could be asking for the IP address of a domain because you want to check your e-mail, you want to visit a web page on it, or there’s an app that pulls data from there, etc… IvyDNS does not ever see or receive the purpose of requests (nor requests made to non-IvyDNS servers).

The reason for this is simple. It is none of our business, and it would be wrong to pull ‘stunts’ as described in the linked articles. We built IvyDNS with these considerations in mind. It offers deep protection from top to bottom and it keeps you secure, undisturbed and as private as it can, while you are on-line!

You can read the original article on NDR.de (in German) about WoT selling out its users, and read about it over at The Register.