25Sep
    Mozilla is facing a privacy complaint for using Firefox to enable tracking without getting user consent.

    The Austrian data protection authority (DPA) has received a complaint from Vienna-based privacy non-profit noyb, short for None Of Your Business, against Firefox maker Mozilla for enabling a new feature called Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA) without specifically requesting users’ consent.

    “Contrary to its reassuring name, this technology allows Firefox to track user behavior on websites,” said noyb. “Basically, the tracking is now managed by the browser instead of specific websites.

    Additionally, Noyb criticized Mozilla for supposedly adopting Google’s strategy by “secretly” turning on the feature by default without alerting users to it.

    PPA is similar to Google’s Privacy Sandbox project in Chrome and is now enabled as an experimental feature in Firefox version 128.

    Google has now abandoned the program, which aimed to replace third-party tracking cookies with a set of web browser-integrated advertising APIs that allow advertisers to learn about users’ interests and display relevant adverts.

    Stated differently, the web browser serves as a mediator, storing data about the many categories into which people may be assigned according to their online surfing habits.

    According to Mozilla, PPA is a “non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking,” allowing websites to “understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people.”

    Additionally, it is comparable to Apple’s Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution, which permits online marketers to gauge the success of their campaigns without jeopardizing user privacy.

    PPA functions as follows: Ad-serving websites can request that Firefox remember their advertisements in the form of an impression, which contains information about the advertising themselves, including the destination website.

    23Sep
    Definition of a network packet: What is a packet?

    What is a packet?

    A network is a group of two or more connected computers. The Internet is a network of networks — multiple networks around the world that are all interconnected with each other

    A packet is a brief section of a bigger communication in networking. Packets are used to separate data being delivered via computer networks*, like the Internet. The computer or device that receives these packets then reassembles them.

    Let’s say Alice is writing Bob a letter, but Bob can only fit envelopes the size of a small index card through his mail slot. Alice breaks up her message into much smaller chunks, each just a few words long, and writes these portions out on index cards rather than putting it on regular paper and then attempting to fit it through the postal slot. Bob receives the stack of cards from her, and he arranges them so he can read the entire message.

    Why use packets?

    It might be feasible, in theory, to transfer files and data across the Internet without breaking them up into discrete information packets. A lengthy uninterrupted line of bits, or discrete information units sent as electrical pulses that computers can understand, could be sent from one computer to another.

    However, if more than two computers are involved, this strategy quickly becomes unfeasible. No third computer could utilize the same connections to convey data while the lengthy line of bits traveled between the two computers; it had to wait its turn.

    The Internet operates as a “packet switching” network in contrast to this methodology. The ability of networking hardware to process packets independently of one another is known as packet switching. Additionally, it implies that packets can go via several network paths to reach the same location as long as they all get there. (In certain protocols, even if each packet traveled a different path to get there, they still need to arrive at their final destinations in the correct sequence.)

    Packets from different computers can flow across the same lines in virtually any order thanks to packet switching. This makes it possible for several connections to occur simultaneously over the same networking equipment.