Spying Browsers?

[Artim]

I try to stay away from "social" networks as long as I don't need them (And I really don't. I never used Facebook nor Twitter).

A lot of people are concerned about privacy and about intellectual property rights. My "social network" is Diaspora, which is kinda sorta like Fakebook (macroblogging), and just for grins and giggles I'm playing with Mastodon, kinda sorta like Twitter (microblogging). Federated, not centralized, privacy-respecting and you own all your own data. So far, so good.

[handy]

@ChrisUK, thanks for your reply. I read that you can turn off the sandbox & it works.

I just copied your command into the terminal & iridium started up. It complained about the sandbox not being used & said that both stability & security may suffer. At least the security part of that was obvious from the start.

Iridium immediately offered to import my bookmarks from Firefox (which I only have installed as a go to in case of failure), but it allowed me to choose an html file; so I could choose to use my Vivaldi bookmarks backup, which are now all there & functioning. :)

So now I can get to have a look around in iridium.

Thanks again Chris for making that so easy for me.

[philotux]

I'm running an older Kernel, but changing the Launcher Menu entry for Iridium Browser to

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dbus-launch iridium-browser %U --no-sandbox

launches without error.

What would be the implications of running it with --no-sandbox regarding to the security? Like a worst case scenario.

[philotux]

I try to stay away from "social" networks as long as I don't need them (And I really don't. I never used Facebook nor Twitter).
The big question is: who can be trust? Brave and Qwant have a partnership agreement (and I trust Qwant - at least for the time being).

I do have some for-a-long-time-not-logged-into accounts on both Facebook and Twitter. I should take measures to delete those.

When it comes to trust, sorrily enough, my trust account seems to be overdrawn for the time being

[handy]

I've basically just finished setting up Iridium. It has some good privacy settings listed & the defaults are much better than I'm used to seeing (it still "had" Bing in the search engine list, but at least Qwant was set as default).

I've installed all of my usual "privacy" extensions, though I know that they can't be trusted either - the devil you know & all that...

I'm running Iridium with Firejail too.

Anyway, just have to see how it goes. We'll eventually get past this sandbox problem. Psychologically I'm thinking that I'm in a better space using Iridium than Vivaldi. It could be illusion, but heh! what isn't? lol

P.S. The graphic display is vastly superior to any other browser that I've used, which is surprising. A lot of contrast & brightness. The colours are very intense (not quite fleuro) in the smilies at the side of this editing window...

[Eggnog]

I try to stay away from "social" networks as long as I don't need them (And I really don't. I never used Facebook nor Twitter).
The big question is: who can be trust? Brave and Qwant have a partnership agreement (and I trust Qwant - at least for the time being).

I do have some for-a-long-time-not-logged-into accounts on both Facebook and Twitter. I should take measures to delete those.

When it comes to trust, sorrily enough, my trust account seems to be overdrawn for the time being

I've never had Facebook or Twitter or anything like that. I've never seen the need. Facebook has gotten so many people into trouble. One of the first things lawyers, especially in family law proceedings, will tell their clients is to drop Facebook and other social media. Some people just can't figure things out. They brag about their crimes on Facebook, talk trash about their employers and what not, and wonder how they got busted.

[PondLife]

After reading through this thread decided to give the Iridium browser a go.

Downloaded from MXPI and the browser would not open, then changed the launcher command as per #28 ChrisUK post about no sandboxing. Now the browser would open eventually (after 50 seconds) with a warning about sandboxing.

Then found this command on

https://github.com/iridium-browser/tracker/issues/208

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kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1 > /etc/sysctl.d/00-local-userns.conf
service procps restart

which has to be added as root, changed the launcher command back to “iridium-browser %U” and now it launches faster than any other browser I have tried and without the sandbox error message.

[handy]

@PondLIfe, thanks. That works for me too. :)

Also, in my previous post I mentioned that the colours & contrast were exceptionally crisp. That actually isn't so much due to Iridium as the different default settings that came with the Dark Reader extension. An extension that I use to make create dark themes on websites that I think need it. oops...

Beyond that, I'm liking Iridium, I believe that it is now my no.1 browser.

[philotux]

Thank you for pointing out the solution @PondLife!
Iridium works here as well.

[Buck Fankers]

@PondLIfe, thanks. That works for me too. :)

Handy, or anyone else, I wonder what I'm doing wrong?

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sudo kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1 > /etc/sysctl.d/00-local-userns.conf
bash: /etc/sysctl.d/00-local-userns.conf: Permission denied

Edit, hmm, looks like I don't have file: '00-local-userns.conf' in that folder
Or maybe, because I don't have permission, file is not created? But shouldn't "sudo" give me permission?

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ll /etc/sysctl.d/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  25 Oct  9  2017 99-mx_allow_non_root_dmesg.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  14 Jan 15 02:59 99-sysctl.conf -> ../sysctl.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 639 May 17  2018 README.sysctl

Ok, so I created one myself:

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sudo touch /etc/sysctl.d/00-local-userns.conf

And still the same permission problem when trying to run that kernel command.

Well, lets try brute force ;-)
Since I already created that file, I can as well write that line into it, correct?
All I need is file: ''/etc/sysctl.d/00-local-userns.conf" and one line inside it, this one, correct?:

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kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1

Final edit, did all of the above and still can't get it to work, now it is not running at all, not even with 50 seconds delay. Anyone has any suggestions? Reinstall and repeat above steps? Something else?