Thanks Mason. I already saw your comment. You are very diplomatic as usual :)
I think they must look at this is at an actual bug, not just a documentation
issue. It it has several parts:
- "Work offline" does not work offline (sends packets on exiting).
- The documentation is wrong
- There is no easy way to get privacy (can be considered a feature request)
- They refuse to give even the difficult way to get what the documentation
promises (can be considered deliberately hiding)
Through closing of the ticket they deny community feedback, however accurate,
objective and detailed it may be. Their comments are meaningless. They are
really telling us "No, you should not trust your eyes, you should trust what
we say. We care so much about your safety, that's why we made a program which
will report to us what you do with full details about your computer and we
call this dependence freedom. We deny the possibility that the user may be an
intelligent entity, so we have made the program convenient for idiots who
will never read and will never care and will provide us with all their system
info and browsing behavior *for free* so we can give it to others too. We
also deny to fix our wrong documentation, although we asked you to waste your
time with a bug report about it."
They also talk about "anonymized telemetry data". I don't know if you have
looked at that data but when I started investigating that for the first time
it I did. It looks like an actual fingerprint of the system. I can see
strings showing disk capacity, CPU parameters, even the model of the video
card. Add an IP address to all that and send it to Amazon and Akamai and you
will know how "private" and "anonymized" all this is. You could probably find
similar data in your ~/.mozilla/firefox//datareporting/archived/
Re. tcpdump: I learned everything from the man page. Explained:
# tcpdump -i eth1 ip src host pc and dst host not router and dst host not pc
-ltq > /tmp/tcpdump.log & tail -f /tmp/tcpdump.log
-i eth1: interface 'eth1'
ip: protocol IP
src host pc: source of the packets is 'pc' (the name of the computer in
/etc/hosts)
and dst host not router: do not show packets to host 'router' (my LAN/WAN
router, also listed in /etc/hosts)
and dst host not pc: do not show incoming packets (reduces clutter, we
actually want to see outgoing only)
-ltq: 'l' is to make output line buffered, 't' is to skip printing of
timestamp, 'q' - Print less protocol information so output lines are shorter.
The part following '>' is for saving the output to a file and watch it as it
happens. I have also removed a few DNS queries from the logs which were not
related to what Firefox does to avoid clutter.
When you run:
# tcpdump -i wlan2 ip src host pc and dst host not pc -ltq
This means:
Show me all packets for interface 'wlan2' with protocol IP which have source
host 'pc' and do not show me those who have destination host 'pc', i.e. all
outgoing IP packets from 'pc' on 'wlan2'. It works for me and shows packets
(if there is communication). If it doesn't work for you - 1) check for typos
2) try to run in parallel a less restrivtive tcpdump and see if there are
packets 3) check firewall 4) maybe ask someone who knows more (I am not a
tcpdump expert)
I think the distro shouldn't matter, neither the desktop environment as long
as there are no any other network programs adding parasite packets during the
test.
> your results seem a little different from mine
I don't know if this may be a factor but I tested with FF 57.0.4 (58 wasn't
out yet). I also suppose it is possible that because we are on different
networks, your FF may be connecting to different CDN hosts, so that would
explain if you see different subdomain part.
