[HN Gopher] Bunny fonts - privacy respecting drop-in replacement...
___________________________________________________________________
Bunny fonts - privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google
Fonts
Author : merlinscholz
Score : 426 points
Date : 2022-06-19 11:24 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fonts.bunny.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (fonts.bunny.net)
| hedora wrote:
| I wonder if browser manufacturers could do a better job of this
| by just keeping a list of junk that > 99% of web browsers will
| eventually download anyway, and then just prefetching it all at
| initial install.
| martini333 wrote:
| Host your own damn fonts. like holy shit
| unicornporn wrote:
| A CDN for this? Sorry, but just store the fonts on the same d**n
| server you're serving the site from. Files are tiny, it's not
| 1080p video we're talking.
| aembleton wrote:
| d**n?
|
| Is that damn, or down, or something else? Why astreisk it out?
| unicornporn wrote:
| Damn if you want it spelled out.
| 60Vhipx7b4JL wrote:
| No info how to host this myself? I thought the top goal was to
| host the crap yourself so you don't have to load from google.
| kadutskyi wrote:
| How many fonts do people use on their websites? 2-3? Just host
| them on your server. It will add 2-3 more requests when user
| first loads you websites but after that fonts are cached so no
| more additional requests.
| 323 wrote:
| Don't trust Google, trust us, a 30 person company.
|
| This is exactly what a FBI/CIA/GCHQ/FSB front company would say.
| They love to set up fronts in good-reputation countries, like
| Switzerland, or Slovenia in this case.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > like Switzerland, or Slovenia
|
| As a Slovenian, thanks for the laugh.
| epigramx wrote:
| Sites like this have many Google employees though.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Google has a proven track record of being malicious and a
| business model that relies on it.
|
| If I had to choose I'd take the unknown evil rather than the
| 100% known evil, though in this case it's dumb to use either
| option when you can trivially self-host.
| mimsee wrote:
| Or better yet, include the ttf/woff/woff2 files inside your
| project as an npm package using Fontsource[0].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/fontsource/fontsource
| usrn wrote:
| Or even better just don't use custom fonts because they break a
| lot of things anyway.
| xigoi wrote:
| I wish there was a way to use KaTeX/MathJax without custom
| fonts.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Can you give some examples? Custom web fonts have been well
| supported since the late aughts.
| usrn wrote:
| They're a big reason pages load slowly and cause text to
| jump around when they do. Custom web fonts are awful.
| lelandfe wrote:
| And while we're at it, custom colors are a big reason for
| legibility issues. Custom colors are awful.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Font variety help legibility through creating distinctions in
| context and hierarchy, though.
| aldebran wrote:
| Won't that cause the fonts to download again if they were
| loaded by Google fonts? I thought the reason to use something
| like Google fonts was to have the fonts download only once.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| That hasn't worked for a while. Browsers will NOT use cached
| resources loaded for foo.com when loading bar.com, even if
| they are the same resource from the same CDN.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Can you provide a link to support / verify this?
| steve_taylor wrote:
| https://google.com
| kenniskrag wrote:
| https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-
| partitioning/
| blip54321 wrote:
| If it were me, I'd make third-party font sources require a SHA
| hash. In pseudocode:
| url("https://fonts.googleapis.com/comic-sans", sha="abcd1234")
|
| This way:
|
| - If my browser has comic-sans cached, no request is made
|
| - Caching works even if the same resource is sourced from
| multiple places (e.g. I can host comic-sans locally, but if they
| got it from a CDN, they don't need to get it again)
|
| - If a malicious site replaces a resource, that's flagged
|
| I think the trick would be to make this optional (but
| bandwidth/privacy-saving), and gradually to make this
| increasingly mandatory for different types of resources. AJAX
| calls obviously can't have SHA hashes, but JavaScript libraries
| can.
| missblit wrote:
| Couldn't you use a Content-Security-Policy for this?
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
| jfk13 wrote:
| Sounds like you're basically reinventing SRI:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subresource_Integrity
|
| One issue with cross-site caching, though, is that it may
| enable timing-based attacks on privacy.
| blip54321 wrote:
| No, I'm not reinventing it, but extending it by:
|
| 1) Mandating it for certain types of resources
|
| 2) Extending caching to cover the cross-site case.
|
| Can you please explain the proposed timing-based attack?
| midislack wrote:
| Do people still seriously download fonts? I turn that crap off.
| pdimitar wrote:
| And I am supposed to believe a semi-pretty marketing site that
| they don't do server statistics gathering that they periodically
| sell to Google, Facebook and any other data brokers?
|
| Yeah, sure.
|
| Or maybe just host your own fonts. 350KB traffic per unique
| visitor per month isn't going to kill your bill unless you serve
| millions of visitors a day.
| richdougherty wrote:
| While we're talking about privacy and CDN delivery, check out
| Decentraleyes. It's a browser extension which keeps a local cache
| of common CDN-delivered files.
|
| https://decentraleyes.org/
|
| I wondered if it supports fonts out of the box, but not
| currently.
|
| https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/105
| cramforce wrote:
| Do not use this, use Google Fonts, just self-host them. This site
| claims better privacy, but does so using the wrong solution since
| you still have to trust them.
|
| Self host (supported by Google Fonts but not by this service): -
| Better privacy - Better performance (no extra DNS lookups, TLS
| connection)
|
| Their default embed code is a CSS @import directive. These must
| never be used in production code (It's fine as a directive for
| the compiler for local files but not with remote URLs). Leads to
| FOUC and FOIT.
|
| Also, next step in amateur hour: They serve their CSS and fonts
| on the same domain as their marketing website. Cookies galore.
| aembleton wrote:
| > Leads to FOUC and FOIT.
|
| What are those acronyms?
| wkirby wrote:
| Flash of Unstyled Content and Flash of Invisible Text.
|
| * FOUC: when you see content in the wrong font, then it
| switches to the correct font, sometimes leading to page
| layout jumps.
|
| * FOIT: when you see _no_ text content because the desired
| font is missing with no fallbacks/the CSS directed not to use
| fallbacks. Once the font loads, page layout might jump.
| cramforce wrote:
| Here the definition is actually broader than FOUC just for
| the font part. It can cause rendering without any CSS
| 0des wrote:
| Flash of Unstyled Content, and Flash of Ice Tea
| xnacly wrote:
| This looks really interesting, does anybody have an insight on
| whether or not all families on gfonts are also on bunny fonts?
| phphphphp wrote:
| Google Fonts: "1424 of 1424 families"
|
| Bunny Fonts: "1429 families"
|
| Presumably Bunny Fonts is, essentially, just a pass through to
| Google Fonts.
| abrudz wrote:
| > With a zero-tracking and no-logging policy
|
| Behold exhibit A: https://i.imgur.com/6F7fZVm.png
| notpushkin wrote:
| Next project idea: cdnjs.bunny.net.
| Destiner wrote:
| I'd suggest stop using 3rd party font hosting altogether and
| adopt something like Fontsource [1]. That way, no reliance on 3rd
| parties, full privacy, and full control over font file changes
| (yeah, apparently, fonts are changed from time to time).
|
| [1] https://fontsource.org
| Raed667 wrote:
| All these hoops we have to jump though and products to create,
| juste because the USA decided that no other country matters, and
| pushed the CLOUD Act
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
| gbear605 wrote:
| It's also good because Google almost certainly uses data from
| Fonts for selling ads. I'm much more concerned about that than
| the theoretical uses by the US Govt, though I'm not a fan of
| those either.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#:~:text=/google/font.
| ...
| jefftk wrote:
| _The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection,
| storage, and use of end-user data to only what is needed to
| serve fonts efficiently.
|
| Use of Google Fonts API is unauthenticated. The Google
| Fonts API does not set or log cookies._
|
| In other words, data from font serving does not feed into
| advertising personalization.
|
| (Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > _Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file
| requests, and access to this data is kept secure._
|
| and https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/website_fine_g
| oogle_f...
|
| leads me to believe that Google has PI when people visit
| sites using google fonts.
|
| Even if they don't use it for advertising purposes long
| term log keeping is not required to serve fonts.
|
| It doesn't really matter what the service is doing, they
| didn't ask for consent to log the IP of people
| downloading fonts.
|
| To be perfectly clear: it wouldn't keep me from sleeping
| at night and fonts permissions should be bundled with
| cookie consent or there should be a permission prompt
| (just like when asking for youtube vid.).
| jefftk wrote:
| "by including Google-Fonts-hosted font on its pages,
| passed the unidentified plaintiff's IP address to Google
| without authorization and without a legitimate reason for
| doing so"
|
| It isn't about whether the IP address was logged, but
| about whether it was sent. Which is an unavoidable aspect
| of loading a resource from a server.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| My concern is totally about whether or not the IP is
| logged though and google's vague language doesn't clear
| doubts about that. On the contrary:
|
| > Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file
| requests, and access to this data is kept secure.
|
| Why does it point this data is kept secure if there is no
| PI in the first place ?
| hedora wrote:
| Secure from whom? The mob? China? The US government?
| Google?
|
| I'm more worried about the last two than the first two.
| It'd be illegal for them to secure it against US law
| enforcement, and they don't claim they're secure the data
| they log against access from themselves.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the
| collection, storage, and use of end-user data to only
| what is needed to serve fonts efficiently._
|
| There's an awful lot of weasel words in there.
|
| If it was a simple "The Google Fonts API doesn't collect
| or store any user data" that would be good. But there's
| so much hidden language in that one sentence.
|
| - "Designed" -- Well, it was designed to do that, but it
| doesn't. After we're caught, we'll put out a press
| release saying We Can Do Better(tm).
|
| - "Limit" - It limits the collection. It doesn't prevent
| the collection. It doesn't not collect any data. It just
| collects "limited" data. And "limited" is defined by us
| and can be revised whenever we want.
|
| - "collection, storage, and use of end-user data" has so
| many ways to be abused.
|
| - "efficiently" -- Efficient for who? Google? Google's
| advertising department? Google's profiling department?
| What if there's an inefficient way? What if there's a
| more efficient way, but it gives Google less data?
|
| All this may seem unkind, but Google has earned the
| planet's distrust. In the early years, Google didn't
| believe that reputation matters. It does. And that's why
| the legal departments of billion-dollar companies like
| the one I work for don't allow us to use Google products.
| yunohn wrote:
| There is no such thing as absolute privacy. By virtue of
| being a web-hosted service, you will need to interact
| with the end server, and that already has the potential
| to expose details like IP, referer, user-agent, etc.
|
| The wording around designing and limiting collection is
| acknowledging this inherent problem and letting the user
| know that they've done their best to prevent malice.
|
| It's not weasel wording except for anons who like hating
| on the internet.
| kube-system wrote:
| You can load fonts with absolute privacy from google by
| not loading fonts from google.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| The service serves very fine-grained CSS based on device
| detection. I'm sure there is some fingerprinting going
| on.
| bscphil wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. Memory suggested that this was
| the case; I think one problem that happens on this site
| is that people distrust Google so much that they will
| trust some completely unknown organization that they've
| never heard of before over one (Google) that has
| presumably made themselves legally liable if they use
| your data to track you.
|
| (I would also note to everyone that you can simply
| disable sending referrers third party, which means that
| even if Google is using this data to track you, they
| won't know what sites you are visiting unless those sites
| use very specific combinations of fonts.)
| wewxjfq wrote:
| Does Chrome send the unique identifier with Google Fonts
| API requests? If so, they don't need cookies.
| jefftk wrote:
| Are you talking about the x-client-data header (which
| isn't unique, but is relatively high entropy at <=
| 13-bits)? [1] that is used for evaluating the effect of
| experiments that Chrome is running on other Google
| services, which does include ads. But it is not used for
| personalization (I wish they would say that publicly).
|
| For example, when I look at a Google Fonts request in
| Chrome developer tools I see: x-client-
| data: CKe1yQEIkrbJAQiitskBCMS2yQEIqZ3KAQiVocsBCOeEzAEIhKv
| MAQjys8wBCL+1zAE= Decoded: message
| ClientVariations { // Active client experiment
| variation IDs. repeated int32 variation_id =
| [3300007, 3300114, 3300130, 3300164, 3313321, 3330197,
| 3342951, 3347844, 3348978, 3349183]; }
|
| Each of those numbers represents an experimental
| treatment that is currently active for my Chrome
| instance. (It looks like more entropy because it's
| multiple values, but they're all derived from a single
| 13-bit per-instance seed.)
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html
| #variat...
| pdkl95 wrote:
| > is relatively high entropy at <= 13-bits
|
| That is only true _if-and-only-if_ we pretend those 13
| bits are the only identifying information being sent to
| Google when requesting a font. The HTTP request is almost
| certainly being sent to Google wrapped inside an IP
| protocol packet. For most[1] requests, there are _at
| least_ 24 additional bits (why 24? see: [3]) of very-
| identifying data in the IPv4 Source Address field. More
| fingerprinting can be probably done on other protocol
| fields, and IPv6 obviously adds an additional 96 bits.
| Yes, IP addresses are not unique, but ~13 bits is easily
| sufficient to disambiguate most hosts on a private
| network behind a typical NAT. Correlating the tuple {IPv4
| Src Addr, x-client-data} received on a font request is
| trivial: it only requires a user to login to any Google
| webpage that includes a font request.
|
| >> re: your [1] A given Chrome
| installation may be participating in a number of
| different variations (for different features) at the
| same time. These fall into two categories:
| Low entropy variations, which are randomized based
| on a number from 0 to 7999 (13 bits) that's randomly
| generated by each Chrome installation on the first run.
| High entropy variations, which are randomized using
| the usage statistics token for Chrome installations
| that have usage statistics reporting enabled.
|
| How many users have 'usage statistics reporting' enabled,
| and are there for a "High entropy variation"? Is it
| enabled by default and thus will only be disabled by the
| minority of people that know how to opt-out?
|
| [1] Google reports[2] they currently see about a 60%/40%
| ratio of IPv4/IPv6.
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
|
| [3] my previous posts on this topic - re: x-client-data
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23562285 re:
| 24-bits-per-IPv4
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167059
| [deleted]
| brycewray wrote:
| Interesting and cool, although apparently no variable fonts[0] as
| yet. While it's best to self-host whenever possible, this appears
| to be a great alternative to GFs if one isn't willing or able to
| do that.
|
| [0]: https://web.dev/variable-fonts/
| favourable wrote:
| This is a great project, but I learned to use a system font
| stack[0] instead to address latency issues on my sites. I run an
| e-commerce site and every millisecond in rendering time is
| potentially a lost sale. It needs to be fast, especially for
| those on 3G (or 2G?) connections.
|
| [0] https://systemfontstack.com/
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I have a question about system fonts. Whenever I declare system
| fonts I always use: `serif`, `sans-serif`, or `monospaced`
| rather than the actual fonts like:
|
| ```
|
| font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, avenir next,
| avenir, segoe ui, helvetica neue, helvetica, Cantarell, Ubuntu,
| roboto, noto, arial, sans-serif;
|
| ```
|
| Am I doing it wrong by declaring it just like `font-family:
| sans-serif`?
| ayushnix wrote:
| No, you're not doing anything wrong. In fact, you're giving
| users choice to use the fonts that they want, if they
| customize their fonts in their web browser. However, this
| choice comes at the cost of potentially ugly default fonts
| out of the box. Courier New, Times New Roman, Arial, for
| example. Of course, this is completely subjective.
|
| Use `font-family: sans-serif` for your everything on your
| website except code blocks and inline code elements, which
| should use `font-family: monospace, monospace`. Yeah, you
| have to specify `monospace` twice. If you don't, monospace
| fonts will be unnaturally smaller than sans-serif fonts.
|
| Please don't use serif fonts on your website, ever. Most
| people on the planet don't have a high resolution display and
| serif fonts look chipped and broken on those displays. Serif
| fonts make sense if you're using them inside a media query
| for print.
| xigoi wrote:
| No, it's a matter of preference. The default fonts in some
| browsers are pretty ugly, so if you want at least a chance of
| getting a better font, you can use a stack like this. But
| it's fine if you don't.
| meribold wrote:
| > The default fonts in some browsers are pretty ugly
|
| Is this really the case anymore these days? I think Firefox
| uses Courier New on Windows as the default monospaced font,
| but other than that I'm not aware of popular browsers using
| terrible fonts by default.
|
| A nice aspect of using just serif or sans-serif is that
| users who configured their browser's font options get what
| they chose.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > I think Firefox uses Courier New on Windows as the
| default monospaced font
|
| Actually, it was recently changed to use Consolas:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1607913
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The system font stacks are trying to target the fonts that
| the _operating system_ uses by default (e.g., using San
| Francisco as the sans serif font on a Mac). If you just use
| "serif", "sans-serif", and "monospaced", you're targeting the
| fonts that the _browser_ uses by default, which probably aren
| 't the same fonts.
|
| So, you're "doing it wrong" in the sense that you're not
| actually doing the same thing, but you're not _wrong_ in some
| kind of cosmic sense. :)
|
| (This does make me wonder for the first time why, when system
| font stacks started to become popular, browsers didn't just
| make the system fonts the defaults, though. Sure, it would
| mean that web pages that only specified "sans-serif" would
| change appearance between the old and new browser versions,
| but if they only specified "sans-serif" they were declaring
| "I don't care what font you give me as long as it's sans
| serif" anyway.)
| kevincox wrote:
| Browsers "fixed" the problem by adding system-ui, ui-sans-
| serif and ui-serif.
|
| I guess displaying an ugly font was important for backwards
| compatibility so instead of fixing millions of existing
| wrbsites they created new keywords that you need to opt
| into.
| cageface wrote:
| This is my preferred solution too. It's really not necessary to
| use custom fonts to achieve a nice design in most cases.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Except for Android, very poor default fonts.
| kube-system wrote:
| They won't notice if your website looks bad: https://images
| .techhive.com/images/article/2014/04/customize...
| chrismorgan wrote:
| The particular stacks advocated by that site aren't
| particularly good (though they're not all that bad either). It
| was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31543054
| a few weeks ago.
|
| I would scrap _at least_ Avenir Next, Avenir, Helvetica Neue,
| Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, Arial, Apple Garamond, Times
| New Roman, Droid Serif, Times, Source Serif Pro, Apple Color
| Emoji, Segoe UI Emoji, Segoe UI Symbol, Monaco, Liberation Mono
| and Lucida Console, and probably a couple more, for one of
| three reasons: that the family is superfluous, for an obsolete
| platform, or inferior.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Most actual versions of this kind of thing out in the wild
| have Roboto; what's your reasoning for wanting to exclude it?
| "Inferior"?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Superfluous: it's there for Android, but I believe that
| sans-serif will normally resolve to that anyway.
|
| (I'm not _certain_ about that, and can't confirm it as I
| don't have ready access to Chrome on Android but I got the
| impression some years ago that Chrome on Android uses the
| system font, which is Roboto. But even apart from that, the
| general idea is "stop specifying specific fonts and let the
| browser do its thing and the user get their chosen fonts,
| unless what the browser does by default is _too_ bad, like
| Courier New for monospace".)
| zinekeller wrote:
| _looks at Samsung and Chinese manufacturers having their
| own house fonts_
|
| ... and now you know why Roboto is _explicitly_ included
| - because sans-serif won 't necessarily resolve to Roboto
| on an Android device.
| politelemon wrote:
| On the font pages, they use this as the example sentence:
|
| > The quick brown bunny jumps over the lazy dog.
|
| While the site is trying to be quirky and cute, replacing 'fox'
| with 'bunny' doesn't showcase what 'f' and 'x' look like.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Shortest I could find in a few minutes:
|
| The quick brown fox jumps over the glazed bunny.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| If a fox encountered a glazed bunny in the wild, it probably
| wouldn't jump over it...
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| By this logic, why would it also jump over a lazy dog?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Perhaps the dog had cornered the fox, but in an a
| location that the dog couldn't reach. So it decided to
| wait the fox out, but then fell asleep because it is
| lazy.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Wrote a quick Python script to explore alternatives. The best I
| found with two words was:
|
| - The quick brown bunny jumps over the lazy podgy fox.
|
| If you want to do it with one word you can do:
|
| - The quick brown bunny jumps over the oversexualized
| dragonfly.
| tigerlily wrote:
| A touch of DRY and you get:
|
| - The quick brown bunny jumps the oversexualized dragonfly.
| dspillett wrote:
| Or "The quick brown bunny jumps over the sexualized
| dragonfly", which scans a little better for me.
| jaclaz wrote:
| I propose:
|
| The quick brown bunny jumps over the lazy dog, here, fixed.
| httpsterio wrote:
| you can replace the text with whatever you wish though so it's
| not an issue
| RobLach wrote:
| It's an issue because you have to replace the text.
| sdze wrote:
| Why wouldn't I just self-host the fonts on my server? What are
| the benefits of such CDN? Years ago I could understand it because
| it may reduce latency (cache), but since browsers don't cache
| from 3rd party servers anymore, also this is argument is obsolet.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I just went through the process of self-hosting Google Fonts.
| The process is actually surprisingly tricky.
|
| Google Fonts lets you download fonts for desktop use, in the
| form of .ttf or .otf rather than the .woff[2] with one file per
| Latin/Greek/Vietnamese/etc. script served by Google Fonts
| itself. If you want the same font-embedding CSS as Google Fonts
| itself, you can use https://google-webfonts-
| helper.herokuapp.com/fonts (a font browser, outdated, doesn't
| support font-display: swap), or
| https://nextgenthemes.com/google-webfont-downloader/ (a
| converter from Google Fonts CSS URLs to downloadable font
| packs, supports font-display: swap, it works well but I chose
| to not host the large CSS files with embedded fonts in base64
| format).
|
| As a technical curiosity, the second site _can_ suffer a race
| condition resulting in partial or broken file downloads (I
| never tested what happens), if two people request the same font
| bundle at the same time, and they overwrite each other:
| https://github.com/nextgenthemes/open-webfonts#bug-reports-a...
|
| I wish browsers would give users an option to set the default
| font-display policy to swap.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I would guess they have a server nearer your client than you
| do.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Fonts would be served over the same HTTP/2 line as your main
| content though.
|
| That's pretty much always faster than a new TLS handshake,
| regardless of roundtrip.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Exactly this. The last mile is always going to be the
| slowest. Where you serve stuff from makes (almost) no
| difference).
| lbotos wrote:
| Browsers don't use cross-site cache anymore (so if 2 sites are
| both using google fonts you don't get the speedup) but I
| _think_ browsers still cache content from request to request
| for a domain.
|
| Additionally, a CDN will let that content be closer to your
| customer, so even if it wasn't cached with the magic of CDNs it
| should be faster than one origin server.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Browsers don 't use cross-site cache anymore_
|
| Correct. The last major browser stopped in early 2021.
|
| _> I think browsers still cache content from request to
| request for a domain._
|
| Definitely! A cache still provides substantial speedup.
| Modern browsers fragment the cache on a per-site basis:
| www.example.com and www.example.org don't share, but
| www.example.com and forums.example.com do share.
| blondin wrote:
| people finding excuses against your suggestion are choosing to
| ignore history.
|
| PDF won the text presentation format war because among other
| things, PDF embedded the user's font.
|
| for consistency, and if you care about not using google's CDN,
| just self-host your fonts.
| Twixes wrote:
| True that there's no 3rd party caching benefit anymore, but
| it's still just very convenient - select fonts a'la carte, copy
| the CSS/HTML snippet, paste it in, and that's it. All for free,
| no licensing considerations with Google Fonts.
| markx2 wrote:
| Firefox > Settings > General > Fonts > Advanced
|
| Uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your
| selections above"
|
| No remote fonts anywhere.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Breaks lots of icons and such right? I disabled fonts for like
| a day with Ublock Origin but it was too inconvenient
| midislack wrote:
| Just close the offending site and never, ever return. Works
| wonderfully!
| markx2 wrote:
| I have not noticed any breakage though it may well happen.
|
| But pages are fast to load, I get a consistent chosen font
| across all sites and my privacy (at least for font loading)
| is respected.
| reaperducer wrote:
| A few elections ago, the New York Times used a font of
| state glyphs to display icons in its real-time election
| results.+
|
| If you didn't have that font, you couldn't figure out the
| election results without clicking through to each state's
| page to see the results.
|
| + It's quite nice. If memory serves me correctly, the Times
| even open-sourced it.
| xigoi wrote:
| If you block via uBlock Origin, you can make exceptions for
| sites that get broken too much.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Yeah but it just kept happening so much with regular
| browsing I decided it was simply not worth it
| moffkalast wrote:
| You underestimate the average person's laziness.
| zagrebian wrote:
| Shouldn't the website disclose who funds this service? Like,
| what's the catch?
| mishafb wrote:
| It is a real cdn with paying customers, trying to advertise its
| product, there is no catch
| omoikane wrote:
| After changing the sample text on fonts.bunny.net to something
| that is non-English, all missing characters are all rendered with
| the same font. Chrome inspector will show the actual font being
| used under "Rendered fonts", and it appears to be whatever the
| locally configured fallback is.
|
| This is in contrast with the behavior on fonts.google.com where
| missing characters are rendered with an inline image to
| explicitly show the missing glyph.
|
| I prefer the fonts.google.com behavior here, which makes it
| easier to find fonts that have all the glyphs I need.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| This has a joint problem with GF though. There is no option to
| download the resulting font.
| usrlocal1023 wrote:
| The service doesn't seem to support IPv6 as there are no AAAA DNS
| records. $ dog A AAAA fonts.bunny.net CNAME
| fonts.bunny.net. 10s "bunnyfonts.b-cdn.net." A
| bunnyfonts.b-cdn.net. 10s 195.181.164.130 CNAME
| fonts.bunny.net. 9s "bunnyfonts.b-cdn.net." A
| bunnyfonts.b-cdn.net. 9s + 195.181.164.130
| moffkalast wrote:
| I'm still not entirely sure why anyone would load fonts from a
| 3rd party link that's bound to break sometime. Just add it to
| your assets like a normal person and Cloudflare will cache it
| for you anyway.
|
| The license is non-standard too, something called SIL. I'm not
| gonna bother looking up what that weird thing permits when I
| can get thousands of CC0 fonts from like a dozen sites.
| matthews2 wrote:
| > The license is non-standard too, something called SIL. I'm
| not gonna bother looking up what that weird thing permits
|
| It's the same as Google Fonts (because they're the same
| fonts). Most of the fonts are released under the terms of the
| SIL Open Font License 1.1, and a handful of them released
| under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.
|
| Most free fonts are OFL'd.
| DantesKite wrote:
| Google uses fonts to track users? I didn't know that. Man, that's
| crazy.
| mda wrote:
| It doesn't.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| How is this service financed exactly?
|
| One would expect this to be at the top of their FAQ.
| jorams wrote:
| Bunny.net is a CDN company with paying customers. This is a
| free service provided by that company.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Presumably marketing budget.
|
| Bunny is an extremely affordable CDN. The business they'd get
| from medium to large sites that already trust them enough to
| serve fonts over them should easily make up for it.
| [deleted]
| hannob wrote:
| I find it really strange where some privacy debates have gone
| wrong, and this is a perfect example. It's basically a form of
| "don't trust them, better trust us, also we're in a country with
| better privacy laws". Which is an imperfect solution at best, and
| given that I have no idea who bunny.net is it's a questionable
| one at best.
|
| If you embed a font hosted somewhere else you expose some of your
| user data to them. Now with fonts there's a really simple
| solution: Just don't. As an added bonus, hosting fonts on your
| own server is faster as it goes through the same HTTP connection.
|
| There are situations where you can't completely avoid privacy
| issues, and then you can try to do better than others. But if you
| can completely get rid of a privacy issue then obviously that's
| what you should do.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > If you embed a font hosted somewhere else you expose some of
| your user data to them. Now with fonts there's a really simple
| solution: Just don't. As an added bonus, hosting fonts on your
| own server is faster as it goes through the same HTTP
| connection.
|
| I never quite understood the debate around fonts. You could use
| the CSS/Link import that Google provides, but that's never the
| optimal solution. Like you I always download the fonts and use
| them directly via @font-face.
|
| The only advantage I see to using Google Fonts / some privacy
| respecting font service like this one, is when you are first
| prototyping an app and want to either test fonts, or want to
| move quickly and not worry about setting up fonts properly. We
| also used in a places like Storybook where having correctly set
| fonts is not as important.
|
| But even if you did use it in prototyping, it's best practice
| to pull down those fonts and store them locally before going to
| production (at least in my mind).
|
| Am I missing something?
| ncmncm wrote:
| On Firefox desktop, I force literally all fonts -- serif,
| sans, what-have-you -- to Linux Libertine. Dingbats can look
| odd, but you get used to that.
|
| For reasons I am sure I will never fathom, browsers on mobile
| provide all the same settings options, and religiously ignore
| them.
| heretogetout wrote:
| If the font is already in your browser cache (which it might
| be if they're hosting it on a common CDN) web pages should
| load with the correct font right away instead of either
| loading blank areas or a default fallback font before
| switching to the correct font, causing jank.
|
| The best solution here is to use standard fonts that are
| available in all browsers, of course.
| modeless wrote:
| Sorry, not since cache partitioning.
| https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning/
|
| Privacy killed the shared cache.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| And it's such a niche privacy issue too. I would gladly
| take a shared cache over cache isolation. Especially for
| something used on as many sites as Google Fonts is.
| yetanother12345 wrote:
| > have no idea who bunny.net is
|
| $ whois bunny.net (...) Registrant Name: Registration Private
| Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC Registrant
| Street: DomainsByProxy.com Registrant Street: 2155 E Warner Rd
| Registrant City: Tempe Registrant State/Province: Arizona
| Registrant Postal Code: 85284 Registrant Country: US (...)
|
| > we're in a country with better privacy laws"
|
| ...it appears that the domain registrant is not, so you will
| just have to trust that the company is not in the US or not
| owned by a US entity (mostly relevant for the rest of the
| world, probably).
|
| > with fonts there's a really simple solution: Just don't
|
| This was worth repeating :)
| helldritch wrote:
| This is run by BunnyCDN, I've been one of their smaller users
| for a few years now (live video hosting and delivery, mostly
| .m3u8, mpegts, HTTP Live Streaming type of stuff) and I've
| always found their service reliable and cheap. One of the
| primary reasons I liked them was that their API is REALLY
| fast at making changes to the files (you make the call and
| 100ms later the file attributes / content have been updated
| throughout all their delivery locations) and the interface is
| pretty easy to use.
|
| This isn't an advertisement, I had a very specific use-case,
| but it follows into this:
|
| Of course, just like with Google, we are the product here.
| Google Fonts is an analytics data collection platform, Bunny
| Fonts is an advertisement for their CDN services.
|
| I'm going to stick with a /fonts/ directory, I think, despite
| being one of their current users. It's really not very much
| bandwidth for the fonts, it's not 2010 anymore, and I prefer
| the control (and the local development environment being the
| same, I don't always have internet and I don't want a dev
| toggle for something as silly as fonts).
| tyingq wrote:
| It seems okay to me for the case of google. Since Google-owned
| sites, Adsense, Gmail, and Google Analytics are so ubiquitous,
| things like a font download are trivially easy for Google to
| correlate to your other activity. There's much less value for
| BunnyCDN to abuse it, because they don't have the critical mass
| of your other activity.
|
| Yes, just serving up your own fonts is better, but this is an
| improvement that seems to work with only a minor change.
| rrdharan wrote:
| I see this completely the opposite. There's much more risk to
| Google to be lying about the privacy agreement applicable to
| Google Fonts (https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_do
| es_using_the_...) than there is to some unknown company that
| won't be a target for regulators and won't make any news for
| casually violating your privacy through shoddy engineering
| work or incompetence let alone maliciousness.
| tyingq wrote:
| I read that pretty carefully, and didn't see anything about
| not saving and correlating the visit with other logs they
| have.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I perceive exactly zero risk to Google in lying about
| literally anything at all. Have you ever heard about them
| being even slightly inconvenienced in response to any
| abuse?
| judge2020 wrote:
| For both bunny.net and Google Fonts, using a CDN is useless
| with the advent of timing attacks related to the browser
| cache https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894135. Storing
| fonts on the same domain avoids a DNS lookup and extra TCP
| connection.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Can someone point out a good reason for not downloading the
| font files and serving them directly from your CDN or servers,
| without any calls to third-parties in your HTML?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| We can reasonably assume that bunny.net doesn't also correlate,
| cross-link, and permanently store which sites our IPs visit,
| for the purposes of enhanced ad delivery. Which Google does:
| that's literally what every single service they offer does in
| addition to "the thing you need that service for". Even sites
| that don't offer Google ads or Google analytics _still provide
| Google with behavioural data linked to you_ by using Google
| fonts.
|
| So no, this is not one of those examples, this is a great
| example of someone setting up a service to remove all those
| free, extra data points that Google harvests. Today it's fonts.
| Maybe tomorrow, it's the rest of their "it's not explicitly
| Google Analytics" offerings.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't think we can reasonably assume either of those
| things. You're speculating about both Google Fonts and Bunny
| fonts based on very little information.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| No, and yes, respectively. If you consider "Google
| recording and monteizing on CORS URL requests" speculation,
| I'm not sure you know much about the company we're talking
| about here. They've been sued and fined over tracking quite
| a number of times.
|
| Do we know whether bunny.net is any better? In the
| abstract, no we don't, but we're not dealing in abstracts,
| so we actually do because of where they operate. A real
| European operation (not an international company with EU
| presence but an HQ outside of direct EU jurisdiction) is by
| default quite a bit better at not violating GDPR, and runs
| the actual risk of being fined into financial insolvency
| (rather than getting a few hundred million slap on wrist
| that a multibillion dollar company goes "pff, whatever, let
| legal sort it out" to).
|
| By virtue of Google's track record, and by virtue of where
| this new service is located, and the track record of EU
| based services with regards to privacy compared to their US
| counterparts:
|
| Yes, we can _very_ reasonably assume both of those things.
| skybrian wrote:
| I used to work at Google and I'm sure I don't know how
| most of it works, outside the area I worked in. It's a
| big company and the systems are complex.
|
| Why do you think you know how it works? What do you
| actually know about Google that doesn't come from outside
| speculation?
|
| That link says that a website leaked an IP address to
| Google. It doesn't say that Google did anything with the
| IP address.
| [deleted]
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| If you're requesting data over a network, ultimately you have
| to trust someone. Fwiw bunny.net is pretty well respected. I
| view them as one level "below" the mega-enterprise CDNs like
| Cloudfront/Akamai, the same way Digital Ocean is one level
| "below" AWS/GCP/Azure
| lolinder wrote:
| > If you're requesting data over a network, ultimately you
| have to trust someone.
|
| If I self-host my fonts, the people I have to trust are only
| those people I have no choice but to trust: those who get my
| site into the user's browser. Every additional cross-domain
| request I add is an extra party I have to trust.
| 1337shadow wrote:
| Can't you self host this?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The only reason is to escape regulatory fines for something 99%
| of the world doesn't give a shit about.
|
| Not using fonts is not always an option
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > Not using fonts is not always an option
|
| The silliness of this is that someone is going through the
| effort to set up hosting for a website but hosting the
| _fonts_ is just too difficult and has to be delegated to a
| third party. The laziness of webdevs never fails to astound.
| lolinder wrote:
| I don't think it's laziness. My conscious brain knows that
| it's anachronistic, but I still have the instinct to use a
| CDN for the shared caching between sites. Obviously,
| browser privacy changes mean that isn't a valid reason any
| more, but for me the instinct is still there.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| > Not using fonts is not always an option
|
| Do you have an example where doing something in an external
| font is not possible in one that's built into the browser?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Sure, not all sites need them custom fonts; I hate when I'm
| reading a page and it reflows because the font changed, but
| there's legitimate uses for fonts. Case in point: icon
| fonts that work using the "private use area" in Unicode.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| I always opt for self-hosting, be it fonts or other assets.
| Sometimes I am briefly envious of the ability to use things
| like Google Fonts, Unpkg or polyfill.io when setting up a
| project. But I started doing web dev in 2018 when GDPR was
| introduced here, and I always was kind of paranoid regarding
| that.
|
| Self-hosting is probably a better habit to acquire anyway, the
| only alternative being explicitly contracting with a company
| that offers edge CDN.
|
| https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts
|
| is great for quick self hosted local Google Webfonts
| fritigern wrote:
| > we're in a country with better privacy laws
|
| Speaking as a European: I think this is a very important topic
| for us. I don't think Americans and American companies
| understand how little trust rest of us have for the American
| government. Working with a company that is not subject to the
| whims of the American government is a huge privacy win. If a
| company pitches me a product, they start 1 points ahead if they
| are based on Switzerland, Netherlands or somewhere similar.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The US government has some restrictions of spying on inside
| the country. Much less so abroad.
|
| So you're safer from the USG inside the US.
|
| Then again, they don't have a great track record of following
| those restrictions, so I doubt it really matters.
| dundarious wrote:
| I'm surprised you emphasized government wrt. privacy here.
| Sure, despite the fact that the US government institutions
| have more mechanisms for oversight and transparency after 20
| or 40 years, etc., they are certainly the most profligate in
| their use of surveillance and hacking, etc., and US three
| letter agencies are the most adept at completely side-
| stepping those publicized limitations -- so it's not like the
| government isn't an issue, and the US government most of all.
|
| But when it comes to surveillance on this quotidian level, I
| think private/corporate surveillance it's far more relevant
| and problematic. In that regard, I'd slightly prefer a
| European country with good privacy laws like those you
| listed, because (probably) Bunny is not itself at the level
| of a panopticon such as Google, and the likelihood it has or
| would avail of avenues for resale to panopticon capable data
| brokers is less than it would be for US companies.
|
| But even there, it does seem like a quite incremental
| improvement. The door is still wedged open, but now probably
| less wide, and probably with a stronger doorstop. It would be
| nice to not leave the door open at all.
| fritigern wrote:
| I am not worried too much about corporate surveillance. I
| can always shop somewhere else. I can't change my
| government.
|
| I use DDG because I don't like Google. I can't do the same
| with my government.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| > ... for the American government
|
| or any government, especially our own, for that matter. Some
| just have a better track record at being bound by the rules
| they give themselves than others.
| fritigern wrote:
| When it comes to privacy and human rights, America's record
| is one of the worst in the world.
| kopochameleon wrote:
| Says who? "Worst in the world" would suggest worst
| 10-20%, while most metrics I can find put America in the
| best 60-20%
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights
|
| https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores
|
| https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2020
|
| From your repeated comments in this post saying
| essentially "America bad" without any additional details
| it seems like you may have some anti-American bias
| unrelated to the topics at hand leading you to
| proselytize against all US associated activities. It may
| be worth questioning some of your priors.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I always had the suspicion that the (seemingly higher)
| interest in privacy/FOSS in Europeans is fueled partly by
| anti-Americanism. In America, even if you don't trust the
| government, at least it's _your_ government, so I don 't feel
| like that plays as big a role, and any interest in
| privacy/FOSS (like mine) is untempered by the anxiety of an
| alien government's interference. :p Regardless, I love how
| much more Europeans seem to value privacy.
| fritigern wrote:
| > I always had the suspicion that the (seemingly higher)
| interest in privacy/FOSS in Europeans is fueled partly by
| anti-Americanism.
|
| Of course it is. After American Wars in the Middle East
| killed and displaced millions, there is good reason to be
| wary of Americans and the American government.
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > at least it's your government
|
| What? Your government is the worst one to go not respecting
| your rights.
| fritigern wrote:
| I worry more about my government compared to the
| government of a county far away that has no power over
| me.
| judge2020 wrote:
| How do the laws play out in practice? If bunny.net started
| storing user agent and IP address information indefinitely,
| and someone complained, how likely is it enforcement action
| is actually enacted on them? It seems such a low-impact
| privacy violation would be a waste of time for a GDPR/etc
| agency to focus on compared to things like ad companies
| selling location data.
| brnt wrote:
| > How do the laws play out in practice?
|
| I think this is important to consider. In practice, it's
| difficult to have any recourse with an American company. In
| Europe it's more expected and common that government and
| consumer orgs take an active role. Both legal culture and
| culture-culture (?) are just very different, leading people
| to preferring to steer clear of this expensive and
| adversarial (compared to EU climes) environment.
| judge2020 wrote:
| That's the exact scentiment the parent to my comment is
| suggesting; I'm saying that GDPR agencies probably aren't
| going to care at all about the type of data sent to a web
| host when all they're doing is serving fonts for 3p
| websites.
| geraneum wrote:
| People are talking about the possibility of being spied on by
| governments. I think if you're targeted by government or
| intelligence agencies, then even self hosting most likely
| won't save you from them.
|
| What is important here, and why these laws matter, is how
| trivial it is to get access to your data, or for companies to
| sell your data. That's why I appreciate the European's effort
| to have better laws for our privacy.
|
| If you really want to be government proof, then you better
| host everything in a server in a remote secret location out
| of their reach.
| dorgo wrote:
| Goverments and intelligence agencies can't target everyone.
| But they can gather data for future use. So if you don't
| give them your data you won't be targeted in the future.
| geraneum wrote:
| This is a good point. I would say we shouldn't make it
| easy for the governments to access the data as well as
| private interest or companies. These are not mutually
| exclusive.
|
| EU privacy laws are a step in the right direction. It's
| progress. We can build on it.
| pdimitar wrote:
| This goes both ways, the lack of the usual amount of data
| about you is a data point in itself.
|
| `SELECT * from citizens where data_points < 50;`
|
| And then somebody aims a botnet armed with zero-days in
| your direction. But yeah, that requires dedicated
| adversaries that actually notice you -- which is not a
| given, I'll agree.
| fritigern wrote:
| You are probably right, but that doesn't mean I want to
| make it easy for them.
| ByteJockey wrote:
| > I don't think Americans and American companies understand
| how little trust rest of us have for the American government.
|
| Have you... have you seen our politics? What makes you think
| that we think other people trust our government? We don't
| trust our government. Hell, it's trusted so little that one
| of our large political parties is basically entirely devoted
| to making sure that the government can't get anything done.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| That political party's actions are about weakening the
| federal government so as to make it easier for large
| corporations to behave abusively, not because of trust.
| States have less resources, and can be played against each
| other.
|
| The public-facing excuse for Joe Q Public is "they can't be
| trusted!", "less taxes on your hard-earned money" (when
| corporate share of taxes has plunged from the 50-50 split
| it used to be, increasing individual taxes), "the
| government is not efficient" (usually because of lots of
| onerous regulations and reporting and oversight that, ahem,
| a certain political party insisted on to fight "abuse")
| ncmncm wrote:
| ... and, at the same time, to radically increasing
| government spending literally everywhere except where there
| might be a possibility of benefit for an individual who
| needs help (just because said individual could possibly be
| ("a") black).
| troynt wrote:
| Would you trust a Switzerland based company that uses GCP or
| AWS?
| encoderer wrote:
| Surely you realize that if a modern sophisticated
| _government_ wants to see your data, they are going to be
| able to access it, even if it's stored in the Netherlands?
| What threat are you protecting yourself against?
| dorgo wrote:
| > What threat are you protecting yourself against?
|
| Against modern sophisticated governments who are busy,
| lazy, distracted to ask Netherlands to give them my data.
| I'm not exactly a high priority target. All I have to do is
| to make it a little harder for them to access my data.
| fritigern wrote:
| No reason to make it easy for them.
|
| Also, proper client side encryption is really difficult to
| break. Usually they need to compromise the client in order
| to read it.
| the_common_man wrote:
| So, with this logic you would host your data in Russia
| (just to give a random country) ?
| pdimitar wrote:
| Why not? Make encrypted backups with `borg` and use
| `rclone` to distribute them to a number of free cloud
| storage services -- this is what I and many others do.
| One of my destinations is Yandex Disk. They all only see
| an encrypted Borg repo. And in the next few weeks or
| months I'll make sure they won't even be seeing that.
| Just a few opaque files several tens of megabytes big
| each. I wish them luck cracking it, lol.
|
| What are they going to do, fly to my fringe country,
| knock on my door and politely ask me to stop storing
| encrypted blobs on their servers? No, they will not.
| First, their TOC does not forbid it and second, they are
| way too lazy to scope me out of the crowd, and third,
| they will only start shutting users down if their free
| plan starts costing them too much. I've been doing this
| for years and nobody seems to give a frak (Google
| included).
|
| And I am just a regular guy who wants to make sure his
| code and passion projects (and personal / family photos)
| are never going to get lost even in a case of disaster. I
| never in my life did anything to warrant government
| attention.
| josefx wrote:
| If the government wants to go after you in specific? You
| might be screwed. If the government wants to identify
| "criminals/degenerates" by checking against
| sexualPreference="gay", semitic="yes", numAbortions > 0.
| Then you at least wont turn up because that would require a
| lot more effort.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Between the joke of an energy policy in Germany this year and
| Douglas Murray's books I have no confidence in European
| governments either. I used to feel Europe's system was more
| competent but the illusion has been shattered.
| 0des wrote:
| Wait what the heck are they doing to books?
| zeven7 wrote:
| To add to that now every other website has an annoying and
| useless cookie dialog I have to dismiss, as if that's
| forward progress in privacy protection.
| dspillett wrote:
| That is the website owners implementing the rules in the
| worst way possible, either through incompetence or
| through deliberately trying to annoy (or fool) you into
| accepting everything.
|
| Be angry at the sites, not the legislation.
| lolinder wrote:
| Can I be angry at both? Legislation is only required to
| regulate bad behavior by some set of entities. As such,
| legislation should be written _assuming_ that those
| entities will exploit any loopholes. Malicious compliance
| is exactly what the EU should have expected and planned
| for.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Malicious compliance is exactly what the EU should
| have expected and planned for._
|
| It usually isn't compliance, malicious or otherwise.
|
| It is malicious "we know we are breaking both the letter
| and the intent, but we know they don't have resources to
| properly enforce against _everyone_ , so we are going to
| chance it for as long as we can". The vast majority of
| these consent systems are not compliant with any of the
| relevant regulations (ePrivacy Directive, GDPR, CCPA,
| ...). They will fix it when they get a slap on the wrist.
| If they get anything it will be a slap or a warning
| because while anyone in their right mind is pretty sure
| that the non-compliance is deliberate, that is nigh-on
| impossible to conclusively prove.
| 6510 wrote:
| They are now forced to tell you what they are doing. That
| it makes you angry is a design goal.
| dspillett wrote:
| Well, not quite. They are forced to stop hiding what they
| were doing. They _could_ make everything opt-in, and it
| could be simple single checkbox or button, they are not
| forced to do any of what they are currently doing.
|
| And if it makes people angry at the legislation, the
| lying back-stabbing "your privacy matters to us"
| arseholes in marketing are successfully making that goal
| backfire.
| pydry wrote:
| >If a company pitches me a product, they start 1 points ahead
| if they are based on Switzerland
|
| Crypto AG was based out of switzerland.
| fritigern wrote:
| It was owned by American Government.
| kube-system wrote:
| Secretly, for decades.
|
| You don't know who secretly owns any companies in
| Switzerland today. Your favorite Swiss VPN could be owned
| by Equifax or Acxiom for all you know.
| [deleted]
| fredgrott wrote:
| is that really a mistrust of US gov and firms or a mistrust
| of the results of the exportation of US Federalisms?
| kube-system wrote:
| Unless you're under a totalitarian government, spies aren't
| really interested in most people's data. Data brokers, on the
| other hand, are willing to sell anything they can profit
| from.
| fritigern wrote:
| eivarv wrote:
| Yet bulk data collection (in effect "mass surveillance")
| happens, and poses a risk in and of itself to data
| subjects.
| kube-system wrote:
| You can't use the internet without risk. All you can do
| is measure relative risks and decide which are
| acceptable. Means, motive, and opportunity matter.
| Someone who is missing the motive portion is less of a
| concern than someone who has all three.
| fritigern wrote:
| No one expects zero risk, it's about reducing risk. I
| choose to avoid American companies in favour of non-
| American competitors because the American government is
| hostile to privacy and is a warmonger.
| kube-system wrote:
| 90%+ of governments are more hostile to privacy than the
| US. It might make sense to prefer countries with GDPR,
| but the vast majority of "non-American countries" have
| even worse protections for your data.
|
| > and is a warmonger.
|
| This is flamebait unrelated to data privacy risk. If you
| don't want to use American companies because you have an
| political opposition to supporting US companies, that's
| also a valid opinion. You don't have to twist it into a
| data privacy argument.
| fritigern wrote:
| > This is flamebait unrelated to data privacy risk.
|
| It's not flamebait, it's a legitimate reason. A country
| who has been killing people in various wars/invasions is
| unlikely to behave ethically when it comes to privacy.
|
| If you behave unethically in one area, I have every
| reason to assume that you'll also behave unethically in
| another area.
| kube-system wrote:
| The number of governments that have not had to deal with
| ethics concerns is exactly zero.
|
| Rather than drawing a broad hand-wavy link between ethics
| concerns and respect for privacy, you'd be much more
| accurate in measuring privacy by directly considering
| their practical legal frameworks that protect privacy.
|
| > A country who has been killing people in various
| wars/invasions is unlikely to behave ethically when it
| comes to privacy.
|
| This doesn't hold up. There are many countries that will
| straight up man-in-the-middle internet traffic with no
| oversight that have been at peace longer than Germany.
| fritigern wrote:
| > The number of governments that have not had to deal
| with ethics concerns is exactly zero.
|
| Some are worse than others. America is one of the worst.
| War, invasions, mass surveillance, mass incarcaration...
| kube-system wrote:
| This is simply not factual, it is an information
| availability bias. America is one of the most publicized
| nations, and sunlight is one of the best disinfectants.
| By any academically rigorous measure, the US ranks high
| in ethics, along with most other western style democratic
| systems.
| fritigern wrote:
| Tell that to the people that were killed by American
| military in Iraq, Afganistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan,
| Yemen and probably other places I am forgetting.
| kube-system wrote:
| This has nothing to do with internet privacy.
| fritigern wrote:
| Of course it does.
|
| A country like America that has been murdering people in
| many wars around the world without hesitation is unlikely
| to take my privacy seriously. They don't respect my right
| to live, do you think they will respect my right to
| privacy?
| kube-system wrote:
| Germany is widely regarded as having the best privacy
| laws in the world, and they participate in NATO
| conflicts.
|
| Several countries in SE-Asia have been at peace for much
| longer and will happily man-in-the-middle your internet
| traffic at the whim of their unchecked government powers
| [e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_i
| n_Vietnam].
|
| A country's participation in war and their effective
| protections for privacy are not strongly correlated,
| demonstrably so.
| 6510 wrote:
| I think he is referring to the drone strikes based on
| meta data.
| kube-system wrote:
| Maybe, but that doesn't have any relation to the state of
| data privacy in a particular country. Most of the
| countries with almost no data protection at all (or laws
| that _require_ your data to be compromised) don't even
| have drones.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Have you considered that Switzerland and Netherlands might
| just, you know, hand other agencies your data without telling
| you?
|
| At this point we're supposed to believe what amounts to feel-
| good talk.
|
| But I keep asking: "How do we know for sure?"
|
| I haven't done anything illegal nor do I need to protect some
| mega-important knowledge but I still dislike giving easy
| access to my data so I automated parts of my workflow to
| double-encrypt my most important data and send it to several
| off-sites plus an own self-hosted server.
|
| Sure, they likely know remote Linux network zero-days but the
| odds of them wanting to target me in particular are minuscule
| so... -\\_(tsu)_/-
| yieldcrv wrote:
| The internet culture's understanding of Swiss privacy laws
| are laughable at best. Switzerland has existing laws to any
| and everything for records.
|
| You are trusting them just as much as a server in any other
| country. Saying "Switzerland" is all marketing for privacy
| enthusiasts who aren't going to do anything on their own.
| itake wrote:
| My understanding of privacy international privacy stuff is if
| a European gov wants to spy on their own citizens, but the
| law prevents them, they phone up the USA and have the USA do
| the spying(hacking?) and get the data from them.
|
| European countries do the same for USA gov on US citizens.
| judge2020 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes?wprov=sfti1
|
| In the US at least, any spying is illegal when both parties
| are within the US and the packets never leave the US.
| patrec wrote:
| > In the US at least, any spying is illegal when both
| parties are within the US
|
| And no doubt it must be even more illegal to then perjure
| yourself in front of congress about not having engaged in
| such illegal spying, when in fact you have.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| And, who ever got executed for spying domestically? Who
| ever got a prison sentence in line with the rough prison
| sentences the US happily gives out for much lesser
| offenses? Wo ever got so much as a bad performance
| review?
|
| Noone? Why am I not surprised?
| the_only_law wrote:
| Illegal things are ok if they involve "national security"
| or are useful for cold war dick measuring.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| In countries that follow the rule of law, they are not.
| kube-system wrote:
| Who has been executed for violating GDPR?
|
| Laws can be enforced without executing people.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| That's why I gave two "lesser punishments", which also
| are apparently not used.
| [deleted]
| 6510 wrote:
| More interesting : Anyone outside the US is fair game.
| Anything goes - by law.
| pdimitar wrote:
| As if anyone have ever proven that those laws were broken
| -- which we know they were -- let alone ever get
| convicted of it.
|
| These laws are a formality and have no teeth.
| youngtaff wrote:
| But if you arrange for the packets to be routed outside
| the US and then back all sorts of possibilities open up
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep, that's why they "coincidentally" do a traffic stop,
| and find stuff "by accident".
| misslibby wrote:
| I'm a European and I have very little trust in European
| governments. Not much trust in the US government, either.
| blooalien wrote:
| I'm an American and I have next to _zero_ trust for
| governments in general. "Absolute power corrupts
| absolutely" and humanity has given too few entirely _too
| much_ "absolute power". I feel much the same about most of
| the massive corporate entities as well.
| jen20 wrote:
| The difference is Europe is better at restricting
| corporate overreach than the US is, regardless of how
| similar their governments have become. That said, I'd
| take almost any European government over any US
| government of my entire lifetime, especially when it
| comes to actually enacting privacy legislation.
|
| I couldn't care less about web fonts though. I'm not
| downloading them from Google or "bunny.net" or anywhere
| else. My computer has some of the nicest-looking fonts
| around as system defaults, and websites can either work
| with that or get put into reader mode.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep, and also the whole EU... Every few months, they either
| want to make encrpytion illegal, scan more private data,
| scan files on end user devices, outright ban e2e
| encryption, or worse.
| dmix wrote:
| And we can thank EU for the extremely annoying cookie
| pop-up's on every website. Every site has a slightly
| different UI and the options/button labels always vary.
| Declining is always a multi-step process with various
| checkboxes.
|
| They are never geo-filtered either so everyone is forced
| to see them.
|
| I'm usually a big advocate for privacy and this was
| obviously done with good intentions but there were so
| many better ways to do it and I doubt 99% of people do
| anything but click okay without reading it.
|
| At least if the browsers did it the UI would be
| standardized and you could have default persistent
| settings.
|
| Now that there has been a massive effort to implement it
| I doubt it will ever get fixed or go away. Even though
| the decline of supercookies and Firefox's new 3rd party
| policy has largely made it obsolete.
| cromka wrote:
| > Declining is always a multi-step process with various
| checkboxes.
|
| https://oblador.github.io/hush/
|
| You're welcome!
| bitofhope wrote:
| >And we can thank EU for the extremely annoying cookie
| pop-up's on every website. Every site has a slightly
| different UI and the options/button labels always vary.
| Declining is always a multi-step process with various
| checkboxes.
|
| No we can't. We can think of scummy adtech companies who
| feel entitled to their business model.
|
| The GDPR very specifically says that the option to
| decline tracking must be at least as easily accessible as
| the option to accept.
|
| The only way the EU is to blame for the pop-ups is that
| the regulation hasn't been enforced strictly enough.
| 6510 wrote:
| If the cookies are needed for functionality the popup is
| not required.
| [deleted]
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Criminals will avoid laws, and lawmakers should write
| laws in a way that makes them hard to be avoided.
|
| If they asked anyone with atleast a minimal technical
| knowledge, they'd get a lot better solutions.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > And we can thank EU for the extremely annoying cookie
| pop-up's on every website. Every site has a slightly
| different UI and the options/button labels always vary.
| Declining is always a multi-step process with various
| checkboxes.
|
| I don't understand this line of thinking. You are
| declining the cookies, so obviously you prefer not to be
| tracked. And it's obvious that it's not the EU who made
| the varying, annoying, and often purposely misleading
| dialog boxes to decline the cookies, but the companies
| who want to force their tracking on you. Without the EU
| law, they would just do it without asking for permission.
| So why blame the EU?
| dmix wrote:
| Of course the outcome of random unfriendly and annoying
| UIs is the only predictable outcome... so why wouldn't
| the EU responsible? Who else would be?
|
| Would some design guidelines be helpful? Maybe but it's
| still fundamentally flawed and I doubt it'd be enforced.
|
| As I said the only possible option where there could be
| design cohesion is via the browsers (or maybe a EU-
| controlled open source JS plugin but that's even worse).
|
| I don't ever use the cookie popups because fine-tune
| control of cookies doesn't have much privacy ROI. I
| _want_ to use cookies on most sites and ublock does the
| rest.
|
| I highly, highly doubt the tiny percentage of people not
| using an adblocker but are still technical enough to uses
| cookie popups regularly and effectively is really worth
| the cost.
|
| I get the impression people _want_ this to be a good
| idea, because it sounds like one, instead of considering
| whether it is.
|
| Has the ever been a study that shows the real-world
| utility of forcing sites to use cookie popups?
| anyfoo wrote:
| > Of course the outcome of random unfriendly and annoying
| UIs is the only predictable outcome... so why wouldn't
| the EU responsible? Who else would be?
|
| "Of course burglars choosing less protected houses is the
| only predictable outcome... so why wouldn't the makers of
| security systems be responsible? Who else would be?"
|
| I still don't get it. Without the EU laws, it wouldn't be
| magically easier to block tracking cookies, they wouldn't
| offer a choice _at all_? What are you arguing for?
|
| > As I said the only possible option where there could be
| design cohesion is via the browsers (or maybe a EU-
| controlled open source JS plugin but that's even worse).
|
| We tried that, it failed:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
|
| > I don't ever use the cookie popups because fine-tune
| control of cookies doesn't have much privacy ROI. I want
| to use cookies on most sites and ublock does the rest.
|
| The cookies for functionality/session are not affected by
| the cookie popup.
|
| > I highly, highly doubt the tiny percentage of people
| not using an adblocker but are still technical enough to
| uses cookie popups regularly and effectively is really
| worth the cost.
|
| I use an adblocker and still decline on the cookie
| popups. I assume you are doing, too, otherwise you
| wouldn't complain about popups you don't see?
|
| > Has the ever been a study that shows the real-world
| utility of forcing sites to use cookie popups?
|
| Me able to decline them is real-world utility. If a
| majority or at least significant portion of users is
| successfully tricked into accepting the cookies, then
| that calls for a refinement of the law along with better
| enforcement, not for retraction of the law. "Let them
| have it", what a bleak, defeatist thing to suggest.
|
| You are blaming the makers of the law for what is very
| obviously the fault of the perpetrators, who are trying
| to get around the law in profoundly shady and just
| downright shitty ways.
|
| I am glad the EU law exists, without it there wouldn't
| even be the option.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| There are many ways to solve this issues, and EU chose
| one of the worst ones, that for most people doesn't help
| at all.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Sounds good, can you name a few ways?
|
| I'm being serious. If there are better ideas, which there
| probably are, let's put them out there.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Client side blocking (by that I mean removing them after
| the tab/page close)? First for third party cookies, then
| for all of them, and add a "button" next to the url bar,
| to enable cookies for that specific site (to allow
| logins).
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Any government sending any request to any company is very
| likely to get a compliant answer if they want to operate in
| that market.
|
| You can only trust services like signal which make it
| impossible for the operators to access your data
|
| GDPR is mainly against corporations making money out of
| knowing who you are across the web, it won't save you from a
| government actor
| fritigern wrote:
| Signal Foundation is based in the US. It takes only 1
| national security letter to compromise them.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Which is an imperfect solution at best, and given I have no
| idea who bunny.net is it's a questionable solution at best."
|
| Anyone doing internet research in Australia/NZ/Oceania who
| peruses publicly available scans of HTTP or DNS ports would
| likely be familiar with bunny.net as they are a large enough
| CDN in the region to have many thousands of subdomains for
| customer IPs. And if sorting by the non-numerical portion of a
| subdomain, as these begin with the letter "b", it is seemingly
| impossible to miss this company's presence toward the beginning
| of the scan.
|
| The company has been around since 2012. It seems reasonable
| that this CDN might offer alternative for its customers. Why
| not. Look at how many extra "services' AWS offers. The founder
| of bunny.net posts questions in nginx forums. I suspect a
| customer could probably get him on the phone. This is not
| Amazon or Google. Amazon sells goods. Google sells online
| advertising services. Both are primarily intermediaries
| (middlemen) who try to prioritise their own competing
| goods/services. All the data those companies collect may feed
| into another businesses that strives to study and understand
| human behaviour, placing internet-connected microphones
| (referred to only as "speakers") in people's homes. Bunny sells
| CDN services. At present, that's it.
|
| 1. https://bunny.net/our-story
|
| The solution may be questionable for someone who does not know
| bunny.net as a CDN, but for someone in the region who has a
| paid agreement with the company, it seems to be a perfectly
| reasonable solution, although certainly not the ideal one which
| is of course to use local fonts.
|
| Or do not use fonts at all. As a text-only browser user, and
| author of own utiliies for information retrieval, I can attest
| that the world is not going to end if websites stop using CSS,
| Javascript or other "features" that are easily used to assist
| with surveillance for advertising purposes. In fact, IME, the
| web actually works much faster for information retrieval
| without those "features".
|
| The bizzare thing about this HN submission is that it purports
| to be the recent announcement of fonts on the bunny.net blog
| however it currently points to an "About" page not the blog
| entry. The blog entry discloses the rationale for the decision
| to incorporate in Germany and offer fonts. It suggests the
| intended purpose here is not to protect www users, it is to
| protect CDN customers.
|
| https://bunny.net/blog/bringing-privacy-back-into-your-own-h...
| hsjdbdksjsj wrote:
| you won't believe this, but as the end user you can solve this
| in your life once and for all, and also improve your life!
| something rare for online annoyances nowadays.
|
| any decent browser, i mostly use firefox, have a checkbox in
| the font screen that prevents sites from changing the page
| font.
|
| i set all sites to user Ubuntu Mono. always. all the time.
| everywhere.
|
| the _only_ downside are sites that use winding-like
| fontawesome. you will get "S" instead of the magnifyingglass
| icon... i got used to things like that. Google meet screen is
| particularly weird. meh.
|
| but after you are past the initial shock, having the same font
| everywhere is the ideal usability hack. faster reading. less
| distraction. it's perfect.
|
| and as a bonus i don't even care (as i block referrer headers
| xdomain), not a single request ever goes to googlefont and the
| likes.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I used to disable font overrides altogether. Another failure
| mode of that mode is that the omnipresent Material Icons
| displays words (the font contains ligatures replacing words
| with icons) instead of icons.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Icon fonts that use the Private Use Area code points _do_
| still work when you just instruct the browser to not let
| pages override your choices. This is the way almost all icon
| fonts work. In the last few months I think I've observed only
| three fonts not doing so; DuckDuckGo is one, the second was
| some small business's site using a style from many years ago,
| and the third is Google's Material Icons font, distressingly
| widely used, which uses a ligation technique the implications
| of which _really_ weren't thought through properly. (It was
| supposed to improve accessibility in case of the font not
| loading, but in practice it makes it disastrously bad much
| more often, as can be seen on a number of Google properties,
| like their docs sites and Google Translate which are both
| significantly mangled by it.)
| michaelmior wrote:
| And that I don't get to see the site as the original designer
| intended. It's of course perfectly fine for others to not
| care about that, but I enjoy it.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| You can also use the DecentralEyes plugin, which caches
| javascript and font resources from the common third party
| providers.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| > the only downside
|
| Ubuntu Mono coverage is only 1200 glyphs as per its website,
| that's very very few.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Doesn't work on mobile anyplace I have tried. Setting is
| there, result nil.
| justinclift wrote:
| Oh, that'd probably work really well with dyslexic style
| "easier reading" fonts too.
|
| eg: https://opendyslexic.org /
| https://github.com/antijingoist/opendyslexic
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Upside: Consistency. Downside: Consistency.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Without forgetting consistent detection of fragile extreme
| typography that breaks layout or looks strange when fonts
| are replaced.
| ajvs wrote:
| Alternatively people can use uBlock Origin and simply block
| all remote web fonts. It'll break some sites which use fonts
| to replace icons, but the add-on can easily be disabled for
| those specific sites.
| miohtama wrote:
| You can self host Google fonts, so you need to trust no one.
| Not sure if I see the point of this service.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Years ago I did sudo bash -c 'echo "::
| fonts.googleapis.com" >> /etc/hosts' sudo bash -c 'echo
| "0.0.0.0 fonts.googleapis.com" >> /etc/hosts'
|
| and I haven't looked back.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I am often tempted to push this further to:
| sudo bash -c 'echo ":: google.com" >> /etc/hosts' sudo
| bash -c 'echo "0.0.0.0 google.com" >> /etc/hosts'
| 0daystock wrote:
| What exactly do you believe doing this will accomplish, other
| than cutting off access from a search engine?
| midislack wrote:
| Stops the biggest advertiser from profiling you on every
| site, obviously.
| dan_pixelflow wrote:
| It doesn't, though. Google use other domains.
| midislack wrote:
| Blacklist those too then.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I'd suggest 1e100.net[1] too.
|
| 1: https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/174717?hl=en
| sbf501 wrote:
| ...and the other 10,000 sites you interact with per year? I
| realize security posture is about layers, but this is
| pointless.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| It's not for privacy's sake! I leave that to Privacy Badger.
|
| I just prefer having pages load quickly and don't generally
| think custom fonts improve the experience.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Blazingly fast!
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Perfect and easy to switch. Great work bunny. Also their cdn is
| the fastest I have ever used.
| jollybean wrote:
| Can someone please answer the question ... why don't companies
| just self-host the fonts? And why aren't people doing that in the
| first place?
| grzm wrote:
| Cost of storage and management.
|
| Time is money, and it's expensive to pay people to mess with
| things if they don't have to.
|
| I might not choose to make the same tradeoffs, but I can
| understand why others might.
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