You are right I should have linked directly to the workaround, sorry. Glad you got it sorted out though.
nikqwxq550
the point of tor is not to avoid fingerprinting, it’s to blend in
Fingerprinting and blending in are the same thing. You can't blend in if you have a unique fingerprint. The Tor Project goes to great lengths to mitigate fingerprinting using their custom browser, it's one of their main goals. It's pointless to use Tor with a regular browser that doesn't have those protections, because websites can just identify you by your fingerprint even when you are obfuscating your IP using Tor.
You are no more tracked by Reddit than you would be with up to date tor
Browser version is a major part of your fingerprint. It's in your user agent, but that can be faked so there are additional mechanisms that check what javascript features your browser supports to get a more reliable read of your browser version. Use https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ to learn more.
And fingerprinting is not a hack or exploit. It's something that websites use for tracking, just like cookies. And I'm almost certain that Reddit fingerprints users to detect ban evasions.
Technically rollbacks are possible using regular packages, but in practice multiple packages will share dependencies and prevent you from downgrading just one of them. This is why it's important that Flatpaks isolate dependencies between apps.
Are you saying that this bug would have been reported there? I don't think I ever saw it, and I honestly doubt it was ever posted there. Unless you're talking about the browser update announcements, but I would still need to check the Help > About page of my browser to notice that it didn't match the latest version. As mentioned in my post, the Flatpak was updating like usual, the updates just weren't affecting the browser.
Really, the main reason I made the post was to see if anybody else was affected, and see how other people avoided the bug. And aside from one other user, it really seems like nobody else was affected, which is surprising to me. The only reasons I can come up with are:
- nobody installs Tor Browser using the Flatpak
- everybody manually checks their browser versions
- everybody installed or re-installed Tor Browser within the last year
Based on the comments I suspect #1 is the main cause. Which makes me lose trust in Flatpaks quite a bit. After all, if nobody is using them, then maintainers have less incentive to maintain them, and the worse they get.
Wow nice. Still not really friendly to beginners, since this is something they would have to dig into documentation to find, but it's good to know
switch to the old.reddit.com site (onion version tends to work more often), and if that doesn't work, switch Tor circuits (the option is under Tor Browser menu bar, I have it pinned to the top-bar for convenience)
Not to mention:
- better isolation between apps, no dependency conflicts
- ability to rollback to previous versions
- easily set environment variables and other launch options persistently
- transactional updates so if something weird happens during an update, the flatpak won't be left in a corrupted state
This was an official Flatpak from Tor Browser, so there's no reason why it should be less reliable than the packages from distribution maintainers. Not to mention for atomic distros, flatpaks are the official way to install software.
You can check the Tor Project blog to figure out the latest release, and go to your Tor Browser's menu > Help > About Tor Browser to see if it matches. It should be version 14.0.7. If it is not, the fix is detailed in the Github issue I linked in the post
This seems like something that Flatpak should be able to handle though. Afaik Mullvad Browser never had this issue. Flatpaks also have numerous advantages, like automatically handling desktop shortcuts.
I hope so, Flatpaks are becoming the default way of installing packages, especially with the rise of atomic distros.
It sounds as though you were aware of this bug already. How did you find out? Did you notice it yourself or was there a notification somewhere?