Re: Making package.el talk over Tor

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2023 00:23:27 -0800
> Cc: akib@disroot.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >   > 185.220.101.26 - - [14/Dec/2023:13:04:00 +0100] "GET /test HTTP/1.1" 301 169 "https://amodernist.com/" "URL/Emacs Emacs/30.0.50 (PureGTK; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)"
> >
> >   > As you can see the User-Agent indicates that I am using Emacs, what
> >   > version and even my architecture.  Compare that to the user agent that
> >   > you'd regularly encounter from an average browser:
> >
> > We should (1) let users specify what User-Agent to send, and (2) maybe
> > choose a different default.
> >
> > Icecat, by default, identifies itself as some widely used proprietary
> > browser running on Windows.
> 
> Should we bump the default to 'paranoid'?  Do what icecat does?
> 
> Does the remote ever need to know if we're using X11 or PureGTK?
> I think they don't, and we should never add that information, in any
> configuration.
> 
> >   > Other than the user-agent, there are certainly other bits of behaviour
> >   > that a malicious actor can use to track a user, such as the order in
> >   > which HTTP headers are transmitted, the size of chunks by which the
> >   > client sends and receives data and of course what requests aren't being
> >   > sent (e.g. due to a lack of Javascript in EWW).
> >
> > We could work on making Emacs-based browsing more similar to the most
> > common browsers, in such aspects of visible behavior.
> 
> If you are very concerned about your privacy, it's probably better to
> browse the web using the Tor web browser and eschew Emacs altogether.
> 
> How about telling users about this in the EWW manual?

It looks like a changeset was installed on master which changes how
URL behaves in this matter, see commit 346e571230.  I'm worried that
this is a backward-incompatible change which doesn't seem to have any
way for users to get back old behavior.  I think we should provide
such a way, and I think this change should be called out in the
"Incompatible changes" section of NEWS.

Thanks.