owebmaster 2 days ago

I propose restricting android apps, not websites.

2
jeroenhd 2 days ago

Android apps need UDP port binding to function. You can't do QUIC without UDP. Of course you can (should) restrict localhost bound ports to the namespaces of individual apps, but there is no easy solution to this problem at the moment.

If you rely on users having to click "yes", then you're just making phones harder to use because everyone still using Facebook or Instagram will just click whatever buttons make the app work.

On the other hand, I have yet to come up with a good reason why arbitrary websites need to set up direct connections to devices within the local network.

There's the IPv6 argument against the proposed measures, which requires work to determine if an address is local or global, but that's also much more difficult to enumerate than the IPv4 space that some websites try to scan. That doesn't mean IPv4 address shouldn't be protected at all, either. Even with an IPv6-shaped hole, blocking local networks (both IPv4 and local IPv6) by default makes sense for websites originating from outside.

IE did something very similar to this decades ago. They also had a system for displaying details about websites' privacy policies and data sharing. It's almost disheartening to see we're trying to come up with solutions to these problems again.

bmacho 1 day ago

Android apps obviously shouldn't be able to just open or read a global communication channel on your device. But this applies to websites too.