Comodo dragon 27.2 released with privdog

wasgij6 · Jun 21, 2013

Comodo Dragon 27.2 is now available for download from the following link:
-http://download.comodo.com/dragon/DragonSetup.exe-

NEW:
- Dragon is based on Chromium 27.0.1453.116.
- Dragon includes PrivDog extension.
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Privdog is the new reinvented privalert that was previously released.

Melih also gave an excellent insight into PrivDog.

PrivDog protects you as you browse the Internet by stopping websites including uninvited guests when you connect to their server, and probably unknown to you, connecting to other unknown servers.

What is PrivDog?
Introducing PrivDog, a powerful mew privacy tool to compliment your Dragon’s existing privacy improvements.

Just like an AntiVirus treats files as viruses, PrivDog treats files on the internet as privacy and potential security risks. An AntiVirus program only allow safe files to run and similarly PrivDog prevents certain files from running in your browser.

As is well known, the best way to stay safe on the web is to only connect your computer to well known reputable sites, however, more and more there are security risks even doing that. When you visit a site, let’s say CNN.com, your intention was to only visit that site as you know it’s credibility, however, in reality sites like this use Advertising Networks to show advertisements. These Ad Networks often then deliver ads from other advertisers. This leads to a situation where your computer will unwittingly and unintentionally connect to several of the ever-increasing unknown ad servers. These are effectively uninvited guests to the CNN.com website and pose a security threat to your system. The content they show is decided dynamically at the time the ad is downloaded to your computer and is not vetted in advance by the web page authors of CNN.com and therefore cannot be considered to have the same level of trust and credibility. PrivDog ensures that only sanitized ads from a safe source are shown and prevents your computer from connecting to all these uninvited and unknown servers.

PrivDog is designed to protect your privacy but you can’t have real privacy without security. PrivDog goes further than regular privacy protection tools and ads a layer of security by blocking these potential threats.

An ever increasing problem seen on today’s websites is large, intrusive and CPU hungry advertisements. Many of these advertisements have large numbers of frames using up your bandwidth causing the website content you visited the site for to appear last and slowing down your browsing experience. The larger number of frames eats into your CPU time and slows down your browser and even effects other applications running on your computer and the speed of the operating system itself. More and more we are seeing large and intrusive full page pop-up ads appear inside pages stopping you dead in your tracks until you locate the tiny close button often deliberately hard to find. PrivDog sanitizes all your ads and prevents all these problems from occurring in the first place speeding up your system and improving your browsing experience.

Adobe Flash advertisements are prevalent on today’s websites. The use of Flash has come under ever increasing scrutiny from the computing industry due to its resource hungry and privacy breaching video. Flash advertisements use a lot of bandwidth and can be intrusive. In addition the use of Flash allows advertisers to employ the use of something called Flash cookies or supercookies. Many people today see super cookies as one of the web’s biggest threats to user privacy. Blocking or clearing your browser’s cookies will have no effect on super cookies. PrivDog prevents Flash advertisements from being shown and prevents these Flash cookies from being stored in the first place.

Ever seen those comment boxes below a photo from a new site, seems safe enough right? You may be surprised to hear many of these social comments boxes use technologies that track your movements around the internet and the data is used to profile you.
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More info can be found on the comodo forums and the privdog website
http://forums.comodo.com/privdog-b303.0/
http://www.privdog.com/

The Red Moon · Jun 21, 2013

Nice addition to dragon.
Runs with other browsers too which is nice.

I dont think i will use this as i run ABP and do not track me.

nice addon though.
Thanks.

wasgij6 · Jun 21, 2013

Hi Everyone,

Due to a higher than normal load on our servers we’ve temporally paused the Dragon update. We’ll resume the update on Monday.

Shane.
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Dragon update has been suspended temporarily

ZeroDay · Jun 21, 2013

AdTrustMedia is the parent company to PrivDog, https://adtrustmedia.com , so PrivDog is the whitelisted Ads from AdTrustMedia
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The above was posted on MalwareTips earlier.

Fingol · Jun 21, 2013

I was just wondering what the heck PrivDog was. I didn't remember installing it.
I can get rid now I know I didn't want it.

TheWindBringeth · Jun 21, 2013

So Comodo Privdog is a "blocks third party ad network communications except those third party ad network communications with our own AdTrustMedia servers because we want to hijack ad space to show our own ads" tool? Installed and enabled by default in Comodo Dragon?

I noticed that the privacy policy mentions delivering ads based on geolocation data and it also mentioned overlaying search results advertisements. It would be good if non-Comodo-related people (who are willing to try it on their system) took a very close look at the traffic to determine precisely what is phoned home both for purposes of ad display and also click throughs. Including on a machine with WiFi, just in case that GeoLocation data is acquired by AP sniffing.

I also noticed that the FAQ mentioned *not* blocking ads that come from the same domain as the site you are visiting. Details on that should also be investigated given that numerous sites assign third party servers a machine name within the site's own domain name. There is also the potential for scripts from the very host you are visiting to be part of a tracking system including one that involves sharing info with third parties. Even content from the very site/host you are visiting can't (shouldn't) be considered inherently trustworthy especially from a privacy POV.

Perhaps this isn't as bad as it could be, but it is concerning that here we seem to have yet another case of a security/privacy tool vendor creating a conflict of interest and trying to make money off of targeted advertising.

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