I use a VPN and/or Tor to do the majority of my websurfing/streaming/torrenting. Some programs (notably web browsers) can read your local system time to access your timezone. And, I happen to live in… let’s just say a very “narrow” timezone, my country of origin can be trivially pinpointed if you take a look at the UTC offset.

I know Firefox has a setting to spoof my timezone to UTC, but chromium browsers do not have that option (at least no option i could find after a fairly extensive search), and I don’t even know whether any of the other programs I’ve installed are reading my timezone, such as, for example, my matrix client.

So, the solution I came up with: Do a timedatectl set-timezone UTC on the device. I can separately make my desktop clock do a little timezone conversion so no worries about time disorientation. This fixes the issue with most apps not allowing timezone spoofing too.

Honestly, now that I’ve typed all that^^ out, this is beginning to sound like an unnecessary schizo post that goes WAY beyond my threat model XD. Still, I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on it. Ideas to improve upon it are appreciated too.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
    2·
    2 months ago

    Not the browsers fault, but the certificates for transport encryption (like https) don’t match with a wrong system time.

    Chromium, i use ungoogled Chromium, with chrome:flags

    Handling of extension MIME type requests

    Used when deciding how to handle a request for a CRX or User Script MIME type. ungoogled-chromium flag. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

    #extension-mime-request-handling

    ​> Always prompt for install

    Disable search engine collection

    Prevents search engines from being added automatically. ungoogled-chromium flag. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

    #disable-search-engine-collection

    ​> Enabled

    Force punycode hostnames

    Force punycode in hostnames instead of Unicode when displaying Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). ungoogled-chromium flag. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

    #force-punycode-hostnames

    ​> Enabled

    Popups to tabs

    Makes popups open in new tabs. ungoogled-chromium flag – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

    #popups-to-tabs

    Aktiviert

    Reduced System Info

    Reduces the amount of system information obatainable through headers and javascript, also causes hardwareConcurrency to respond with two cores. ungoogled-chromium flag. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

    #reduced-system-info

    Enabled

    WebAssembly lazy compilation

    Enables lazy (JIT on first call) compilation of WebAssembly modules. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

    #enable-webassembly-lazy-compilation

    Enabled

    ClipboardChangeEvent

    Enables the clipboardchange event API. See: https://ch40mestatus.qjz9zk/feature/5085102657503232 – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

    #enable-clipboardchange-event

    Disabled