Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

rudism.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 251 posts

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#211

Post by themacguffinman »

monadic2 wrote: post #186
xixixao wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to remind everyone that we enjoy this conversation on a FREE forum, which is basically one big AD for a startup incubator company. Which I personally have no gripes with.

I would be more sympathetic to your worldview if the quality of the free services online weren't clearly lowered to service ad views. Just think how useful google could be if you could filter out commercial results, or import a domain blocklist, or control the ranking algorithm. Think how usable social media would be if it weren't a way to turn money into "engagement". Think how much better news sites would be if jou…

Think of how small and untransformative Google would be if only middle and upper class people afforded or bothered to pay for it because it charged a fee for its sophisticated services.

Think how useless social media would be if it primarily connected together wealthy individuals that can pay the upkeep needed to operate a sophisticated global network while those who most need a voice cannot.

Think of how much worse society would be if news required an unpopularly high ad-free fee which meant that the best news organizations catered first and foremost to wealthy and already-educated patrons.

The illusion of a service being "ad-free", without serving the broad but lower class foundation of society, would ultimately just destroy the impact and democratizing power of technology. It's not just a machine for a small portion of wealthy, educated Hacker News elites to pay and keep for themselves.

Advertising influence is surely not all positive, but there is no silver bullet here, and I would consider the wet dream of those who want to get rid of advertising without a practical substitute to be a massive regression. I consider the alignment of profits with breadth of access to be one of the biggest engines of progress in the modern age. A poor child in Detroit and a simple mother in a third world country use the same web browser and internet as the most powerful political leaders and heads of industry. That's the world I want to live in.

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#212

Post by jl2718 »

surround wrote: post #117
jl2718 wrote: post #102

It’s been almost 30 years and I still don’t understand why browsers exist. Isolated client-server apps were always better. Except that app design now emulates the browser. Soon we’ll have wasm apps that look and feel like windows 1.0 and call it revolutionary.

I actually prefer web apps because browsers make it easy to view control what’s being sent over my network. Requests are decrypted in the browser and can be viewed in plaintext with the browser console. They can be blocked using tools such as uBlock Origin. Standalone client-server apps have full, unsandboxed control of your computer. It’s impossible to see the content of encrypted network requests, short of hacking…

This is a good point, and I agree with you, but it seems there are better methods of isolation. Cell phones do this pretty well, and they are the dominant platform anyway, so I guess we're moving in that direction. I just wish I could use the UI features of a PC for all they offer beyond screen-based gestures.

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#213

Post by LessDmesg »

johnphamous wrote: post #205
jsjddbbwj wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. I've been burnt before by Mozilla and Google. Brave will also mess up eventually. I'm just praying that there will be another good browser to hop to when that occurs!

Have you checked out Microsoft's Chromium Edge?

It doesn't work. As in, can't render some perfectly renderable sites correctly. It seems Microsoft is chronically bad at making browsers, even when using a good ready-made engine.

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#215

Post by BrendanEich »

Angeo34 wrote: post #175
songshuu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you wholly misunderstand that the fingerprint is randomized on every restart of the browser. That is so much noise that it renders fingerprinting as a strategy utterly useless.

You are aware being based on Chromium means you cannot fake many vectors? Even Tor browser isn't able to spoof e everything Chromium hardly can spoof 1% of what Tor/Firefox can. You will maybe have a randomized fingerprint but it doesn't matter if 99% of other fingerprinting vectors are Stoll left open. Just look at their github. They have fingerprinting bugs that are beyond uniquely identifying (fonts best example)…

Chromium is just C++ and it can be hacked. The claim that something "isn't solvable through Chromium" shows magical thinking.

If a vector can be randomized or otherwise arms-raced vs. the remote adversary via C++, then "Chromium" is not an obstacle for Brave. Consider the case of extensions, where your point would have been valid if you'd written "Chromium extensions".

Fingerprinting can be done many ways, but most are not economic: they cost too much for the too few bits they get from the target browser. The common methods, notably fingerprint2.js, use APIs that we at Brave, along with Apple and others in the W3C Privacy CG, are taking on.

ICYMI, https://brave.com/whats-brave-done-for-my-privacy-lately-epi....

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#216

Post by BrendanEich »

ssl232 wrote: post #103

I will not use Brave because I disagree with the legitimacy it gives to ads on the web. I want an ad-free web, or at least an ads-in-anything-like-their-current-form web. If that means the web is 1000x smaller than it currently is, then fine - most of the web today is total garbage anyway. I don't care about jobs supported by ads, because they're another form of 21st century bullshit job and we can invent some other…

Brave ads are off by default, enabled per user. It gives no legitimacy to "ads on the web".

Perhaps you heard some false claim we "replace ads" on pages -- this is usually asserted without skepticism. We've never done this, we talked about doing it again only with both user and publisher opt-in, via private matching and anonymous confirmation so no remote tracking at all.

Anyway, if you don't like ads on the Web, use Brave. If you want to try Brave Ads to get tokens to give back to your top sites and channels, rather than free-ride, cool. If you'd rather not try Brave Ads but want to give back, you can do that too (you have to sign up with Uphold, though; regulators do not make this easy but it's doable).

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#217

Post by BrendanEich »

onyva wrote: post #120

“...its built-in advertising network and Ethereum-based crypto token exchange system.” I really don’t think that that’s a selling point. I really think most would think this is not a browser’s job. Also, not our job to help Eich displace Google. As users, this is not our concern at all.

Then don't use them -- they are off by default.

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#218

Post by BrendanEich »

fastball wrote: post #204
onyva wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) being open source doesn’t mean much in this context. 2) Mozilla’s stated goal and track record is user privacy. Brave’s is a Trojan horse for an alternative ad network. 3) we know who Eich is. Having co-founded Mozilla doesn’t make him a saint. The fact that his world view (expressed through real substantial action that has impact on people’s lives and happiness) is not compatible with what Mozilla stands for, is…

(2) is not related to ad networks at all. Mozilla does not facilitate this point in any way.

Ignoring Onyva's misstatements, please note that Mozilla does depend for most of its revenue on Google's ad system (people don't use "ad networks" much any longer, but as a loose term for a platform such as Google's Authorized Buyers and AdSense programs, it'll do).

Brave does not have such a data-breaching ad "network" or "real-time bid" platform. Instead the Brave browser downloads a fixed-per-day-for-large-N-population ads/offers catalog of URLs with metadata for each URL, including the first level text-y search-like ad call to action, only if that browser's user opts in. This catalog compresses well and delta-updates, similar in scale to anti-malware/anti-phishing lists. For ad confirmations we use a blind signature protocol (Privacy Pass variant).

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#219

Post by BrendanEich »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #38

What kind of information from the user does Brave hold and/or give to their ad publishers? And for how long? You are going from a situation where many ad networks receive pieces of information (ok, google 90% of the time) to a single ad network receiving 100% of information, which I don't think is good. Not to mention Brave becomes the gatekeeper of which content publishers receive BAT and I remember there was contro…

I hope you mean uBlock Origin!

Re: The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think

#220

Post by zormino »

_bparks_ wrote: post #54

The BAT stuff is dumb....I can’t wait to watch 30 mins of ads for 3 cents of a fake money no one wants.

It's literally taking other people's content, putting their own ads on it, and paying you fake money for the privalege. If I create content, I should be allowed to charge for it. I'm okay with people not wanting to pay or being worried about their security and disabling those ads. I am 1000% not okay with them stealing content to run their own ads. I don't want their fake money, they are essentially running a scam. They may as well just rehost other people's articles and videos with their own ads and skip the whole browser thing entirely, same scam different name.

I don't care that a tonne bat shit has real monetary value. I don't want it. It's not legal tender, I'm not willing to accept it. I don't care that their fake internet tokens have monetary value. I don't want them. Brave is stealing from people and paying them in shit.

Post reply on HN