> “In short run, without sounding Nietzschean, will matters. Patreon’s is weak or corrupt. Ours is not“ What is he, a ‘Silicon Valley’ character?
Life imitates art.
The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
161–170 of 394 posts
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically there’s only one browser with a sane business model and it’s Safari. You have to buy an Apple product to use it. Simple. That’s probably why it’s the only mainstream browser, outside of obscure open source browsers like Falkon and Gnome Web, that doesn’t have any built-in ties to third party services.
Apple gets billions and billions each year to make Google the default search engine in Safari on iOS and Mac OS. (reported to be 12 billion in 2019 [1]) Apples privacy efforts and signaling are motivated by differentiation to Android/Google and are mostly just marketing targeted at increasingly privacy-aware consumers. Not some value judgement. (in my opinion) [1] https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-se…
Also increasingly apple is moving to compete in services. Every incentive in the world will be to adopt the practices the other guys do. Putting your trust in apple right now on the privacy issue seems pretty misguided.
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#163How could they not realise this would turn away their target audience?
What IS their target audience, though? I always vaguely thought it was the crypto people, who as a community are quite accepting of weird slightly shady stuff. I could never really figure out who this product was for tho.
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#164[deleted]
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not on the new tab page, this is hijacking links typed directly into the address bar. “If you’re using Brave and try to go to the Binance crypto exchange, Brave hijacks the Binance link you typed in, and autofills with its own affiliate code.” There’s an animated screen capture of this happening here: https://twitter.com/cryptonator1337/status/12692014801055784...
Hate it when people do this. Have you actually even tried it ? It just shows the referral link suggestion at the top, it doesn't hijack the link you typed in. You're still free to open the original link. Of course the twitter post cleverly hides this by hiding the list of suggestions. Now we have this long flaming thread for something that's totally normal and perfectly acceptable.
Firefox: type in Binance.us and immediately press enter - no referral code.
Chrome: type in Binance.us and immediately press enter - no referral code.
Brave: type in Binance.us and immediately press enter - yes referral code.
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#166Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming privacy things.
With Chrome taking the lion's share of the browser user market, you end up with a lot of sites that work well in Chrome but not so well with other browsers. So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup. Now the problem for Android users is that, in light of this news, there's now one less (seemingly) viable option if you're using Google Play services.…
"If you're using F-droid, however, you have Bromite and ungoogled-Chromium as prime candidates."
I can't seem to find bromite on fdroid. Why it not there anymore?
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#167Wow. They appear to have a death wish. If your entire raison d'etre is privacy and clear stated model then one covert shady move like this can wreck trust irrevocably. If they had just declared that their model includes inserting affiliate codes then that would all be fine. The codes aren't the issue here its a violation of trust. If I'm OK with mystery monetization stuff happening behind the scenes I'd be using Chro…
I think the privacy angle was just a side-benefit for people who mainly cared about crypto currency. I don't see how someone could care about privacy and use a browser funded in part by the Palantir guy. If someone cared that much about privacy, they would look into the funding, and run screaming from that.
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#168How could they not realise this would turn away their target audience?
What IS their target audience, though? I always vaguely thought it was the crypto people, who as a community are quite accepting of weird slightly shady stuff. I could never really figure out who this product was for tho.
People that are too lazy to install add-ons or that want some pocket change in tokens?
The shills say "privacy", but it's not any better than Firefox with add-ons (and worse because using it adds to the Chromium ecosystem which Google ultimately controls), and you have to KYC if you want to withdraw the tokens.
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was the co-founder & CTO that authored the commits, not a rouge engineer: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/component... https://github.com/bbondy
Two possibilities: (1) CEO tells CTO to do something nefarious. CTO does what he's told. CEO gets caught out. Publicly, CEO spins it as an innocent mistake. (2) CEO tells CTO to do something more innocent. CTO decides to do something more nefarious instead (maybe entirely intentionally, maybe simply by misunderstanding the ask.) Either way, the doing something more nefarious wasn't intentional by the CEO. Which of th…
I don’t think number 2 is the amazing improvement you seem to think it is...
Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
#170Typing this on Brave for iOS. What is the best browser for iOS from a privacy standpoint? Firefox doesn’t have uBlock Origin. I don’t trust Microsoft Edge or Chrome. What do you suggest?
Um Firefox not only has uBlock origin, it's way better than Chrome's version. FF is definitely way better.
Apple doesn't let it's users have the freedom to install add-ons.