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Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

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Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#31
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG's CEO has a shady background. It's not as privacy centric as they claim to be.

Source?

His investments into Locately in 2010.

Locately is pioneering the science of Location Analytics. Locately's software analyzes semi-continuous GPS data from mobile phones to better understand what consumers do and how they shop.

Edit: why the downvotes? :/ I like my HN points...

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#32
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you make this assumption? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that a program actually does what it claims to do.

I sometimes do computer forensics for clients and you can be sure that you leave traces. You'd need to wipe out the area of the disk over and over again to fully remove it (sometimes it'll still remain despite that, for undisclosed reasons).

“undisclosed reasons”

There comes a point where I simply won’t believe in magic. Whether it’s 3 writes or 7 writes, at some point there is not enough contextual information left on rigid magnetic media to recover any amount of useable information.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#33
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes do computer forensics for clients and you can be sure that you leave traces. You'd need to wipe out the area of the disk over and over again to fully remove it (sometimes it'll still remain despite that, for undisclosed reasons).

“undisclosed reasons” There comes a point where I simply won’t believe in magic. Whether it’s 3 writes or 7 writes, at some point there is not enough contextual information left on rigid magnetic media to recover any amount of useable information.

They might be referring to SSDs which would also be bad to do overwrites on since you are essentially killing the life of the drive. Better off just outright filling up a whole drive.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#34
post #4

well, compared to undisclosed affiliate marketing for trading sites[1], soliciting of donations without consent[2] or the recent redirection through affiliate links[3], this seems pretty tame. [1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8793 [2]: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

I've disliked Brave from the beginning. Initially because of the pretentious - and frankly appropriated - name, but now for the much more substantive reasons you've cited. Seriously, if you want a browser that gives you control over your data and privacy, use Firefox. It doesn't do any of this shady nonsense.

appropriated name?

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes I know, even the Gutmann wipe is no longer effective and SSDs are essentially unwipeable, but that's not what this is about. It's about the software not wiping (or not even deleting) data at all when you'd expect it to do so. Generally, you'd expect software to do what it tells you.

The best way to wipe an SSD is to have full disk encryption and then wipe the key off the ssd. Even if you do manage to recover the key which is a big if, you still need the key in your brain. Combined with writing random data over the ssd you will be lucky to pull anything out of it.

Or fill it with some AAA Steam games shouldnt take long to fill the whole thing.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#36
post #26

> It doesn't seem to be anywhere (in text) in: /Users/mark/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware Of course it's not in text. It's a SQLite3 database: $ sqlite3 ~/'Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Top Sites' .dump PRAGMA foreign_keys=OFF; BEGIN TRANSACTION; CREATE TABLE meta(key LONGVARCHAR NOT NULL UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY, value LONGVARCHAR); INSERT INTO meta VALUES('mmap_status','-1');…

They still use 83.0.4103.116 even with that it's easy to mess chromium up with your patches. I don't think it has malicious intend, just a bug.

[1]: https://brave.com/latest/

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#37
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG's CEO has a shady background. It's not as privacy centric as they claim to be.

Source?

Last time this came up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23709270

founder has a bad track record on user privacy. Founded Names Database[1], a social media website designed to collect user information as aggressively as possible, before selling all the information to classmates.com.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_Database

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you make this assumption? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that a program actually does what it claims to do.

that seems a little naive. what about actual evidence of performing said wipe? a little progress bar showing the 35× overwrite technique maybe, verified by a failed recovery. do any browsers have these small, open source capabilities baked in? seems like nowadays the only way to ensure and audit personal privacy is by having network inspection and disk utilities constantly monitoring these "pro-privacy" apps

Store browsing data in memory. That said, data being available to forensic level HD recovery is very different from data still being used to populate the most visited sites.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#39
post #36
post #26

> It doesn't seem to be anywhere (in text) in: /Users/mark/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware Of course it's not in text. It's a SQLite3 database: $ sqlite3 ~/'Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Top Sites' .dump PRAGMA foreign_keys=OFF; BEGIN TRANSACTION; CREATE TABLE meta(key LONGVARCHAR NOT NULL UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY, value LONGVARCHAR); INSERT INTO meta VALUES('mmap_status','-1');…

They still use 83.0.4103.116 even with that it's easy to mess chromium up with your patches. I don't think it has malicious intend, just a bug. [1]: https://brave.com/latest/

83.0.4103.116 is current stable. Chromium itself is distributed in snapshot form (I cask installed it) so naturally it's ahead — kind of like Canary, which is currently at 86.0.4194.0.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#40
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking because I don't know: does that also hold true for SSDs if the sectors are overwritten (either with new data, or due to wear levelling)?

Correct. None of the publicly/commercially available software can do that, so don't worry most people won't pay for it.

secure erase is the only way to clear all sectors on an SSD but at that point you're just relying on the manufacturer's implementation (and past experience from encryption has ruled that to be a derp).

an easy alternative is just to encrypt the drive using software-based encryption and just delete the key. Windows 10 has now stopped relying on hardware-based ssd encryption because it was found some of it was just garbage.

Edit: Additional caveats: some drives can move data in and out of the non-system viewable area and dead cells cannot be written if they're no longer viable so data can still remain there.

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