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Brave, the false sensation of privacy

ebin.city

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Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#311

Post by jaywalk »

addingnumbers wrote: post #257
jaywalk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your issue with that? In that scenario, the user doesn't even have Internet access. If they didn't force the DNS to specific servers, the user would only see that their service isn't working with no indication as to what's going on. It's clearly not something they do with normal, functional users and I never said that they didn't have the capability to do it.

That was a pretty rapid shift from "Comcast isn't doing anything to your DNS" to "So what if they are? There are times when they should!"

Yeah, wow I guess I should have included the caveat "Comcast isn't doing anything to your DNS... except when you literally don't have Internet access and couldn't reach a third-party DNS server anyway"

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#312

Post by rchaud »

fastball wrote: post #221
Moodles wrote: post #132

I appreciate articles that look into topics in some depth that I’m curious about. But I really dislike the author’s strident writing style. Now, if there’s a single exaggeration or untruth from the author, It’ll throw the rest of the article in doubt for me. I think it would be better if it was a bit more dispassionate. Another thing I’ve noticed in security (and I actually work in this field) is that if a project ma…

Most of the article is in fact factually incorrect. The main thesis is that: Brave's adblocker is just uBlock Origin and so it's better to just use uBlock Origin on FF. But Brave's adblocker is not just uBlock Origin so the entire article falls apart. Everything else is just trying to misrepresent everything in the worst possible light. > It is said that this might be a backdoor. But I don’t want to get conspiracist.…

On mobile, it's not as easy to say "use FF Android". Desktop FF is fine, and it's what I use, but on mobile FF is not as fast as Chromium based browsers. Text-heavy content is fine everywhere, but for sites that are more interactive, Chromium based browsers usually deliver less choppy performance.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#313

Post by rchaud »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #288
trts wrote: post #233

Slightly off topic, but it was a lot of fun to listen to Brendan Eich on Lex Fridman's podcast talk about Brave and the browser wars of the 90s and 00s. I've been using the Browser for several months without any of the rewards enabled and appreciate that it seems to quietly remove 95% of ads and does it effectively. https://lexfridman.com/brendan-eich/

Same here. I've also had Brendan Eich respond to one of my posts on HN - not something I'd expect from any other browser on the market. He understands techies because he is one. I wish Mozilla was headed by a techie and not a lawyer :(

The thought of Firefox shilling crypto bux turns my stomach, so I'll have to disagree with you.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#314

Post by jaywalk »

unknown_error wrote: post #303
jaywalk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that was VeriSign back in 2003: https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/advisory-conc...

Ah, OK. I didn't realize verisign did that too. Comcast followed not long after... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/08/comcasts-dns-red...

Comcast used to do a lot of messed up stuff. As I mentioned in a comment somewhere close to here, I've been a customer long enough to have seen those bad days and how they've managed to change since those days.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#315

Post by jonathansampson »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #11

I find Brave Rewards very egregious. You get lots of BAT and the marketing copy hypes it up immensely without mentioning, anywhere, that you need to provide your SSN and Driver's License to a third-party (Uphold) if you actually, you know, want to cash out. This seems particularly irritating because, let's say you set your browser to show you the max amount of ads for a while. You saved up for a few months, decided y…

This is the law; it's not Brave's design. Our design enables you to opt-in, earn, and give to content creators without having to provide any information. The law, however, requires and compels Brave to add KYC into the mix when you wish to self-fund or cash out. Anti-money laundering is not something we can or would circumvent.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#316

Post by mattalex »

_fnhr wrote: post #234
wmitty wrote: post #16

> Their adblocker is just a fork of uBlock Origin, This does not appear to be true. Here is the github repo for their open source adblock engine written in rust: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust Here is a (somewhat dated) article describing it by the authors: https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/ > Google will take decisions that benefit their advertisement business, like making impossible to use ad…

There are more lies in that article. This one for example is so often repeated but untrue: > Rewards is their shitty program that will replace ads displayed on websites with their own. Brave doesn't replace ads with their own. Brave ads are displayed as desktop pop-ups. They can also be easily disabled (which, surprise, the author doesn't mention because of his bias). And the idea behind Brave ads is to give you toke…

I still don't really get how brave is supposed to work:

You watch significantly fewer ads than before, these ads are then supplied to whoever you yourself engage with. That seems like watching these fewer ads directly on the site, just with a few hoops in between.

The difference is that now you watch fewer ads in total, and you have the Brave-browser as an inbetween, which also somehow has to survive. This means that you get potentially even less money, since less ads are watched and the ones that are watched are more diluted (even if brave currently doesn't take a cut at the moment: At some point they have to pay their developers, too).

Also, why do they pay out in BAT? (other than the fact that they cooperate with "uphold" a crypto-exchange and that they also really really want to jump on the crypto-bandwagon)

Somehow there has to be money going into the system that supports its own existance. If brave had something like a subsciption service or other way to get additional funds into the Network, then it might be more understandable, but even then: Why should I support someone by using BATs instead of paypaling/patreoning/whatever-elseing him the money directly?

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#317

Post by fastball »

CharlesW wrote: post #307
fastball wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a difference between an imperfect implementation of something that has never been done before (especially when your competition is an adtech giant oligopoly) and "dark patterns". Worth pointing out that part of the reason it was hard to just refund people who donated to non-verified creators was Brave actually caring about privacy, so the donations in question were completely anonymous. So when it wa…

> So when it was pointed out that it's still a problem, they came up with a solution that I think strikes a good balance. Fair enough. To me, it couldn't have been more obvious that collecting "money" in creators' names and also misrepresenting that was Bad™. I'll try to be gracious and chalk this up to "lack of common sense" instead of "part of the evil plan".

Actually I'm less charitable than "lack of common sense" and chalk it up to hubris – I think what happened is that they couldn't really imagine why someone wouldn't want to accept donations from their viewers/consumers, regardless of source, and so just defaulted to collecting for everyone assuming everyone would love to hop on board the BAT train. This of course turned out not to be the case for various reasons and yes is pretty obvious in hindsight.

But I'm still willing to forgive if I think the course-correction is adequate, which in this case it was.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#318

Post by bhearsum2 »

jonathansampson wrote: post #315
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #11

I find Brave Rewards very egregious. You get lots of BAT and the marketing copy hypes it up immensely without mentioning, anywhere, that you need to provide your SSN and Driver's License to a third-party (Uphold) if you actually, you know, want to cash out. This seems particularly irritating because, let's say you set your browser to show you the max amount of ads for a while. You saved up for a few months, decided y…

This is the law; it's not Brave's design. Our design enables you to opt-in, earn, and give to content creators without having to provide any information. The law, however, requires and compels Brave to add KYC into the mix when you wish to self-fund or cash out. Anti-money laundering is not something we can or would circumvent.

You could still the user of this during onboarding, or before the start seeing any BAT ads.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#319

Post by freeone3000 »

jonathansampson wrote: post #310
rch wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer it if I could contribute cash monthly, and let the browser distribute the funds based on my browsing. The notion of getting paid to view a separate stream of ads seems bizarre. It's the 'Ad Buddy' model, but with crypto.

You can do that today with Brave. Brave Rewards enables users to self-fund, and contribute automatically to the sites they visit, proportional to the time spent on those sites. See https://brave.com/rewards and https://creators.brave.com for more information. The beautiful thing about Brave Ads, however, is that everybody can support the content they love. Even if they don't have the ability to self-fund; they can co…

Okay, but, how do I give them actual money, instead of BAT? Will you redeem BAT for dollars?

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#320

Post by jonathansampson »

eterevsky wrote: post #40

For me the best feature of Brave is the ability to reward the content publishers without watching their ads, basically YouTube Premium for web. I just wish more publishers would opt into this program.

Is anybody is looking for more information, check out https://creators.brave.com
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