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Brave, the false sensation of privacy

ebin.city

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Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#391

Post by HWR_14 »

vntok wrote: post #69
atatatat wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the timing and size of everyone's connection to everything is "not very much"?

Indeed it is not. Unless of course you find a way to map the timing and size of a pageload to its potentially sensitive content, in which case do tell.

> Unless of course you find a way to map the timing and size of a pageload to its potentially sensitive content, in which case do tell.

Wasn't there a HN story about people doing exactly that to figure out what condition people were looking up on WebMD? I don't recall when.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#392

Post by rglullis »

mattalex wrote: post #316
_fnhr wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That seems like watching these fewer ads directly on the site,

The ads from Brave are completely separate from the website. They are presented as an OS notification pop-up.

> Somehow there has to be money going into the system that supports its own existance.

Yes, of course. Their revenue coming from the advertisers that get to place ads on their notifications. They only pay to the users a share of this revenue. If for some reason they stop getting advertisers, they will stop paying the users. Simple as that.

> This means that you get potentially even less money.

This is making the very bad assumption that they have a fixed revenue. As their user base grows, more advertisers will be interested in placing ads on their network and their revenue will increase.

> Also, why do they pay out in BAT?

Primarily, because it simplifies the logistics and allows them to escape the regulatory hurdles of having to become licensed money transmitters, and lets them outsource all of that crap to the crypto exchanges. A second-order but also important effect is that it attract users who want to speculate on the token.

> Why should I support someone by using BATs instead of paypaling/patreoning/whatever-elseing him the money directly?

Whynotboth.jpg?

Patreon is not bad, but they are not in a business that can fight surveillance capitalism. Patreon does not have a way to block Facebook from tracking my browsing. Brave does. Patreon does not block the Youtube ads from the people that you want to support. Brave does.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#393

Post by addingnumbers »

robocat wrote: post #358
addingnumbers wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just block all outbound port 53 traffic, any device or app that doesn't honor my DHCP-provided DNS resolver can suck it. Looking at you, Chromecast that tries 8.8.8.8 40 times an hour even though you know perfectly damn well that 10.10.10.1 is working

The DNS provided by many ISPs is not to be trusted, as per this thread, so how else can your Chromecast act to find a trustworthy DNS? And with newer decides that use DoH, you can no longer prevent devices from contacting their own DNS provider without totally firewalling them (or perhaps using some IP blacklist or whitelist, if available?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS

When I said blocking all outbound 53 I meant no exceptions, my local forwarder already uses DoH to an outside resolver.

Everything that I don't have complete visibility into the network stack of goes on a VLAN that does not forward traffic to the internet, it advertises a proxy via WPAD and DHCP option 252. I have a whitelist of hostnames that each device is allowed to make CONNECT requests to, so far there is only one.

If it's not a plain unencrypted HTTP request to my proxy, or a CONNECT request involving a server/device pair I've decided to trust, it's not going anywhere.

This breaks a lot of things that I would just as soon rather do without. I can't change my universal remote hub settings from the vendor portal, boo-hoo. I can't view my cameras from the hardened VLAN or from the internet (unless I VPN in first since the only copy of the recordings is on my local NAS)... good.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#394

Post by rglullis »

ipaddr wrote: post #336
mattalex wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I started using it. Found it fast. I get many 4 ads a day. They don't appear on the website they appear near the button to the side. Really small ad, just text. It is so out of the way. The model for profit is around the bat coins gaining popularity. The payouts are extremely low for everyone.

> The model for profit is around the bat coins gaining popularity

Incorrect. Their revenue is in USD, and their payout is calculated using the revenue in USD. The price of the token does not affect them in any way.

Their model from profit is unbelievably simple. They are an ad network that uses the browser as a distribution vehicle. More people using the browser, more advertisers will be buying ad space, more revenue for them.

They do have a published roadmap about offering more services in the crypto-space (built-in web3 wallet with direct connection with crypto exchanges, use of NFTs to access features and services on different websites, etc) which are very interesting and it might even become a bigger play than the existing ad network. At the end of the day however, they can have a solid and sustainable business just with the ad distribution network.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#395

Post by dblohm7 »

meibo wrote: post #331
CodeGlitch wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

Reminder that there's a reason Brendan Eich doesn't work for Mozilla anymore, and it's not just layoffs due to dwindling userbases. Half of their board stepped down when he was about to be appointed. Decoupling software from the people behind it may be a good thing, but I don't want to support people that work against my interests.

> Half of their board stepped down when he was about to be appointed.

You mean the same board that appointed him?

Yes, a number of board members stepped down around that time, but a couple of those were coincidental timing.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#396

Post by AzzieElbab »

celsoazevedo wrote: post #229
AzzieElbab wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the biggest deal is hardcoded whitelist imho. rest of the article is just raw emotions

You can't fully block certain services without breaking pages. Block Facebook and you break hotlinked images and comments on some sites. Block Twitter and embeded tweets break. Some people use these services to login too. And so on. I assume most users here understand this and would be able to fix the page, but the average user doesn't know how to do that. But then more advanced users should use uBlock Origin too, wh…

I understand this as well, but I would very much prefer if I could flip block/unblock on those cookies at will

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#398

Post by andai »

fallat wrote: post #168
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…

Why not just use Ungoogled-Chromium?

I tried this a year ago. Had some trouble first downloading this (afaik the project only provided sources, not binaries, so you had to trust some random guy's website to download the .exe), then it randomly crashed within 5 minutes every time I launched it, then I deleted it.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#399

Post by andai »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #230
fastball wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[insert link to infamous HN Dropbox comment here]

This is the second reference to that in this thread. It's getting pretty old and I don't even think it's relevant

Yeah just download it over FTP bro!

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#400

Post by andai »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #79
toolz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, Brave appears to force you to use Uphold in order to "verify" your wallet. So this is absolutely Brave hiding your coins from you until you dox yourself with a third-party. It's entirely possible to trade bat for many other coins on exchanges without KYC, but Brave forces you to be unable to do that (regardless of your local laws it seems?) This is something Brave could easily fix by just exposing an…

This is true. When you "receive" BAT in your browser, your browser is not a wallet. You can't send it to any address of your choice, or move it to an exchange that doesn't require KYC like Uniswap. The only place you can send that BAT you "received" is "verified creators" in the Brave ecosystem. It's much more like an IOU BAT than real BAT. If you want to get real BAT that you could send to any address, send to Unisw…

Isn't this for legal reasons? I'm pretty sure my crypto exchange couldn't give less of a crap about my ID but due to anti-money laundering laws every exchange I've used has had to ask me for it.
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