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Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

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Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#81

Post by jjulius »

antonok wrote: post #75
jjulius wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are we all suddenly against ad/content blockers and the built-in tracking protection that Firefox/Safari have? No, but the point is that it's a bit more nuanced than your original post suggests. Users should have the control over how a page is displayed to them. I want to tell my browser to block ads, and which ads to block. I don't fully trust it to make the same exact decisions in that area that I might want, or t…

> It is the user's agent, and as the user, I want the control. I want to make the decisions. What kind of decisions do you want to be able to make? Unless you're writing all your own filters (in which case, kudos to you!), you're still ultimately delegating these decisions primarily to a handful of filter list maintainers you've probably never met. Brave's source code and filter lists are all developed in the open an…

>Brave's ... filter lists are all developed in the open and are heavily customizable, as well.

As are so, so many of the filter lists developed by "maintainers [I've] probably never met." Every list I've added to my pihole is fully readable and customizable.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#82

Post by tomComb »

zormino wrote: post #51
jp42 wrote: post #21

May be naive question. How does Brave earn money to sustain its operations?

By replacing ads on websites with their own, and url hijacking for referral profits. They are not a good service, they're content thieves with a mask on.

I didn't think they did those anymore. True, though, they've tried endless very slimy business models - anything that works until they get caught or called out.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#83

Post by nicce »

mistrial9 wrote: post #60
DonHopkins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many times does this need to be repeated? Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up. Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or t…

> Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich true ! Mozilla harassed Brendan Eich publicly and he resigned.

They are always two sides for the story.

So how did they harass? They told about harassment against their employees by Brendan Eich. I guess the main question is whether that is harassing. Brendan Eich did the same publicly against his employees.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#84

Post by opheliate »

jonathansampson wrote: post #66
sneak wrote: post #24

How many times have Brave pivoted at this point? First it was ad replacement, then it was a patreon thing that took donations (illegally) for third parties that didn't want it, then it was ad blocking, then it was a search engine, then it was videoconferencing.... What exactly is their revenue model?

No pivoting; just an incremental realization of a better Web. We never replaced ads. Brave blocks trackers, and their associated third-party ads for privacy and security reasons—we've done this from the start. But when you block third-party ads, you cut into the revenue of publishers, creators, and other content makers. Cutting revenue for those who make the Web wonderful is not ideal, so an alternative approach was…

> We never replaced ads.

How can you be so disingenuous? You removed ads, then introduced your own advertising. You may see those as two separate events, but the consequence is the same as if you had chosen to replace ads.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#85

Post by BrendanEich »

zormino wrote: post #51
jp42 wrote: post #21

May be naive question. How does Brave earn money to sustain its operations?

By replacing ads on websites with their own, and url hijacking for referral profits. They are not a good service, they're content thieves with a mask on.

No, we never replaced ads on websites with our own; and no, we made nothing from the binance.com/.us autocomplete bug (no other URLs, no links in pages) getting affiliate codes.

Be careful what misinformation you parrot. It doesn't help anyone looking for better privacy products or trustworthy commenters.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#86

Post by ziddoap »

vrc wrote: post #74
soundnote wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't? It adblocks ads like uBlock Origin and tracking blocking tech in other browsers (except the shields are not an add-on so they can exceed the Manifest v3 type limits). There are entirely separate channels (toaster popups, start page backgrounds) that they use to deliver their own ads. I get the crypto stuff is not everyone's cup of tea (certainly isn't mine) but get the basics straight, at least?

uBlock origin is the only ad blocker worth trusting. Privacy Badger is fine but breaks things too often. PiHole is good but requires too much know-how for most. ABP and Brave both do the same garbage ransom-taking with their ad replacement schema. So few publishers have an account with them that the monies supposedly going to support content sits (at best) in an escrow account that is escheated at some point.

>Privacy Badger is fine but breaks things too often.

I know it's a bit of a tangent from the topic at hand, but I'm really curious what Privacy Badger has broken for you? I (and all the staff at my office) have been using it basically since release, and not once has the root cause of a website not working properly been Privacy Badger.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#87

Post by tomComb »

jppope wrote: post #56
nicce wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is just very hard to trust them... they get caught on very hostile things again and again, when they promise that won't happen again. In the end, they are yet another ad based company.

sure... but lets remove the whole trust/ ad thing... Brave is a faster version of chrome, and Brave search gives me the code sample I'm searching for first thing in the sidebar...both are major improvements in my life. It's a better product.

> but lets remove the whole trust/ ad thing.

Huh? Trust is what it all comes down to! You are trusting them with your data and access to your devices.

Brave is the last browser company I would trust (based on their record) and to me that it the key.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#88

Post by BrendanEich »

tomComb wrote: post #82
zormino wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By replacing ads on websites with their own, and url hijacking for referral profits. They are not a good service, they're content thieves with a mask on.

I didn't think they did those anymore. True, though, they've tried endless very slimy business models - anything that works until they get caught or called out.

We never replaced ads on web pages. The binance.{us,com} auto-complete affiliate code was a bug and we renounced any (tiny) revenue that might come from it.

I think it's slimy to do what you just did. Why'd you do it? We didn't do the first thing you said, and we shipped and then fixed the bug on the second. I don't see how you can excuse your action.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#89

Post by tsumnia »

aeturnum wrote: post #31
IceWreck wrote: post #18

> Have Brave Rewards (their crypto-and-ads service) turned on If this is true then its another shady thing by a self proclaimed privacy company. They used to do the protection racket thing where they indirectly threatened website owners with the ultimatum that if they don't work with them, they will man-in-the-middle them to replace the website's ads with their own and not give them a cut of the profit. Also, Brave h…

I don't understand why Brave Rewards needs to be enabled, but it seems very normal for the company operating a service to require some kind of account or membership. If you don't trust Brave this is probably not the service for you.

Here is their Reddit response: https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/ptbf7e/brave...

In a nutshell, enabling Rewards is their incentive for giving the product away for free, otherwise they charge via Premium.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#90

Post by tolien »

sneak wrote: post #64
tolien wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many times have Brave pivoted at this point? On one hand, the features are at least somewhat adjacent to their core business of building a web browser. On the other, whenever Mozilla did something like this they were panned for spreading themselves too thin and diverging from their core mission.

Mozilla is a nonprofit. Brave is not.

Good point, Brave's responsibility as a for-profit enterprise is to attempt to go full Paperclip Game and grow to consume the entire universe.

More seriously, I don't think for-profit/non-profit really matters here. Mozilla's reasoning was pretty clear (for better or worse) that they saw these adjacent services as helping to break into the lock-in of Apple/Google/MS who used either their own browser-adjacent services to push their own browsers, or to provide privacy-respecting versions of services (in an attempt to displace, say, Zoom).

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