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Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

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Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#101

Post by BrendanEich »

tomComb wrote: post #97
BrendanEich wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because I don't believe you. For example, I followed up on your claim about the second when it happened and it appeared clear to me that it was not a bug. I'm now familiar with how you aggressively and dishonestly attack people who call out Brave's actions. I know I'm not special - that's just how you do business - but you aren't going to intimidate me. I will make one concession to your attack though, I will declare…

If you don't believe me, then there's no point in talking. But you can verify for yourself that we've never replaced ads in publisher pages. On the binance.{us,com} autocomplete with affiliate code, it was a blunder where two entries in a table had the wrong flag passed in. Not sure how to prove intent, so again: no point talking if you don't believe me but my work has been in the open for 23+ years and I stand behind it.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#102

Post by jonathansampson »

opheliate wrote: post #84
jonathansampson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Replaces implies in-situ substitution (i.e. ads on pages, etc.); in fact this is often what is explicitly stated when the claim "Brave replaces ads" is made (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28619682 for a local example). Brave blocks harmful ads and trackers, and introduced an alternate model to supply missed revenue for creators. Brave Ads (desktop notifications) are off by default in Brave; users must opt-in. So there is no replacement (in-situ) of ads, but there is blocking (of necessity, for security and privacy reasons) of third-party trackers/ads.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#103

Post by vrc »

ziddoap wrote: post #86
vrc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So I couldn’t tell you all of them because I don’t keep track of when I need to disable it and refresh to make a page work (and that’s not that big an inconvenience for me). But I used to have to travel a lot for work with strict travel caps. Working within those, I had perfected a few strategies to really get the lowest fares available. On one specific planning adventure, I found a way to book a business class flight through Air Canada’s website that took me through Europe and back across the US for the price of the standard economy fare for the same trip. Privacy Badger killed the payment flow, and I could never get that rate back. I ended up on over 30 hours of flights in economy, and I’ll never forget the refreshed faces of the business class travelers… But more seriously, that and similar situations were the only really bad ones. Many times it’s just disabling and reloading a page. But for a casual Internet user, identifying that fix might be too much.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#104

Post by tomComb »

BrendanEich wrote: post #101
tomComb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I don't believe you. For example, I followed up on your claim about the second when it happened and it appeared clear to me that it was not a bug. I'm now familiar with how you aggressively and dishonestly attack people who call out Brave's actions. I know I'm not special - that's just how you do business - but you aren't going to intimidate me. I will make one concession to your attack though, I will declare…

If you don't believe me, then there's no point in talking. But you can verify for yourself that we've never replaced ads in publisher pages. On the binance.{us,com} autocomplete with affiliate code, it was a blunder where two entries in a table had the wrong flag passed in. Not sure how to prove intent, so again: no point talking if you don't believe me but my work has been in the open for 23+ years and I stand behin…

I'm not stupid: I'm not going to discard my judgement based on careful examination of independent parties in favour of how you want me to judge it. (Even if I hadn't seen that you are not trustworthy and will aggressively attack people for speaking the truth.)

> If you don't believe me, then there's no point in talking.

Ok, something we can agree upon!

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#105

Post by BrendanEich »

tomComb wrote: post #94
dkdk8283 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Mozilla any better? They’ve lost their way and Google remains their largest source of income.

Yes, Mozilla is way better - the polar opposite really. Judge them on their record. Your not liking a company that is giving them money and Brave's actual record of being endlessly slimy and untrustworthy. Mozilla undermines Google at every chance so clearly the only result of Google money is what you see in Firefox and that is easily changable.

I'm glad you like Firefox, I spent a lot of years on it, and on Mozilla, Gecko, SpiderMonkey, and the XUL platform before it. But Mozilla is currently beholden to Google and this has left them with year over year market share losses against Chrome. I don't see how they've "undermined" Google. If they switch to Bing as scooped by TechCrunch, they may start.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#106

Post by tomComb »

BrendanEich wrote: post #105
tomComb wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Mozilla is way better - the polar opposite really. Judge them on their record. Your not liking a company that is giving them money and Brave's actual record of being endlessly slimy and untrustworthy. Mozilla undermines Google at every chance so clearly the only result of Google money is what you see in Firefox and that is easily changable.

I'm glad you like Firefox, I spent a lot of years on it, and on Mozilla, Gecko, SpiderMonkey, and the XUL platform before it. But Mozilla is currently beholden to Google and this has left them with year over year market share losses against Chrome. I don't see how they've "undermined" Google. If they switch to Bing as scooped by TechCrunch, they may start.

Yes, I'm quite familiar with your record - you sell it endlessly. Your getting in early at Mozilla doesn't make up for the damage you've done to the web with Brave.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#107

Post by BrendanEich »

tomComb wrote: post #104
BrendanEich wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't believe me, then there's no point in talking. But you can verify for yourself that we've never replaced ads in publisher pages. On the binance.{us,com} autocomplete with affiliate code, it was a blunder where two entries in a table had the wrong flag passed in. Not sure how to prove intent, so again: no point talking if you don't believe me but my work has been in the open for 23+ years and I stand behin…

I'm not stupid: I'm not going to discard my judgement based on careful examination of independent parties in favour of how you want me to judge it. (Even if I hadn't seen that you are not trustworthy and will aggressively attack people for speaking the truth.) > If you don't believe me, then there's no point in talking. Ok, something we can agree upon!

I didn't refer you to independent parties. You can check Brave (we provide old versions on github) and you won't ever find us replacing ads in publisher pages. We're all open source on the client side, so you can read revision histories too. If you don't check for yourself, then how do you know what you said is true?

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#108

Post by nicce »

jonathansampson wrote: post #92
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.

> "they get caught on very hostile things again and again" This is not the case. The most common claims are "Brave accepted donations for others", "Brave replaces ads across the Web", "Brave injected/modified referral links"—each of these claims are unequivocally false. You are right that Brave is an "ad based company," however. But that needs to be explained a bit, since Brave is unlike any other ad-based company yo…

> This is not the case. The most common claims are "Brave accepted donations for others", "Brave replaces ads across the Web", "Brave injected/modified referral links"—each of these claims are unequivocally false.

How so? For example the case "Brave injected/modified referral links" https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/o...

The "problem" of open-source is, that you can see what is happening.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#109

Post by ziddoap »

jonathansampson wrote: post #102
opheliate wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Replaces implies in-situ substitution (i.e. ads on pages, etc.); in fact this is often what is explicitly stated when the claim "Brave replaces ads" is made (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28619682 for a local example). Brave blocks harmful ads and trackers, and introduced an alternate model to supply missed revenue for creators. Brave Ads (desktop notifications) are off by default in Brave; users must opt-…

I can't help but wonder if you were in politics at some point in your career, being able to hinge on a very strict and literal definition of "replace" and missing the entire spirit of topic at hand.

Re: Brave Talk – Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing

#110

Post by lamontcg »

ziddoap wrote: post #86
vrc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have 17 exceptions in PB that I've setup, including my ISP, my broker, and my local utilities. Those would all be since I switched to firefox (2-3 years ago now?). It used to be worse, I'm pretty sure I had many dozens of exceptions on my old chrome settings.
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