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Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

omgubuntu.co.uk

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Re: Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

#221

Post by seth_at_kagi »

nouryqt wrote: post #196
deng wrote: post #187

I'm probably not the only one who got an email from "Brandon Saltalamacchia" with We're giving you a full 30-day trial of Kagi Professional because we know you'll love it. Click "here" to activate your trial, no strings attached. Well, clicked on it, saw that OF COURSE it'll convert to a normal subscription after the trial, which I usually wouldn't have a big problem with, but this is clearly a string that is very mu…

I got that email too. When it wanted my credit-card number I didn't have my wallet by my side so I thought I'd do it later. When I remembered the next day and wanted to give it a try again I was told I had already used the code. Guess not then.

Heyo, did you try recently? We had some bugs initially but released some fixes to make the experience better afterwards.

If you try again - it should work just fine. If it does not, you can always contact support@kagi.com and we'll get it fixed asap.

As for the credit-card number, the form should not ask you for a card. It will ask you for your name and address for tax purposes, should you continue the trial afterwards but it will not ask for your card number. We've had some other people mistake this form for a card form as well. (and if it somehow is, then definitely contact support with screenshots because that is not expected)

Re: Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

#222

Post by seth_at_kagi »

deng wrote: post #207
freediver wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trial does not convert to subsription automatically, you got that wrong. It is just how Stripe trial code works. We may may mistakes from time to time but Kagi is not and never will be in the business of BS communication or deceiving customers. Fighting against those kind of practices and bringing sanity to the web is the entire reason I started the company.

Thank you for chiming in, it is really appreciated. This is what I see when trying to redeem this: https://imgur.com/a/NJvCagh I apologize for getting this wrong, but I hope you can see that it is very hard to parse this any other way than "This is a Kagi Professional subscription, which is free during the first 30 days and will cost you $11.90/month afterwards". (Unfortunately, I cannot edit my parent post anymore t…

Hi - I am the engineer @ Kagi who works on billing things.

From my understanding (at least with the way we do trials at the moment), it will always say "and then X per month" even if the trial is to cancel at the of the period. I do not believe Stripe (our payment processor) has any options to change this behavior from their built-in checkout page that we use.

The options they do let us control (and options we do set) are if there is no payment method given during the trial - it will cancel it at the end of the trial. If a payment method is given during the trial, then Stripe will it set it to auto-renew by itself (and as far as I know, this is true for if a payment method exists beforehand).

Stripe does not let us control this like it does for no payment method, but we can do a simple workaround on our end to get around this. For what it is worth, there is a warning email is sent out 7 days before if it will renew.

As Vlad (freediver) mentions though, it is definitely not our intention to be misleading or anything like that. I hope that makes sense and clears things up.

Re: Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

#223

Post by chias »

treesknees wrote: post #132
Volundr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems more like an indictment of iOS than collusion between search and browser vendors. I'm using Kagi as my default search on Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows, both Chrome and Firefox. The kind of nonsense your describing us why iOS doesn't show up in my list of devices.

My point was more that you claimed to not understand and I was just providing an example where it does take longer than “15 seconds” to switch to Kagi. iOS/iPhone has the majority mobile market share in many countries including the United States. If you’re unaware, Google is currently being sued by the US government for establishing a monopoly over search engine placement including payments to Apple and Mozilla to ke…

meta-note: I am the person claiming not to understand something, and the person you are replying to is not me.

Re: Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

#224

Post by chias »

treesknees wrote: post #114
chias wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I don't understand. Kagi has been my only search engine since they dropped the price to $10/mo. I've only ever used Kagi with Firefox, and I use it on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I just add it to my search engines and set it as default, which takes about 15 seconds. Everything seems to just work seamlessly. Searching in private windows works without any configuration or token juggling. I have never tri…

To set it as your default search engine on iOS, you need to first install a separate Kagi Search app from the App Store, enable the extension, and then dig through some fairly obscure Safari settings so that the Kagi app can run with enough permissions to intercept/redirect search URLs for other search engines. So now when I search in Safari, the browser says “DuckDuckGo Search” but when I hit return Kagi jumps in. I…

If I understand your response correctly, it boils down to "specific browsers do irritating things".

So I honestly still do not understand. It does not make sense for the raison-d'etre for the Orion browser to be "we don't do the irritating thing that Safari does" when most other browsers also don't do that thing. But clearly people want to use the Orion browser. So I guess I'm just (still) missing what the point is.

Re: Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

#226

Post by kerkeslager »

saagarjha wrote: post #215
kerkeslager wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you think this can be analyzed effectively . Yes, I'm aware of bytecode analysis, but that's a slow difficult process, and for browsers, the release cycle is short enough that by the time you're done analyzing the current version, a new version is out, and it's significantly harder and less useful to diff a binary, so you end up having to basically start the analysis over for the new version. Unless t…

Evaluating browser security is hard. Checking privacy guarantees is easy: you can just look at the traffic it generates. Vlad has a pretty simple and quite strong policy that Kagi doesn’t phone home unless you agree to it. If you find it does otherwise (should be pretty easy to monitor) you should take it up with him.

This is completely wrong.

Malicious software has a long history of detecting monitoring so it can avoid detection. A closed-source browser with backdoors can detect Wireshark, Little Snitch, or whatever you're using to detect outgoing connections, and not connect while those programs are running.

The problem is even more insidious when you're making regular expected connections to a site that the browser creator controls. Many (most?) Orion users are already connecting to Kagi on a regular basis, so they can simply wait until the user logs in to Kagi and smuggle out the data they've collected along with the login request.

In the most extreme case, the browser can not exfiltrate any data at all unless triggered to do so. In this case, the attacker targets specific victims to exfiltrate data from, but avoids exfiltrating from any security researchers or knowledgeable users who might be running software to detect the exfiltration.

In short, the goal here is for those of us with more knowledge to be able to verify the software for every user, because not everyone is capable of monitoring their outgoing traffic effectively, and it's far too easy for backdoored software to simply not phone home when it's being monitored.

Re: Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

#227

Post by andelink »

superkuh wrote: post #208
freediver wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy Pass removes the need for 'trust'. It gives you cryptographical guarantees of anonymity.

Just as long as you now give your trust to the Kagi made browser extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kagi-privacy-... ) that is required and has access to your browser. Big yikes.

Big yikes? Is it not open source? https://github.com/kagisearch/privacypass-extension

Re: Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

#229

Post by nouryqt »

seth_at_kagi wrote: post #221
nouryqt wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got that email too. When it wanted my credit-card number I didn't have my wallet by my side so I thought I'd do it later. When I remembered the next day and wanted to give it a try again I was told I had already used the code. Guess not then.

Heyo, did you try recently? We had some bugs initially but released some fixes to make the experience better afterwards. If you try again - it should work just fine. If it does not, you can always contact support@kagi.com and we'll get it fixed asap. As for the credit-card number, the form should not ask you for a card. It will ask you for your name and address for tax purposes, should you continue the trial afterwar…

Hey Seth!

Thank you for reaching out, sorry I only just now saw it. I just tested it and it indeed work without any problems now and I successfully started my 1 month professional sub. I think what confused me about needing a credit-card was the stripe(? I think) checkout form :D But you are right, it didn't actually want my credit-card number after putting in my address.

Much appreciated the help!

Re: Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

#230

Post by saagarjha »

kerkeslager wrote: post #226
saagarjha wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evaluating browser security is hard. Checking privacy guarantees is easy: you can just look at the traffic it generates. Vlad has a pretty simple and quite strong policy that Kagi doesn’t phone home unless you agree to it. If you find it does otherwise (should be pretty easy to monitor) you should take it up with him.

This is completely wrong. Malicious software has a long history of detecting monitoring so it can avoid detection. A closed-source browser with backdoors can detect Wireshark, Little Snitch, or whatever you're using to detect outgoing connections, and not connect while those programs are running. The problem is even more insidious when you're making regular expected connections to a site that the browser creator cont…

This is true of open source software too. At some point you have to trust that the software you run is not designed to act like malware, because if it is actually backdoored your life is going to be miserable regardless.
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