Brave allows me to easily donate money to creators. I currently fund the internet to the tune of $10/month using Brave. Someday that will be $100/month.
Brave removes ads "pre-render" so it is the fastest experience one can get. Other ad-blockers remove them after they have already loaded via JavaScript. Brave does this natively.
Brave has features to let users watch ads and earn currency, I don't use that at all. But some do, and it is consensual and fine for them.
Brave has an option called "Private w/Tor" and that is what yabones is claiming that "its users fall for the VPN fallacy". Which may be true for a small percentage but yabones is making a sweeping generalization here by implying "all users", which is not even close to true. I don't even use Private w/Tor mode. I don't consider anything truly private on the web and nobody else should either.
Brave is one of the best things to happen to the web as the web has become swamped with tracking and ads. Brave does remove all those by default.
Doesn't Ublock Origin remove ads "pre-download" which is obviously faster?
Isn't this only for sites "signed up" with BAT with Brave keeping the BAT if the site isn't enabled?
NB: It has been a long time since I've checked out Brave so my info may be out of date.
Honest question - how much does that money actually reach the creators? Brave is sitting in the middle and I assume a. is charging a fee and b. has to be trusted to properly account for the money it has to pay creators.
It's a weird sort of marketplace where supply (content) isn't constrained at all, since it's trivial to duplicate. This means there's limited incentive for Brave to be nice to creators.
Are there any (3rd party, not Brave) stats on how much money creators are getting?
Tell that to Pi-hole.
US ISPs:
- Were given retroactive immunity for their participation in illegal domestic spying.
- Often operate in a duopoly, caring not at all about their reputation.
- Routinely engage in shady practices like DNS hijacking.
which is precisely the point because one of the most popular use cases of VPNs is to send copyright infringement letters to /dev/null.
Every single time when VPNs come up there's people talking about all the pitfalls of VPNs when the vast majority of people just want to get past geo-restrictions or avoid being sued for torrenting.
[0] https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/02/25/data-retention-scheme-a...
That's nice if you live in one of those countries. Some countries have very little privacy regulations for data collected by ISPs; others actually mandate collection and storage of data.
At this point:
I use Chrome for one Metamask HD sequence
I use Firefox for another Metamask HD sequence
I use Brave for another Metamask HD sequence
Funny to say this, but I use so many browsers mostly for accounting purposes.
I wish there was a good wallet that maintained multiple HD paths and assisted in other best practices.
for two, I don't know anything about Firefox profiles, does that create a profile for my extensions too? Will multiple firefox profiles have different metamask instances segregated?
As with Firefox, the profiles are completely disconnected, and have different history, extensions, cookies, etc.
If you don't like Chrome's resource hogging, try something like The Great Suspender.
I've started using them recently to have entirely seperate environments for personal and work websites and it's a blessing. Previously I used 2 browsers just like you, now I have the unlimited power of Firefox AdBlockers in every environment.
>Different flavour of mystery sauce
There's no "mystery sauce". It's completely open-source.
>You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.
Brave's completely open about its analytics, and they're designed specially to be privacy-preserving. (No, it's not some naive "anonymous identifier".)
https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/
And you can also turn them completely off.
for many of us who grew up in 'third world' (and/or 'developing') economies, this is not in any way better to "heavily regulated". I expect that people from very corrupt ex-soviet states will agree with this sentiment.
If someone goes into private mode (and tor becomes enabled) and visits a site, wouldn't the owners of that site have less information on that person than if they visited from their own IP address?
What exactly is the fallacy here?
Look for the fingerprinting result.
It's that you're "safe" because big bad mega corp isn't seeing your DNS traffic or in this case they aren't sending you ads.
But you've traded big bad mega corp for up and coming bad mega corp2, so you're not really any safer.
Not sure I agree with that in this case.
Same for ad blocking but I have native mitigations with browser meta data spoofing on every http request (which of course gets unmasked if you log into sites, but its always funny to get a warning email from google when I check gmail occasionally).
Advertisers can very well get websites to run "cloud functions" at the edge (with Fastly, Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, AWS Lambda etc) under the first-party domain, and the content blockers (native or not) will be none the wiser. This is similar to how content blockers struggle to block ads served from first-party domains on YouTube and other Facebook properties.
Exhibit A: https://github.com/samkelleher/cloudflare-worker-google-anal...
Interesting link. I will say though, Brave's been aggressively pushing for an end to third-party cookies, and if websites are increasingly forced to run first-party analytics as a counter-measure, that is still a major win for the internet as a whole.
I actually do like some ads. I have money, and I like to buy cool and interesting things. Occasionally, ads tell me about a new thing or service I'd never heard of. Those are ads that I'm really glad I saw. When they're respectfully informing me of things I might actually be interested in, then I don't mind them.
When I don't like ads is when they slow the page load down by 100x. When I don't like ads is when they have malicious exploits of my browser to install malware on my computer. When I don't like ads is when they auto-play video or put intrusive obnoxious things all over the screen. (Seriously, does anyone respond to those kinds of ads?) When I don't like ads is when they chase me around the internet trying to get me to buy the thing that I just bought.
Using Brave, I see the static ads, and I get to choose to see ads through the Brave network or not. At the moment, I don't mind the Brave network ads -- they're mostly for crypto, which I don't care about; but they're not obnoxious and I know I can turn them off. And occasionally they're for things I might actually be interested in, like chess or electronics.
Right now only 2 of the sites I visit regularly are signed up to be Brave content creators; when this reaches a critical mass, I'll probably start putting in $10-20 per month specifically to support them. At that point, maybe I'll disable the Brave netork ads... or maybe I won't.
I lost track of him about 10 or 15 years ago, but I wouldn't be surprised to know that he has a mobile infested with ads!
That's only fallacy if you think I'm using VPN because I care about who has my browsing data.
I really couldn't care less. I'm using it because my country blocks certain websites and Netflix doesn't have Arrested Development or West Wing licenses for it.
This is the extent of Brave's analytics: https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/
You can also disable it completely.
Using a VPN is a good way to obscure that information. Not every website you visit or app you use needs to know that you're in city X on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and city Y the rest of the week. That's pretty sensitive stuff for a lot of people.
In completely unrelated code paths, all open source, we have timing-channel blinded, few bits per answer, automated survey questions that tell us, e.g., how many people reset default search to a different engine (but nothing more). See https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/.
I'm not sure why you wrote what you wrote. Assumption? It makes an ass of u and umption, to quote Samuel L. Jackson's character from "The Long Kiss Goodnight" :-/.
Some don't like Brave's approach of an alternative, opt-in ads / rewards system because in their view everything crypto-related or ads-supported is scammy. That's an understandable perception: a significant number of crypto enthusiasts appear to be scammers pumping pyramid schemes, and we've already established the ad-tech industry is a towering inferno.
But technically I think you have to concede Brave's on-device ad relevance model is a better way (and the only conscionable one) to run an ad system that delivers relevant ads to interested users, and even directly reward them for their attention. If you think ad-supported anything is a non-starter, then you'd just never enable Brave Rewards, or use another browser (although they're entangled in the current ad-tech system so...)
What you say about 'VPN fallacy' makes little sense.
By default Brave is the most aggressive in blocking trackers, adware, and spyware compared to Firefox and Google — and this is actually a problem for Brave.
Follow their web-compat issues on Github [1] to see the kind of things they're dealing with (an example of the very problematic and kind-of-unresolvable issues that come up include the Duolingo issue [2]).
Users can disable shields on a per-site basis to deal with these things, but it's an open question as to whether this kind of friction will increase or decrease, and whether it's a barrier to larger adoption.
There is no question though that the Brave team have the most commitment to privacy compared to Firefox and, of course, Google.
Your statement that the Google spyware Brave has removed in their Chromium derivative has been replaced by some mystery sauce is based on...?
I do find it curious that whenever this little challenger brand pops up on HN there's a predictable surge of hot take / bad take commentary which aggressively tries to paint a picture of Brave as anything but a plucky challenger brand full of technologists who are expending a lot of energy on privacy, security, and moving browsers forward.
The accounts trying to shop a myth of Brave as a low-rent scam operation will inevitably find buyers for various reasons, but you'd hope technologists in the main will do their research and ignore, or even become curious as to what is driving this continued negative opinion-shaping...
I did mine, and I fell for Brave due to a desire to opt-out of the worst of ad-tech surveillance, get a faster browser, and participate in a novel attempt to bootstrap a frictionless crypto / tipping / payment economy. Not all of these novel ideas will work, but they're worth exploring.
For now Brave's been a dream, and when I accidentally use another open test browser for normal browsing, I'm taken back to a gross dystopia of a web experience.
I'm going to give Brave a try
I use Epic and LOVE it. However, do need a second browser to remove my dependence on IE/Edge
Anyone here in HN has any clue as to ethics of those VC funding Brave?
I have seen that argumentation only in reverse when people were defending DNS over HTTPS by Cloudflare.
I agree though that you cannot check if the VPN provider logs your traffic or not even if they claim they don't log it.
The thing with being protected through paying off politicians is that it works, until it doesn’t.
I could care less what some abstract country has on me. My own country - different story.
What some other country has on your country’s citizens (whether friend or for) is a target for your country's security services, by exchange or espionage, so you can't ignore one if you are concerned about the other.
Yes I can. I understand reasonable security concerns and that is why countries have various security agencies who are being paid to do their job so I let them worry about it. My job is to worry about myself personally and I really do not care about what Timbuktu knows about me. They can't do shit to me personally. My own government and corporations however can.
The exception of course are large neighbours and their multinational corporations. I was surprised and irritated when I've discovered that Amazon knows exactly what kind of car I have even though I bought it from a used car dealer without any Internet involvement and I do not keep Alexa and likewise spyware in my place.
If “Timbuktu” has information about you and it's friendly with your government, it's likely to trade it; if it has it and it's unfriendly with your government, it's a target for your government’s espionage. In either case, it's a place where your information is that your government is likely to be trying to get it (unless you are a particular target, not in isolation, but along with other information), so if you are concerned about your government, you should be concerned about it.
Using a local ISP means that domestic spies will easily hoover up traffic and have easy ways link it back to all sorts of data about you. Using a VPN means that first the VPN provider has to be compromised somehow, the data has to be aggregated into the pool of domestic data - not a trivial task.
It is a pretty simple improvement that puts more of a burden on data collection agencies.
In these cases, deception of the user is a prerequisite for "success".
Dilettantes, perhaps?
I'm referring primarily to gaming subcultures (board and video). Tech illiterate may not be the proper term. But most geeky people I know (even the ones who build their own PCs, and dabble in scripting) have a very cargo-cultish understanding of computing technologies.
Dilettantes, perhaps?
Is this in reference to tor?
I use brave because it's fast, compatible with chrome extensions, but a least a little bit disconnected from Google. Trackers and ads are blocked by default, and it's generally a nice browser.
Brave is like that, but a browser. You replace Google/Firefox with a smaller, maybe slightly less watched, browser that still does the same stuff.
At least with FF there isn't an incentive to sell your attention.
Brave is explicitly positioning themselves as a reseller of attention which they then obscure by pretending to focus on privacy. I'm not sure why anyone uses them - they're an ad company and their incentives are not aligned with their users.
I find them really untrustworthy and their pro-privacy branding has really confused their users.
Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.
Or - with browsers - rather than install and configure Firefox to disable the (very limited) telemetry and configure ad blockers etc, you install a chromium derivative with all the Google pieces replaced with a different flavour of mystery sauce. You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.