I also like they provide a Wireguard file and a way to filter it, so it's super easy to get started.
I tried to get us to use Mullvad, as it was perfect for me, but for him it was constant problems with the services he used, whereas the sketchier providers like NordVPN and ExpressVPN always worked without issues.
Sketchier VPN providers use "home ips" and rotate them regularly in order to defeat Netflix or other services blocking them.
Often they pay someone to include their code in a "free" software or browser extension (or malware) that allows them to route traffic through the host.
Oxylabs is one of the larger examples whose record is somewhat dubious.
BHProxies is the largest residential proxy provider on the internet and almost all of their proxies are acquired through the botnet above.
https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-bo...
This needs to be on the front page of.... something.
I'd be shocked if any of the major VPN providers were involved with illegal residential proxies. It just doesn't make sense, can you imagine just how unstable and slow those connections would be? Why would they risk being legally liable when there exists legal residential proxy providers that get their IP's from people that voluntarily share their connection (honeygain etc.)? I've never heard of any of the big VPN providers offering residential connections. As I understand the VPN providers that promise support for netflix and similar streaming services just acquire newer IP's from time to time but the connection still goes through a regular datacenter, definitely not from some random dude's home.
The proxy market is more so targeted towards developers who scrape data and criminals that do credential stuffing/other criminal activity.
>can you imagine just how unstable and slow those connections would be
Yes, yes I can and they are. I tried them some time ago before I found out how shady they are and encrypted connections were like 2 Mbit while Mullvad gave me many many times faster bandwidth with higher encryption. Their support was completely useless.
See https://github.com/d2phap/ImageGlass/issues/1252 for an example on how this might happen (spider.com).
Not that it's your point, but, at least in the US, you can pay for BritBox on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/storefront?contentType=subsc... .
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_(video_on_demand)
Given a) they started experimenting with iPlayer pretty early in the streaming came, and b) they have a huge and valuable back catalogue, it's always amazed me that they didn't open up pay-per-view and subscription options for an ex-UK audience.
I've always suspected there's a good reason why not behind the scenes - maybe because a successful PPV operation would lend huge weight to people in the UK seeking to abolish the license fee?
Smart DNS providers like Getflix provide access to BBC Iplayer and a ton of other streaming services too.
Basically you use their DNS servers and they handle the geo-unblocking.
of course, I wanted to do this for as close to free as possible, since plugging an aerial into a tv also cost next to nothing
VPNs were already being detected and banned. I tried at least 4 extensively, including tcp, udp, socks, wg, obfuscated servers, etc. to no avail
dodgy residential/mobile proxies were too unreliable for live 720p m3u streams, not to mention expensive
I went through a few cheap linux VPSs with UK ip addresses, forwarding their web streams to my tv outside the UK, until I found one that seemed to work well. so much so I even invested in some fancy routing through intermediary countries for almost jitter-free stability
until a few weeks later, back to the same old shite -- everything 403 Unauthorised
after yet a few more weeks of furious head-scratching shame over the stable-now-vanished CBeebies and BritComs daily consumption, I concluded and confirmed the BBC had just started detecting and banning datacentre IPs more aggressively
it was at this ebb I discovered the wonderful world of illegal IPTV streams and adopted a fuck you too, BBC attitude
Maybe it was something to do with the fact that it was a Proxy and not a VPN, though I'm not sure if this makes it any less detectable. I even had a Firefox extension that automatically turned on the proxy when opening iPlayer tabs! It worked very well, though I wish I could've paid the license fee and just got access.
interesting about Dubai though, makes me wonder if they have some sort of expat or economic deal with them. if Google thinks you're there, you can bet BBC do too. I discovered they use multiple CDNs and delivery mechanisms as fallback/best effort, which sometimes (but not always) sieved most (but not all) VPN locations in an indeterminate (but authoritatively just) fashion, so perhaps Dubai is whitelisted on one of those. might investigate further at some point if I can swallow some bile first
It’s pretty silly though, I would absolutely pay for a TV license if given the opportunity. Dear BBC: Shut up and take my money!
The shell provider I used was Phurix, not if they are still around or not.
A shame BBC can't accommodate its paying customers who happen to be abroad.
I’m French living abroad and have never missed French TV. The quality of the content is just very sub-par compared to American shows. They just don’t have the budget to compete. Is the UK different because it’s English speaking and perhaps it has access to a wider market and thus more capital?
As an example, Doctor Who sometimes releases new episodes. BBC doesn't just have UK television — they have an "on-demand" offering that actually works, and isn't sparsely populated with 15% of the episodes like some other services (cough Xfinity cough).
Would installing WireGuard server on a router directly solve this (like Gl-Inet travel routers)?
> We need a Firefox with good defaults
Ideally my browser and all the software I use do not connect and fetch data unless I tell them to. A browser should not be "bundled" with extra widgets for convenience.
I want the web to be built around something else than ad-/tracking-supported software and Brave is being very self-contradictory with this.
Don't use Brave if you care about the global picture / tracking around the globe.
Other (independent) initiatives like NetSurf [1] and Ladybird [2] are on my radar. NetSurf has been around for a while; Ladybird seems impressive, achieving some great progress and result with little resources. I should actually try Ladybird more seriously when I get the chance, and maybe contribute if I find the time :-)
[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
[1] https://www.netsurf-browser.org/
[2] https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
If Chrome disappears, Brave ceases to exist. Brave totally relies on Google developers working on Chrome and do the vast majority of what it takes to build the browser. Brave only does superficial work in comparison. Brave may itself be privacy-focused but only exists thanks to Google's business model which is mostly tracking the world.
So, yes, Brave is mostly funded by tracking since it is mostly Chrome with some lightweight work on top of it.
> Unreliant on Chrome?
Your cookies rely on the flour you use to make them even if they have chunks of chocolate that the flour doesn't have. No flour, no cookies. (Except in this case it's even worse, the cookies is already done, you just add some colors...).
I too can take chromium and put it in my own git repository and change some minor stuff. It will be "forked" and "separately" developed but it would not mean a thing.
You have a strange definition of not relying.
Of course, we can't maintain all of the upstream ourselves, although we wish Google had fewer typists adding bad or marginal things; but neither can Samsung, Opera, or even Microsoft. But if Google stopped maintaining, the remaining Chromium browsers would carry on.
Your comments suggest a lack of familiarity with our GitHub.
Brave rewards is opt-in, off by default. If you dislike ads, don't enable it.
I suggest you consider that your big-picture thinking is short sighted. Instead of spears vs. Maxim guns, the better trope and line of attack is judo: use Google's weight against it, by differentiating a level up in a way that puts users first and if they opt in, pays them 70% of the gross.
(I'm assuming you are educated on how our private ad system works. If not read my comments in the past year or so, easy to find from my profile.)
Wut? Citation needed. I’m sure you don’t mean his support of Proposition 8 in 2008, because Barack Obama professed the same belief in 2008… making him, in this formulation, a homophobe.
Or just read the summary on Wikipedia [2].
There's a lot of material on this topic, it's easy to make up one's opinion on this.
(I know you are not the one who started it today, my comment is also directed toward the parent comments)
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
But if these details are to play a factor in browser selection, one should reflect on the myriad of undesirable associations involved in going about daily life.
Just typing this reply involves an entire supply chain associated with individuals and organizations of questionable character.
To apply this same level of sensitivity to daily life would be to mostly unhook oneself from modern society.
I care deeply about the safety and freedom of the LGBTQ+ community, and find little value in allowing someone else’s lack of acceptance of me dictate my life. Doing so is a form of “doing something” that does nothing but widen the gap to actual change, which can only ever happen via open dialogue.
I think there are plenty of reasons not to choose Brave based on the actual technical merits of the product.
But wondering whether is Eich homophobic? Meh. Bored of these discussions. I have set my opinion on this. It's been discussed enough.
Avoiding Chik-Fil-A at all costs: primarily affects me.
Being willing to frequent a Chik-Fil-A because a friend somewhere else on the political spectrum enjoys it: potentially opens an opportunity to talk.
Most of my family and their circles fit that latter description, so this is not a hypothetical. Any chance of influencing them is actively harmed by choosing/avoiding fast food based on tribal allegiance.
None of this should be construed to mean that I find their leadership team and public stances acceptable.
It has everything to do with your comment? I'm inviting anybody interested on the topic to go read about it themselves instead of rehashing the same subject again and again, since I believe everything about this has already been said already?
> You libeled someone without providing any proof at all.
On the contrary, please notice how I carefully and deliberately stated nothing about Eich, not given my opinion on this and not taken sides here.
It would not be smart, it would invite people who have opinions on this to further push this discussion.
Did you confuse me with another commenter?
Declaring someone else is a homophobe without their making such an assertion is mindreading.
The same way a principled vegan also eats meat, to be sure.
But he also opposed gay marriage, so to some extent he was homophobic, at least for political reasons. He later changed his mind on it, likely also for political reasons.
But shame on you for using such disingenuous bullshit tactics to make your homophobic point: “If you call Eich a homophobe, then you also have to call <insert beloved liberal figure> a homophobe!”. For one, it ignores the fact that people’s minds can change over time, whereas Eich has never changed his stance on gay marriage and has never disavowed the money he spent trying to stop it. And two, it’s just a red herring argument and attempted hypocrisy trap.
And worse, it’s a fucking terrible hypocrisy trap. There are millions of people who support gay marriage but never supported Barack Obama, and millions more who supported Obama precisely because they didn’t want gay marriage and thought they could trust him to not change his mind on it. Obama may be beloved by some liberals, but he is a hypocrite to many on a multitude of reasons, ranging from his gay marriage flip flop, to his support of the patriot act, to the promotion of indefinite detention and torture to federal law, to the fact that he continued the pointless Iraq war for his entire term.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3292619/the-brave-brow...
> Brave scrubs sites of ads and ad tracking, then replaces those ads with its own advertisements, which are not individually targeted but instead aimed at an anonymous aggregate of the browser's user base.
Sounds an awful lot like Google's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts, no?
btw I don't know anything about Brandon Eich, but I still would never use a crypto browser
We don't aggregate anything into Federated Learning, all opt in (off by default) machine learning is local to the browser. Chaum blind signature protocol (Privacy Pass standardized this) to confirm.
I know it's fun to repeat misinformation on hacker news out of ill will, but many people have verified our claims from open source audits, network audits, and more. Comments like yours just look sloppy or even malicious, even on HN.
Brave doesn't do any of this cloud surveillance based ad-tech. We leave ads off by default, but when a user opts in, all the ad matching is local to the browser against a catalog that's the same for a large cohort by region and human language. Ad impressions are confirmed by a Privacy Pass variant protocol. Users get 70% of the gross.
There isn't a great category for what Google is, it already won its own "google it" verb. But among many other things, it is a huge ad-tech player. Brave is small, user-first, privacy-by-default, and ads are opt in. See the difference?
The desktop client also supports some obfuscation schemes (UDP over TCP) which is useful when you're in countries which block any kind of VPN. The default smartphone app doesn't support this out of the box, but they have some tutorials to setup Shadowsocks and OpenVPN to route the traffic over https as well
If you're looking such option for Android, you can check out Mull [1] which is available on F-Droid [2] as well and use it along with uBlock Origin.
And more often than not the response has been "well we did investigate Firefox but working with it was pita so we went with easiest option"
Shit dude. You want to start a business so at least do the right thing.
If there are more Firefox forks, like there are chromium forks today, that would normalize Firefox because currently chromium is the de facto web standard.
If Firefox wants to have a competitive market share they should actively compete instead of begging people to increase their market share.
One is actually the right thing to do. The other is how to make more money faster and quicker.
> ...Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
More bizarrely, there’s an open Bugzilla and GitHub issue on that, both a few years old.
Obviously I have transferred my entire family and social circle over to Brave. If Firefox won’t make their users secure, I will.
I can understand why it's not a priority at this point, at least, given that Firefox on iOS is currently a reskin of Safari, and the door is reportedly about to open for actual competition among iOS browsers due to increasing anti-trust pressures on Apple.
It would make more sense to me to address this with a real port of Gecko to iOS, and then you can just run the full version of uBlock Origin for Firefox on your iPhone.
Allow me to introduce you LibreWolf https://librewolf.net/
It's a custom build of Firefox with somewhat sensible, sometimes strict, privacy respecting default settings.
There's also the Arkenfox user.js which you can put on top of vanilla Firefox, aiming for the most privacy and security possible. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
A lot of sites allow interaction even with the above but they shadowban you without telling you. Craigslist shadow bans and auto-spam-filters any submissions done with a VPN, and then also auto-spam-filters any subsequent submissions on the same account even with the VPN turned off.
Reddit also universally spam-filters any submissions and comments done under a VPN, and rate limits your commenting a shitload on VPNs.
Mullvad, who has a reputation in the HN comments for being just like... over the top amazing + great (they swear up and down they don't store traffic logs and if you don't trust them, you can pay anonymously somehow or whatever), is having a "hard time" being profitable/growing
all while
NordVPN, who has a bad reputation in HN comments for being untrustworthy and "not so anonymous", seems more well known (and therefore most likely has more paying customers and makes more money?)
What is that law called in business? when the "less good" offering wins?
NordVPN and others spend a lot of money on aggresive and pretty shady advertising, which tricks consumers into all kinds of false assumptions.
NordVPN has spent an incredible amount of money getting their name out there.
The majority of the population hasn't a clue about what a VPN is or does. The ones that do, their only interface is "its this thing my company makes me connect to"
Of the remaining subset of people who are aware of what VPNs actually do for you, it's likely they can only name 1 or two brands: NordVPN and ExpressVPN.
So if you have the superior product, but the lesser position in the market, then get busy marketing.
Easier said than done I imagine. Big brand VPN providers charge several times more for the "same" service, or make you sign up with 3 year commitment to even come close to Mullvad's monthly pricing.
I think you misspelled "spamming ads everywhere".
The old company: https://www.allabolag.se/5567839807/amagicom-ab
The current company: https://www.allabolag.se/5592384001/mullvad-vpn-ab
> Mullvad [...] is having a "hard time" being profitable/growing
This is how I originally interpreted the parent comment as well, but they actually meant "a VPN is not enough to maintain your privacy, you also need a privacy-respecting browser."
The law that "in a free market, the best product wins" has been beaten by profit-driven companies with billions at their disposal. Sure, you can have a better product. But maybe it's more profitable to have better marketing, or secondary sources of profit.
It's quite telling that VPN providers sponsor so many YouTube videos... Which require login to the biggest ad-driven company... Which will identify users by their login, no matter if they have a VPN or not!
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. I suppose you could say that was "post-fact" as it drew on what was happening at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the English and Scottish agricultural revolutions among other things, but "invented" would seem a bit of a stretch.
> The law that "in a free market, the best product wins" has been beaten by profit-driven companies with billions at their disposal.
Of course, given that law then the other possibility you appear to have dismissed is that the market is not free.
But then I'll day: maybe these guidelines are outdated, 250 years later. For example, does the best product win? Not if the product is complex enough and people cannot quickly measure its quality. There's 10$ crap and 100$ crap, and fake reviews, and paid reviews, and swapped products, and misleading marketing.
- available
- at a price that the producer makes a profit
- at a price that the buyer can afford
- and does the job
Many such products may exist in a market, some "better" than others but that would be a subjective opinion. The problem with a non-free market e.g. one with monopolies or interference from governments in the form of subsidies, is that it interferes with the above list and you end up with inferior products (in terms of the above list) to those you would've had in a free market. Even the "producer makes a profit" part would be worse because there are less producers making profits, and thus fewer products, higher prices for those products remaining et cetera.
Advertising is not a bad thing in a free market. Fake reviews and the rest are, but they lead to less trust, as we see occur with Amazon, and you would go to a more trusted competitor but Amazon is a monopoly so…
No it probably won't help if I want to buy fertilizer for a truck bomb.
So, like LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc. ?
There's a ton of those already.
Now, I didn't really know about LibreWolf, I'll look into it for myself.
Why would they?
I don't really blame them for this though. Buyers should also do their homework.
I mean... yeah? What else should it be?
This is an open source, rebranded Firefox and Firefox-like browsers could use some publicity. It promotes privacy and privacy can use some publicity too. Tor too.
Mullvad seems to be honest in the fact that their business model is selling VPNs and it's nice they are saying it's not enough. They are not saying that you might not need one though.
We need a Firefox with good defaults and it seems like this browser is such a thing. I'd prefer these privacy features to be in upstream Firefox but I guess world is not perfect and that Firefox still relies on revenues from Google so can't be as privacy-focused as it should.
My little concern I guess is that this browser will push for their service so it's a bit like an ad for them, at least with its name. But fair enough, and at least the business model seems healthy.
With Mullvad already being a Mozilla partner for their branded VPN, all this actually look good. They seem to be spending their money on worthy stuff.