this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people,Why exactly? The tricks like "optional things to click" are explicitly targeted on less tech savvy people and defeat the point of privacy focused browsers.
I've literally installed Firefox and uBlock Origin for elderly people, and walked some other elderly people through installing them. In, like, 2 minutes. This is not difficult.
Just getting somebody on Firefox with ublock origin is enough IMO. I’m not going to also remove their ability to use Google search. Especially if they’re older. I am very privacy oriented but you have to make some compromises for people lol.
Those are choices, not requirements. Using Firefox is better than using Chrome. Doing the extra stuff is even better, but if doing that means someone gives up and goes back to Chrome, that doesn't help, either.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Actually, the librewolf installer for windows has included an updater for some time now.
I'm no privacy expert, but TechLore has covered Brave a lot and it's one of his recommended daily drivers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eRlAbyjKfU
Last I checked Stallmann wasn't "CEO of Linux". Such a thing does not exist. Eich is CEO of Brave. Apples to oranges.
People are already aware of the shit Stallman does. Hell, you don't need to read the shit he writes, dude's a real-life creep.
And besides: GNU project's tools have continued popularity despite him. Do I need to remind you of XEmacs? EGLIBC? EGCS? A whole lot of projects that reminded GNU equivalents to "oh yeah, maybe we should get gud instead of being an inferiour code base" (XEmacs) or "oh yeah, this fork is clearly superiour, we should merge and call it official" (EGLIBC, EGCS). And now people are like "Hey guys, I just found this compiler called Clang and-" and GNU is like "FFFFF-"
If you download an ad blocker, I'm pretty certain that you don't want to "opt in" to any advertisements by default.
Hey, you thought that was easy to debunk? How about this: When Brave advertises that content creators are able to accept BAT crypto tokens as donations, should the content creators themselves first opt in? They most certainly didn't. Brave specifically said that they would accept donations on behalf of all content creators and held the donations on their behalf until they would opt in.
If these content creators never would actually opt in, what then, I wonder? Did they just deceive the fans of those content creators?
This is dangerously close to the whole rhetoric NFT bros had during the peak. "Why, someone made illegitimate NFTs of your creations? Well you SHOULD have minted those NFTs while you had the chance. Oh, you prefer to NOT participate in this whole NFT ecosystem on principle? Have fun staying poor!"
In this case it makes a difference because there has been an alarming increase in harmful lies made by the far right. This is a purposeful spread of misinformation that many people hesitate to get involved with in any way, and for good reason.
I do not trust the creator of Brave to be aligned with the far right and to still be guided by ethical conduct that I can trust. If you align yourself with people who lie and put others in danger for profit and control, you're condoning such behavior and may be capable of it yourself.
Quite the opposite, brave's defaults are very good. An alternative to brave on the firefox side would be librewolf, which gives firefox great defaults, but the issue with that is that they disabled auto updates, and there's still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager (even though many exist).
And again, there's no "bullshit" if you don't explicitly opt into the crypto.
No, the browser asks you once.
I run it secondary to Firefox when I need to use IPFS, have been for about 6 months now. I also occasionally use it because it also blocks Youtube ads by default, AND when combined with privacy badger, it is the only browser that still works while giving half decent anti-fingerprinting. Firefox, Chrome, nothing else even gets close. They just straight up lie about your screen rez and plugins to keep you from being fingerprinted.
Their account sync is pretty nice. Encrypted P2P syncing of configs and bookmarks. No need to make an account with them to store your settings.
Yeah, if you use their new tab page, there's an crypto option there which you can remove. Their new tab page sucks and I don't use it anyway.
There is ONE crypto button to the right of the URL bar, which you can right click and hide. The other stuff is actually the controls for their PWA install , share and privacy/ad block settings. You can just run full block everywhere and flick off the extra blocking for a site if it's a problem.
I also refuse to use their search, but it does work really well last time I tried it. DDG is good enough and the smaller the company selling my data, the better.
Updates don't generate any crypto popups for me, perhaps because I don't use their front page.
It's open source, so they at the very least aren't hiding what they're doing.
The fact that they offer shitty crypto with hideable buttons should be the least of your objections.
They replaced webpage ads with their own when you enable bat. (I don't crypto so I don't see those)
They swapped referrer links on unreferred things to make money. (which is sunset now, but is an indicator of how they DGAF)
They used their crypto as a pyramid scheme to sell to investors, even got in trouble over it with the Government.
Once their crypto pyramid scheme fails, They'll either fold up, or double down on selling data passed through them.
They have an insecure TOR implementation
They are likely to sell your data
They are likely to sell your data to AI projects.
Their CEO is a POS, but that's hardly unusual these days.
I think "lots of people" here can just be simplified to "nearly everyone". Anyone that is ware of a package manager and why it's useful and thinks to look for an equivalent for Windows is not going to be bothered by a few extra configuration steps.
What does this mean?
If these people really want to ban technology based on the views of the author then they might as well live in the stone age. And even then the tools they used was probably invented by some nasty people. The US space program was built by literal Nazi scientist. Most of the research on how humans survive in space was based on experiments done to Jews. The first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research are the HeLa cells taken from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks. She did not consent to have those cells taken nor was she or her family compensated. Are we gonna boycott cancer research because of this injustice? No? Only the things that make them feel uncomfortable?
You mentioned that politics should not be mentioned with software. Consider Hans Reiser, the author of reiserfs. He murdered his wife and was sent to prison. Would you be okay with running code written by a murderer on your computer? How about a vase made by a murderer in your house? Would you enjoy the voice of a murderer in music?