I've been critical of Brave in the past, but I'm glad to see IPFS gaining more traction. IPFS getting browser based support is what's needed to connect in traditional consumers and let it take off.
I agree, I still want to support Firefox because I'm worried about all web browsers becoming shallow reskins of Chrome, but having built-in support for IPFS is pretty great.
That being said given the trajectory taken by Mozilla it seems like I'll have to give up on it sooner or later... What a waste.
The phrase "hijacking links" is, in a word, a lie. Its standard meaning implies that Brave changes the URL loaded when you click on a link (any or many links) in a web page. That never happened, and would be fatally scandalous if tried by any reputable browser.
What happened was a bug in a keyword and domain autocomplete tier we added. Reminder for those not aware: all browsers add reference codes identifying the browser make (not the user) to keyword queries when you type words into the address bar. This is industry standard. See https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1273327455105773568?s....
The bug in Brave was a flag set wrong for two domain names, which are not keywords: binance.us and binance.com. These should not have default-completed when typed into the address bar with a Binance affiliate code, they should have been suggested completions the user would have had to pick by arrow down and <return> or mouse equivalent. We fixed the defaulting bug and turned off the entire suggested completions feature. As noted by someone else in a comment nearby, we instructed Binance not to pay us for any referred new users who traded (Binance does not pay on the referral, they pay only after if the user trades, sharing a fixed proportion of trading fees).
So this was not "link hijacking" in any case. I'm sorry for the blunder, and we added a process step around any changes to address bar to audit harder.
Please see https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ regarding this claim. It's important to note that Brave never hijacked links, modified pages, our injected codes into content. The browser offered a pre-search list of suggestions for a small set of keywords (see blog post for screenshots). Happy to answer any questions you may have beyond the contents of that blog post. Nothing malicious here; no data or privacy impact either. We were able to fix the behavior within 48 hours (IIRC), and burned the associated affiliate code.
I just added it to an Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu), very easy instructions, and familiarly default too - https://brave.com/linux/.
One slight gotcha, if you view the link from Tor it offers an .onion site for the apt repos string, but I wanted the regular repos as I don't use OS-level Tor but happened to be using tor-browser.
Peter Thiel is not personally an investor in Brave. The firm he's a partner in (Founders Fund) has a small seed series investment, which was led by Cyan Banister. Some first floor engineers at Brave have more equity than that small investment constitutes. Repeating falsehoods once you know they are false is lying, so please don't.
Palantir exists to improve privacy of citizen data within the government. Without it, government workers have massive, untraceable and unaccountable access to private data. (See Snowden for more info.)
I don't like that there's even a need for Palantir, but given the need, I'm glad it exists and I'm glad someone like Thiel is behind it.
I don't honestly care all that much about Palantir specifically (pros and cons, though lots of cons), but one thing they do not do by simply existing is help citizens protect their data. They do a lot of things, but not that.
Well, that's annoying. Here is what I meant to post, more or less:
Huh. So the argument to overcome objections to a system designed for ingesting, canonicalizing, normalizing, and correlating private data acquired via dubious means from dubious sources is that at least the access to and use of the data is controlled monitored and auditable, reducing the incidence of LOVEINT and similar abuses as compared to ad-hoc systems constructed on the sly?
That's really damning with faint praise, especially since Jevon's Paradox ensures that both the use AND abuse of such data will increase when you reduce the 'costs' of doing so, and that's assuming there is no unsanctioned/off-book/'black' use or egress of the data (which is far from assured, IMO, given what we know about the history of these systems and projects, eg. Total Information Awareness and Trailblazer vs. ThinThread).
That headline is certainly inflammatory, but I don't think the actual content of the post is nearly as bad - they're not suggesting web browser start flagging/blocking sites or anything similar like it initially made me think.
They're simply suggesting further transparency in algorithmic suggestions and research be conducted. You could even argue that they're suggesting that deplatforming simply isn't the ultimate solution.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. They take the banning of Trump and conclude that there needs to be transparency in advertising? I mean, I agree, but it's certainly a weird article. I'm not sure if they're just piggybacking on a hot issue and inflammatory title to push this message. Whatever it is, I don't like it very much.
You're right that the content itself doesn't suggest Firefox doing something troubling, but the headline certainly does. It bothers me much more from a company known for privacy than it would from someone else.
How is "more transparency from platforms" not in line with what you'd expect from Mozilla? It's not like they just suddenly started to talk about the topic.
It is not particularly surprising considering that the founder of Brave was fired as Mozilla's CEO and replaced by the current one specifically because of politics.
After a bit of reading, it sounds like he has some very nasty personal views. At least he respected the Mozilla community enough to step down when they came to light.
His views do not impart themselves onto Brave of course, but I will stay with Firefox.
Mozilla's current CEO is like the opposite of what Firefox used to stand for... I can't wait to switch for something better. I think that he really likes the Google dollars.
Disabling most add-ons in Firefox Mobile, really? I still use the old engine (Fennec) even if it probably makes me vulnerable. And there's a bunch of other problems that make the new Fenix engine less useful then Fennec... I don't even know what is supposed to make the new engine better.
I'm a liberal. But this is fucking fascism. When you want to take your position and jam it down everyone's throat and police how people can even talk.
Fuck this. Decentralize everything.
Edit: I just re-read the article after skimming and now I feel completely different. The article title is really bad. Mozilla is just calling for more transparency into how advertisers and social media operates.
What a bad headline.
I hope Mozilla never treads into the censorship territory.
"Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation."
One has to read closely to pick up on the doublespeak. They are calling for the use of algorithms to hide ideas they disagree with and artificially promote ideas they agree with. It is soft censorship but far more sinister.
The people downvoting me would be terrified if it were Trump that had this power.
My belief is that nobody should have this power.
edit: You merry downvoters that believe we shouldn't have freedom of speech should move somewhere freedom of speech isn't permitted. That way you won't have to be offended anymore. Although I think it would be fitting if you don't have a say as to which speech is permitted.
