If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it’s even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?
But is it though?
Believing that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be a government-supported institution isn’t the same as believing LGBT people are “invalid” or “wrong” or whatever.
For example, I personally oppose government-supported marriage entirely (despite being married myself) because I think marriage should be a religious/personal thing instead of an official government institution, and that we should replace it with a series of contracts that grant certain legal privileges (e.g. joint tax filing, power of attorney, etc) in an a la carte type setup (i.e. you may want to join finances w/ someone, but not give them hospital visitation rights). I think we should also allow more than two parties to enter into these agreements to cover a wide variety of unique living situations (e.g. you may want to joint file with a parent that you care for).
I don’t know Eich’s personal political views, and I honestly don’t care, as long as they don’t interfere with his role.
Not necessarily. For example, they could partner w/ someone like Axate, which basically does just this.
My understanding is that they can’t really do that, because the payments are anonymous. I could be mistaken though.
And if that applies to you, you should be very careful about the tools you use. Brave is a new thing and is relatively unproven. Use established, proven tools like Tor Browser.
Eh, I don’t really like Gabe Newell, but I certainly appreciate the investment into Linux. It just so happens our interests align more than they don’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if GabeN’s personal politics were quite conservative, because conservative policies generally benefit rich people like him (the closest I can see is maybe libertarian).
Meredith Whitaker is an absolute treasure, we don’t deserve her.
How is it not?
I mean, legally, that’s what marriage is.
You don’t have to do either of those things just because you’re married. Marriage just gives you the option.
And what would they bring to this partnership?
You should be. But companies also should not be creating tools that propose to give you those protections when they’re not smart enough to. Just leave it to the professionals.
As long as he keeps his mouth shut about them and doesn’t financially support them, he’s doing worlds better than Mr. Eich.
Is it me or the people defending brave are homophobes too.
Not just you, if they can ignore or defend Brave, they’re on the side of its CEO. No questions about it.
It seems incredibly obvious to me. For example, here are some things I believe:
Personal beliefs about what government policy should be can be very different than personal beliefs about what is “good” and “bad.”
To be clear, I support same-sex marriage because it’s on the table and my preferred alternative has almost no shot of being considered. So I support it as a harm-reduction policy, not because I actually believe the government should actually regulate marriage.
Marriage is a basket of contracts (power of attorney, joint custody, financial obligations, etc), and it’s limited to two people, which is odd. The original intent seems to be to encourage procreation, but it’s hardly enforced at all, nor is that particularly important in most countries (except maybe Japan).
We should treat marriage similarly to corporations. If you want to call your civil partnership “marriage,” more power to you. If you want to call it being BF/GF, life partners, or whatever else, more power to you. The government should only care that you meet the requirements for whatever the benefit is.
In many (most?) states, it is enforced unless you specifically opt-out (e.g. a pre-nup). Laws certainly vary by state, but generally speaking, if you’re legally married, anything you earn in the marriage is considered joint assets, even if you keep them in separate accounts. In some areas, things you bring into the marriage are also jointly owned, unless they are never interacted with.
That’s why divorces are so messy, the couple could have agreed to keep things separate at the start, but without any evidence of that, it’s up to the courts to decide what’s fair. And pretty frequently, they’ll lean on the side of 50/50 for all assets, regardless of when it was acquired or what the understanding was.
Integration into the browser product, users, and marketing.
I’ve been wanting Firefox to do something like this so get more visibility w/ online services. I’d love to be able to load up an account balance and click “view article” and the website owner sucks a few pennies from that balance or whatever. But my only options are:
Axate provides more than that, but so few online services work w/ it. A browser could bring them a ton of visibility.
Agreed. But like I said, users request features, bugs happen, etc. At the end of the day, the responsibility is on the user to pick the right product for their needs. Brave isn’t that product for at-risk individuals until it has been vetted by actual security experts.
Eich did the first half of that, his only “sin” was that someone found out about his donation. That’s it. My understanding is that nobody was aware of it until someone dug into the donation records.
Got it, so being gay isn’t “wrong” or “invalid”, it’s just “bad”?
Yes, that’s what I was referring to. You might call it a “contract”.
They don’t need Brave for that. They need the website owners. If you’re talking about injecting Axate ads where Google and other ads already are, then we’re back to square 1 where you’re ripping off content creators from their revenue for their content.
The problem with doing that with fiat is that there are transfer fees. You’d essential be paying a $3 to transfer 5 cents. That’s why everyone uses crypto for this.
Users can request features all day, developers are the ones who have to implement them.
It’s a completely unnecessary bug from someone trying to replace a perfectly safe and secure tool with their own and build value for themselves. This isn’t just any bug. Like I said, people’s lives can hang in the balance in a very real way. They need to get it right or just stay the fuck away.
Bullshit. Both are responsible.
Then they shouldn’t have launched it.
Not good enough.
deleted by creator
I didn’t say that.
My point here is that personal views can differ from political policy views.
The issue is that it’s opt-out. Instead of that, people should opt-in only to the parts they want.
No, I’m talking about creating a protocol where browser clients can inform website owners that the customer is using this separate method of payment. It could happen separate from the browser (e.g. as an extension), but the browser gives it a lot more visibility.
The UX here would be pretty simple: if the user has enabled this feature, websites would prompt users for payment or to show ads.
Browsers win because they get a revenue stream, Axate wins by having more customers, and websites win because they’re getting paid instead of customers blocking ads.
That’s why you batch up transfers. General flow:
Boom, total number of transfers are pretty low, no need for cryptocurrencies.
Sure, but the browser vendor has very little at stake, whereas the user has everything at stake. At the end of the day, it’s on the user.
You’re welcome to your opinion. I personally don’t have an issue with how people spend their money, I only have an issue with how they treat their employees and choices they make about their product.
That makes absolutely no sense. You would advocate for and even donate to political reform for something you don’t personally believe in?
No, it isn’t.
Nothing says more about who a person is than their political donations.
Yes. I believe in personal freedom, so I’ll support the freedom to do things that I believe are harmful like drug use, gambling, or prostitution. You doing those things doesn’t impact me or anyone else so it should 100% be your right to do it. In short, I believe principles should carry the day.
I may not agree with you doing something I believe to be bad, but I’ll defend your right to do it.
In the same vein, I believe governments should be as small as possible, and no smaller. The role of government is to protect me from you, and vice versa. It’s not to ensure I’m making good choices, in fact it shouldn’t be in the business of deciding what’s “good” or “bad,” it should merely enforce laws that protect people from eachother.
Does the government deciding which marriages are valid protect me from you? Not really, all it does is determine who can take advantage of certain benefits. That sounds exclusionary with no particular purpose, so the government shouldn’t decide that.
So I really can’t speak to why Eich donated to the prop 8 fund (or whatever it was). Was it because he hates gay people? Or because he thinks same sex marriage goes counter to the reason marriage exists as a government institution? Or something else? I don’t know, nor do I really care, provided it doesn’t get in the way of doing his job.
First of all, @[email protected] , thanks for calling out the bullshit of this professional far right fire hydrant apologist. You’ve stayed on track with the main issue of their argument despite them wanting to hide attention away from it.
The reason their propaganda sounds reasonable is because it pretends to be rational and sounds calm, when in reality it’s ignoring extremely glaring issues. In one of these cases for example, it’s pretending that funding intolerance isn’t intolerance. Another is ignoring details, such as how the crypto scam was essentially malware, and did cause performance hits to devices using Brave (part of the reason why it was caught).
Second of all, for everyone following along this far, I just want to point out the false equivalency between something like hard drugs and gambling - things that literally statistically bring literal harm - to marriage.
And finally, we’re done entertaining, bullshit in the tea - that’s why Teslas are burning. Remember that when shit hits the fan.
I was pretty confused when reading because it sounded like you were thanking me for calling our far right BS from the person was talking to, but I was calling our far left BS instead.
But after a couple paragraphs, I realized it was me you were talking about. So thank you for giving me a chance to see this and respond.
Everything here is incorrect. I’m not being paid, I’m not far right (I hate Trump and voted for Biden in 2020), and I call out far right BS all the time (had an argument w/ my boss the other day who supported Trump’s tariff and immigration policy).
I’ve tried to cover all of them, but my posts get long as is, so I try to combine a few. I don’t follow Brave news much, so I’ll miss some things.
If I donated to an intolerant PAC or something, sure, I’d get that. If I bought products from a corporation that openly funds intolerant PACs with a large chunk of profits, I’d get that as well.
But if the CEO uses their personal money on it, I have more trouble connecting that with the company. As long as they keep personal opinions personal and don’t drag the company into it, I’m fine. The VP seems worse than him honestly (from the article).
A CEO is not the company, and if you disable ads, don’t use their search engine, and don’t engage with their crypto nonsense, you’re not giving them any money. I do all of that for the handful of minutes each day I use it.
I use Firefox as my main browser, and that’s what I recommend to others. I use Brave as my backup browser, because I need something that runs on the Chromium engine that doesn’t have ads. I think people are overreacting about Eich. I disagree with his politics, but as long as he keeps that outside the company, I’m okay with it.
I assume you’re talking about the referral link thing? Yeah, that was bad, and I think I mentioned that. At least they quickly reversed course.
I can see an argument for them thinking it wasn’t that bad, so I’m willing to chalk it up to naïveté. It wasn’t quite as bad as Honey, which removed other referral codes. It’s still bad.
I didn’t hear that it caused performance issues though.
I never claimed they were equivalent. I merely pointed to them as fairly unpopular things that I support, and gave reasons for it.
And I agree, they can absolutely cause problems in marriage, as well as non-married people (addiction is real), hence why I said they are “bad.” But “bad” doesn’t necessarily have to mean “illegal.”
I have never used drugs, gambled, or hired a prostitute, and I don’t think anyone else should, but I will absolutely support legalizing them. In fact, I’m quite religious, and those things are 100% against my religion, but I believe personal morality shouldn’t really impact politics. My religion and moral code is for me, and I’m not going to force that on anyone.
In short, I support these probably for the same reason you oppose Eich: I believe in freedom. I guess I define that a bit more liberally than you do.
Teslas are burning as a symbol of opposition to Musk and DOGE. And I completely respect that, I also don’t like Musk and DOGE.
That said, this isn’t going to change anything. Musk has enough money that even if Tesla disappears, he’ll still be filthy rich. He does seem to care about the “richest man in the world” title, so I guess it will hurt his ego a little.
The ones that’ll suffer more are regular people who bought a Tesla years ago and are getting caught in the crossfire. Some idiots will burn privately owned Teslas, insurance coverage will get dropped, etc. That’s not worth it IMO.
Protest at Tesla dealerships, or better yet your state capital. I might even join you. But wanton destruction isn’t the way.
That’s great and all, but we don’t live in those times yet. Not granting people the right to marry whoever they want in current times based on the premise that we should change the marital law somewhere in the future is still nothing short of discrimination. And let’s not forget that Eich supported a campaign that was very explicitly against gay marriage, not the current concept of marriage altogether. Weak argument.
That’s what marriage already is for the most part in many parts of the world. And in those cases, the resulting financial disadvantage for example also makes it more apparent, why being against gay marriage is not just about names on a piece of paper.
How empathetic of you. Might as well support Josef Mengele with that attitude. A bit more personal responsibility couldn’t hurt.
Well, last I checked it’s just another ERC-20 Token and not a new Monero, so I have my doubts about that. I also assume that they must keep transaction logs somewhere to keep track of the amount of BAT donated to a creator. But I can’t be sure either.
It’s also kind of useless for Brave to have implemented Tor in the first place. Even if Brave matures further, there’s basically no reason not to use the Tor Browser for its intended purpose.
I never claimed it was. I merely gave an example of how opposition to something doesn’t necessarily indicate opposition to the people it’s intending to help.
For the record, I support same-sex marriage, on the grounds that my preferred policy (which would open up marriage to more than just same-sex couples) is unlikely to get traction anytime soon, so something is better than nothing. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.
However, I have friends who oppose same-sex marriage and don’t hate gay people (in fact, they’re good friends with LGBT people). The world isn’t black and white, so we shouldn’t assume someone is a Nazi just because they believe a couple of the same things Nazis do. That’s a logical fallacy, and it does way more harm than good.
Exactly, and I’m arguing that those benefits shouldn’t be bundled. I’ve known couples that want to share custody but not finances, or maybe visitation rights but not power of attorney. Relationships are complicated, and I think the institution of marriage is outdated. We spend tons of time and money on divorces and prenuptial agreements, and I think that could be dramatically simplified if we separated out the specific agreements and let people pick which they want.
Marriage should be a religious/personal thing, not a legal one. Whether you want to consider yourself married shouldn’t depend on a piece of paper in much the same way that your chosen gender shouldn’t.
That’s quite the logical leap.
I don’t know, and honestly it doesn’t matter.
My preferred form of record keeping is GNU Taler. You’d load a wallet to pay for articles or whatever and the browser vendor would use a very cheap form of accounting to keep track of purchases, and lump payments to websites together with payments from other users. Taler is nice in that it protects the privacy of the purchaser, has cryptographic protections without the complexity of P2P verification (and none of the ecological impact), and is pretty easy to understand. The vendor could even audit transactions if they want without violating the privacy of the user.
But honestly, I don’t care what mechanism they use, whether crypto or some form of centralized wallet. I just want to be able to pay to remove ads without needing a million accounts.
I disagree. There’s value in having a second rendering engine in case a website doesn’t work on Tor Browser. It’s unlikely to have similar protections (e.g. finger printing resistance), but it could work in a pinch for a site you need to access that doesn’t work on Gecko for whatever reason.
That said, you could probably achieve that by pointing the browser at a running Tor service (e.g. Orbot on Android). You’d need to be extra careful about things like DNS (which Brave got wrong), but it’s an option. Having it bundled is nice though.