IPFS Support in Brave
brave.com
brave.com
Excited for the forthcoming DNSLink support too, even if it's just a bridge to something even better. Best of luck to everyone who wants the web to stay bundled inside of the corporate state.
Along with IPFS it's nice to see Tor integration, low-level content blocking, a privacy-respecting Zoom alternative (https://together.brave.com/) and integrated MetaMask for Web3.
Brave still has a small userbase (~24 million), but hopefully it creates the space / incentives for Firefox and others to play catch-up so we see a lot of these features standardised for the benefit of all users, regardless of browser preference.
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035025231-Wha...
Most sites now feel like they're some hyper-optimised, next.js static site generated build even if they're not.
The web experience is not unlike that first time you switched from spinning platters to SSDs.
amazing what can be forgotten and reinvented in an industry moving in circles.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/
It is still Firefox, but that battle has been won. Firefox won it, then Google came in with Chrome and pounded the old way into the dust. It is gone now, mostly forgotten and good riddance.
Brave is a more in the character of Firefox than Firefox in many ways. There is a vision in there somewhere of a new web where users are one of the primary beneficiaries of advertising dollars (!) and intermediaries like Google are cut out of the picture. That is a very bold vision. I don't think Mozilla is capable of that sort of out-there visionary approach to browser design. Succeed or fail, Brave is trying.
Brave is more like Opera by building in support for a bunch of additional protocols.
Edit: you guys are right. it seems i have installed the add-on some time ago and forgot about it.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=722567
They've also whitelisted ipfs:// links since August.
The internet is in desperate need of decentralization.
> Of the three layers, only the UI layer is closed-source. ... The Vivaldi UI is truly what makes the browser unique. As such, it is our most valuable asset in terms of code.
No, it isn't.
(Though on a Linux system I also modified the low water setting up to 1000 peers and the high water setting to 2000 peers)
But yes, from running it ~10 minutes just now, it looks quite reasonable.
I don't think I'm going to adopt this.
Thank you for the support!
Half my extensions are still broken on Firefox Android. I've been using Firefox desktop on my PinePhone off-and-on and not only do all of my extensions work, but it's snappy and has a superior UX. I can actually access and manage my bookmarks with a sane interface.
And yet even desktop is sullied. Each major version tries to hide my bookmarks, or something equally egregious, and Mozilla frequently abuses my trust by promoting products and services through privileged channels.
It's getting hard to justify using Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Is that similar to First Party Isolation in Firefox?
I've tried this in Multi-Account Containers for Firefox and SessionBox in Chrome, and they're both pretty buggy, e.g. the console's username menu indicates I'm in account "A", but I'm seeing resources listed from account "B", or EC2 will work fine but clicking over to ECS prompt me to sign in again.
Does this effectively do the same as the 'Canvasblocker' extension does for Firefox?
Nonetheless I'm happy to hear about the improvements in Brave. I've actually shifted from Firefox to Brave since I'm expecting Webkit/Blink to become a 'Linux kernel' for web technologies and thus the web.
Keep up the great work! The only true remaining nitpicks I still have with Brave (after the introduction of Sync V2) are
1. iOS Brave being based on Firefox instead of Chrome iOS (I am aware of the technical cost of switching codebase)
2. Prevent browser close on last tab close
If those two existed Brave would be perfect for me.
[1] https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#...
It was the only reason why I left chrome for firefox
Debatable how significant that is as a difference.
> For advanced users: You can also enable Containers without the Multi-Account Containers extension, by changing some preferences in the Configuration Editor (about:config page). Note that you will get a better user experience by installing the extension but, if you choose not to, you can set privacy.userContext.enabled to true, privacy.userContext.ui.enabled to true and privacy.userContext.longPressBehavior to 2 in about:config.
In my view it's nowhere near as nice as it is on Firefox, with site isolation (Facebook, Google, Twitter, reddit), temporary containers, and a myriad of other add-ons that improve managing them (keyboard shortcuts and transition rules are the two I use the most).
its more like Vivaldi's tab stacks or FF's Tree Tabs. With groups there are no inherent additional security mechanisms in place to prevent cross-group contamination/access. i.e., two different tab groups can access the same site data.
containers however are completely isolated from each other. i.e., two different containers have completely different sets of site data.
Are you saying the biggest advertiser on the planet likely doesn't want to add functionality that could potentially hinder tracking for advertising purposes...?
I am shocked, shocked and appalled. /s
I've wondered how send could be so slow but maybe something in my setup is just killing it. More than anything though, I would love an easy way to access my phone's sharing options from my laptop (perhaps an addon button that shows a list of app intents that can receive a url/page).
This is one thing I'm hoping to hack at when I get my Librem.
Never rode my bicycle quicker (public transport sucked). Fortunately my computer was on mute but still had to confess to watching certain content on a work machine to my boss. Nothing came of it but all the same.
Be careful. I even posted on r/TIFU at the time.
You can share links and files with any connected device. Use it as a remote control for music players and presentations. Ring your phone from your computer to find it and more.
(edit: add second paragraph and link)
PS: Just noticed there is a VPN feature https://userbase.kde.org/KDEConnect#Running_KDE_Connect_over... -- KDEconnect is really amazing.
I also remember a popular extension that could do this, PushBullets
Even if it’s off, you can see all your other device’s tabs at the bottom of the mobile safari tab switcher.
They have both recently put existing tabs in the omnibox suggestions, which is a huge quality of life improvement.
Works great, though I needed to whitelist some domains on PiHole for it to function.
Except that the mozilla 's site does not care about your privacy. Whether you use containers or not, they automatically get your identity from the browser, and then you cannot just be logged out.
Mozilla has something like a $200M pa income (from Google alone). I wonder how that compares with Brave's income.
If you're talking about typical user of the average web browser, they care about IPFS as much as they care about the rendering engine - i.e. not at all.
It would be cool to see IPFS integrated and enabled by default on all browsers. I doubt Google would ever take the leap, but maybe Mozilla would. I also have doubt that Microsoft would but they would be more willing than Google. Anyways, I hope this can happen before Mozilla's market share shrinks more.
I would love to hear more about your privacy concerns; we have excised quite a bit from Chromium. You can read about those changes [on GitHub](https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...). We also audit our network activity to make sure nothing ever slips out. You can read about our [desktop](https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...) and [iOS](https://brave.com/ios-browser-first-run/) audits on our blog.
Perhaps more of interest would be an independent, third-party review and comparison. Trinity College's School of Computer Science and Statistics did a comparative review of Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Yandex, and Safari. They found that Brave was the "most private" in terms of phoning home. You can [read their review online](https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf).
Always happy to discuss any specific concerns you may have.
That isn’t really applicable here though. That’s kinda like claiming we should be against Linux because it runs all the web servers. There is a difference between centralization and standardization.
I don't think the linux comparison makes any sense for this situation. Linux has very little to do with the web experience, where the rendering engine is the core of it. Linus's ability to change world wide web standards on a whim is close to non existent. Google is literally replacing the WWW network stack (a good change mind you, but nonetheless demonstrates the level of power)
Brave takes an existing browser (Chromium) and adds some extra features to the UI and networking stack.
Modern web browsers are incredibly complex pieces of software. The overwhelming majority of code in Brave's repository is shared with Chromium. What Brave's developers do and what Mozilla's developers do are not comparable.
None of the reasons really sheds a good like on Mozilla.
Hopefully uptake by non-mainstream browsers like Brave will increase the exposure, attract developers, increase the network and get us closer to having IPFS, Hypercore or some other protocol available to the mainstream, whether that be in Firefox or by some other means.
Besides, you could argue that browsers have added plenty of fad technologies over the past few years, DRM comes to mind.
TIL about hypercore! Looks like an interesting concept based on append-only logs. It reminds me of this work being done at VMware: https://github.com/vmware/node-replication
I don't think that is ever going to happen.
I think this is closer to being true, as someone who forks ff and has had to remove/add stuff and compile it myself for almost 5 years now.
I'm tempted to start working on adding native ipfs support for myself in netwerk/protocol/ipfs…
Do you think Mozilla will ever switch to chromium? It is the linux of the web - would be nice if they could finally focus and stop dressing up their dead horse.
I don't think so. If they did, there wouldn't be much incentive for using Firefox.
> It is the linux of the web - would be nice if they could finally focus and stop dressing up their dead horse.
And what would they be focusing on exactly?
Ipfs for one
Such hyperbole.
It was easy for Apple to deliver Safari, when biggest work was done by Konqueror team...
It took years of shipping Chrome before Google actually forked Blink.
https://blog.bitergia.com/2013/02/06/report-on-the-activity-...
Focus on Brave. You have nothing to do with Mozilla.
"We need more than deplatforming"
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...
noun: deplatforming; noun: de-platforming
the action or practice of preventing someone holding views regarded as unacceptable or offensive from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website.
Blocking, silencing and removal does suppress speech.
You also suppress freedom of speech indirectly when you put someone in prison, so any crime punished by imprisonment seems to be considered reason enough to justify that as well.
Saying that freedom of speech can't ever be limited is a very ideological point of view, so far away from reality that I wouldn't consider it worth debating at all.
Now there is a valid argument to be made, how decisions to deplatform a person should be made and/or how such decisions can be appealed.
You’re confusing suppressing an individual’s ability to speak with the general notion of the free exchange of ideas. Arrest one person and free speech activists aren’t concerned, arrest everyone that says something, now they are concerned. The notion of trying to suppress topics is the problem, not the limitation of a particular individual.
> Saying that freedom of speech can't ever be limited is a very ideological point of view, so far away from reality that I wouldn't consider it worth debating at all.
You built a shitty strawman and then attacked it. Bravo. If you actually want to debate people who advocate free speech, the concern is when speech is suppressed because of the contents of the speech. Not because the person is dead, in prison, in a coma, or some other contrived crap.
I may just be my misunderstanding. I get the feeling in these discussions, that people think things like deplatforming, etc. are generally and always wrong and people/institutions speaking about it (such as Mozilla) are bad. If that is considered a strawman, then I am glad.
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. [link to post on changing Facebook's timeline algorithm]
> Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
The first two are no-brainers. The third is alright, but I doubt re-weighting Facebook's timeline algorithm is going to put the genie back in the bottle. The fourth is useful but pretty generic at "do research on things".
"Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms. Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken"
Note: More than. Additional. Also.
> But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.
And then lists several possible solutions that seem quite reasonable, and we should for sure push for the first two.
PS to anyone reading this exchange, at this point our comments are longer than the original blog post, you might as well just read the original instead of our out-of-order commentary. :)
> Changing these dangerous dynamics...
The "these dynamics" Mitchell speaks about are, the rampant use of the internet to:
1. Foment violence and hate.
2. Reinforce white supremacy.
3. Politicians (or anyone playing politics, really) exploiting the architecture of the internet to spread lies / hate / what-have-you.
> temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors
These, presumably, include:
1. Terrorists organizations like the Proud Boys.
2. Divisive, regressive, repressive figures like Donald Trump.
3. Institutions hell-bent on inciting hate, spreading disinformation, facilitating abuse, inculcating disharmony, encouraging violence, sowing mistrust, aiding conspiracies...
> Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken
Absolutely.
I see this policy stance as being no different to wanting the education system to not purport Racism; this isn't curtailing freedom of speech or any other freedom. It is purely an exercise in needing to do more than just deplatforming Racists: Not actively seek to create new ones!
It’s horrifying that they think this is even possible. Some of the worst political divides are over which set of facts to emphasize (children in cages vs children separated from traffickers) or are speculation on ongoing events (Russian pee tape, Trump is a Russian asset, Russia stole the election, etc).
“Amplify factual voices” just sounds like more echo chamber bullshit where you follow your politically aligned fact sources like Twitter.
No, it doesn't. Facts, which are a subset of universal truths, need to clearly outweigh falsehood. For example, you'd not find schools teach conspiracy theories like "Earth is flat", or "Global Warming is a hoax" for a reason. Fringe theories that rely on absurd reasoning and have no basis in actual facts must be curtailed, and under no circumstances do those theories deserve any amplication platform, definitely not one which operates at the scale like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter.
I realise that what's a universal fact today needn't be a fact tomorrow, but we have got substantially better scientific and socio-political tools to verify and come to conclusions one way or other for many topics. It is only prudent to let fringe theories be fringe and not amplify them for more eyeballs and revenue.
Consuming nonsense does affect real people and has real world consequences.
Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that both sides of the political spectrum base a bunch of bullshit based on sets of facts they deem important.
There is no set of facts that indicates wealth should be taxed or corporate rates should be cut. Each side trots out “facts” supporting their view but the conclusions are completely different.
This is great, silencing disinformation... or maybe not.
On one march friday, facebook would silence the "conspiracy theorists" claiming you should wear a mask, because our 'experts' (and american too, and WHO and many others) said, that wearing a mask for covid is useless.
Then, on the next day, our government mandated masks and gloves in every indoor location (stores,...), and facebook would silence the people claiming masks are useless.
“We work to ensure the internet remains a public resource that is open and accessible to all.”
I guess by “all” they mean only people with political opinions they support.
Unfortunately part of making things "open and accessible to all" means revoking access to people who would weaponize the internet to contradict those goals.
A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists.
If we deplatformed every “violent thug” that did something people didn’t like, you would have a fraction of the rights you have today.
This is not about shutting down all controversial discourse. It is about "defend[ing] a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant". Surpression shall only happen if there is no other way to defend a tolerant society cause the intolerant are working with (massiv, wide spread) violence.
I don't know who is in the position to decide when that point has come. But one could argue that people invading the capitol is that point.(I don't think so)
What I am really worried about, is that it seems like tech companies will have to make those decisions. In the end there will be individual persons, who make that decisons and that is very dangerous.
Look, an "Anti soviet warrior", "on the road to peace" - https://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abo...
Google and Facebook should host whichever legal content they'd like, and we should build alternative systems that give us control over how we spend our attention and share our influence.
But: There is noone else, who is able to control the growing beast of social networks that they created. And in parts they can not control it either. There are too many languages used, that no employee or AI understands.
In the end we are darned to watch and hope they make the correct decisions.
Basically it's about whether you can get them to agree with both of the following statements:
1) X-ism should not exist. 2) X-ists have a fundamental right to exist.
Point number one is perfectly reasonable as should be point two. The really scary authoritarians flat out deny point number two, but most people will start equivocating or scream at you because you don't want to punch X-ists.
This is a growing problem that society needs to find a solution to quickly. Denial of point 2 leads to mass murder of people for thought crime. Still some people seem okay with this.
And I just want to point out before I get tons of hate that it's perfectly acceptable to give X-ists consequences for their _actions_. Not their private thoughts.
You're exaggerating. We don't have a real problem with people who want to mass murder people for being X-ists. It's easy to observe the inverse, though.
Ex CEO of Mozilla and current CEO of Brave has been removed from Mozilla for donating his private money to some conservative same-sex marriage organisation.
You can't be taken seriously as an advocate for a tolerant and accessible non-profit when you spend your salary denying people the right to get married.
"But we should claim the right to suppress them (intolerant philosophies) if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
How relevant to our age... and this appears in a treatise by philosopher Karl Popper from 1945, who attributed the paradox to Plato's defense of "benevolent despotism"... i.e. the discussion is as old as civilisation itself!
The question is: When do we reach the point where the defence starts to break?
You could argue that that point is reached when terrorists storm the capitol.
I don't know if we reached that point already. What I do know: If we wait for too long, we reach a state of no return.
But how do you know who is a 'freedom fighter' and who is a 'terrorist' then? Do you let google and facebook decide?
Look, an "Anti soviet warrior", "on the road to peace" - https://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abo...
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
And it could as well be written yesterday:
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice."
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means."
"1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?"
(Note that the guy writing all this was a socialist who volunteered to go and literally shoot at - and be shot by - actual Fascists in the Spanish Civil War less than 10 years earlier.)
You are just misinterpreting what that quote says. They think that the internet should remain a public resource that is open and accessible to all. They don't think that everything on the internet should be a public resource that is open and accessible to all as you are implying.
Do you really think that everything on the internet should be a public resource and accessible to all, even your email, bank accounts, etc?
I guess we should simply ignore these political endorsements and only take the functional utility into account when choosing browsers.
Interesting. When Mozilla promise this, and what sort of time frame were they talking about?
Presumably "more private browsing" has been delivered somewhat already in Firefox?
They even started a bunch of Tor nodes to collect some metrics. It looks like they are removing their blog posts about it
https://blog.mozilla.org/it/2015/01/28/deploying-tor-relays/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150722100146/https://blog.mozi...
> Our primary goal is to un-fork the Tor Browser
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1173199#c31
They were very vocal about how web is broken, needs more Tor and IPFS for everything to allow more free speech for disadvantage. Today they promote unregulated censorship, banning and shadow-banning public channels. You will find many posts about it between 2014 and 2018.
Boycott Firefox, Switch to Brave, my browser had Bittorrent support 16 years ago
In 2005, Elinks browser had built-in Torrent support. In 2021, Firefox still does not have built-in Torrent support. In 2021, Brave has built-in Torrent support.
Why Firefox has not focussed on decentralisation and uncensorability for the last 16 years?
Maybe because they work for their grand masters (Google and other GAFAMs) who want power, and don't want decentralization?
I would've embraced brave had it written its own browser engine or simply picked something non-google.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way.
https://docs.beakerbrowser.com/faq#what-does-beaker-do-bette...
I still remember the rhyme "Buy Opera today and make this banner go away!"
ipns://k51qzi5uqu5dlusethckbaq0kf1udrhaq99lvrd21krkbnjukthfbv3hu4wkk8/ [Brave] (edit: got ipns://kickscondor.com/ working.)
hyper://f8f860772e5e489beaf5c00390ab5b42703f8dd2a57d74e4d563433834208543/ [Beaker]
http://kickscofbk2xcp5g.onion/ [Tor]
https://kickscondor.com/ [Plain]
Needs a Gemini version.
nc apitman.com 2052 <<< /txt/feedDare I dream that an entire frontend assets (compiled html, js, css) is hosted on IPFS, making a truly decentralized apps?
Seems like an exciting era to be a JavaScript/frontend devs.
Let's see if the underlying economic models can mature to be viable in the "real world," or at least the digital real world. BAT, for example, made Brave possible, but the tokenomics are bad and basically no one uses it.
That said, it is an exciting time, for sure! JavaScript sure has grown from humble beginnings.
Our hand was forced, effectively. We needed to pivot to a solution that offered better throughput, with lower fees, or possibly die an early death as a project. Hopping to an ERC-20 token offered immediate relief in both areas, ensuring Brave "Payments" would be able to go on and develop.
Serious question — how does BAT distribution work with ETH fees being in the same range now? Have you considered doing atomic swaps with a network like Stellar for a low fee transaction environment? They have a Metamask alternative called Albedo that you could probably effectively integrate into Brave.
I've worked a lot with Stellar and would be glad to help (not shilling, I don't own many XLM, I just know the network well).
Contact in bio if you're interested.
(Disclaimer: I'm a bit biased toward Ethereum. I think it's more meaningfully decentralized and I own some eth.)
That said, I was more asking what they're doing right now than what they plan to do in the future (I'm fully aware of ETH 2.0 and all).
[0] https://medium.com/faast/brave-ico-review-600-in-6-days-b51d...
edit: added citation
navigator.registerProtocolHandler('ipfs', 'https://dweb.link/ipfs/?uri=%s', 'ipfs resolver')
Afterwards opening something like:
ipfs://QmbWqxBEKC3P8tqsKc98xmWNzrzDtRLMiMPL8wBuTGsMnR
will be redirected to the public gateway configured above and handled accordingly.
You can also configure a different gateway as some have voiced their concern about routing everything through dweb.link.
[0] https://blog.chromium.org/2020/09/chrome-86-improved-focus-h... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/r... [2] https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/pull/7802
> The go-ipfs daemon binary will be packaged into a crx file and installable via the component updater. There will be a different package per platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux x64) each with a different component extension ID. [1]
[0]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Brave-Components
I have been a loyal user of Firefox ever since I quit Opera (ironically for it's shitty extensions catalog at the time compared to Firefox), but now I am very frustrated by its lack of meaningful progress and the way they break things and regress quite often while ignoring the feedbacks of the community.
Firefox for Android is a joke, the tabs still behaves in a weird and confusing way, and half a year later I still don't have my extensions back.
I'm also tired by the non-integration of the Chromecast on PC and the fact that it is not even possible to get this as an extension since they killed the ecosystem years ago and didn't give back the features as promised.
Recently the synchronization stopped working on my Android, and like always with Mozilla, the only solution you will find from them to fix a bug is to reset your profile and loose everything.
If Brave implements extensions for Android, I'll definitely migrate and quit Firefox.
I hope that local nodes and pinning become default from here on.
I suppose right off the bat, Brave is a "normal" browser - so it just supports +1 protocol. That's really cool.
However, Beaker has its own extended web API and tooling. You can fork websites, edit them - and you can script this functionality. (For example, I have a wiki software in Beaker that will handle all the forking and editing behind the scenes - using Javascript to make it happen.)
You could say that Brave is a read-only HTML browser with wide support for decentralization protocols. While Beaker is a read-write HTML browser with its own protocol. And they both use the regular web as well.
Brave becomes first browser to add native support for the IPFS protocol
https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-becomes-first-browser-to...
From my understanding, the file hash is basically the file URL, such that any change to the file content is a change to the file url as well. For hosting something like Wikipedia, how would one create pages that link to one another? And if indexes need to be created on top of the content, how are the different indexes kept in sync?
Quoth:
IPFS uses content-based addressing; it creates an address of a file based on data contained within the file. If you were to share an IPFS address such as /ipfs/QmbezGequPwcsWo8UL4wDF6a8hYwM1hmbzYv2mnKkEWaUp with someone, you would need to give the person a new link every time you update the content.
The InterPlanetary Name System (IPNS) solves this issue by creating an address that can be updated.
A name in IPNS is the hash of a public key. It is associated with a record containing information about the hash it links to that is signed by the corresponding private key. New records can be signed and published at any time.
...
Alternatives to IPNS
IPNS is not the only way to create mutable addresses on IPFS. You can also use DNSLink, which is currently much faster than IPNS and also uses human-readable names. Other community members are exploring ways to use blockchains to store common name records.
First you had a decentralized internet, anyone with a computer could put something online, but sharing IP's everywhere was not easy to remember, and some weren't static... So they created DNS and Top Level Domains...
You can then link to files within the folder using relative links.
I guess this avoids having to have IPNS entries for every file?
When I visit an HTTPS URL I see content and some authenticity (of the server, at least) tied with the transport mechanism.
IPFS provides the content and a distributed transport. Does the protocol include authentication of the author? Is it up to the content author to include their own signature protocol outside of IPFS?
[If you post an ipfs:// link claiming it is a New York Times article, how do I know it’s real?]
But this is just another way of authenticating the "author". You can also use dns (if you can trust it), or you can use signed content, or you can get the ipfs hash through a channel you trust.
The main idea though, is that IPFS content is authenticated by default because it is referenced by its own hash. The problem on obtaining a hash you can trust is just a layer above and solvable in multiple ways, as needed.
As far as I’m aware every resolver on every system I use will silently fail open to non-DNSSEC DNS. It feels like that’s going to be the case for a long time yet, so maybe the rely on DNS you can trust route isn’t the best option.
To be clear: I’m not worried about malicious nodes on the IPFS network corrupting data which I’ve asked for. It’s more about how to avoid being phished with ipfs:// links I find posted online whose contents claim to be something they are not.
I hadn’t realised how much I relied on the safety of the padlocked domain name at the top of my browser, and on the domain name in links over which I hover. With plain IPFS every click feels like a new website?
(‘hecturchi’s response hints at how IPFS achieves this, I think.)
All that said, IPNS likely bridges the content/authorship gap you're asking about.
> A name in IPNS is the hash of a public key. It is associated with a record containing information about the hash it links to that is signed by the corresponding private key. New records can be signed and published at any time.
https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns/
In this context, that key would be held by the author, allowing the author to publish different content by signing it with the key.
If for example NYT tweeted an IPFS hash, you could trust the content was from them.
the links that do work go through ipfs.io. Is this just a gateway like onion.ly for tor?
ipfs://
How I wish they develop their own engine(I know, tough task), or at least use Firefox's. Chromium based browser is really a deal breaker for me
* Atm. on my PC Firefox with 3 sites open and 10 add-ons installed (Including adblocker, decentraleyes and containers) uses 630,5MB RAM and 0 - 0,3% (of a very old I7) CPU.
For example, this site is published using https://github.com/hyphacoop/api.distributed.press and it can be accessed over HTTP, IPFS, and Hypercore.
https://staging.compost.digital
ipns://staging.compost.digital
hyper://staging.compost.digital
(gateway) https://ipfs.distributed.press/ipns/staging.compost.digital/
(gateway) https://hyper.distributed.press/staging.compost.digital/
We were also in touch with folks from Decentralized Science https://decentralizedscience.github.io
Does anyone know why this was omitted? Verifying a hash is straightforward. Both the old simple MerkleDAG format [0] and the new complicated IPLD format [1] allow fetching and verifying individual files inside a CID-addressed bundle.
> Both requests you make and content you serve are observable by network peers.
That is a deceptive way to say, "if you click the 'Enable IPFS' button then your computer will continually publish your browsing history to the world." And they make it too easy to enable. It's just a button below the address bar [0]. And the button has a deceptive name, "Enable IPFS". The browser can use IPFS through a gateway, so IPFS is already enabled.
There are many important projects to improve privacy and reduce tracking and monitoring of user behavior on the network: DNS over HTTPS, TLS Encrypted SNI, blocking third-party cookies, proxy services (incorrectly called VPNs), anti-fingerprinting work in browsers, and mobile privacy features. Is there any work on making IPFS resistant to tracking? Right now, IPFS seems like a step backward for privacy.
> By default, Brave will load the URI being requested via a public HTTP gateway
> If IPFS is not yet configured, the user will have the IPFS page loaded through the gateway https://dweb.link. [2]
Fortunately, Brave shows the gateway URL in the browser address bar. This lets users know which company is tracking them. For Brave users (dweb.link users), this is Protocol Labs https://protocol.ai , a VC-funded company in California.
[0] https://github.com/ipfs-inactive/papers/blob/master/ipfs-cap...
A CID for a file is not a simple hash, it represents the root of a merkledag of a file tree and chunks of the file. Getting the dag metadata requires a p2p connection under normal circumstances. A public HTTP gateway, given the CID, returns file content, not the file tree or merkledag the CID is a hash over.
It's doable, but totally reasonable that they didn't include this in 1.0.
further reading:
Really excited to see brave adding native IPFS support, though I would hope the team could start dedicating some cycles to some of these core features that firefox has over them.
There is also https://ipfs-search.com/
Some sites may offer IPFS versions transparently and you only notice if you have something like IPFS companion installed, as it then switches to your local node.
If the container re-ordering patch[0] would be implemented it would be perfect, but it seems to be stuck in limbo.
If Brave implemented this and did it right (with sorting & reordering) I would consider switching.
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/pull/160...
I use this a bit. But the configuration GUI (provided by an extension) is soooo bad. So I only use it for about 10% of the sites I _ought_ to use it for.
I wish Firefox would work on these features, instead of for example messing around with the address bar on every other release.
Would love to try out the new stuff, but I depend on containers and tree tabs.
But it's doing what I want it to do, have multiple AWS accounts open at once in one browser.
1: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...
Even more specifically because of his anti-LGBT politics.
His views do not impart themselves onto Brave of course, but I will stay with Firefox.
Nor does that article say what you think it does.
But whatever, think what you like.
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.
See also
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25841660
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.
They can keep my money. :)
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.
We're on hackernews, where comments are indeed moderated
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.
That's just marketing/PR nonsense.
Huh. So the argument to overcome objections to a
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).
Is "first floor engineers" an SV-ism (or Brave-ism) that indicates something like "early employees"?
The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...
This may be the change I needed to know about to try Brave at some point.
Are there any plans to get into any Linux distro's repositories? Brave wasn't in Ubuntu's last time I checked, although that was a little while ago.
E: Formatting doesn't like asterisks.
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.
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.
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.
I'm also not comfortable with Brave's attitude towards forks of its browser. afaik, two of the main forks (Braver/Bold and Gab's Dissenter) were bullied into obscurity by Brave's management. Here's Brendan being overly salty towards Dissenter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1118705815127347200
That's nice. I was worried it was just going to be centralized somewhere at a different level.
Last time I looked IPFS software used a lot of memory and bandwidth.
It seems to make things better like client privacy, server versioning and censorship of good actors.
As usual, nobody bothered to worry about problems it worsens. Do we want more anonymity and less censorship for bad actors?
Good and bad may be subjective, but nearly everyone looks at that issue pragmatically in some instances (to pick an unlikely example: some demented billionaire buying nukes), and in tech we seem incapable of accounting for that.
It’s sort of like complaining that making it easier to vote brings the average voter education level down. The people making it easier are certainly aware but don’t think it’s right to make it more difficult to vote.
That said, it's not a given that it be all or nothing. In fact, my complaint is specifically that we don't often ask such questions.
There might be ways we haven't exploited yet to disincentivize certain behaviors. Whoever invented Bitcoin, for example, had to take problems with incentives into account that, at first glance, seem intractable.
Given the way the internet turned out, we should think seriously about how people wind up using new tech in practice, rather than assume everything will just work itself out for the best.
'Oh, now you want thoughtful dialogue, and a discussion. And then, when the reins of power are installed and your ilk have taken them, you'll be sneering as you kick me out.' - Something like that is a relatively common sentiment. Assuage this sentiment, and you might succeed.
But tons of people do, all the time. There has been excessive pearl clutching about making it easier to spread ideas since the invention of the printing press.
ipfs://Qmdpah7j4mLswRLsv55qX4R9RzK3RtCWKfYNt4AEtXE2dG
Otherwise all of ipfs will end up going through dweb.link, and that's how you centralized a decentralized technology.
List of public IPFS gateways available here: https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/
Also funny how all browsers populate the top sites by default with facebook, amazon and other privacy perpetrators, instead of leaving it empty. Like their obnoxious preinstalled or top suggested apps aren't enough of a nuisance. Go ahead, help them gain even more market share.
Bummer. This means normal webpages can't load images or videos from IPFS. :(
nit - can you please fix the icon? The color and icon undersell Brave by a huge margin.
Click "Feed Tab" at the top once inside the app, to meet some other Fedizens.
Any plan to at least allow using other crypto platforms like coinbase?
We talk to many custodians and would love to partner with Coinbase. We've added Gemini (creator wallets now, user next) and are adding bitFlyer. So options beyond Uphold to comply with regional regulations, as well as to give users choice, are coming.
I think they need to work on making these urls human readable.
ipfs://bafybeiemxf5abjwjbikoz4mc3a3dla6ual3jsgpdr4cjr3oz3evfyavhwq/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh.html
Hoping to be proven wrong though.
For a start, newer versions of IPFS work much better, but the network still had a significant amount of older nodes making the experience worse for everyone. Luckily, this is changing as of late, it seems.
IPFS shines when it can take advantage of content proximity (i.e. in your LAN, in your node etc.) or when there are few providers for the content within reach, at which point it just works regardless of connectivity to the outside world.
In a general scenario, comparing IPFS-delivery speed with a CDN-backed website is not very fair. Might be slower but offers much more versatility.
1) First it loads it through a proxy, then shows me button to enable a local node
2) When I click that button, I then get a page with "Connection Refused" talking to localhost
3) After a few more seconds, the page reloads I get the actual IPFS page
I am guessing with (2) the local node is being a bit slow to start. (I am using a 2013 MBP.) Ideally it would display some kind of "please wait node starting..." message at (2) rather than a connection refused error
I switched from Firefox to Brave a few months ago and really like it.
Chrome performance is really needed for all the heavy weight browser apps I use for my job and Brave paired with NextDNS form a really good ad-block team.
Firefox is also pretty bad on my mbp though.
It may not be able to beat chromium right now, but a working IPFS and TOR right inside your "vanilla" Firefox would give a compelling reason to keep it, when you can install chromium/chrome/edge and get better features - except this one!
For 3 people? I don't think IPFS is going to impact market share.
Firefox does provide privacy.
Really? Most people who use Firefox are still exposed to tracking. Google is still the default search engine and promoted via Firefox Home, and continues to track the large majority of users who don't change their default. Pretty sure Facebook and Twitter are promoted via the default home page as well. Third party cookies, browser profiling and other tracking mechanisms have barely been addressed. Mozilla seems more focused on lip service, shameless self-promotion and double speak than addressing the problem. The so-called free web is a joke, it's a web of giants, and companies like Mozilla who are mere pawns in their protection racket.
Mozilla today is not the Mozilla we knew.
Also, as you probably know, many of those things you mention are caused by lack of funds.
When you are short on funds to do all the things you want to do, you have to prioritize. It's my opinion that Mozilla is prioritizing the wrong things if they want to remain relevant.
What does it matter what good things they plan to do, if they will be gone in a year or two?
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/2457
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5761 (duplicate)