Brave browser now blocks cookie banners

Content is basically never important enough if it's behind one of those.

Otherwise known as "allowing a network _owner_ to determine the DNS used".

Anyway, we're investigating what might have gone wrong. So far we can't find a difference between Chrome and Brave regarding DNS and DoH configuration and configurability. More info welcome, thanks.

I know they'll show higher prices for people on a Mac and lower prices for people on Linux.

It's sad because I love the browser. But it looks like they don't want to succeed at all.

Plus, I straight-up don't believe it, and you've provided no evidence to support your claim.

> companies are made up of people, politics is the interaction of people.

conflates (intentionally or not) two very different kinds of "politics" - GP was talking about partisan politics, but you started discussing organizational politics. Unless you're claiming that all human interaction is intrinsically partisan...

Also, I don't believe the claim that all execs are unable to prevent their political opinions from leaking into their direction for the company. They're often motivated extremely strongly by money, and I'm sure that we all know of at least one person that is willing to compromise on their morals (-> political views) for money.

Finally, even treating the claim as true for the sake of argument - not all companies will push their own political agenda with the same strength, and it's entirely reasonable to avoid those that push harder.

But if you look at the breadth of company politics at say, Brave or Vivaldi, and contrast those with Mozilla, it's night and day. Brave and Vivaldi have politics of privacy and user control, and it shows. Mozilla has many other concerns, like cultural coolness (hello, color themes by an ex-Nike designer. Street smart, eh?).

There are narrow, relevant-to-topic stances on things which companies very well should have.

Even in 2022, the world wide web is still a hell of a lot more diverse than one single organization. Especially Mozilla.

Should you trust any one website? No. But which websites you frequent is your choice, and it's one of the few dimensions of freedom remaining to the internet. The only job of the browser is to facilitate this freedom, and any divergence from that goal will only diminish what free choice remains.

> how we would establish a source of truth

Your reply:

> limit the reach of people with a history of making wildly unsubstantiated claims.

That's circular; to determine whether a claim is unsubstantiated, you need a source of truth.

Stepping to authority over youtube randos on the other hand seems like a flawed idea too, 'authority' is often a biased group of the old guard. And in the most controversial topics, you'll have widely varying opinions on who the authorities are.

Evidence then? Evidence can be cool, but is often really easy to spin whichever way the talking head wants. And that is if isn't outright doctored.

The scientific process, including peer review? Maybe, but this doesn't work particularly well on some of the most important things we want to discover truth in such as politics an recent events

Even in some kind of ideal world, where we can theoretically try to find the most truthful answer, we'd struggle hard. Let alone in our chaotic society where what's loudest and most catchy is surely going to outcompete whatever is the most truthlike

While they might allow you to alter the probability of certain types of content showing up, the platform is already the arbiter of what content appears in your feed and is recommended to you.

An example of this would be engagement. Platforms have generally made the decision that they'll promote content other people have seen and interacted with. You typically won't be shown content that has low engagement unless you've gone out of your way to find it. This already has huge effects on the type of content that reaches or is created by people.

I understand that point in particular might be disagreeable to you but it'd be nice to know how do you feel about the other three. So much of the current discourse focuses around what isn't or can't be agreed rather than calling for action on points that are relatively settled.

This is a very good point. Let me provide an argument:

The woke ideology/movement does attempt to address some real social issues (e.g. racism, classism, and areas where the disabled aren't served as well as they could be). However, on many of those issues, they either (1) attribute a specific cause to the issue that isn't universally shared (2) attempt to manipulate the language around the issue and/or (3) use unethical means to attempt to fix the issue.

This wouldn't be a problem by itself, but is made into one by the woke movement's totalitarian facets - the redefinition of common words in order to push an agenda, the suppression of dissenting thought (either through censorship or through extra-judicial persecution), and the weaponization of emotion to win arguments.

This means that while basically everyone (aside from white supremacists) can agree that white supremacy is bad, as soon as the woke movement gets involved, you lose the ability to tell what is white supremacy, because participants in the movement actively twist speech around the issue and emotionally attack those calling for reasonable discussion. For instance, in my work organization, a recent internal discussion thread had multiple employees claiming that "white supremacy" was the reason that Black people happened to be underrepresented in specific branches of that organization - and then attacked those who disagreed using emotional language instead of reasoned arguments.

This is why Scott Alexander doesn't like "SJWs" and tries to keep them out of his discussion forums - not because he finds their views bad, but because a core part of the movement is tribalism, censorship, manipulation of language, manipulation of emotion, and other anti-intellectual things that are definitionally unsuitable for the rationalist community (and, topically, Hacker News), and probably unsuitable for liberal democracies like the United States, as well.

> Personally I feel like discourse has grown more toxic.

It has - as a direct, causal result of the woke movement's aggressive propagation of the idea that "everything is political", which necessitates conflict and politics spreading into every area of life where there formerly was none.

That's why you have to be careful to separate the woke movement from the individual issues that they claim to represent - because the movement isn't just about (the very real issue of) racism, it also includes redefining the definition of "racist" to advance a hidden agenda.

> If you do agree, how would someone go about discussing how to tackle it without being dismissed as woke?

I find it hard to address these questions, because I do not know what the person who uses the phrase "white supremacist" means. To me, it's hardly more than a slur, like the word fascist or, to some people, communist; so imagine my confusion if you asked me whether I thought fascists have found a voice in certain parts of the internet. Merriam-Webster's dictionary offers two definitions of white supremacy, of which the second — if the Internet Archive is to be trusted — was added only in 2020. The first, traditional, definition, which I share, says that it is "the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races". The second, recently added, definition says (and you can clearly hear the political background in which it was added), "the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races".

I have not, personally, seen or corresponded with a person who would profess to be a white supremacist in the first sense; so to me, they are as exotic as flat earthers. It is hard for me to believe that they need any more significant tackling than the Jihadis, or any other violent whackos (and only when they are violent, mind) — and you do not hear the media and the twittersphere constantly taking the names of those other groups of whackos in vain. So, to answer your question, if there arises a terrorist group of militant white supremacists, then yes, it would need tackling; but I am sure that in that case both the danger will be seen as clear and present, and the language will be not of shaming and moral outrage, but of concrete measures of law enforcement.

Partly, though see my comment below in addition to the reply you already got: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33330789

There are issues with at least two of the things they suggest, though:

---

Let's start with

> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.

(PSA: I lean right)

This sentence could be good, on its face. But Mozilla for example linked to a Facebook post about Facebook manipulating their own algorithms specifically for the election. The entry lists various websites that are both mainstream and lean distinctly to the left. Facebook's outlet choices may have been less partisan back in the day, but certainly are not in today's world. Imagine CNN touting "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" in front of a burning building.

Second, the whole idea of factuality is a purely partisan issue: Most fact-checkers police not factuality, but narrative.

See this famous Snopes rating, for example:

---

Claim

Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network.

Rating Mixture

What's True

Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.

What's Undetermined

In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."

---

One look at that should disabuse the reader that the purpose of the site is to honestly assess factuality. Membership in a bombing organization and being sentenced for possession of a shitton of explosives apparently just isn't terrorism. At that point, you shrug and file the fact-checking enterprise into the same bin as claims about racism - so frivolous they don't even merit consideration anymore.

---

The second one that's problematic is this:

> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.

This could actually be very nice. The downside to it, though, is the sort of thing where people knowing what you spend money on politically could be used to harass you. We can just look at how a couple political donations outside of work cost Brendan Eich his job at Mozilla. Some people are so big they can't reasonably be persecuted in these ways, in which case transparency isn't a bad idea.

This one has a good ideal, but history is full of ideas that sound good and have good intent, but disastrous second-order consequences.

> Do you not think that there's a case to be made that white supremacy has found a voice in certain parts of the internet?

> If you do agree, how would someone go about discussing how to tackle it without being dismissed as woke?

Yes and yes. Though the kind of genuinely heinous stuff that actively wishes ill on our fellow men is generally very, very niche.

Wokeness is a very specific way of approaching things, so you definitely can. The issue is mostly that woke activism has been steadily eating left-liberalism alive for the past decade and more. The result is that a lot of avenues for talking about a topic or for understanding them are very limited.

It's like 99% of math teachers went gaga over Common Core and did nothing else for twenty years. If you protested against Common Core, would you be protesting against the idea of teaching children mathematics? Hardly.

But once you're familiar with wokeness, it's a very distinct thing and you can definitely distinguish people coming at it from a different perspective. It's not hard at all.

I would caution though that a lot of the modern concern about racism etc. is whipped up by the media: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...

Similar hockeysticks exist for most other social justice related topics.

Messing with referral codes to websites is not even remotely in the same ballpark as being paid for searches from the default search provider. It's asinine to compare them.

The issue persisted, as far as I know, one day. The response was to both fix the bug and make the feature be off by default.

Not sure the Amazon link thing is true at all. What I remember is that there was a Binance referral link that was built-in to the browser, which would show up at the top of auto-complete when you started typing "binance" in the URL bar.

If you turn the BAT rewards on, you get system text notifications at intervals, it's not anywhere on the site or triggered by browsing.

They are two completely different features. The adblocker is a basic utility for everyone.

The BAT rewards is an optional program you can enable if you want extra tokens.

It's a real user agent, as in, for the user.

I’d rather pay for articles than have ads blasted everywhere. YouTube premium as an example is very worth it! However when you subscribe to something like The Economist they still blast ads at you. Also I really don’t want to pay for one off subscriptions everywhere, especially when they don’t even turn off ads.

Long term, blocking ads isn’t viable, nor is it even really ethical.

Sure I’m bummed that brave didn’t go another route and try to get a group of publishers in on the attention token rather that the sorta shady interception tactic. Still Firefox is in a position to try and make a federated micro transaction system, but haven’t tried.

Almost everything wrong with the modern Internet can be traced to payment being difficult. If you could get small donations to sites, they'd be able to pay for themselves and wouldn't need to rely on your friendly neighborhood mega corp and ads. Crypto's promise was to provide that, digital money you can move around globally over the Internet fast, easy and without a middle man. So it's makes a ton of sense to have that in the browser. That crypto currency so far falls quite a bit short on delivering on that promise is a separate problem.

> Remember all the shit Firefox got for bundling Pocket? Difference is, Pocket actually makes a little bit of sense in the context of a browser.

Pocket never made any sense at all. Why would you bundle some proprietary service into an Open Source browser instead of improving the built in bookmark and download functions of your browser? Software-as-a-service is a cancer that should never ever get anywhere near a project claiming to be about privacy.

Pocket makes people mad because we expect Mozilla to be better. By the way, where is the source for the server side of Pocket? I can't find it anywhere, Mozilla lied about it. Whatever Brave did wrong doesn't excuse anything Mozilla does wrong, nor vice versa. They're all snakes, corrupted years ago by Google's influence, kept alive suckling on the teat of the biggest monopolist in the room. Both of them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I can't understand how this seems negative to anyone. There is a certain assumption that any Brave user would have an ad blocker anyway.

What is the alternative?

Do you have a company that depends on advertising? I hope it fails. I use firefox btw, and I block all ads.

Maybe a screenshot? Literally anything.

I’ve been using Brave for a while, even before the crypto stuff but all, and I mean all of that can be turned off. I haven’t seen an Brave ad in place of where a typical ad would be. Ever. That kind of defeats the purpose of Brave, doesn’t it?

The only reason I known internet ads still exist is because of Chrome forced on my work computer.

You're presenting a very persuasive argument for using Brave[1].

1. They automatically block ads.

2. By default, they show no other ads.

3. If the user wants to see ads, the user can opt-in, and then only receive text ads OOB (of the actual content).

I don't think that I've ever had such a joyful reaction to a feature-list in software before.

Thank you.

[1] Downloading it now as I write this.

I have no dog in this race. I use Safari and Firefox as products, but I don't have a deep enough connection to browser development and the web to feel like either is a part of my identity.

The original commenter substantiated their opinion [1] to a level that rises above deserving a caustic reply. That's all I'm saying.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262620

from 2018

https://productmint.com/brave-business-model-how-does-brave-...

its worse

>In June, reports emerged, which stated that the company had been quietly inserting affiliate links for certain search queries without telling users. For instance, Brave had added a home widget for Binance a month prior, which turned out to redirect users via its affiliate offering.

The ideal situation would be to have no ads if the browser is (often) advertised privacy-first. But then we know the world isn't perfect. We work around tradeoffs.

As long as Brave keeps these contentious options transparent, I have no problems in supporting them.

I'd argue that website owners are being scammed by a company stealing profits. Brave is literally going "We don't think you should earn money from your visitors because of factors we decide, but we're going to show people on your website OUR ads because we picked them."

Adblock is just as bad. They block all ads and then go "If you've got plenty of money and want us to let your ads show to our users, you've got to pay us for the privilege."

They're literally like an Ad mafia.

I'm telling you that the criticism against Brave's use of cryptocurrencies is informed by a well-warranted generalized belief that all crytocurrency schemes are scams. The only reason I don't slam my door on girlscouts is because it is immediately obvious to me that a little girl in a girlscout uniform is not a kirby salesman. I can see that difference plainly at a glance, without having to read or hear anything they say. To perceive the difference between Brave's scheme and a typical cryptocurrency scam takes a lot more effort and careful examination. It isn't fair to blame people for not putting in that effort, given the general odds in the cryptocurrency sphere.

Firefox advertises themselves as user respecting but falls short frequently and that disconnect riles people more than being abused by google and chrome who we generally know don't care about respecting users at all (unless it's profitable)

You can block websites from asking for notification permissions.

Cookie banners and email signup prompts are part of the page. I don't consider them popups.

They don't care about the tracking/ad blocking side of things.