If you can read the code and asure that the traffic won’t be sent to a malicious third party, why not? What is the concern?
Being able to MITM any HTTPS request on my system is a privilege I'd not grant lightly. It's up there with browsers, browser extensions (with "all content on all sites" access), and password managers in terms of blast radius in case anything goes wrong.
You don't know this person, and I see no personally identifiable information to make me trust them. They could literally be a state actor right now! We've also seen so many large supply-chain attacks over the last decade which could easily target a tiny project like this.
I agree with the parent - not wise.
Incidentally, no I have no objections against closed source. I find the religious dogma behind FOSS patently stupid.
I mean, no, I would dispute you, because everything Microsoft is doing in those products isn't publicly available for the world to see.
Still probably pretty unlikely because those products are hugely popular and widely scrutinized.
As I said, I think it's still pretty unlikely that Microsoft products are compromised by a state actor. It's certainly not part of my threat model. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make though. I certainly wouldn't install a system-wide HTTP proxy from a developer I didn't trust. And I don't have much of a choice but to trust Microsoft, their products are so ubiquitous I often have little choice.
Of course, you do have a problem as you've already made clear. However, that problem stems from how Microsoft's code is closed source compared to Google's open source code. That's religious FOSS dogma which I referred to earlier, and has nothing to do with whether programmers are paid to write and examine your code.
The hardest part is determining that you want to go through all of this hassle to replicate something browser extensions already do (for the most part).
> All you have to do is view the changes/new commits every time you want to update.
These can be thousands of lines of code per day in busy projects.
I'm installing it now and the best part is if I don't like something I can change it. OSS FTW.
How would you know that for future updates?
I think we have to face the reality that web browsers might no longer be considered "user" agents.
Well obviously, if you keep insisting on using a browser made by Google, an ad company.
If by "web browsers" you mean specifically Chrome, yes. Firefox, Brave, and others are all committed to supporting MV2, and will continue to serve my interests as a user for the foreseeable future.
I think too many techies are, much like yourself, contributing to the problem by refusing to move away from Chrome for "reasons"[1], and then compounding it by refusing to acknowledge that "web browsers" != "Google Chrome".
[1] The "reasons" are of dubious quality. Myself and many others are able to do all normal web-browsing from firefox or firefox forks with no functional or performance degradation.
Contrary to your assumptions, I've been quite vocal against the Chrome/Blink monoculture for a while. Unfortunately there is a legit case for it; several generations of "low-end" devices (anything older than 10 years basically), that are still quite capable and in common use, where the difference in performance between Firefox and Chromium becomes quite noticeable, especially as you try to watch video.
I don't think the problem is "techies", we have zero influence outside our own circles - see the historical rates of Linux adoption. The problem is we need the good ol' hammer of antitrust to start swinging again. We also need the regulators to be smart; if we get really unlucky, they will target iOS Safari instead. (This would be good in a healthy ecosystem, but would only serve to further entrench Google's position in the current situation.)
By the way, using a filtering/rewriting proxy has other merits, especially on said older hardware; you can rewrite the entire web page to make it more lightweight and accessible. Check out miniwebproxy[1] and medium-rare[2]. It's also quite simple to write one; you need maybe a hundred lines of Go to start getting results. I've been experimenting with integrating Readability[3][4]; and I think there's more potential to this approach.
[1]: https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/miniwebproxy
[2]: https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/medium-rare
I apologise for my incorrect assumptions. What browser are you reading this on, right now?
I don't have any trust in any of those components you mentioned, but I came to terms with the risks associated with using them as part of my threat model. However, I find the notion that open source is somewhat safer because "we can audit it" exaggerating if not misleading. It's not a valid argument, and it should never be used because there's no way to do it in an either practical or consistent way for the users of the said product.
You're not living in a vacuum. The more users (and perhaps more importantly, contributors) an open source product has, the less likely it has intentional backdoors built into it.
There is no way to easily verify that unless some trusted bodies do this for us and publish their work specifically for what you're using.
Now you just have been stating a problem and no solution.
I do agree with you though that "hey it's OSS and easy to verify because we have the code" is indeed lying to ourselves and especially tools with privileges like this (MITM your encrypted traffic) should not be taken that lightly and have the proper warnings, disclaimer and attention (to watch for bad behavior)
Building the code yourself for every update is also a solved problem on every system with a feature complete package manager, including Windows. Trust is not so easily solvable, but if you trust nobody, you can choose to look at ads.
Sorry, I change my question to "how is this a usable free?"
Applies to this program no different than your Linux distro.
Of course there could be other tools that can help verify things such as checksums on reproducible builds.
If none of that is "usable" enough for you, feel free to set up your own tooling and automation
Thank you. That's my point. There is no point in stating that some open source code is somewhat safer because "it can be audited". No. As you said, it's the same as everything I use on my computer. Unless we can establish a consistent safety level for certain type of projects, we can't claim an arbitrary category of software is somehow better.
Please define "easily"