Users banding together to send crypto anonymously toward their favorite sites and creators is not "parasitic" -- you and your browser are the host, already colonized by tracking scripts for ads if you don't use a no-compromises blocker such as uBO.<p>Users' right to block is well supported by web standards and case law. Adding a separate, direct to creator funding option is not parasitism, it is found money for creators.<p>To see someone here call our opt-in (meaning that each user consents without duress) anonymous micro-contributions and (coming up fast) private ads model layered on top such a name tells me that person has confused host and parasite, or is working for one of the parasites.<p>It was never a given that your browser should become a blind and passive servant to surveillance super-companies either wholly or partly dependent on ads, but such companies did capture arguably 3 of the top 4 browsers.<p>Now is the time for users to push back, whether by Brave if you like it, a blocker such as uBO on a browser that doesn't track you by default (perhaps when "logged in"; whatever), or another method that works for you. I hope those who have not yet will give Brave a try. <a href="https://brave.com/download-dev" rel="nofollow">https://brave.com/download-dev</a> for the chromium-extensions-ready new version.
I know Brave has their own arguably evil agenda, but their Android browser right now is simply amazing. It blocks all ads and trackers, without needing to set up VPNs or proxys or companion apps that mess with your settings and don't always work. If you prefer Chrome over Firefox on your Android then for ad-free browsing it can't be beat.
I want to like Brave, but I just can't get past the planned ads, the crypto stuff, how memory intensive chromium is, and, well, I really like Firefox.<p>My browser is for reading docs, for JS/WASM development, and the occasional Gmail or HN visit, so maybe I'm not their target market.
The first time I heard of Brave, I thought Oh cool, a privacy focused, chromium based browser. But I must say I'm honestly appalled by its parasitic business model.<p>Content creators are strong armed into becoming verified publishers, while users have to trust Brave that their data is handled properly and carefully.
I really like the idea behind Brave.<p>However, I think a fundamental issue arises if you are going to pay people to see ads: What if someone forks Brave, and creates a browser which blocks all Brave ads, while pretending to click on them?<p>Neither of the two solutions I can think of are pleasant ones: you either need to somehow verify that that ads are viewed by a human (i.e. CAPTCHAs), or use DRM-like mechanisms to hide a token in Brave’s brinary, so that only “honest” browsers can get paid.
> This app has access to: Device & app history Allows the app to view one or more of: information about activity on the device, which apps are running, browsing history and bookmarks<p>Why is this required?
I support Brave's vision for the Web, but it currently seems to represent a step <i>backwards</i> for privacy. Making payments to providers essentially involves sending your Web browsing history to Brave. The FAQ states that "we do not know which BAT wallet is associated with the lists of sites that you choose to support". I believe that is false.<p>I think it works like this: (1) Brave Browser submits its transactions to a Brave server to exchange a BAT for an Anonize ballot (anonize.org), (2) each ballot has the name of a site you visited randomly added by the browser with probability proportional to the frequency of site visits, and (3) the ballots are sent to a Brave server. Key here is that the token and ballot submissions are sent directly (e.g. not through a proxy or Tor). In addition, I believe the ballots may be submitted as a batch (i.e. at one point in time). Therefore, it is easy for Brave to see your votes for your visited websites, all coming at once, all from your IP address. That IP address may well be the same one used to exchange the BAT for ballots as well.<p>There are additional problems regarding visits to unusual and identifying websites that I feel like Brave hasn't begun to consider, either. Suppose that every and only time that Brave receives a ballot for your personal website, they also receive a ballot for some unpopular and sensitive website. They can then conclude that the owner of the website also visits that sensitive site.<p>These problems must be addressed before Brave can be considered seriously by privacy-conscious users.
Brave claims to be 2-8 times faster than Chrome & Firefox on popular news sites. If Brave is based on Chromium, no ways it can be twice faster than Chrome. If it based on a new developed browser kit, it’s too fantastic to be true. It’s already a respectable performance if a new browser kit can come close to the unicorn browsers like Chrome & Firefox (Quantum). The whole thing is too fishy for my taste.
Block current ad tech and replace it with their own. Where does Brave hope to be in 10 years? Controlling the internet ad marketplace via their BAT token platform. Once the initial creators have earned their take and lost their will the platform values will be slowly (rapidly?) eroded and we'll be right back where we are today.<p>How is this appealing?
There’s adaway for Android (needs root) that downloads, merges and replace /etc/hosts with your favorite hosts blacklists, working system wide and not consuming extra battery: <a href="https://adaway.org" rel="nofollow">https://adaway.org</a>
I respect the CEO's right to keep details of his opinions on other people's rights to himself. Unfortunately, the appearance of his Prop 8 donation makes me not want to send money his way. There are plenty of browsers out there.
Installed brave on Linux, the autocomplete is sluggishly slow which I guess is due to history search but makes it completely unusable. There's an open issue for that, but I wished they didn't market it with such a critical bug.
If anyone from Brave is here, I look forward to customizing the install location on Windows. I need to install to a secure area, not my user directory. I look forward to giving it a good test when I can.
i have lot count of the number of browser projects that positioned themselves as an alternative to XYZ existing product. not saying it doesn’t happen (chrome) just that there are often several attempts made that rise and fall quickly. adding cryptocurrency may be an interesting spin...but in the end it’s just a spin and the core loop is not much different. best of luck to them!
Just need to say that I really appreciate different people taking different approaches to ad security and privacy enhancement. I have so distressed by the amount of malware that has been infecting people's networks from mainstream sites it scares the dickens out of me.<p>The privacy things also really disturbs me.<p>I don't mind seeing an ad and you getting paid for it when I read the latest changes to the HPV guidance from the FDA for example, but I don't want multiple evil places like "addthis" "add-to-'any" and the likes to be creating some kind of profile and selling it.<p>The newspaper ads did not tell others that I read the "whatever article" in the paper.<p>I also can not stand moving ads. SO many really good articles are ruined by animated gifs/mp4s jumping for attention. It saddens me, and likely the authors of really good long form articles, I think from the Atlantic and NYTImes recently I was taken out of the feeling and captivating moments of articles to look at the moving distractions next to them many times.<p>This not only made articles take twice as long to read, but made them much less impactful, and harder to remember.<p>These are some of the reasons I posted a while back (<a href="http://www.ideasandwritings.com/2016/adblock-into-fairblock/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ideasandwritings.com/2016/adblock-into-fairblock/</a> ) the desire to have an ad-blocker with some 2 way communication so I could have settings that block all third party ads, and moving ads, but would gladly accept static self served ads from sites that had reasonable privacy policies.<p>I would take it further and offer up some extra data points to those ads the were guaranteed secure so you could make more money and "i could get awesome ads relative to me" - I imagine many others would be happy to offer city, sex, and age for example, if privacy was controlled by "reputable publisher on list here" for example.<p>For these reasons I seriously applaud this project. It's not perfect, but it seems to be the closest to what I wrote about some time ago - and I think it's a huge jump in the right direction.<p>I applaud all the attempts, ad blockers, micro payments, different models for payments and attention - lets try everything and find what works for different people.<p>So glad to see publishers jumping on board to get some ad revenue from those who would choose to block privacy stealing, possible malware sending ads. Now if we can fine tune it a bit more I'd love to see some back and forth discussion between my browser and the ad server. (no alcohol ads, yes to tech, static only please, male, etc)<p>Heck I might actually click and buy to support more if the ads get better, not just more attention stealing which seems to be the race to the outrageous that clickbait and such is going.<p>Maybe this will start to force some changes.
Brave, DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi, etc... are examples of the parasitic products that are trying to make use of the current privacy paranoia to earn a very tiny market share while they aren't any different from the big players. They only look innocent because they are small not because they are different.
i had a similar idea. a local client that scrapes (ahem, reads) forum sites and formats the content in a consistent way. with much more powerful UI. like tapatalk, but actually good.<p>oh, and it removes site ads and inserts it’s own. then it holds the forums hostage to get into its own ads model.
The Brave browser loads pages faster, because it completely ignores the web standards (i.e. it does not show you what the author wanted you to see). Precisely, it does not load and display some elements, which it considers to be ads (or at least that is what they want us to believe).<p>If the page author writes <body id="ads"> ... , normal browsers will show you the content of the <body>, while Brave will show you nothing (in 0.001 seconds) :D<p>Personally, I think that using browsers, which add / remove / rewrite (i.e. censor) the web content for you, is quite dangerous. If it rewrites the Google Search results once in a while, or rewrites some part of the news, you would not even notice.