If you have the Brave Browser installed on your Windows devices, then you may also have Brave VPN services installed on the machine. Brave installs these services without user consent on Windows devices.
Brave Firewall + VPN is an extra service that Brave users may subscribe to for a monthly fee. Launched in mid-2022, it is a cooperation between Brave Software, maker of Brave Browser, and Guardian, the company that operates the VPN and the firewall solution. The firewall and VPN solution is available for $9.99 per month.
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Why is every fucking post in the privacy communities just a circle jerk about Brave?
Marketing
I know “not everyone who cares about security has anything to hide” but the fact they’re so eager to use the pedophile browser is… concerning.
If you care about privacy at all why are you installing brave
Would you looks at that brave doing something crazy again.
Now we just gotta wait for the CEO to go on a marketing campaign for new users, in an attempt to drown out the story.
Yet another reason to not use Brave.
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Why is a server in Washington DC not safe and secure? I’ll give you private against government snooping it’s not, but it can still be safe and secure.
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But it isn’t the entire point tho, I use it when connected to public wifi networks to keep my connection secure. Sure, not letting your local ISP spy on you and report it to the gov is one but not the entire point.
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Not always. If someone really wanted to, it’s easy to create aan in the middle attack with something like a VPN. Shouldnt really ever trust public wifi with sensitive info. Can easily be sniffed with a little effort
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Well, there are 5 governments you should be concidering. Or is it 8? Might be 12 by now…
What is the consensus here on using Brave search in Firefox?
It’s giga cringe
I’ve posted a similar question to asklemmy but more over the focus on preference than privacy. In short the search engine Kagi is really good, Brave search was what I had used for a while. I think search engine choice is a case by case kinda thing, each person uses what they like. There are some other engines I forgot from my post which are more privacy centered.
Kagi is a literal scam
Yes it is 10 dollars a month, but you can create an account and try it for free to see if it is for you. It also does not use your data nor push advertisements which explains the cost.
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ddg does that for free
$10/mo is also crazy overpriced for a search engine, they’re really not resource intensive at all
ddg relies on Bing so it isn’t really comparable, idk about kagi’s costs but they claim 1.2 cent per search and an average of 700 searches per month (as what they are serving and hence pricing for)
If you mean has a crawler, ddg does crawl and augments with bing. Kagi doesn’t have any crawler.
And yet, Kagi’s search results far surpass both DDG and Bing.
I use Brave Search on Firefox, but I mostly use the shortcuts it provides like !yt and !g. A few months back I mostly used it over google, but the search results more times than not have been worse in comparison for me.
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Oh, thanks I forgot it was called bangs. I used DDG a few years ago but missed some features from Google, so I ended up giving up on it, maybe I’ll try again soon.
And spyware for free, and I would not be surprised if they included an insecure backdoor at no extra cost.
As compared to a secure backdoor?
Well, yeah, wouldn’t want the users knowing about it.
Both shitty, yes, but an unsecure backdoor is opening the door to every hacker on the planet, not just one group.
I was disagreeing that a backdoor can ever be secure, because by definition it’s a way to bypass security protocols and if one person can bypass them, there’s no guarantee others can’t too.
Of course, no backdoor is secure, but among them, there are the just plain bad and the even worse.
I don’t use Windows but if you install a program that requires a service on Linux, the service will be written to your system’s services daemon awaiting your activation. I don’t see what the issue with that is.
What’s to stop the installer on Linux from configuring the service such that the service always runs on boot? e.g.
systemctl enable malware.service.You still need to manually enable the service. The configuration of the service has zero effect on its activation or lifecycle.
Huh? Any script can create a service, enable it and then start it. What would make you think the brave package (or just the application itself) can’t do this?
Not possible to start or enable a created service without user intervention. You don’t know what you are talking about.
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Bruh you just ran the command to enable the ‘written’ service. Comprehension is a problem in this community.
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OK… challenge accepted. Maybe you don’t know about systemd user services.
Content of
mytrojan.sh:#!/usr/bin/env bash echo "Writing the service unit file" cat > ~/.config/systemd/user/my_test_service.service << EOF [Unit] Description=Script Daemon For Test User Services [Service] Type=simple User= #Group= ExecStart=/home/user/bin/myscript.sh Restart=on-failure StandardOutput=file:%h/log_file [Install] WantedBy=default.target EOF echo "Reloading systemd for the user" systemctl --user daemon-reload || exit 1 echo "Enabling and starting the service" systemctl --user enable --now my_test_service.serviceContent of
myscript.sh:$ cat ~/bin/myscript.sh #!/usr/bin/env bash while true do now=$(date) me=$(whoami) echo "User $me at $now" sleep 10 doneNow run the script (
mytrojan.sh) and check service status after that:$ ./mytrojan.sh Writing the service unit file Reloading systemd for the user Enabling and starting the service $ systemctl --user status my_test_service.service ● my_test_service.service - Script Daemon For Test User Services Loaded: loaded (/home/user/.config/systemd/user/my_test_service.service; enabled; vendor preset: ena> Active: active (running) since Thu 2023-10-19 12:15:21 EEST; 6s ago Main PID: 1666383 (myscript.sh) Tasks: 2 (limit: 18757) Memory: 556.0K CPU: 4ms CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/app.slice/my_test_service.service ├─1666383 /bin/bash /home/user/bin/myscript.sh └─1666387 sleep 10 Oct 19 12:15:21 tesla systemd[1866318]: Started Script Daemon For Test User ServicesYou failed. This requires the user to run a script aka manual intervention.
I thought that you only were ignorant, but no, you’re more than that!
Systemd “enabled” services are literal symlinks… whenever a target runs, it tries to start also all the service files on its “wants” directory.
You can literally enable any service for next boot by making a symlink in
/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/(or whichever other target you want it to run on) as root (and installation scripts are run as root).ln -s /usr/lib/systemd/system/whatever.service /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/whatever.serviceThis is actually very close (just tested and confirmed it). I somehow stand corrected about requiring manual enablement but this is just using the package manager to do the dirty work for you.
However the program itself cannot write into those directories without root permissions. You still have to allow your package manager to do this with root permissions as mentioned.
Linux doesn’t have “installers” as Linux uses package managers. The only way you can get malware is if you manually add a bad repo.
So it doesn’t really matter in the long run
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Linux doesn’t have “installers” as Linux uses package managers. The only way you can get malware is if you manually add a bad repo.
Are you really serious making this claim? lol.
Yes, prove me wrong. As long as your running a up to date system there shouldn’t be anything that could be easily compromised.
I’ve been using Linux (and UNIX) professionally since the kernel version started with a “1.” I have no need to try to prove anything to you. Linux has installers other than just those invoked by a package manager, and it is laughable that you claim otherwise.
Well I feel better about making the switch to Firefox now, and doing a custom user.js
u/@Max_P said this at the !technology thread:
Software installs services to make its features operate, including optional default off ones. More news at 10.
This is just like any other optional feature of Chromium you don’t use
Check out thorium.rocks It is a fork of Chromium with performance and security improvement. Chris Titus recommends it.
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Thorium isn’t good at all imo. They don’t really do much to enhance privacy/security, and have constantly delayed updates. It seems to be ran entirely by 1 college kid in his free time.
I like Chris Titus, but I wouldn’t really use him as a source for privacy/security advice.
I use Vivaldi, Andisearch and Mojeek. I’m going fine with these. As VPN Proton
That doesn’t really seem that bad. There are issues with brave but that’s not one of them
A VPN provider has the same level of insight into your traffic as an ISP does when not using a VPN. If having one installed without your consent isn’t a privacy issue I don’t know what is…
Is it activated by default though?
I just looked on a VM I spun up for risky shit. It seems to be opt-in only.
Is it a good VPN? No. Is it worth the overreacting that Lemmy seems to do every time someone mentions Brave? No.
But hey, social media.
Apparently we need a anti brave circle jerk
Unclear to me, according to the OP the service is set to manual start. But there is an event trigger attached to the service and the article doesn’t mention what that event is.
