New to Lemmy. A privacy advocate. Interested in number theory.
See also:
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records
The French National Police is unlawfully using an Israeli facial recognition software [installed massively and secretly. The Minister ordered an investigation]
Some of possible solutions include:
Just fyi: recently EFF is creating Privacy Badger browser add-on and GNU also has LibreJS. They’re technically not ad-blockers, though; apparently a tracker-blocker and a non-free-script-blocker, respectively.
That is correct. Tor Browser on Tails comes with uBlock Origin. It might be that DDG (or some other financial supporters) are not happy if the Tor Project ships TB with uBlock. There are many things to be blocked by uB even on DDG, Brave, MetaGer, etc. (although obviously they are much less invasive than you-know-what search engines). Purely privacy-wise they’re annoying of course. But understandably they do need to monetize something to provide search engines, and I think some of them are financially supporting the Tor Project too, or they’re helping each other, so… I don’t know. Just a guess.
Isn’t it like Mozilla has to be nice to Google? Ultimately, doesn’t this mean that end users are not making enough donations? People say privacy and freedom are important, but normal people really don’t like to pay for these important things, like assuming libre is like free beer!
I’ve been a long time Mozilla-supporter, since forever—since much before Firefox was even born. Every browser I use now is also Firefox-based [EDIT: one of them is SeaMonkey, not firefox-bsed but from Mozilla too]. As such, I wouldn’t like to say bad things about Mozilla. While I could clarify what I was trying to say, let’s just say several other people prefer LibreWolf to Firefox (I’m not a LibreWolf user, though).
In the big picture, we don’t want to be abused by big tech companies like Google, and relatively speaking, Firefox is a much better choice. Also, you’re absolutely right about how free software is supposed to work (at least in principle). Like I said, I really hope I’m totally wrong here.
The original (initial) post is a question about Brave, and we’re getting so off-topic now. Besides it seems that most Lemmy users don’t even read anything older than a week anyway, too busy to have a slow, deep conversations. So let’s call it a day. What I was trying to say in passing might become painfully clearer soon enough, or perhaps—hopefully—I’m just overly worrying about nothing. Although maybe Mozilla as an organization can’t exist anymore without Google’s financial supports (and so not in a position to keep saying “No!” to Google for a long time), as you pointed out, let’s hope that the philosophy of free (libre) software will prevail in the end.
That is correct—or at least they said so. Brave might be an option too, except if you open their pages, analytics.brave(.)com may be loaded instead of google-analytics(.)com…
I agree that their search engine may be sometimes helpful. Having their own index is awesome.
Thanks for taking time to dig deeper and share the results. It’s ironic if big search engines are practically assisting those scams.
The main thing behind my previous comment is the SREN bill and Mozilla’s blog post about it.
I hope I am wrong, but I feel that Mozilla, while being against browser-side censorship, is strongly supporting Google-side restrictions. The situation becomes clearer if you actually read SREN, Art. 6, which is based on the premise that browser providers can and will monitor each user’s activity (my post about this on Lemmy). Conceptually similar to WEI.
The technology that restricts what a user can do can be useful, if unquestionably bad things are blocked. The fundamental problem is, in order for this to work, someone has to decide what is “bad” for you, and has to monitor your activities directly or indirectly so that you may not visit “bad” websites. Protecting users from malware may be important, but I don’t want forceful “protection” by for-profit big tech companies, especially when their OSes/services are not really privacy-respecting, if not themselves spyware. While “protection” might not involve real-time monitoring or anything privacy-invasive, the current situation feels preposterous. We should be free to customize programs, free to block what we don’t need; it’s not like they have freedom to block us from accessing info, to force us to use/view what they want us to.
Money is bad—it is used for a lot of bad things like trading drugs or hiring killers…? Money is the root cause of mugging, scams, exploitation, killing, corruption…?
Money is good—it can be used to help people…?
Perhaps money is not good nor bad; a person who uses it may be ethical or unethical. Please do not confuse pure mathematics or technology (such as public key cryptography) with its users/abusers.
Someone I know is curious about the SPN, which says, “It’s Time to Ditch VPNs - Stop paying for out-dated technology that was never intended to protect your privacy.”
I’m not too sure, but interested in it. Opinions?
Sorry, fixed that North hemisphere-centric expression. Next time I’ll be more careful. Thanks for pointing that out.
Since LibreWolf is libre software, it’s likely that a user has freedom to tweak this maybe via about:config. You just need to ask this directly in the LibreWolf community.
I think I know what you’re talking about, though. Perhaps CSS @font-face is forbidden, because many sites use Google fonts, which allows them to track you.
If Tor Browser is acceptable, give it a try. While TB too has very strict font restrictions to avoid finger-printing (so that a remote site may not know which fonts your system already has), web fonts are allowed by default. It’s relatively harder to distinguish/track individual Tor users, since TB hides your real IP & by default cookies are per session only.
LibreWolf shows your real IP, so it’s understandable and reasonable that it wants to be more careful about fonts. Still a user should be given freedom to do whatever, at their own risk. That’s what free software is all about, after all. Just a thought…
The current use cases are for Brazilian banking sites. Although free (libre) software users don’t like to be remotely monitored their browsing real-time, the technology itself can be helpful if used right.
The context is, even though Firefox is getting more and more annoying with telemetry, phoning home, etc. (imho the last good version was v52 ESR), it is still much better than Google. So use Firefox, if you don’t like other options.
Mozilla is financially supported by Google, and perhaps they can’t continue their projects without Google, so it’s kind of inevitable that sometimes they have to support that giant. Nevertheless, they still try not to be evil, explicitly against WEI.
Please do support Firefox and/or its forks (LibreWolf, Tor Browser, …). Stop cooperating with Google. They can do evil things because of their monopoly power. We can make Google less powerful, if we refuse to use their products, if we escape from their privacy-invading services.
It’s a free country, you can use whatever you like. Respect yourself and your own intuition :)
The current situation (summer July–Sept 2023) is, you better switch to any browser that is not Chromium-based. The reason is “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI), which seems to mean, basically, Google is trying to DRM-lock the whole Internet to make sure you see their ads and they can track everyone. Freedom-loving users obviously don’t like that.
At the same time Firefox is getting more and more annoying, yet it’s better than Google. A safe bet for a general user might be LibreWolf. Another new option is Mullvad Browser.
Ask them to understand that CloudFlare often blocks Tor users. Providing onion while accepting donations via ko-fi doesn’t make sense b/c ko-fi is behind CF.
Thanks, didn’t know LibreJS. Its concept is interesting. But there is a libre tracking JavaScript too. Besides, these tracking URLs on DDG are images (“web bugs”), not scripts. uBlock blocks these things on DDG already on its own.
Noscript can easily disable JavaScript for specific domain(s). One can install this add-on (or if you use TB it’s already there by default). So if disabling JS partially or totally is acceptable, that’s one of the options for DDG.
So you are lolcat and spamming the link to 4get.ca? If so, that makes you look a bit uncool.
Good things: unlike DDG or MetaGer, zero tracking. zero ads. Clean. Unlike SearXNG, you’re not using Github (a good move). This might become huge. The fact that it’s not perfect now, doesn’t matter.
Bad things: Obviously it’ll be hard to be better than SearXNG. A donation link is especially bad; ko-fi.com itself can be there, but… In the donation campaign, SearXNG accepted crypto, while you’re only using a Paypal-like thing. That’s not really cool.
I just did some tests on DDG (sorry OP, not related to SearXNG). If you use it normally, they put a lot of images from URL like improving.duckduckgo.com/t/we?monitor=you&spying=secretly&id=etc (supposedly for improving DDG by gathering statistical blah blah). Their no-JavaScript version is much less invasive.
Solution(s): 1) uBlock is highly recommended, 2) if possible disable JS, 3) try Tor Browser, which is just an anonymity version of Firefox
Sorry, this question was SearXNG specific, so MetaGer was irrelevant. I’ve never self-hosted it, but I’d say Brave. It’s supposed to have its own index (correct me if I’m wrong), so one can expect some diversity.
As for DDG, there shouldn’t be any problems if used via SearXNG. In general, there are a few comments about DDG here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1164105.html and I quote:
Negative:
~1-2 years back they collected data on which search results their users clicked on by default with their own link-forwarder. After some outcry they removed that. Their “privacy browser” allowed third party cookies by Microsoft to track their users because DDG made a deal with them without telling anyone. When it came out Gabriel Weinberg released some BS statements.
Positive:
DDG doesn’t even have a Linux browser, but I love their Android browser. The DDG search engine provides results that are quite fine
uBlock + (MetaGer or Searx or DDG/html[no JS]), via Tor 24/7. Onion available. Individually, hit and miss. In total, good enough for me. While DDG is okay (the default search engine for Tor Browser, Tails), intuitively I don’t fully trust it. Its no-JS version is acceptable.
about time 😊 that’s not the goal; one of the first basic steps!
EDIT Sorry I should not have said it like this. Even though that was my honest feelings, said as free speech without any meany connotations, this should have been treated as good news, like someone finally ditched Windows.
One of the next steps might be to figure out how not to load GA.js GTM.js Google Fonts etc.
There is a long way to go to de-Google oneself, and unfortunately it’s not easy nor trivial. One subtle example: Google is a broker of Tor Snowflake, which could cause a difficult dilemma.