I don’t think this should be downvoted. Brave Search is one of the very few search engines that is building its own index.
DuckDuckGo and Startpage are both great, however DDG uses results from Bing and Startpage uses results from Google.
We need proper competition against these big tech giants, and Brave Search is one of the few alternatives which is attempting to provide it. Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index.
Could you please explain why you don’t think Brave is privacy friendly?
I think Brave Search has a really good privacy policy.
Brave Search is designed to be private by default. We don’t collect personal information about you, your device or your searches. We also don’t transmit information to the web that could be used to profile you or track you or learn anything about you. Your searches are private to YOU.
It’s also worth noting that Brave has its own search index… as opposed to DuckDuckGo which uses Bing, and StartPage which uses Google.
Although admittedly this does mean that the search results from Brave Search isn’t the best at the moment. Hopefully this will improve with time.
Are you referring to the time when the DuckDuckGo browser was blocking all known trackers except Microsoft trackers? After that information was made public and users complained, DuckDuckGo was able to renegotiate its agreement with Microsoft so that it can block their trackers.
Furthermore, DuckDuckGo now publish their blocklist on GitHub.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts
It’s worth clarifying that this issue affected the DuckDuckGo browser, not the search engine itself.
So if you were refusing to use DuckDuckGo browser on the basis that they allow Microsoft tracking, then that issue has been resolved now. But if you were saying that this incident has made you lose trust in DDG and that’s why you refuse to use it… well, that’s fair enough. It’s your choice, but I personally would trust DDG more than StartPage, just because StartPage is owned by an ad company.
Look how they massacred my boy…
For real though, if it bothers you that much, I think it’s possible to change the shortcut icon on your desktop. You would have to download the old Firefox logo as an image on your computer, and then edit the properties of the Firefox shortcut to use the downloaded image of the old icon instead of the regular app icon. This won’t help for the mobile app though.
I’m a native English speaker so I can’t really contribute much to this post, but I remember watching a hidden camera prank show in the 90s, and the victim of the prank started yelling at the guy who pranked him. Unfortunately, I don’t know what language the show was in.
The TV show translated the insults he used and put it in the subtitles… and one of the insults was “curse the pig who delivered you”.
It probably sounded fine in his language but I remember thinking how oddly specific and personal to insult the midwife who helped your mother give birth to you lol.
Maybe there’s someone here who can recognise what phrase and language was used here?
Well the privacy/security enthusiasts will prefer open source browsers, as these are viewed as more trustworthy.
Safari is closed source (although WebKit, the rendering engine that Safari uses, is open source).
Apple devices are only more “private” in the sense that the prevent third parties from collecting your data (don’t get me wrong, this is great), but then proceed to go and collect the same data for their own uses instead.
While I accept that Apple are far from perfect, my understanding is that even their data collection for their own purposes is still less than the data collection that Google use for their own purposes. And since their are only two major phone OS (Android and iOS), we can only choose between the lesser of the two evils.
After all, do you want to give your data to a company which is the world’s biggest ad company? Or instead give your data to a company whose business model is convincing people to buy $1000+ phone every year?
But yeah, I agree that Apple’s anti-consumer practices are awful. I wasn’t aware of the aftermarket parts re-using chips just for the serial numbers and I’m not even the least bit surprised. We need governments to bring in legislation to protect right to repair, because companies like Apple can’t be reasonable.
Great point. I can’t think of another company in the phone/computer industry that has such a cult following, that it allows them to get away with awful business practices without criticism from its loyal fan base.
I would also love to see a competitor to Apple make equally great products without all the awful business practices… Although I think the sad reality is that Apple’s anti-consumer practices earns them so much money, that it allows them to spend more on UX design, R&D, hardware etc and create better products.
As for the “overpriced” description, I’d say it’s a bit more debatable for a MacBook, but it’s a lot more noticeable on Apple’s other products (The most egregious example, of course, is the infamous $999 monitor stand). Even the accessories, such as a simple charger or adapter, will require you to pay the Apple Tax too.
Well said. I agree with your point. I love Apple designs/products but hate Apple business practices.
I guess my point is that people who buy an Apple product know that it’s a package deal. For instance, you know that you will get a beautiful high-end iPhone but you can’t side load apps. So it’s a case of weighing up the advantages and disadvantages.
And yes, I agree that the Magic Mouse is poorly designed, which is uncharacteristic of Apple. I was given one from work to use with my work-issued MacBook. And it was only when my mouse battery ran out for the first time that I discovered that you can’t charge and use the mouse at the same time! So frustrating!
I hate the tribalism regarding Apple products. There are loyal fanboys who won’t hear a bad word about Apple, and then there are Apple haters who criticise everything about them.
I wish we had some more nuance in this debate. The reality is that there are advantages and disadvantages to Apple products. I’ll outline a few:
Advantages
Disadvantages
However, this is of course annoying for people who don’t mind holding the phone vertically or who are watching videos on a widescreen device
I think you meant to write “horizontally” here :)
Ah ok, thanks for letting me know. I haven’t used KeePass in a long time but I’m going to download it and give it another try now. It sounds like a good idea to avoid passwords from being stored in the clipboard. Thanks.
community driven
I see what you did there.
I’m getting a bicycle because I’m two tired of all these car puns.
Good idea, although this wouldn’t tell you if they truncated the password at 9 characters instead (or 10 or 11 characters etc).
So you would have to try different attempts without making too many in one sitting that gets you locked out.
If you tried your password without the last character, then I think that would tell you if ANY truncation is being used (but it won’t tell you whether it happened at the 8th, 9th, 10th etc character). But that seems like the best thing to try first just to rule it out.
Yes I’ve made a similar mistake in the past. On one screen I performed the auto-type and it was in the process of typing out the user/password combination, and while this was happening I clicked into a chat window on my other screen without thinking. The chat window immediately started having part of my password typing into it!
Luckily I managed to click elsewhere in time to prevent ‘enter’ being typed at the end of auto-type.
It’s just a reminder that you have to wait for auto-type to complete before you can do anything else.
The UI isn’t obvious into which window it will autotype
I found that if you click into the username field first and then switch directly to KeePass without opening/switching to any other applications in between, then when you click auto-type in KeePass, it works every time. This is because the browser window was the last used application before KeePass was selected. But yeah, it’s not an ideal user experience.
I could be wrong because I haven’t used KeePass in a few years… but it’s my understanding that the auto-type feature doesn’t work on every website, depending on how they’re designed.
So auto-type will work on websites where the username input field and password input field are on the same page, and where you can switch from the username field to the password field with a single tab key press.
However I don’t think it will work on sites where the username needs to be submitted first before the password field is even visible. I think signing into a Google account is an example of this.
At least that was my experience when I was using KeePass a few years ago. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Just wanted to say that I found the description of your job really interesting, so thanks for taking the time to write about it.
There’s absolutely no way that I could do it - I’m far too squeamish. But I’m glad that there are people who can do a job like this, which increases mankind’s understanding of diseases.