Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 9

Brave advertises itself as a privacy-focused browser, but for every cool privacy feature I look at there’s a reminder of how deeply enmeshed it is in the exploitative venture capital side of Silicon Valley, with cryptocurrency features and a core business model that blocks ads on websites and replaces them with its own ads.

So I’ve never really trusted Brave, looking at them with the same kind of skepticism as post-acquisition Opera. But I figured since I’m evaluating (or re-evaluating) a bunch of other browsers, I should upgrade my skeptical opinion to an informed one.

On first run it showed me an ad for a bitcoin credit card.

So there’s that.

Moving on. It also wanted me to opt into a “web discovery project” that would share anonymous search activity to help build up their index. To me it seems like the kind of thing that could be de-anonymized with a little context, but at least it’s opt-in.

I remembered reading that they’d added IPFS support to the browser a while back, which I thought was a good idea. I’ve experimented with it from time to time using an extension with Firefox and Vivaldi, and wanted to try it out in a browser with native support. It turns out Brave just removed IPFS in the second half of 2024. But hey, it’ll still detect NFTs!

As for privacy: it comes with an ad blocker and a bunch of anti-fingerprinting measures (comparable to those in LibreWolf). It can use placeholders for embedded posts like Privacy Badger does, but only supports Facebook, X and LinkedIn. Its sync service uses a single client-side key (in the form of a long pass phrase) instead of an account. There’s also a Tor mode, which is nice if you don’t want to download yet another browser to access onion sites, though it’s still not as private as the official Tor Browser.

But I don’t need a crypto wallet or an AI chatbot built into the browser, and things like Brave Rewards and the Basic Attention Token are basically letting Brave track you itself instead of the sites you visit. And they’ve been known to claim they’ll pay creators who hadn’t actually signed up, and silently add affiliate codes to links using autocomplete. Even some of its fans are complaining about bloat and increased attack surface. (That’s not even getting into the CEO’s unpleasant parting with Mozilla.)

The upshot is that while it does seem the browser is a bit tighter, privacy-wise, than LibreWolf where the sites I visit are concerned…I don’t trust the rest of the application. So now it’s my informed opinion that it’s comparable to post-acquisition Opera. For now I’m sticking with Vivaldi for Chromium compatibility, LibreWolf for a little more privacy, and when I want to use Tor, I’ll just use Tor.

Software developer Brendan Eich invented JavaScript while working on Netscape, and went on to co-found Mozilla. In 2014 he was promoted to CEO, and within days people pointed out that he had made a large-sum donation to the campaign for California’s anti-marriage-equality Proposition 8 in 2008.

A fierce debate ensued as to whether he should be trusted to handle teams that might include people whose lives had been impacted by that campaign – the proposition had passed (though it would later be overturned by the courts, and in 2024 voters elected to repeal it outright and replace it with a clause affirming marriage rights). He resigned after less than two weeks, and not long after co-founded Brave Software.

Legacy

Now, in 2025, barely a week out from the Firefox ToS debacle and looking back at Mozilla over the past decade, I see this episode as a turning point.

• They lost the trust of people who were alarmed to see him promoted.
• They lost the trust of people who were alarmed to see him resign.
• They lost his technical skills.

It’s easy to imagine an alternate timeline in which they put a little more effort into choosing a new CEO, promoted into leadership someone who hadn’t actively campaigned against civil rights, and kept Eich on in a technical role.

Maybe Mozilla would have held onto more support in 2014. Maybe Firefox would have gotten some of the features Brave experimented with. Maybe they would have spent less on C-suite salaries and more on development. And sure, maybe Eich would still have left at some point to build a “Web3” browser, but without the bad blood from the split as it happened here.

And while Brave in our reality launched as an ad company masquerading as a browser company, and Mozilla has turned itself into one over the last couple of years, it’s also easy to imagine a world in which Mozilla didn’t spend the last decade chasing every last trend that might turn up an alternative revenue stream, and instead focused on making the browser as good as possible.

Or maybe it would have played out largely the same, just at a different speed. It’s impossible to know for sure.

What might have been…

Full disclosure: I don’t like the premise of Section 31 (the organization) in the first place. IMO it undermines the concept of the Federation rather than complicating it as Deep Space Nine’s more gray-area episodes did. I didn’t like it when it showed up in DS9, and I was so tired of it by the end of Discovery season 2. (More about that later.)

But I was going to watch this anyway, because Michelle Yeoh is always compelling. As awful a person as Mirror Georgiou is, the character is fascinating to watch – particularly when she’s navigating the different rules of the Prime universe. And she does not disappoint!

The Verdict

Viewed as a pilot for a Star Trek series, it’s…okay. The only really good pilots the franchise has had are “The Caretaker” (Voyager) and “Second Contact” (Lower Decks), with “The Emissary” (DS9) coming close.

As a stand-alone movie, though, it’s a mess. Too much exposition, too little story. Characters drawn with bullet points to be filled in later. A cliffhanger halfway through, with a stark change in setting and supporting cast making it clear that it was two regular-length episodes. And an epilogue that does nothing for this story, serving only to set up a series that won’t happen.

It could have been retooled as a good heist film like Solo (no, seriously), but the seams are way too visible, especially considering that (IIRC) the decision was made before shooting started.

(And as cool as that ship at the end is, it makes absolutely no sense given what it’s being used for.)

Fridge Logic Time

It took a while to figure out that this was Georgiou after her disappearance in Discovery Season 3, having popped up again in the prime universe about halfway between TOS and TNG. That still puts her several decades out of sync with her own time, something which messes with the timeline of her contemporaries in her home universe.

Side Note on Deep Space Nine

Sisko is willing to bend the rules on the regular because he’s working in a place where things are messy, but he bends them to avoid breaking them. We see the murkier side of things during the Dominion War, and when O’Brien gets dragged into an undercover intelligence investigation. But while there’s a lot of gray area, they’re still striving to keep in the light, and there’s a point beyond which the darkness is not acceptable. In “Paradise Lost” Sisko comes down hard against a conspiracy that’s willing to throw out the Federation’s ideals wholesale, claiming that they’ll come back in some nebulous future.

“In the Pale Moonlight” works because it’s a last-ditch plan, and because it shows the decision process. We watch Sisko work through the moral quandary and conclude that this time, in this place with this situation it’s necessary to violate those ideals in order to preserve them in the long run. Whether the audience agrees, he’s at least grappled with the problem.

Similarly, Discovery Season 1 made a very clear point about Starfleet’s ideals being something to keep aspiring to, not to discard for the sake of expedience. Lorca’s approach may have been effective in the short term, but that didn’t mean it was the only solution, or the best one, even in wartime.

That’s a far cry from an entire organization dedicated to assuming the dirty work is always going to be necessary and simply tossing ideals out the window to do it, even if it’s framed as making sure other people don’t have to.

Like everyone else in the Los Angeles area, I installed Watch Duty in mid-January when fires were burning down entire neighborhoods in Altadena and Pacific Palisades and scouring the mountains. This is what official alerts should have been: Clear maps of fire perimeters and evacuation zones, and alerts when conditions changed.

While the LA Times fire map is always useful, it’s not always specific enough, especially when you want a sense of which side of the fire perimeter is still burning, which zones are under orders vs. warnings, etc.

And the official alerts going out on emergency channels tend to be too specific, except when they accidentally went out to the entire county.

Being able to look on a map and see things like, “Oh, that alert is only for the Eaton fire in Woodland Hills, it hasn’t burned over the mountains and through 10 miles of city in the last 5 minutes” was really helpful!

It’s a non-profit, volunteer organization, and the emergency alerts are free. I decided to buy the $25/year membership to help keep it going. It’s a small price. Especially since I’m going to want this through fire season, which is year-round these days.

A no-nonsense SSH client for Android. You can set up profiles for each system you connect to, with or without auth keys. When using the on-screen keyboard it adds buttons for Control, Escape, Tab, arrows, and all the function keys you don’t have on your phone. When using an external keyboard that still doesn’t have Escape, you can use Ctrl+[. Works so well I’ve never bothered to try out other SSH clients for my phone or tablet.