The Libre News

> switch to brave

Fun suggestion to switch to a browser that has a company behind it that has pulled a lot of shady stuff related to ads and tracking. A company where privacy is more marketing than a core value.

Edit: Since people are going to ask anyway, here is an article that covers a lot of the shady stuff brave pulled https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/

If you are one of those folks who don't care about the political arguments, feel free to skip over paragraph one and two. Paragraph three till ten cover actual shady stuff done by brave the company itself.

There is one more thing I can add to the list, though it wasn't as widely published about. At some point the team behind Brave decided to implement browser extension support from scratch and only support specific extensions. Which sounds okay in theory until you realize how they did so. Without involving the extension creator they would fork a version of the extension and bake that into Brave. They did so without informing the extension creator, meanwhile users would still go to the extension creator for support who couldn't fix a thing.

Every time one of these things come up, the Brave team either is irked (but changes it anyway) or goes "oh, yeah we'll remove it in the future". This to me indicates a company culture where there is no thinking ahead about the impact of features or where they simply don't care as long as they aren't called out on it.

This consistent pattern over a period of years has,…

This thing, despite using "captcha" in its name, is not your typical captcha like hCaptcha or Google's one, because it uses a proof-of-work mechanism instead of writing answers in textboxes/clicking on images/other means of verification requiring user input.

AI bots can't solve proof-of-work challenges because browsers they use for scraping don't support features needed to solve them. This is highlighted by existence of other proof-of-work solutions designed to specifically filter out AI bots, like go-away[1] or Anubis[2].

And yes, they work - once GNOME deployed one of these proof-of-work challenges on their gitlab instance, traffic on it fell by 97%[3].

[1] - https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away

[2] - https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

[3] - https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/: "According to Bart Piotrowski, in around two hours and a half they received 81k total requests, and out of those only 3% passed Anubi's proof of work, hinting at 97% of the traffic being bots."

1. I fear you may be underestimating the volume of bot traffic websites are now receiving. I recommend reading this article to get an idea of the scale of the problem: https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/

2. Not all requests are created equal. 20 requests a second for the same static HTML file? No problem. But if you have, say, a release page for an open source project with binary download links for all past versions for multiple platforms, each one being a multi megabyte blob, and a scraper starts hitting these links, you will run into bandwidth problems very quickly, unless you live in a utopia where bandwidth is free.

3. You are underestimating the difficulty of caching dynamic pages. Cache invalidation is hard, they say. One notably problematic example is Git blames. So far I am not aware of any existing solution for caching blames, and jury rigging your own will likely not be any easier than the “solution” explored in the TFA.

In case it's fixed later, this is what the website currently says (also links to the article https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/):

Oh no! Forbidden Error: access denied: denied by administrative rule b7050bdf35a65cce29f930db7f36fe80/0e8b4aae7b07d2b89401 Why am I seeing this?

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up go-away to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites.

Mass scraping can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.

Please note that some challenges requires the use of modern JavaScript features and some plugins may disable these. Disable such plugins for this domain (for example, JShelter) if you encounter any issues.

Guru Meditation: b7050bdf35a65cce29f930db7f36fe80 Protected by go-away :: Request Id b7050bdf35a65cce29f930db7f36fe80

Then you haven't been listening, because it's been widely discussed and well publicised.

My personal two favourite piece on Brave are these...

2023:

«
Stop using Brave Browser

Seriously.

Corbin Davenport

07 Aug 2023
»

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

And from a couple of years later, with a very apt URL...

2025:

«
Why I recommend against Brave

Luca Bramè

March 24, 2025
»

https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/