It’s just a Web browser. It’s open source. (MPL 2 license, like Firefox, along with various others.) It does not promote a political ideology.
If anything, I think most of the people I’ve seen using it have a strong Libertarian bent.
Libertarians are not extremists, unless you mean extreme case of non-aggression.
Libertarians tend to view the world in a lens of non-interference and not manipulating others to go along with things by way of threats and perverse incentives.
Since the Republican and Democrat parties in the United States prefer to launch drone strikes all over the world and kill people, including our own citizens, and haven’t met a threat or free market manipulation/perversion they don’t like, it seems like they have to hurl accusations of “extremism” at Libertarians.
Nobody knows what the price of milk really is.
It’s subsidized, by you, no matter how much you actually consume.
Nobody knows what a Pfizer COVID shot really costs because the government negotiated to give several times as much of your money away to Pfizer as you would have paid if it was optional.
If you don’t take it, Biden wants you to lose your job. That’s a manipulation.
Few people know what the wars we enter into are about or how much it really costs their family, or how many Americans die pointlessly. The news is censored, and essentially an organ of state propaganda.
Libertarians don’t want the wars. Libertarians are “extreme”.
Libertarians generally don’t want there to be no government at all. We would like the government to have a low and flat rate of taxation that is fair, and less than what the average person pays now. We would like a system of policing, laws, and courts that protect people from violent crimes, rape, property damage, and uphold contracts. “Extreme!”
The whole point of big media and GAFAM/Big Tech is to spy on people and to mentally corrupt them and dumb them down so much that they are governable by the shitheads we have in DC and our state capitals and city halls. They operate by buying you off or clunking you over the head. That’s a “great” system. Anyone who opposes it must be “extreme”.
Libertarians don’t have to be “Climate Deniers”. There are market solutions to lower emissions. Quit subsidizing oil and stop making millions of people around Chicago get in their cars and drive for 20-30 minutes with the engine running to get their emissions sticker being just a couple. “Extreme!”
The far-left paints Libertarians as “far-right” to try to lump it in with the Republicans, who are also vicious psychopaths like the far-left, but Libertarians were the first party to support marriage equality in the United States, said all along that the drug war was ridiculous and the government was paying massive incarceration fees and losing tax revenue and destroying lives with little impact on crime, and says that people should be able to get all of the abortions they want with their own money. And we like immigrants who obey our laws and want to reduce the barriers to legal immigration, and protect them from violence. Clearly racist and horrible and extreme. In fact, I married one.
If people with an agenda want to attack Libertarians as extreme, don’t buy it! There’s nothing “extreme” about being a rational person. Well, I guess you could be extremely rational.
Anyway, I think that they get the idea that people who want to be left alone, and who say “to each their own” (the horrors), are very interested in Free and Open Source Software, encrypted messengers, Tor, and VPNs. They’re probably right.
The reason the fascist left and SJWs twitch so much about the idea of personal freedom is because it’s the last thing they want. To not be able to push you around and steal from you anymore. As such, anything that gives you personal freedom must be wiped off the face of the earth, like Free and Open Source Software and strong encryption.
Encryption is cheap (computationally).
I use several layers of it routinely (VPN, Tor, HTTPS, tox, E2E in Matrix, Secure IRC, etc…) on my Internet traffic just because I can. If it can confound even just some creepy ISP like Comcast or T-Mobile that wants to sell my browsing history, it’s worth something to me. If it prevents a security breach, it’s nice.
Who I talk to or what I talk about is only the business of me and my audience who I am speaking to.
I also think that SPLC may have an ax to grind with Brendan Eich personally over some money he donated to Prop 8 in California, which ultimately got struck down. That happened 13 years ago. People who live in the past and support Cancel Culture don’t impress me. Also, I’m gay. Not “extremely” gay. Just gay.
Let us also pay no mind to the fact that there are gay people working at Brave Software.
There may be some technical reasons to criticize Brave, but that’s outside the scope of this post.
And for the most part, I agree with what they’re trying to do. They’re taking a very bad platform, Chromium, and trying to defang it of APIs dumped in by Big Tech companies in order to spy on you, and they’re trying to put in features that protect you from surveillance capitalism.
Mozilla, on the other hand, is a party styling itself as “Social Justice Warriors” who have done nothing for your freedoms and online safety lately. They fell so hard, so far, and so fast in the last 7 years, that they’re all but unrecognizable at this point in those terms.
Free and Open Source Software should appeal to Libertarians. It’s not Communism, as Microsoft tried to frame it.
If anything, Microsoft is a Communist company. They get state bailouts and Five Year Government Plans to buy failed products like HoloLens. They bribe elected officials, and then Microsoft gets government contracts. The FBI got “hacked” the other day, and their email system was used to send scam emails out.
The US government is incompetent with cybersecurity, yet issues directives, even as the FBI can’t even protect its own networks because the government buys Microsoft products.
Free and Open Source Software is something that people are paid what they think is a fair amount of money to work on, and so they do it. Or they might be a hobbyist. Most are paid though.
Their employer makes money selling products or services based on it, and then we can benefit from it too. Debian is an organization that people voluntarily fund which produces a coherent GNU/Linux operating system based on FOSS.
Proprietary software tends to be unloved software. People who produce it keep it proprietary to avoid having to compete with others. They have a right to attempt this, it’s not illegal, but people should know that it almost always does something wrong to them.
Being proprietary by itself hides how the program works, and that helps obscure the further wrongs and harm it commits. For example, Windows Telemetry only gives you a vague idea of what it transmits to Microsoft. They use strong encryption to prevent you from seeing what’s really in those compressed archives. What’s in there?
Without even being able to know, people jump in and defend it. Think it’s sketchy? “EXTREMIST!” “PARANOID!”
What Microsoft _admits_ their Edge browser sends back to them is enough reason not to use it. What people have found it doing by digging a little deeper is even worse, but it too can hide the true extent of the snooping.
Aside from backdoors that proprietary software hides, the software also tends to be incredibly bloated. Windows has dozens of GB of crap in it that is mostly legacy junk, where security holes can lurk. The US government (among others) finds them and hoards them and then weaponizes them.
The Flame and Stuxnet malware were pieces of art. They evaded all antivirus solutions on the market for years, infested lots of systems, and then when Iran chose to run Windows in their uranium enrichment center, President Obama ordered a strike.
The United States didn’t need to send bombers. It just needed to push a button, and state malware for Windows, laying dormant, sleeping, for years, woke up, and spun the centrifuges too fast, and broke 94% of them beyond repair.
Many faults in the underlying OS end up propagating into the programs that run on it. Web browsers deal with Web sites. Web sites can run anything you’re not blocking. Almost every release of Firefox mentions some CVEs that only affect Windows. These are inherited from the OS, and since nobody but Microsoft can fix the OS, or sometimes it was designed wrong and can’t be fixed, the solution is usually a hack to hopefully block the exploit, but it only protects the program that was patched to avoid triggering the OS bug.
Content Blocking lists have to be updated frequently to keep up with new threats. It turns out that the US Intelligence Agencies run ad blockers to lower attack surface. Not just “malvertising”. Companies can gather data just by placing bids.
During the COVID lockdown, various government agencies in the United States monitored whether people were complying with it or not by bidding on and/or buying data collected by advertisers through Web sites and mobile ad networks.
I use Tracker Control on my Android phone. I went through disabling or uninstalling most of the crap I found from Samsung. They even include a Facebook “Service” you can’t remove which monitors the apps you sign into, even if you don’t have Facebook on your phone, and associates it with your Facebook profile. I deleted the data and disabled that. But that’s what lurks in your Android phone. Not all of the crapware can be turned off, but Tracker Control can block tracker libraries from phoning home, and I pulled the plug on Internet access from all apps I don’t use, and most apps I use are also from the F-Droid store.
The situation on iPhones is worse, because you can’t run Free and Open Source Software, and very nearly all apps in the App Store have Apple and Google trackers in them.
On top of this, Apple plans to add a scanner that goes looking through your phone and reporting in. They claim anyone who objects is probably a “pedophile”. Such a system can and will be used for other things. China will use it to hunt people down for having pro-democracy protests. Muslim states will behead gay people who Apple turned over for the right to keep selling products there.
The government also paid Facebook to help them locate undocumented immigrants. It has geolocation data. They collect it every time they damned well please if you have it on your phone. You’re walking around telling Facebook everywhere you are, even when it’s not open.
The government may or may not have legal grounds to get a warrant, but it hardly needs to. It’s spending your money to buy your data so you can help get yourself arrested, deported, ratted out for being outside during COVID “emergency” powers that Illinois Governor Pritzker keeps giving to himself.
If you want to avoid this, or even limit the harm, you’re an “extremist”.
So, really, the Southern Poverty Law Center needs to shut the hell up. They aren’t helping. There’s really not much of a way that “software” and platforms usually have an extremist agenda. Extremists might _use_ software and platforms. But extremists/terrorists, whatever those are, use Windows, Macs, Android Phones, iPhones….
Almost all of the government’s criminal cases involving January 6th rioters involved Facebook and Twitter somehow. We know that now. But at the time, they told us it was Parler’s fault for not taking the posts down, when actually it was almost all being coordinated on Facebook, which left the posts up.
The far-left pushed to have Parler taken down. They got it booted out of Big Tech app stores, Amazon Web Services deplatformed it… They had to end up being hosted by some company that hardly takes anything down, and then the agitators made hay about that!
And Parler was actually not even close to being the source of the problem, of course narratives get changed around and people are easy to mislead with Big Media on the side of the state and the billionaires.
To clarify, I am not on Parler and I am not planning to be. I don’t accept their Terms of Use. But this example shows what Big Tech and their state allies will go through to maintain hegemony for PRISM companies.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is very obviously some sort of Democrat think tank that would love for you to police your kids for them, unwittingly.
I’m not against parents trying to protect their children, but there are other dangers out there than Internet perverts. Proprietary software is an injustice and Social Control Media platforms that turn people into the product are big problems, indeed.
If you want to block something at the firewall level, block Facebook because FACEBOOK the company is evil.
Quit using Google search. Quit using Skype and Zoom. Replace applications and operating system software with Free and Open Source software.
Use social platforms that are really social, not open sewers.
Encryption, VPNs, and Tor are your friend. They’re tools to block surveillance.
There’s a saying that it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools. I would go further and say it’s probably a poor parent who blames Brave, the Web browser.
Children are human beings too, and I think that what horrifies parents is that they won’t turn out carbon copies of themselves if their kids are exposed to a marketplace of ideas.
Most parents unfortunately succeed, and turn out children who are narcissistic, self-centered, one-dimensional, and materialistic mindless consumers. That serves….the state. It really does. They’re happy with things exactly like they are right now.
I think it’s pretty extreme to destroy the human experience to create more wards of the state, who keep toiling away in the fields, and get to enjoy very little in the way of reward for their own labors.
Paying taxes to a central government that’s thousands of miles away and does almost nothing to help them.
Most people under 50 barely know it, but those taxes include a Social Security program that’s got about 10 years left, maybe, before everyone on it gets a 23% benefit cut, and the folks who draw it in retirement now can’t even live off of it.
I think that they should be allowed to save and invest for themselves. They could even leave it to someone if they pass away. My Aunt paid into it for decades, died in a car accident, and they paid nothing.
The program’s “trust funds” which are actually imaginary promissory notes, earn 2-3% interest on “special” government bonds.
The stock market’s average return is over 10% per year.
Am I an “extremist”?
Maybe to some. I mean, the state, the rich, they want people broke all the time. They want people distracted with porn, booze, drugs, and fights with the neighbors. We live in a country that entertains itself by watching the police invade the wrong house and attack people.
I think that’s extreme.
And again, all the fault of the Brave Web browser. After all, the Southern Poverty Law Center produced a white-paper and briefed a bunch of Congress Critters who are all rich and don’t have to live in the world they create for us. Very compelling. ⬆