Brave browser quietly slips a VPN service onto your Windows PC

AlmightySnoo đŸąđŸ‡źđŸ‡±đŸ‡ș🇩@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 622 points –
Brave browser quietly slips a VPN service onto your Windows PC
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The ol' bait and switch...classic. Opera used to be good too, then chinese people bought it, then emerged opera vpn. Shaddy af. Same as camscanner

Camscanner hurt. I used it constantly. Then boom, absolute 180. I guess that's the goal. Make a legit app that people love. Then sell it to someone who will exploit your loyalty customers. Cool!

Pretty much everybody has a number they will sell out at, for some it’s astronomical, for others it’s basically what you’d expect

Mine is staggeringly low.

At this point that seems to be the case everywhere. The future looks bleak, and so for most, trying to get what they can out of life before the climate wars, or WW3, or whatever happens seems to be the case. I don’t criticize it. I think there’s a high probability that the reason that we see little extraterrestrial life is that they did the same shit we are doing. The universe has a fractal nature. There are likely many species that also had planets that could support intelligent life. However since the competition for resources is baked into existence, they probably did what we are doing and are themselves no longer alive because they ended themselves before they could really end their stupid arguments about their gods, or work for the collective good more than the individual good

Some of the OG devs who made Opera have made Vivaldi. It’s chromium under the hood, but with googles tracking and telemetry turned off. It’s not perfect, but it adds a significant number of power user features, includes its own (limited) ad and tracking blocking. I alternate between that and Firefox dev edition as my daily driver

Can you elaborate on CamScanner please?

It’s a Chinese app that lets people “scan” a document using the camera on their phone. It was “free” for a long time, turns out it was dropping injected adware on people’s phones.

To be honest, Microsoft lens has had the same features for a long time, but didn’t have “scanner” in the name and most app searches are piss poor so people just literally searched “camera scanner” and got the adware result. Microsoft has their own long and shady history, but dropping an adware payload wasnt part of that.

I use it a lot during my study. But when CamScanner started serving ads, intrusive ads, "cloud backup"...i tried searching for alternatives and use microsoft lens. TBH, microsoft lens is shit compared to camscanner. The detection is slow, janky, cant do multiple pages scan and a lot more troublesome to use. CamScanner detection algorithm was way better at that time. So i bite the lbullet and just use it until end of my study.

I'm not so sure that's true anymore with Windows 11.

Showing in app ads is one thing. Installing a Trojan specifically meant to circumvent App Store ad requirements is another. Windows 11, and most MS products at this point are ad delivery platforms, but they still follow the rules of app stores with the basic requirement of “shows in app ads” and “won’t try to inject a Trojan that beats your phone’s app sandboxing”

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