What are the serious issues with security, how are they any different to every other software-at-scale project and how has unsatisfactorily dealt w them?
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How is their intent nefarious? Have seen a lot of vague attempts at casting shade on project with nothing of substance.
Criticism of monetising content is criticism of entire internet industry, not particular to Brave? In that context theirs seems like better model?
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DRM to enforce viewing advertising as part of building their business model based on monetizing attention spans is nefarious and a terrible precedent. They've set the precedent now and good luck to them at preserving their business model if web sites end up doing the same thing.
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Also, enumerating badness simply isn't a viable approach to privacy and security. The same goes for doing it to try externally replacing the monetization model for the web. Needing to use DRM to try to make their broken model work demonstrates exactly why it's not a viable one.
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How is using SafetyNet going to make any difference when it's such a weak software-based attestation model, anyway? They could use the hardware-based attestation but a model based on the root of trust rather than pairing is inherently not very strong. Way better than that though.
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What are they going to do on platforms without support for arbitrary application-defined DRM via attestation? They could use hardware key attestation on Android (SafetyNet attestation is what they used and is easily bypassed) and some half measure on iOS, but what about desktops?
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Thanks for sketching out some of your concerns in a bit more detail. Need to ponder.
So is weak attestation bad, or all attestation b/c it ultimately leads to lack of user agency?
Is the bigger criticism simply that ad-funded model is totally unworkable as a model?
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If the last, then good bye Internet. It own't be user funded, not at $320B/year globally growing to $1T/year. If you have a better way, lay it on us. In the meanwhile, we level the antifraud playing field vs. G and FB native stacks (low adfraud incidence) vs. programmatic (high).
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The painful reality seems there is no 'best' way.
Appreciate fear that normalising strong attestation for ad-views may lead to mandatory rather than optional ad-view by industry even if not Brave.
Also appreciate that without attestation fraud wins, content loses.
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No Best Way = Worse is Better.
I object to double standards. Apps (including big ones) use safetynet and are not pilloried for "DRM" or accused of "enforced viewing".
Use the same yardstick on us.
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I do call that DRM consistently. I'm using the same standards. I was very put off when I saw that Brave was doing this. Regardless, I suggested a stronger way of doing it without a hard dependency on a Google service to try to be helpful and was basically told to fuck off.
github.com/brave/browser- is one of the places that this started and github.com/brave/browser- is another. Notice how in both cases I was trying to help and was told to fuck off in response. I even put in work to resolve an issue for other browsers, but you aren't welcome to use it.
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I talked about it on Twitter a while ago, which was followed with you folks spreading misinformation about Chromium and Android without Play Services. I took a deeper look into what Brave has been doing in particular with using SafetyNet attestation as a form of advertising DRM.
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So you as commenter who wrote github.com/brave/browser- want us to use pairing for higher bar against fraud? We agree and are on it.
But you still abused "DRM", and stated falsehoods with "enforced viewing" and "(the site with different ads)". That stinks.