Tell HN: Lobste.rs blocking the Brave browser
This is the message I got:
> Lobsters has blocked the Brave browser since a scam in 2019. We still block it because they lie about following standards to they scrape and sell copies of websites. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but they have previously targeted Lobsters by name and have a years-long pattern of bad behavior.
As the message says, this is not new.
When you want to open this website using Brave anyway, you have to change your User Agent. You can do that by opening "Network conditions" in the three-dotted menu in developer tools, and setting a different User Agent value.
Changing the user agent doesn't work for me. I remember pushcx saying (on one of his Twitch streams or something) that they do additional fingerprinting to block Brave.
I see. And I thought Brave was quite trustworthy, maybe not so much now. Firefox not working well for me: It is resource hog. Guess I'll need to keep looking.
I’m currently using Onion (https://onionbrowser.com/ - from the people who make Kagi search) and it’s been quite good. Not perfect, but it’s getting there. I recommend giving it a try.
Kagi’s browser is Orion https://kagi.com/orion not to be confused with Onion
> Firefox not working well for me: It is resource hog.
Anecdata to the contrary: on my Android devices I've switched from Brave to Firefox maybe a year ago (exactly because of the Lobste.rs story) and I found out performance to be completely acceptable for my needs.
And both solve youtube ads, which is how high I set the bar.
I see. Firefox is the only browser on my machine (Macbook Air M1) that regularly consumes massive amounts of RAM, typically like 4 GB or more.
Apparently due to this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
A tweet that was deleted? From someone with no connection to lobste.rs?
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45#issue...
A GH comment that references the same tweet? The one that was deleted?
A GH comment that explains why they blocked it, a deleted tweet does not matter.
I never trusted Brave. This validates my skepticism.
Ok.
I have a proxy http script in val town that simply fetches lobsters with the right user agent and returns the response as is. I have a bookmark to scriptname-lobsters.web.val.run.
It works for now. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a cat-and-mouse game, but if it does I'm ready. I understand Lobsters' POV, but I also suspect they had an axe to grind with Brendan Eich back from the Proposition 8 donation.
I suspect it is just political pettiness. None of their complaints about brave seem to hold water. Why should Lobsters be bothered by brave ads? That only happens if the user tells their user agent (brave browser) to show extra ads, in order to earn a worthless cryptocurrency. If the user wants to see extra ads or otherwise modify their browsing experience it isn't a concern of the website. Lobsters also doesn't seem to value the brave token, so why is it a problem if they can't access less than $100 in brave token?
Brave leaking DNS to cloudflare in tor browsing, compared to google Chrome leaking every request to google at all times? Why not block Chrome?