From article:
If you have the Brave Browser installed on your Windows devices, then you may also have Brave VPN services installed on the machine. Brave installs these services without user consent on Windows devices.
More reason to ditch the crypto bro browser.
True open source projects like LibreWolf, Ungoogled Chromium > Sketchy world of Brave
I applaud LibreWolf’s efforts, but the hard-coded timezone makes it unusable for me. Other than that, it’s a great browser. I used it several months until the timezone confusion got the best of me.
What’s the deal with the timezone?
If I recall correctly, it was meant as a measure against fingerprinting. It’s basically one less thing to uniquely define a user based on the info that the browser gives to a website. I’m not sure if it’s still like that, cause it’s been easily a year since I used LibreWolf.
Yes, what is the deal? I can’t say that I’ve noticed any issues. Am in UK if that makes a difference. And I usually run it through Proton VPN.
While I’ve never used LibreWolf before (I use Waterfox), that probably does make a difference as the UK is UTC+0.
The UK is only UTC+0 for half the year, currently at UTC+1.
I switched to LibreWolf after I learned that Waterfox was/is ran by an advertisement company.
Today they should be independant again, however my trust in them is forever lost.
https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/waterfox-regains-independence-abandoning-the-advertising-company-system1/4594
I do not subscribe to guilt by association or being that concerned about privacy.
Two issues.
First of all a lot of websites show times in your current timezone. Beehaw for example says you wrote your post “2 days ago”. Depending what timezone my browser is in, that could display 3 days or 1 day. When I hover over it, it shows the exact date/time in my timezone. Which is handy.
Second it doesn’t actually achieve the intended goal. Even if you use a VPN chances are you’ve set it to give you a public IP address close to you to have good performance. And if your IP address is in Proton’s London datacentre but your timezone is UTC+0 when everyone else is UTC+1… well you stand out like a single black sheep in a flock of white ones and ad networks are absolutely fingerprinting you with that.