HN Explorer

Tell HN: Lobste.rs blocking the Brave browser

15 points by prmph ↗ HN
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.

7 comments

[ 13.5 ms ] story [ 601 ms ] thread
kesor
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.

runjake
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.
al_borland
I never trusted Brave. This validates my skepticism.
curtisblaine
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.

switknee
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?