Smarter-encryption Alternatives

smarter-encryption reviews and mentions

• DuckDuckGo for Mac in Beta (With Waitlist)
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Apr 2022

  > However, you do not need ublock origin here for privacy protection.

  I'm happy to see DuckDuckGo entering this space and happy to see them building off of WebKit. And I think that DuckDuckGo is doing some fairly good stuff for privacy right now.

  Nevertheless, this is a concerning comment. Ublock Origin isn't the only way to block ads of course and it's not impossible for something else to do better. But there is a reason it's widely considered the best adblocking browser extension right now, and it's not just hype or advertising.

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  > Our tracker blocker is powered by our best-in-class Tracker Radar data set

  The reason Ublock Origin is currently arguably the best-in-class adblocker for privacy protection is not because it does web crawling or because it uses a special data set, it's because of its capabilities.

  DuckDuckGo using Tracker Radar data really has nothing to do with this conversation. It's possible DuckDuckGo's protections are sufficient on their own, but to make that determination you'd need to talk about the actual anti-circumvention features that it has, not just where it gets its data list from.

  The comparison to Apple is particularly unfortunate, because Safari has easily the worst adblocking performance out of any major browser, so if they are using the Tracker Radar set to inform that, it's apparently not enough on its own to give them competitive adblocking performance.

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  > Similarly our Smarter Encryption (HTTPS upgrading -- https://github.com/duckduckgo/smarter-encryption) is also based on regular web crawls and is many times more comprehensive then anything else out there.

  This really shouldn't be in the same conversation, adblocking and connection upgrades are two separate factors of privacy. Both are important, but "we upgrade HTTPS" is kind of orthogonal to extension support.

  However, since we're talking about HTTPS upgrading, bringing up that DuckDuckGo maintains a large list of sites to upgrade for doesn't really mean that much given that HTTPS upgrade policies (ought to) just all be based on the same lists. It's the same issue as above, I'm not worried about what data you use, that should be something that a lot of different extensions pull from. I'm worried about the capabilities, I'm worried about how effectively the browser can actually leverage that data set.

• Set up Firefox on a new computer and HTTPS Everywhere alerts on almost every site. Did I forget a setting in FF?
  1 project | /r/firefox | 18 Aug 2021

  HTTPS Everywhere does not have a rule for indochino.com in its own database. There are some indochino.com related entries in DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption database, which HTTPS Everywhere is using, but indochino loads fine for me with HTTPS Everywhere enabled.