this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Given their crypto functionality uses a third party which has been found to skirt the legal system I'd be a lot more concerned about this integration even if I don't intend to use it.
Keep in mind the stuff you read about is only what has been surfaced so far. Who knows what skeletons are still hiding?
Personally, I don't see any point risking it when there are perfectly viable alternatives such as Firefox. Granted the same guy infected Mozilla, but they stood up and ousted him so credit where credit is due.
Go and have a look? https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
My argument is that Brave is a Chromium browser with questionable business goals, but it is also the most private and secure, open-source, mainstream* Chromium browser. These keywords cannot be said about Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium and many other projects unfortunately.
That said, I primarily use Vivaldi because of its customizability and added features, something Firefox seems to reduce with every new version.
Being open-source doesn't automatically make you secure or reputable. Especially considering the open-source ecosystem in particular is a big target for exploitation right now. And auditing a software project of this size by its source code alone is no small feat.
"Mainstream chromium browser" is doing most if not all the heavy lifting there. Fair enough if that's what you're after, but mixing "private and secure, open-source" in feels disingenuous.
Last time I played with either Vivaldi or Brave you had to literally monkey patch the source code in order to customize things further than what the extension SDK allowed you to. You could do the same thing with Firefox, except they make it slightly harder because much of the source code is shipped in archives.
That said it's been years, maybe this can now be done purely through the extension SDK? It'd be news to me.
They offered a tenuous high yield lending program, that the SEC only jumped on after it collapsed from the FTX contagion. Litigation is pending afaik and depends on whether the program qualifies as a security, but the SEC has been losing ground in their optimistic claims of what they think qualifies as a security (outcome of Ripple lawsuit etc.).
Don't get me wrong, any such program is sketchy and I trust Gemini less for having offered it, but IMO it doesn't put them on the same tier as an exchange like FTX or make me think they would inject malware into software they have a connection with.
Yeah that's fair. I'd say it falls into the same boat as the argument against the CEO; they haven't done anything clearly malicious, but their bad decisions are enough to give you pause and reconsider.