People, no doubt, choose privacy-oriented browsers like Brave for many different reasons, but a common one is surely to avoid control and surveillance from nanny states, nanny corporations, nanny standard-setters, nanny “non-profit” “industry associations” and everyone else who for one reason or another feels entitled to decree what and how Internet users may and may not do, where they may and may not go. I am at the moment struggling with a very simple case: how to open a page with what promises to be a very interesting article when that page has a troublesome SSL certificate. Here is the deal: I don’t care what the flaw in the certificate is in that faraway place, how big a security gap in my home station’s environment accessing it might create. I would be happy without any certificates. It is MY freaking system, and I accept all responsibility. Probably there is nothing, just some oversight on those people’s part. Now, if Brave is so about avoiding evildoers, why doesn’t it challenge the most insidious kind - where they civilly spread control over your life under the pretext of security - whatever that means? And what do I need this browser for, then, if not to view all the pages I want? My life choices aren’t being protected here, but my credit card number - oh, that will be?
The article is here: https://globalobserverdotblog.com/2021/04/07/is-mass-culture-still-culture. Try opening the link. Now I tell you, I just spent hours trying solutions and went through several browsers - Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Firefox-based Tor - looking for ONE that would let me accept the flawed certificate and see the page. Nothing has worked: --ignore-certificate-errors in Brave does nothing, ditto for the localhost switch; ditto both for Chrome; thisisunsafe does nothing; no option to access the page in Opera and Firefox. To be fair, Firefox doesn’t even promise that the option will be there. I won’t raise a rhetorical cry and ask “Who do those people think they are?” They think they are our masters in big matters and small. What I would like to know is whether there is any solution to this at all, like using a completely different and obscure browser (I’ll install it) or a very old version of a browser that doesn’t check for SSL or allows exceptions (I’ll find one). I will truly appreciate any advice that ends up working, because much of my time online nowadays is spent on struggling with standards and prohibitions that continue to pile up.