It was really bad a couple years ago because anything wrapped in Inno Setup kept being flagged. Now maybe one or two flag vendors do; Bkav Pro and CrowdStrike Falcon are the dominate culprits always.
I try not to buy from US companies these days, but Kagi is really so good that I make an exception here, despite the US government getting some of my money.
It's a matter of scale. Objectively, yandex is a great resource, and Kagi's results would be degraded without it. Pennies per user go to them. The sum of the entire money that has ever transferred from Kagi to yandex is what? 30 seconds of EU oil and gas purchases?
I use duckduckgo and live in a neighboring country, so I know Russian well (thanks, imperialism) and have to search things in it from time to time. It's still good at those queries, so this is just an excuse.
Unfortunately, it's the only way to perform HTTPS inspection outside the browser. It's essentially required for any filtering beyond doing basic host-based matching.
> how is this better than uBlock
I wouldn't claim that Zen is strictly better than uBO. However, Zen works outside the browser (protecting against many desktop apps that have ads and tracking SDKs) and also supports any browser out of the box – including post-MV3 Chrome.
The project I'm working on (https://zenprivacy.net) currently has an active application with NLNet. Everyone's situation is different, but let me share ours. We had a source of funding that allowed us to work on the project full-time, but it unfortunately ran out a few months ago. We're now in the exact same position @JimDabell described - trying to decide what to do with an unclear timeline ahead. I'm of course hugely grateful to everyone behind the foundation, but it would've been nice if there were a separate "fast track" for established projects.
Definitely feels like it. I frequently see people here complaining about how everything has the same boring, homogenous corporate look now, but anything interesting and original gets critiqued for lacking "visual clarity". These might be two different camps, sure, but it's sometimes sad to see the quality of discussion here.
Having just posted the app to a couple of small subreddits before sleep and then waking up to being on the front page over here is quite an experience :) I was hoping to make a Show HN post after giving Zen a bit more polish, but I guess here we are.
Thanks for all the constructive feedback. I totally share your concerns about its security and likewise wouldn't use some unverified application trying to install a root CA on my system. For those wanting to audit the certificate generation and installation code, feel free to take a look at certmanager/get.go and certmanager/install_{platformname}.go. It is mostly self-contained and, I hope, easy to understand. The lack of any instructions on how to delete the certificate is an oversight on my part, and I'll be working on this. Regarding the binaries: all of them are built on GitHub's CI. I wish there was a way for users to verify this fact, but to my knowledge, there is no way to do that currently. You can run and build the app yourself using Wails (https://wails.io/docs/gettingstarted/installation). I'll be sure to add more instructions to the repo in the coming days.
As always, any feedback, help, and suggestions are much welcome.
Thank you for starting this project. There is a bit of overall negativity in this thread from users who don't fully understand what is going on here, but please don't get discouraged. This is ultimately the correct approach to addressing browsers that have a financial interest in serving ads.
Thank you for your work. I appreciate it very much. Please don’t be down motivation by the negative comments.
About your comment of security, I think it’s better to make a FAQ file and write it there to clearly explain.
And one suggestion is I hope zen will have function to choose upstream DNS server (can be DoH or DoT server). It will be the best block ads with combo DNS and HTTPS.
