I just switched to Librewolf from Brave because fuck Chromium and fuck Google.
Did I trust brave as a Browser? Yes, at least enough to use it as my daily driver. Because the worst thing they’ve done that I’m aware of is add affiliate links. When somebody noticed they didn’t bullshit their way out of it, they apologised and fixed it:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
There is a lot of hand wringing about various aspects of their browser and the personality of their CEO but the browser is open source and the code is watched by a lot of eyeballs. If they went truly bad somebody is going to notice quickly.
They are a company and have to find a way to make money but they never once forced anything on me. It was always relatively simple to disable anything they added that I didn’t want and they never added anything surreptitiously. Unlike Firefox: https://medium.com/@neothefox/firefox-installs-add-ons-into-your-browser-without-consent-again-d3e2c8e08587 and https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/mozillas-mr-robot-promo-backfires-after-it-installs-firefox-extension-without-permission/
I know it’s not going to be popular to criticise Firefox and I understand it’s importance as the last true alternative to chromium but my point is that none of the options are whiter than white. And in so far as the available options, Brave and Firefox stand head and shoulders above the rest.
I imagine product managers at Google and Microsoft would be very happy to see us shitting on one of the few open source browsers to gain any kind of traction, instead of focusing our outrage towards their behaviour.
A long time ago I used something like sockd to run a local proxy and then send that data to my personal remote proxy server over port 80, something like https://win2socks.com/ I think
Maybe there’s something better than socks these days.
Back then it worked pretty well, but I don’t think they were doing DPI. They (admin guys) did seem to notice large file transfers and seemed to be killing them manually.
I would assume most places these days will collect net flow data at least, so while https will protect the contents, they will be able to see the potentially unusual amount of data moving back and forth to your proxies IP.
I would suggest at least using a VPS to hide your schools IP address from the irc servers. And you may be in serious trouble if you get caught. If you’re in the UK you’re going to be risking jail time, and speaking from personal experience, they take this shit seriously.
So maybe just set up a personal hotspot.