One year after its first 1.0 release, Brave says it has hit the milestone of 20.5 million active monthly users. "At the same time last year, the browser had 8.7 million active monthly users, and of the 20 million monthly users, 7 million are daily users, which represents more than a doubling of last year's 3 million," reports ZDNet. "Brave added that since Apple allowed browsers other than its own to be the default option on iOS, it has seen its iOS user base increase by a third." From the report: One of the touted features of the browser is that it hates ads, and will go out of its way to block them, unless users decide to see Brave-powered advertisements. To that end, Brave has hit "2 billion ad confirmation events" and completed 2,215 campaigns from over 460 companies. The browser maker says its users have a click-through rate of 9%, way and away outstripping industry averages. The browser also has its own cryptocurrency, Basic Attention Tokens, that users use to "tip" content creators. Thus far, 26 million of the tokens have been sent to creators. At the time of writing, the blockchain-based token is trading for just under 18 cents, meaning $4.6 million has been sent from users.

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According to Phoronix, a Dell privacy driver is is being prepared for the Linux kernel. From the report: Beginning in Dell's 2021 laptop models they are providing hardware-based "privacy buttons" to disable microphone and camera support. These new Dell privacy buttons are basically hardware kill switches for the microphone and web camera video stream. The Dell privacy driver sent out on Tuesday for the Linux kernel is about manipulating the relevant LEDs and tracking the status of the hardware-based controls where as the actual toggling of the audio/video support is handled by the hardware. The Dell privacy driver in its current form is talked about for the camera and microphone support but the patch does also note a "PRIVACY_SCREEN_STATUS" bit as well. Presumably they will be extending this privacy driver as well for privacy screen handling around reducing the horizontal/vertical viewing angles of the display. The dell-privacy Linux driver in its initial form can be found via the kernel mailing list. It's great seeing Dell working on this driver punctually for Linux ahead of their next-gen laptops.

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