Technology

Boutique browsers try to scratch out a living by scratching out a niche underserved by the usual suspects. Brave is one of those browsers.

Brave has gotten more attention than most new browsers, partly because a co-founder was one of those who kick-started Mozilla's Firefox, partly because of its very unusual - some say parasitical - business model.

That model, which relies on stripping every site of every ad, then substituting different ads, came under attack almost immediately from publishers that depended on online advertising for theirlivelihood. "Your plan to use our content to sell your advertising is indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website [emphasis in original]," lawyers for 17 newspaper publishers wrote in a letter to Brave Software in April 2016.

As USB thumb drives and memory cards have grown larger and cheaper over the years, it's become easier to trust more data to them. Cloud storage services notwithstanding, flash drives have remained a common way to store data and transport files from one computer to another — and it's all too easy to accidentally erase data from one or have it hiccup on you.

In the world of corporate IT, technology advances often have a "one step forward, two steps back" feeling. Try to boost security by insisting on more robust passwords that have to be changed regularly, and users will write them down more.

This stutter-step nature of progress is going to be a key factor in the next generation of mobile interfaces, as gesturing in the air near the device becomes the preferred mode of interaction. Such gesturing has the potential to allow for an order-of-magnitude improvement in ease of use, with more diverse commands available, but before we get there, it has the much greater near-term potential for generating massive user errors.