Never use a “for-profit adblocker”. Ublock Origin is free, open source and therefore won’t fuck you over. You can guess where this “profit” is coming from when you’re not paying for your “for-profit” adblocker
Never use a “for-profit adblocker”.
Most prominently, this includes Adblock Plus, which functions as extortion-ware, extorting payments from ad-dealers to let their ads through.
We have a problem. People have learned that they shouldn’t use a free VPN. By that logic you shouldn’t use a free ad blocker either. People don’t understand the details enough so they operate on broad ideas.
I feel like the name of this product is a SEO manipulation to catch people trying to look for information on the Pi Hole. Overall shady manipulation on all fronts…
Considering the recent revelations about the shady, scummy and unethical business practices by Honey, I can’t say I’m surprised that one of the co-founders is doing more shady shit with their new endeavor.
I did a double take at first- PiHole, how could you!!
“From the founder of Honey.” Which means that stealing code and affiliate links is just the surface of shady stuff they are up to.
The founder of Honey no longer owns Honey, and hasn’t for some time. It’s owned by PayPal, a much more notoriously shady company that some people still use for some reason.
The founder still made it do what it does.
Depends when all of that functionality was added in. Honey started as a legit coupon scraping extension back in 2012, and was sold to PayPal in 2020. Somewhere in the last 12 years, someone got a bit too greedy.
Reminds me of the story of AdBlock - helpful extension gets a huge market share, people get greedy, it gets sold to a for-profit, and starts doing shady deals with the people it’s supposed to be “working against”.
Um, PayPal paid $4,000,000,000 to buy Honey. $4 billion. Now, think about how much profit Honey would have had to been generating for PP to look at the numbers and buy it for that much. However it “started”, the functionality to steal was in there before they sold it to PayPal
Companies that aren’t profitable get bought all the time for ridiculous amounts of money not because they currently make boatloads of money, but because they have a huge userbase and brand recognition, and the buyer thinks they are the geniuses that can make it do that. Yahoo paid 1.1 billion for Tumblr - since sold to wordpress for 3 million - and Musk 44 billion for Twitter - now worth a fraction of that - for example.
That is exactly why they often go to shit only after they have been bought.Fwiw, Honey did around $100 million in revenue back in 2018. That’s 40 times less than what they were bought for, and that isn’t even profit, but just how much money they received before all their business expenses were paid.
Did you seriously cite a Medium article? C’mon now, it’s an open blog where anyone can write anything without any fact checking. Ir’s worse than Wikipedia.
According to a tech crunch article, “As of today, Honey’s 17 million members have saved more than $2 billion to date.”
That translates to a lot of transactions.
Now I feel bad. I use paypal because in some cases of purchases it is the only means I can use. What is shady about them?
Look up the PayPal mafia. Tldr: their founders are overthrowing the world’s oldest democracy at the moment.
What’s the worlds oldest democracy?
they’re up to something in Greece?
Isnt that a GPL violation?
Yes, as mentioned in the first sentence of the article
Who in their right mind would use this bootleg piece of shit when uBO exists?
They’re offering to pay you to watch ads, same as what Brave does.
You’re going to get people who fall for the “free money” aspect, same as always.
(Also replacing a site’s ads with their ads is exactly the same shit Honey is doing, so it’s nice to see that the founder has a single idea and is going to keep going after it.)
Probably people who see a big banner about uBO no longer being supported in Chrom(e)ium
Totally foolish. Either don’t use the code if the license doesn’t allow commercial use, or leave the license notice in place. It’s pretty straightforward.
Isn’t that illegal? What kind of license is uBO under?
GPLv3
The majority of ads on YouTube for the last 3+ months have been Pie, even after blocking dozens of them.
That seems to be this guy’s MO, judging from Honey. Sell an invasive browser add-on via intensive youtube ads and convince gullible people they’ll get free money from it
If you’re getting ads for an adblocker, it might be time to get an adblocker (but not that one).
It’s my work computer and extensions are blocked. 😔
Oof, you gotta find that FBI post (might have a different 3 letter agency) said that adbock is required for safe browsing. Tell them users can’t click on malware ads if there’s no malware ads to click.
