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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!!
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.
There is a difference between "free & open source" and "free because you don't pay with money".
The first means it can be peer reviewed by anyone to make sure they aren't doing anything shady.
The issue is that the difference is clear to us, but not to everyone else. Even at the periphery of the tech world, I've met people generally aware what source code is, but not of the specific concept of "Open Source" and why it makes a difference. We should avoid falling into the bubble trap where we assume that what's familiar to us is familiar to everyone else as well.
I dunno if there's just a lack of education around what open-source means or what. Like jeez, you can contribute to unlock origin. You can study it and see if there's anything you disagree with. You can fork it and change it.
The GPL is enforceable, as far as the courts in the US are concerned, but the time and expense of doing so means such cases are rare. One such claim against Vizio, filed in 2021 by the Software Freedom Conservancy, is expected to be tried in September 2025.
Hill pointed to a series of posts he made in June 2024 about "sleazy rip-offs in the Chrome Web Store" that simply rewrap "uBlock, uBlock Lite, or other content blockers with their own user interface," and some monetization scheme, often removing the copyright and licensing information
If a pretty large project such as ubo doesn't have the means to enforce the GPL license, I think pretty much all open source projets, that are usually lacking funds, wouldn't be able to enforce their license either
I didn't realize that before, I thought copyleft licences like GPL really offered something but unless the project is backed by a for profit company or has enough funding, permissive licenses like MIT/FreeBSD achieve kind of the same result in practice.. And all the contributions I did on copyleft projects could be (and probably were) stolen to make profits, while the maintainers of the original project struggle to pay for coffees.. I feel a lot less guilty for my media piracy
But I wonder, are there means to enforce this license from outside the US ?
"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
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.
Fun fact: the founders threw out musk, before it became PayPal, he actually wanted it to be called X, he was hoarding that domain since then.
they're up to something in Greece?
It's the only means you can use because it's the only one the seller provides. Not your fault.
What is shady? You name it.
I mean first and foremost they're a public-traded company that you'll see on every storefront on the web, which together basically guarantees unethical business practices.
They automatically enrolled users into PayPal credit without their knowledge or consent. They advertised $10 free credit for new members, then just...didn't give it. They charge late fees and interest when their shitty servers fail to process payments. They will almost always take the buyer's side in any dispute, regardless of provided evidence, they automatically opt users into data sharing, etc.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/paypal-pay-25-million-fines-deceptive-shady-business-001516273.html https://www.dailydot.com/debug/stop-paypal-data-sharing/
Isnt that a GPL violation?
Yes, as mentioned in the first sentence of the article
Yes, it sounds like they were violating GPL.
Yes it is
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.
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.)
More than that, they’re also hijacking affiliate links.
The majority of ads on YouTube for the last 3+ months have been Pie, even after blocking dozens of them.
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. 😔
Set your DNS to a pihole or some other ad blocking DNS server, that's about the best you can do on a managed system
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.
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
And then sell to a big company
Guy belongs behind bars
Isn't that illegal? What kind of license is uBO under?
The very first sentence of the article answers these exact two questions.
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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