Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

davidgerard.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 394 posts

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#61

Post by skissane »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #45
skissane wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says "We are a Binance affiliate, we refer users via the opt-in trading widget on the new tab page, but autocomplete should not add any code." Charitable interpretation: It is possible that he told the development team to add the affiliate code on the new tab page, and someone in the development team decided to add it to the autocomplete code as well, without him realising. I've certainly seen it happen when devel…

It was the co-founder & CTO that authored the commits, not a rouge engineer: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/component... https://github.com/bbondy

Two possibilities:

(1) CEO tells CTO to do something nefarious. CTO does what he's told. CEO gets caught out. Publicly, CEO spins it as an innocent mistake.

(2) CEO tells CTO to do something more innocent. CTO decides to do something more nefarious instead (maybe entirely intentionally, maybe simply by misunderstanding the ask.) Either way, the doing something more nefarious wasn't intentional by the CEO.

Which of the above two possibilities is true? I don't know. But I don't think you know either.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#62

Post by dsissitka »

alexruf wrote: post #29
meerita wrote: post #15

Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming privacy things.

Agree. Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium users to finally give Firefox a try.

I try it regularly but it just doesn't work for me. Here are just a few of the reasons why:

1. Chromium based browsers give me control over extensions that require access to everything. https://imgur.com/a/ENZkQyc

2. Firefox doesn't support media keys.

Edit: Turns out it does if you enable them in about:config. See bad_user's comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442732

3. There are still some areas in which Firefox's performance isn't competitive. Try using it with something like Rainway and it will completely fall over.

#3 isn't that big of a deal to me. #2 I could probably adapt to. #1 makes Firefox a non starter for me.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#63

Post by Shank »

this_user wrote: post #13

I'm surprised people are surprised by this. Brave have said from the beginning that this is how their business model works. What I'm even more surprised about is that Brave has gotten any traction at all, as there is really no reason to use it instead of a normal browser with regular ad blockers.

> Brave have said from the beginning that this is how their business model works.

This sounded like a pretty surprising claim. I looked at the terms of use (https://brave.com/terms-of-use/) and the privacy policy for the browser (https://brave.com/privacy/) and I wasn't able to find any reference to the notion of automatically inserting affiliate or referral links. Do you have a more specific source on this? I'm really curious about when and how this has been communicated. I'm not trying to accuse you of anything, I just want to make sure I'm understanding the situation correctly.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#64

Post by neiman »

Sevaris wrote: post #39
drannex wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have Android try the new Firefox Preview, best browser I've used on mobile so far. Complete rewrite.

Which is missing nearly all of the addons that I use and which don't seem to be a priority for Mozilla. Their whole strategy regarding addons is incredibly frustrating.

True dat.

Personalization is super important (in any software), it's a shame that in general, it's not being the focus of most of them.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#66

Post by noxer »

this_user wrote: post #13

I'm surprised people are surprised by this. Brave have said from the beginning that this is how their business model works. What I'm even more surprised about is that Brave has gotten any traction at all, as there is really no reason to use it instead of a normal browser with regular ad blockers.

Collecting sh*tcoins is a reason for a lot of the crypto people. Also many many people put brave download ref links all other their web-presents to generate revenue. Even people who do not use it and openly admit that, still gladly collect the bucks form other downloading it. The whole ref thing is the classic ponzi and it always works for a while because people do whatever you want if the work/reward ratio is good.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#67

Post by LeoPanthera »

dkdk8283 wrote: post #28

Brave has to pay salaries - I suppose this is better than selling user data. Chrome is subsidized by search and Firefox gets money from Google. The revenue model for browsers is fucked up.

Ironically there’s only one browser with a sane business model and it’s Safari. You have to buy an Apple product to use it. Simple.

That’s probably why it’s the only mainstream browser, outside of obscure open source browsers like Falkon and Gnome Web, that doesn’t have any built-in ties to third party services.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#68

Post by Koshkin »

Shared404 wrote: post #47
superkuh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Opera from 5 to 12, then Firefox till v37, and it's been Pale Moon ever since. Check out the latest release notes. I know I'm not the only one that likes things such as, >Removed more telemetry code >Removed the in-browser speech recognition engine and API >Removed support for the obsolete and unmaintained NVidia 3DVision stereoscopic interface. Palemoon is Firefox if it were still Firefox instead of feature-f…

I would love to be able to use Palemoon, but I just can't get over the fact that it's a single main developer trying to maintain an entire web browser. That seems like a security nightmare waiting to happen. If I'm wrong about this, please let me know, I really like the idea.

Except they don’t “maintain the entire browser,” rather, they “maintain” a trimmed-down build.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#69

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

skissane wrote: post #61
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the co-founder & CTO that authored the commits, not a rouge engineer: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/component... https://github.com/bbondy

Two possibilities: (1) CEO tells CTO to do something nefarious. CTO does what he's told. CEO gets caught out. Publicly, CEO spins it as an innocent mistake. (2) CEO tells CTO to do something more innocent. CTO decides to do something more nefarious instead (maybe entirely intentionally, maybe simply by misunderstanding the ask.) Either way, the doing something more nefarious wasn't intentional by the CEO. Which of th…

Two possibilities now since your last hypothesis was proven wrong with a simple git blame?

But sure, maybe the CTO/co-founder went rouge, lol.

What's the difference at that point? Both are leaders/founders of the company.

Either way, I don't want to use a browser that either someone is implementing affiliate links in the omnibar because they were stupid, or because they want $$$$.

The traffic and 99% of the browser code isn't theirs, why do they deserve affiliate money?

Btw there's a difference between being charitable and being naïve. It's obvious this was intentional.

What really happened was the CEO and the CTO sat down with these crypto companies and sketched this deal out to the T.

They hijacked the search terms "btc", "ltc", "bnb", etc. and herded users to those sites for a fee.

Could you imagine your scenario though? The CEO just woke up and was like WHOA where'd all this money come from, so the CTO says well I accidently added too many affiliate links, but the CEO was like ehhh keep it like that for a few months until people make a big deal about it, then I'll act surprised and remove it.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#70

Post by Koshkin »

Priem19 wrote: post #43
sergiotapia wrote: post #9

I'm going to have to switch browser AGAIN? Dammit. Is Opera safe or what shady shit have they done? I haven't used Opera since Opera back in 2006. God I miss the Presto engine and dragonfly. Can I go back to them or they doing shady stuff?

May I suggest using Vivaldi browser? https://medium.com/@Priem19/how-to-use-the-web-properly-f98f...

Are we supposed to “trust” this one now?
Post reply on HN