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uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
181–190 of 469 posts
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I understood MegaLag's video correctly, Honey was indeed overriding an affiliate session cookie with their own once the user the reached the checkout. The extension would silently open a tab in the background, which seems pretty scummy. I've observed the same background tab shenanigans with the Capital One extension as well.
They do this to not interrupt the purchase flow, not to be scummy. Opening a tab in the foreground or refreshing the page is extremely annoying to users and merchants request it to be in the background so it doesn't hurt their conversion. I never said Honey doesn't override cookies. I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem. If the affiliate networks used first-click or multi-click a…
Stop justifying Honey's scumminess.
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be incumbent on Honey to check if these discounts are indeed public. 100% discounts would be an obvious place to start. Given that Honey claims to search the public internet for discounts according to their claims they can in fact do this. At the scale and resources of Honey the claim of ignorance becomes unreasonable. It would help their case if they had a made a documented good faith attempt, but I think…
Why would it be incumbent on Honey, or illegal at all? It is a voluntary transaction by two businesses. If the business does not want their codes given out, then they should not agree to Honey’s T&C.
> Why would it be incumbent on Honey, or illegal at all? It is a voluntary transaction by two businesses.
There are three businesses involved. A 3rd party (eg YouTube reviewer) has their affiliate code stripped from the page, and as a result is losing out on income. That may be illegal. And the affiliate doesn’t have a business relationship with honey. They didn’t sign anything away with them.
Also honey was (until recently) marketing themselves as “we find you the best coupon code”. That was & is false advertising, since they were clearly hiding coupon codes they knew about when companies paid them to do so.
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#184If something is "heavily promoted by influencers", it's garbage. Would it make a difference if this garbage was GPL licensed?
personally I think it's hilarious that "influencers" were taking a pittance to unknowingly cut off their affiliate income and not just cut it off once, but cut it off forever and as a bonus: cut it off for all other influencers too
What's so hilarious about it?
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#185To be fair, Honey could easily bypass the blocklist redistribution legal issue by downloading filter lists at runtime from the official source. Then they aren't redistributing the resources. Update: It looks like they're also using code from uBO without attribution or authorization. That's most likely illegal.
I would be careful handing out legal advice as a non-legal expert, especially when it is about "bypassing legal issues". You might be doing someone a big disservice. @readers: Obligatory notice: Don't base your business decision on random internet comments.
This is excessive. Any fool taking legal advice from pseudonymous internet comments is getting what they paid for.
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#186I know it’s not necessarily the same people, but it feels contradictory for this community to say “copyright infringement isn’t theft” when we’re talking about movies, but use the opposite language when talking about GPL source code.
infringing on copyright is like stealing from the rich
infringing on copyleft is like stealing from the poor
its the difference between robin hood and government corruption
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#187[flagged]
> They're not stealing, they're disrespecting a license.
Breaking into someone's car and riding off isn't stealing, just disrespecting the concept of ownership.
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we know when Honey started stealing affiliate links? Was it after the acquisition?
Before, this is how ALL coupon sites/extensions have worked for decades. I'm frankly baffled it weren't more common knowledge, despite being common sense, before the MegaLag video. Did people really think that sites like retailmenot.com or wethrift.com make you open tabs to the shop you're searching for coupons for before you can see the coupon code just for fun?? Affiliate code stuffing is the coupon provider busine…
In my defense I assumed they were a user data-mining scam, not a coupon code scam. Still never used it and told people not to whenever they asked, but, whatcha gonna do.
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the "information want to be free" crowd is very consistent. They want the information to be free. They don't want artificial scarcity. Sure they'll use IP as a means to an end, but that doesn't mean they believe IP is a good idea in general. It's just one of few tools that exist to solve it. In an ideal world all software would be forced to be FOSS, and we'd have to come up with ways of funding it that aren't…
It seems like a bit of a strong restriction to have in the law that if I distribute an executable (which people may reverse engineer, modify, redistribute as they wish) that I am obligated to provide the source code upon request. Like, what if I want to release a rather difficult puzzle in the form of an obfuscated executable and provide a reward to the first person who solves it? If I’m required to release the sourc…
The puzzle case is no different to how you can't sell somebody a rubiks cube without allowing them to "solve" it by taking it apart and putting it back together.
You can make a physical item intentionally hard to work with or modify, but I see that as a shortcoming of our current legal standard—that's why we need some kind of "right to repair" framework. Requiring people to distribute human-readable code alongside software follows the same underlying philosophy as physical "right to repair" requirements.
Re: uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop spamming the same bullshit apologism over and over and over Nobody cares that other companies and extensions do the same thing, they're bad too.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem. If he actually wanted to influence change, he should cover the affiliate networks responsible for dictating this behavior (CJ, Impact, Rakuten, Awin, etc). The extensions are forced to comply by their rules.
> I'm not saying this isn't a problem, it's just not a Honey-specific problem.
You didn’t just say that. You said a whole lot of other things. You lead with the fact that it’s well known within the industry. The implication of your comment is that the companies did nothing wrong, and people are idiots for not knowing this stuff before. If that’s not your stance, you should make your stance more clear.
If you instead simply said “people should also be angry at all these other extensions and companies, they’re complicit and just as bad” then nobody would be calling you out for astroturfing.