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dantheclamman@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.worldEnglish · 1 year ago

For-profit Pie Adblock (from the founder of Honey) called out for copying uBlock Origin open source code without credit

www.theregister.com

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  • technology@beehaw.org
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For-profit Pie Adblock (from the founder of Honey) called out for copying uBlock Origin open source code without credit

www.theregister.com

dantheclamman@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.worldEnglish · 1 year ago
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  • technology@beehaw.org
Pie Adblock called out for copying uBlock Origin code
www.theregister.com
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And, magically, a repo appears on GitHub with attribution
  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “From the founder of Honey.” Which means that stealing code and affiliate links is just the surface of shady stuff they are up to.

    • Ulrich@feddit.orgBanned
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      • Bibbiliop@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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?

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          Look up the PayPal mafia. Tldr: their founders are overthrowing the world’s oldest democracy at the moment.

          • takeda@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • havocpants@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            they’re up to something in Greece?

            • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Greece

          • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            What’s the worlds oldest democracy?

          • superglue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            Thanks I barely used them out of convenience and now I’ll make a point to stop entirely.

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      • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The founder still made it do what it does.

        • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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          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”.

          • freddydunningkruger@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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

            • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • freddydunningkruger@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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                  1 year ago

                  https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-11-20/paypal-is-buying-price-compare-tool-honey-for-4-billion

                  https://fortune.com/2019/11/21/paypal-honey-acquisition-worth-4-billion/

                  https://uniquebusinessmodels.substack.com/p/33-how-does-honey-acq-by-paypal-for

                  Those better sources for you?

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          • extremeboredom@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Do you believe that the affiliate scam only started when PayPal acquired Honey?

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              • dantheclamman@lemmy.worldOP
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                deleted by creator

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