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Brave privacy browser 'mistake' added affiliate links to crypto URLs:
Brave, the open-source Chromium-based browser that promises elevated privacy, has been called out by users for potentially putting revenue over user trust. The company has been redirecting certain crypto company URLs typed in search bars to affiliate links and presumably taking a commission, Decrypt has reported. For instance, he typed in "binance.us" and the company replaced the term with "binance.us/en?ref=35089877," according to Twitter user Cryptonator.
[...] Some Brave users on Twitter (many from the crypto community) weren't mollified, but Eich offered a mea culpa. "Sorry for this mistake — we are clearly not perfect, but we correct course quickly. We will never revise typed in domains again, I promise."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Booga1 on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:23AM (6 children)
Oddly specific apology spotted! So, I guess URL rewriting for clicked links is still on the table. Probably links opened from emails or other external sources as well.
There goes the trust for a browser that only had trust for its entire selling point.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @03:17AM (2 children)
And didn't have the balls to declare his large enough to have to report donations to anti-gay marriage campaigns during the California proposition on it until it got brought up after his election as president or ceo or whatever of Mozilla. (For the record, Mozilla should have vetted him for controversies like that BEFORE elevating him to the position, given their 'ultra liberal' attitude they should have understood the potential for disharmony if he was elected and simply not offered him the position, and he should have been more than aware of the ramifications of his political contributions given that he could have financed them at a level BELOW reporting standards, which would have kept his opinions on the matter private. Personally though, I think ousting him was deserved just because of his part in Javascript, which has been the biggest disaster in the history of the free web outside of DRM and soon to be GPU DRM from Vulkan/WebGPU.)
Point being he's a wealthy self important asshole who was NEVER going to look out for his user's privacy. I don't blame him for that, but I do blame the rest of you schmucks for ever thinking he was, and not simply forking Firefox back when there was a chance of taking it in the right direction.
(Score: 5, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:14AM
For the record, it's not Mozilla's business. Such a "vetting" would still be illegal under California law which applied to both Mozilla's hiring and firing processes. Eich doesn't have to be "aware" of anything.
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:48PM
The donation was years before, and why should anyone fucking care? He's a developer, not a social "scientist."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Touché) by lentilla on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:07AM (2 children)
Would someone be able to clarify? Was this:
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:40AM (1 child)
I'd be most surprised if it was (1). This isn't their first controversy [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:51PM
Ha. Nice.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:17AM (6 children)
They claimed to be privacy-oriented, but all the news about them seem just about the opposite.
Who fall for this shit?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:52AM (3 children)
People who don't follow tech news or dig much past a company's marketing materials.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:57AM (2 children)
Even they would have to question how they fund their operation if they have any common sense.
But then again, they may not know what a gargantuan operation it is to maintain a modern web browser.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @12:27PM (1 child)
>>But then again, they may not know what a gargantuan operation it is to maintain a modern web browser.
Tell that to the man who writes Pale Moon. The reality is that 99.9% of the labor on most modern web browsers is used in writing Code of Conduct, enforcing CoC, cleaning and maintaining separate bathrooms for the 97 CoC-recognized genders, and deciding what hare-brained SJW projects to fund with excessive money sitting in the bank. The actual writing of browser code takes one engineer 15 minutes per week, tops.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @08:57AM
Maintaining a browser is easy when most of what you do is cherry-pick the work of the upstream. Even then, there were constant reforks to try and keep up. Now that ship has sailed and the cracks are becoming crevasses. UXP is the last hope to try and come up with something, but even that is falling behind and failing as the code bases diverge even farther. Even Alex with Waterfox saw the writing on the wall years ago.
(Score: 2, Touché) by petecox on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:38AM
The novelty in choosing Brave is its crypto-tokens. Opt-in to their 'approved' ads and you'll get some rewards. But it's chicken and egg; few websites I visit actually seemed to be donate aware so your tokens are worth not much.
But it's yet another Chrome clone and I'm Stockholmed enough to still prefer Firefox.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @10:39AM
Runaway1956
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @07:44AM
Brave Privacy Browser 'Mistake' and full stop. No need to add anything more, the circle is complete.
I'd rather use the cutting edge links2 browser. At least I know it's not pumping me in the chocolate starfish when I'm not looking.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @10:19AM
The modern Privacy (R)(TM) has just nothing to do with privacy. It can be seen in "Privacy policies" which have nothing in common with privacy. The same thing is with Mozilla: We respect Privacy (R)(TM) so we sell your history to Cloudflare, a service known from forcing users to run obfuscated code on sites, blocking access and actively fighting with anonymity (Tor). We also run telemetry to have enough anonymized data about you to deanonymize you successfully.
I think the Privacy (R)(TM) should be marked this way as I write it, as it is an artificial, marketing name having nothing common to the real meaning of the word. Or instead of (R) or (TM) just (🖕) for abbreviation?. This symbol is in Unicode for some reason.
By economics, it can be understood. Not many parties can nowadays develop a browser. Instead of a software to show rendered structural code (which can be implemented even with regexes, but will be slow), it became a huge, entangled runtime for "applications" which are eating CPU and "enhancements" which sells user data.
The objective of it seems to be to tightly couple data to "application" - a nonfree software which has its own purpose and spyware features added. This is no way how the Internet should work. The HTML was made to be readable both by humans, browsers and user's scripts. It is just fun to watch how these hypocrites remove blink tag as it causes eye strain, but introduce a whole framework to make webpage blink, spin, blur and move using more CPU than ever.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:16PM
You guys just don't understand what it is like at the top of one of these projects. Look at Zuck. He's been VERY sorry too. Many times. Many many times. He always lets you know that they are learning from these mistakes and that they've heard the message "loud and clear" and that they'll never do it again. I'm sure Eich is very sorry too and has learned his lesson and is ready to move on from this experience.