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...
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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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!!
Isnt that a GPL violation?
Yes, as mentioned in the first sentence of the article
Yes it is
Yes, it sounds like they were violating GPL.
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 ?
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.
Yeah that's right. Really, the difference is between free software and free services.
Software can be free and open source and that can be a viable model, even a preferable model. Services can not be free without some party being exploited. In the best of cases this means services are provided by volunteers (and they are being exploited), but more commonly in business, it's the users who are being exploited.
But as a rule, you should be suspicious of free services.
UBO is also free as in beer.
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For-profit ad blockers make their money from either ad injection or extorting ad companies to whitelist their ads. This is why the original adblock plus fell out of use.
I agree, unless it's straight up paid software which I usually don't mind paying for if it's good and I need it. Although arguably uBlock Origin is so close to perfection that I can't imagine how a paid ad blocker would hold up.
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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.
"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.
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.
What’s the worlds oldest democracy?
Thanks I barely used them out of convenience and now I'll make a point to stop entirely.
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/
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
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.
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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.
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Probably people who see a big banner about uBO no longer being supported in Chrom(e)ium
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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.
Maybe they mean ads by the creators themselves, which I do understand. While my Freetube has Sponsorblock, I am still exposed to ads - Sponsorblock is not applied to downloads.
Huh… I’m never off YouTube but never heard of or seen ads for Pie. I wonder when they will start showing up.
I still see a lot of Better Help ads and that sucks. I’ve gotten to the point where if it’s a YouTube Ad or sponsor, I ain’t buying it ever.
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
Isn't that illegal? What kind of license is uBO under?
The very first sentence of the article answers these exact two questions.
Closed-source browser extension Pie Adblock was this week accused of copying code and text from rival uBlock Origin in violation of the latter's software license – the GNU GPL version 3.
GPLv3
Guy belongs behind bars
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