For-profit Pie Adblock (from the founder of Honey) called out for copying uBlock Origin open source code without credit
Pie Adblock called out for copying uBlock Origin code
"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.
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.
What ads are they replacing? I didn't hear anything about that.
In the early days of brave it was glorious. Set up max notification on my phone, set to minimise notifications - profit.
Literally cashed out like $100 this way over the span of about 6 months, before the rugpull, I assume. Ads paying out way less now.
It was hilarious. For me. The ads were (and I believe still are) primarily advertising other shitcoins hahaha
Edit: I should note, I used Tasker and did not have to see a single ad.
Probably people who see a big banner about uBO no longer being supported in Chrom(e)ium
Old people who still believe that if you're paying for a product it must be better, right?
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...
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!!
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 ?
The majority of ads on YouTube for the last 3+ months have been Pie, even after blocking dozens of them.
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
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.
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
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.
Guy belongs behind bars
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.
of course they did
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
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.
I dunno if there's just a lack of education around what open-source means or what. Like jeez, you can contribute to unlock origin. You can study it and see if there's anything you disagree with. You can fork it and change it.
Can't save them all.
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.
What software have you paid for? Over here, proud owner of (off the top of my head) Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Shottr, and superwhisper for Mac.
Would be hard to live without these automation/macro, screenshot, and dictation tools!
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.