It was the co-founder & CTO that authored the commits, not a rouge engineer:
https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/component...
https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/component...
Interesting as I didn’t realize Brave did all their development out in the open like this.
“ Similar to top site suggestions, we'd like to add Crypto Widgets and Binance related suggestions based on what a user types in the URL bar. This is mostly an experiment to see if it's useful. It could be expanded in the future to involve BAT or even be used if the user has Brave ads turned on.”
(1) CEO tells CTO to do something nefarious. CTO does what he's told. CEO gets caught out. Publicly, CEO spins it as an innocent mistake.
(2) CEO tells CTO to do something more innocent. CTO decides to do something more nefarious instead (maybe entirely intentionally, maybe simply by misunderstanding the ask.) Either way, the doing something more nefarious wasn't intentional by the CEO.
Which of the above two possibilities is true? I don't know. But I don't think you know either.
But sure, maybe the CTO/co-founder went rouge, lol.
What's the difference at that point? Both are leaders/founders of the company.
Either way, I don't want to use a browser that either someone is implementing affiliate links in the omnibar because they were stupid, or because they want $$$$.
The traffic and 99% of the browser code isn't theirs, why do they deserve affiliate money?
Btw there's a difference between being charitable and being naïve. It's obvious this was intentional.
What really happened was the CEO and the CTO sat down with these crypto companies and sketched this deal out to the T.
They hijacked the search terms "btc", "ltc", "bnb", etc. and herded users to those sites for a fee.
Could you imagine your scenario though? The CEO just woke up and was like WHOA where'd all this money come from, so the CTO says well I accidently added too many affiliate links, but the CEO was like ehhh keep it like that for a few months until people make a big deal about it, then I'll act surprised and remove it.
I just feel like people may be jumping to conclusions with little information to go on.
Maybe that feeling is justified, maybe it isn't.