Comment by gorhill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorhill | Hacker News Reader

I want to clarify a few points in the article re. uBlock Origin, they might be seen as minor details but to me they matter.

> Raymond Hill, after (you guessed it) he transferred ownership of uBlock to a new, untrustworthy maintainer

Only the GitHub repo was transferred, I never transferred the extension in the Chrome Store, and Opera Store.[1]

The Firefox version was published by a contributor, and he chose to stay with the new maintainer, and as a result I created a new publication for uBlock Origin in Firefox store.

All this was nearly 6 years ago.

> Aljoudi began reducing blocking features, eventually choosing to permit certain ads via the "acceptable ads" program

"Acceptable Ads" was added to "uBlock" in February 2019 by the new owner, BetaFish Inc. (maker of AdBlock).[2]

BetaFish Inc. was itself sold circa October 2015 to an (still) anonymous buyer.[3]

> Hill created a fork, now called uBlock Origin, which reverted the changes

I didn't revert any change, I forked while I was still controlling the GitHub repo.[4] If you look at the project timeline, it shows that I have been in charge since the first commit in June 2014.[5]

> Nano Defender and its 200,000+ users, upon their recent acquisition, immediately began having their personal data mined.

Note that the malware did not require the blocking ability of the webRequest API to collect the data, it needed only the observational ability, which is not deprecated by Manifest v3.[6]

**

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/57

[2] https://github.com/uBlock-LLC/uBlock/releases/tag/0.9.5.13

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10318200

[4] This was the first release following the split, nothing had to be reverted: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/0.9.3.0

[5] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/graphs/contributors

[6] https://github.com/NanoAdblocker/NanoCore/issues/362#issueco...

Thank you for your work on ublock origin! I mean it, it's reflecting an important part and protecting a lot of internet users.

I wanted to ask whether you tried to go against the uBlock maintainer through legal actions?

DMCA takedown comes to mind as well as registering the uBlock trademark and force him to change the name...or revoking rights to him specifically for new updates/changes of the codebase.

uBlock meanwhile is just as scammy as AdBlock and AdBlock Plus, which both are owned by eyeo GmbH (and their acceptable ads program which they abuse to force websites to enter their program, while getting 30% of ad revenue for the "allowance").

And I would hate to see uBlock pulling uB0 through the mud with its name.

BetaFish now owns the trademark for "uBlock"

> BetaFish now owns the trademark for "uBlock"

The international patents and trademarks database doesn't confirm this, because the trademark application of Betafish was cancelled.

The only thing that's actually registered is the uBlock "graphical trademark" (don't know the US term for it) so it's not the word itself that's registered, but only the combination of word and picture with its exact form that's protected.

This graphical trademark #017822487 is registered by uBlock, LLC, 30309, Atlanta, US and it was registered on 19.02.2018 - almost 4 years later.

So, technically, @gorhill could still register the term "uBlock" as a trademark and probably win a case against uBlock, LLC because their trademark is bound with its graphical representation and not the word itself.

(Also, I am not a lawyer - because I heard people assume this all the time on the internet for whatever reason.)

Thank you for the productive response! I am definitely not the author of the article. I have no idea who they are, the similarities between our usernames is entirely coincidental.

I wasn't aware that you hadn't transferred the rights to the Web Store. I suppose the article wasn't clear enough on the timeline for the uBlock Origin swap: it was included because it was another case of maintainership change gone wrong, and it was closely related to the Nano Defender situation that was virtually identical to The Great Suspender.

I was aware that acceptable ads were added much later than the change in ownership: however, I thought the removal of per-site switches would be less relevant to the modern situation. On review, it does seem to imply that the impetus for the fork is that change: my apologies.

I trust that you didn't revert any changes, but Git doesn't necessarily preserve that information properly. Some git commands ('git reset --hard') remove any changes from history, as well as not creating a log of such changes. Much of what I could find around the change seemed to imply that you had reverted them, as opposed to simply never getting them: the difference is mostly academic, in my opinion.

Thanks for putting that clarification here: it wouldn't have fit well in the article, but it is worth mentioning. Manifest V3's new restriction on remote code is the main relevant security addition, and I am not a fan of how they bundle that in with the other changes. That restriction would make it a lot harder for these sorts of changes to fly under the radar. Nano Defender's malicious changes were quickly discovered: The Great Suspender flew under the radar for months..

> On review, it does seem to imply that the impetus for the fork is that change: my apologies.

No worry. I forked the repo at the same time I transferred ownership. The reason was simply that I wanted to get back at being able to mostly work on the code base, as the issue tracker had become a burden taking most of the time I allocated to the project, and I found that @chrisaljoudi was good at handling opened issues.

I really want to thank you for your work on uBlock.

No other software that has contributed so much to my overall happiness, productivity and well-being.

I just double checked the repo but couldn’t find a way to support your work. Is there any way I can donate or send something your way?

Donations are specifically not accepted. Too many chances for a conflict of interest, or the appearance of one.

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