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Takennickname

Does Brave ad blocker block these ads? Or does it only block competing ads?

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Its business model has always been the latter, they're just no longer bothering with the pretense of opt-in.

Usually businesses wait until they capture the market before saying the quiet part out loud.

1 - The initial idea to create Brave was to allow users to view ads and get paid for their attention.

2 - They've been caught replacing affiliate links with their own.

Based on that information what does your instinct tell you?

Point #2 is false.

Brave partnered with a few crypto exchanges. The issue (which is on GitHub) was a bug in the URL auto suggestion feature of the chromium browser. Instead of suggesting the links, it was replacing them ONLY ON THOSE 2-3 CRYPTO WEBSITES.

The bug was fixed before it became news. It was fixed on day 1 of the report.

Your defense was to mention that they were tied up in crypto?

Maybe it's just me, but it really devalues a product when there is a crypto association.

That's a bias, then. If what the person you're responding to says is correct, being associated with crypto would seem to have nothing to do with it. I have no idea if it's correct, but it sounds like it could just as easily have happened with any kind of partnership.

Desperate attempt to confuse the issue. Brave introduced a "bug" that if no one noticed would generate large amounts of money for Brave and would have eventually spread like affiliate links on tech news sites. They tried for a money grab, got caught, and called it a bug.

You're so gullible.

How do people keep peddling #2, when it isn't even factually correct on what happened? Sure, presume malice on the campaign links to Binance, but the bug was about turning people writing binance.us IN THE ADDRESS BAR into a campaign link, not replacing anyone's affiliate links on web pages, which is how it's always presented as.

Brave does not block native ads (except for Google’s) on any website. All third party embedded ads are blocked by default.

So it blocks Google search ads, but not brave search ads?

No, it doesn't block Google's sponsored ads. It blocks embedded ads that track you.

Yes, Brave will block via Aggressive mode in Shields.

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