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Comment by b40d-48b2-979e | Hacker News Reader

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Brave also got caught hijacking links and swapping in their own affiliate codes

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...

Not quite. We had a couple domains that—when typed into the address bar—would offer a referral-option in the browser UI. If you quickly hit the enter key, you might mistakenly have selected one of those unintentionally. This was a UX bug on our end as the feature wasn't intended to match complete URLs.

The goal was to offer folks a means of supporting the development of a privacy-preserving browser, at no cost to them. We blogged about the feature at https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/, and ultimately disabled it by default. But there was never any "hijacking of links," or "swapping of affiliate codes".

The truth is less exciting, I know.

The back and forth with Eich on Twitter and him defending it as ethical when it was first reported on painted a different picture at the time for me: https://imgur.com/a/MotmTGh

When pushback increased, it seemed like it was addressed and then retroactively labeled a bug.

Your own dismissiveness of the issue on Twitter, including posting an image which didn't reflect the actual user experience in Brave stable at the time, left a similarly bad taste: https://imgur.com/a/x9smj6M

That was when I thought the attribute was added only when the user searched, but it was added even to a FQDN which should not have been done.

We didn't make anything from this bug, fixed it quickly, it's a black mark on our shield still but it wasn't some mustache-twirling grand plan, believe me. It was a blunder.

16-18 years ago. Is bigotry always a permanent condition?

At that time, it was 10 years ago, which is what I was responding to.

    Is bigotry always a permanent condition?

Yes, people famously change more as they get older. Eich was already a man in his 40s at that point in time. He also doubled-down instead of acknowledging any wrongdoing.

Has he apologized?

You know, you're condemning most of California. The measure he supported won the vote. Would you like to drive all of them out of their jobs?

I wouldn't want to use anything that earn them money, if I could avoid it. That it was half the population doesn't change my view.

I understand that it is difficult for me to shun (which is basically what I'm talking about) so many people, or to even know if they should be shunned, but it would definitely be my preference.

My man, we do live in a society.

As if apologizing to the cancel mob ever worked out of anyone. All that does is affirm the mob.

Your perspective only confirms that it’s popular within the Mozilla audience to ban people for their political opinion when it’s slightly out of currently-approved opinions. TODAY. Not 18 years ago. Today.

Making Mozilla a politically-extremist organization intolerant to other opinions than theirs, and thus incompatible with being a steward of the global web.

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