Re:Brave browser now blocks cookie banners
by mort96 on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @10:41AM
(#33262941)
This isn't about just using cryptocurrency, there are absolutely uses of cryptocurrency which I wouldn't describe as a scam. Here's what's making me call Brave a scam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262620
Re:Brave browser now blocks cookie banners
by monetus on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @10:26AM
(#33262712)
They were, for a time, taking donations on behalf of websites despite those websites not knowing that brave existed, or the donors not knowing that their donation was going to an unclaimed wallet. I can't remember what happened to the BAT - held for them if they ever did pick up brave I think, but eventually dumped back into the BAT pool. That, and substituting Amazon referral links, engendered distrust that is hard to overstate. Do you think is just a crypto=bad thing alone? That wasn't my impression.
Re:Brave browser now blocks cookie banners
by monetus on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @01:08PM
(#33265028)
It actually wasn't Amazon links, but links to sites partnered with brave, like binance and Coinbase. They didn't seem to know about it ahead of time.
Re:Brave browser now blocks cookie banners
by soundnote on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @09:59PM
(#33270015)
Not Amazon referral links. More like Firefox Suggest or the like: Write eg. "Binance" in the URL bar, and one of the results in the dropdown menu is a sponsored link to "binance.us" who are partnered with Brave. The feature had a bug that caused complete, valid URLs (ie. you wrote "binance.us") to be shown the sponsored link as a primary completion option.
The issue persisted, as far as I know, one day. The response was to both fix the bug and make the feature be off by default.
This phenomenon early on was even targeted at simply cryptography based security (Although not super common on HN thankfully), since the word 'crypto' was associated with the software.
Ironically, it was born as a response to the crypto-crazed people that had the same thoughtless reaction in reverse