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lobsters / lobsters-ansible

Ansible playbook for lobste.rs
ISC License
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Why Brave is blocked? #45

Closed norbertpy closed 4 years ago

norbertpy commented 4 years ago

Any specific reason why Brave is blocked as per block "Brave" cryptocurrency scam?

Thanks.

pushcx commented 4 years ago

Fraud. They added UI to the browser to claim users could pay individual site creators who'd signed up, but had scraped the names and photos of site creators who'd never heard of them. Brave planned to take the payments after they were unclaimed for 90 days. When caught, they claimed the funds were held "in escrow" but later admitted there were holding the funds themselves. Story broke here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

The UI went beyond confusing into deliberately deceptive, and inventing a financial partner made their bad faith unambiguous to me. This seemed the only way to effectively opt out of them claiming to fundraise on the site's behalf.

From their issue tracker, they've targeted us specifically in their plan to circumvent blocks. This linked issue isn't implemented, but they must have reverted their user agent to pretend to be Chrome again because I haven't had ICO hucksters in my Twitter mentions for a while. I don't know if they're actively scamming visitors now but would appreciate hearing about it if so. I hate that we have to burn precious volunteer developer time dealing with spam and cryptocurrency scams, but that's the internet sometimes. :(