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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I thought it was obvious you wouldn’t say “hey I just took your benchy model and changed N vertices”. But just “happened” to inadvertently create a benchy lookalike.

    Also there is definitely a point where it would be safe to reproduce the benchy design otherwise we could point at anything on earth and say “that’s a heavily modified benchy.”

    Or are we all benchy? Am I a benchy with a thousand modified vertices?

    So let’s be pragmatic there is nothing preventing me even to start a new design that vaguely ressemble the Benchy design. All it takes is for that “vaguely” to be enough so that you could argue you were not making a benchy redesign but just stumbled on something that could look Like a benchy.



  • I’m not sure why people are trying convince me to change my mind on something.

    I have seen it in my logs with my own eyes. I wish I could be left alone without having to bother looking into it.

    Whatever the reason is. Someone is crawling through dictionaries of address. It is slow but steady. It started with abuse@ and other generic addresses and then started trying names. I blocked the sending SMTP server once I realized what was going-on.

    What am I suppose to do? Ignore it and just triage in inbox?




  • Does it?

    Do you think spammer will just stop at the first address and then call it a day?

    In my experience there is no such thing as a “catch all” domain address. The second your domain leaks then many spammer will just go into a frenzy and try hundreds or thousands of mail aliases.

    Especially since they can’t really spam Gmail as easily (since early 2024) they will even more aggressively spam any other domain.








  • Something I wonder is how would it even be possible for vendors to ignore PayPal is doing something fishy.

    You got a guy who’s job is to monitor who is getting their affiliate money. He sees PayPal collecting millions of affiliate money.

    The other players in this game (of affiliate link) knew very well that honey was doing something fishy. Why didn’t they contest it?

    Because they were doing the same kind of “last click” bullshit. If that was so unfair there would be a trial already. They all followed this stupid rule and the megalag video talks about it.

    The fact that Linus Tech Tips knew and we are supposed to believe the rest of the affiliate links mafia didn’t see a thing?



  • Realistically most extensions open many links in the background. Even a simple adblocker will “open links” or URLs in the background to perform updates of lists etc.

    The difference here is the malware was installed by the user after accepting a user agreement that probably covers network use…

    Also they hijack the affiliation when the users interact with the extension and not with the website where the link for the product is.

    I doubt honestly this will be a good angle to attack Honey.

    IMO the fact that users are told that the best coupon will be used even though it’s demonstrably not true is a much more provable issue.

    Especially since the extension opens a tab for an instant makes me think they didn’t really try to be super super sneaky.



  • About that is it normal that the other videos are not released?

    I feel like he is losing the momentum he had with that video series and the more time he waits the more likely the gag orders or retaliation from PayPal.

    What if Megalag can’t release the next videos because a horde of lawyers is already on his back?

    Surprisingly I think Honey decided not to be able to sell user data (Ludwig sponsorship’s with honey was pushing this).

    Basically they were making so much money on affiliate links they probably thought it wasn’t worth risking to be caught for some privacy reason.


  • Technically, there is not necessarily a partnership in a situation where an affiliate link was stolen. Any user with the extension would see his affiliation given to PayPal.

    Also, I can’t help but think it will be very difficult to account for how much money was “redirected” by Honey. The creator would need data from YouTube that I don’t think is logged for much time. So you wouldn’t know who clicked and when and even after that I thing the vendor of the product would need to be involved also.

    Who knows what LegalEagle intends to do, they shouldn’t be too clear on their intent and keep their strategy secret. Maybe they hope for some kind of settlement because I think this is more damaging in term of PR than it will ever be in terms of fines. It’s like the recent case of Apple, they choosed to pay to expedite the process but never admitted guilt?

    Again I’m no lawyer let’s trust Legal Eagle and see where it goes. But PayPal will be a strong case for sure.