Does anyone here know about the youtube honey scandal? I find it quite fascinating how they laid out their whole scam just in the source code-- and it’s quite crazy how nobody figured it out before Megalad. It also in a weird way inspired me to code more so that maybe I myself can even do some wannabe FBI stuff through being able to read code.
I think I tried Honey at one point in the past, found it useless and deleted it, it is kind of scary, considering also how they managed to have part of the code not on the extensions marketplace. But it is also a great example of reverse-engineering, and it also started the creation of a load of extensions to stop or at least alert about the same behaviour that Honey is doing of swapping out referral cookies.
If someone missed it, these are the three videos of the journalist that investigated Honey
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Yeah I tried it out in the past too but it literally gave no coupons and it was useless (like your experience) so I got rid of it. It’s crazy how they literally stole so much from companies, OTHER AFFILIATE marketing companies, and lie to users. It’s a disgusting thing but reverse engineering is beautiful and it’s what exposed them in the end.
It is very weird that Linustech team didn’t care to warn anyone else when they are literally a tech tip youtube channel. But hey at least now everyone is aware of “cookiegate” and being more wary about these extensions.