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Just Noticied The Boycat Firefox Extension Warning Me Against Reddit
(media.piefed.ca)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Boycott US
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917 users here now
Overview:
The community dedicated to boycotting the US until they stop fascism, restore full democracy and start following international law.
Americans have a moral obligation to resist Donald Trump and project 2025 at every turn.
America is a flawed democracy currently being ruled by oligarchs. Stop the backslide! Dont let America become the next Hungary.
America needs to challenge the court rulings of citizens united v. fec and shelby county v. holder, protect the media, implement independent district drawing, and the single transferable vote so they don't end up having people stay home in life-changing elections because they cannot vote for their favourite candidate.
Join 50501.chat to fight back!
Related communities:
Boycott:
!buycanadian@lemmy.ca
Activism:
!antitrumpalliance@lemmy.world
founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
heads up: this extension is not open-source, has an account system, and has a carve-out in its privacy policy for sending data it has collected about you through your account to third parties:
Excerpt from the privacy policy
Edit: It also has no listed location, and the contact page is a 404. i'd definitely stay away from this.
Edit 2: from the tos
yeah, it's an american entity with pre-paid lawyers in the most litigious state in the us. uninstall this crap now.
somebody from us is taping into anti us sentiment market here lol.
(also no alternative to reddit? come on.)
this is either a venture capital thing to collect and sell data, or an NSA thing to collect and use data later, probably both
The point is to figure out who is anti-US, what their browsing patterns are, etc
apparently this is the backstory
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IexiPrPPIY
Got it, I looked through the source code earlier. It seems pretty straightforward. Auth and storage through Supabase.
Basically intends to make money the same way Honey does, by affiliate linking you to “alternative” online shops with the same thing you’re looking for.
Though like most tech things, the value is really in the collected browsing data which will probably be acquired
how did you reverse the source? it's some bundled react app it looks. I've little experience with these. can you share brief procedure?
Sure, the extension is a zip that can be downloaded, and you're correct, it's an injected react app.
Generally, you can just beautify / format JS in your editor to get a better look
If that doesn't work, usually https://lelinhtinh.github.io/de4js/ is helpful
This is also certainly one of the places where AI has better application than most of how it's used today
Most of the actual logic occurs in popup.bundle.js but there's a number of files
But skipping through the boilerplate react and webpack stuff you can find the Supabase specific-code
Without even beautifying one of the smaller files you immediately see
And then in the popup code you see
So it's definitely just showing you affiliate links to fund itself from what it considers "ethical" alternatives. I also saw Posthog in there which they are using for analytics, but it looks like
It's configured to not capture each pageview you go to, so it's not tracking every site you're on, it looks like only if you're browsing amazon or ebay based on the background runner code:
https://libredirect.github.io/
not really the same usecase
Yuck
Anyone know a good alternative service (not necessarily an extension)?
Can you expand more on the court laws of Delaware and California?
Delaware in particular is very business-friendly in terms of law. Many businesses in the US incorporate in Delaware specifically due to how friendly the law is to their interests, usually to the detriment of the consumer.
I used to work for a Delaware-based company. It had no employee from the US, we worked from one of the cheaper eastern Europe countries, the only person who lived in the US was CEO's wife.
moody got the main point of it, but there's lots of shady shit in delaware when it comes to law. it's the main home of patent trolls, for one. there was a, i think, vice documentary some years ago where they went around a huge office building with nobody in it, every door had like five company names on it; they just needed an office in that jurisdiction to be able to do legal proceedings there. because the district attorney and judge were father and son.
Not just patent trolls, most US corporations (at least every non boutique tech company I've worked for over the past 20 years) are incorporated in Delaware.