They aren’t. From a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ublock_origin/ by u/tehdang:
For people who have stumbled into this thread while googling “ublock vs origin”. Take a look at this link:
"Chris AlJoudi [current owner of uBlock] is under fire on Reddit due to several actions in recent past:
- In a Wikipedia edit for uBlock, Chris removed all credits to Raymond [Hill, original author and owner of uBlock Origin] and added his name without any mention of the original author’s contribution.
- Chris pledged a donation with overblown details on expenses like $25 per week for web hosting.
- The activities of Chris since he took over the project are more business and advertisement oriented than development driven."
So I would recommend that you go with uBlock Origin and not uBlock. I hope this helps!
Edit: Also got this bit of information from here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/32ory7/ublock_is_back_under_a_new_name/
TL;DR:
- gorhill [Raymond Hill] got tired of dozens of “my facebook isnt working plz help” issues.
- he handed the repository to chrismatic [Chris Aljioudi] while maintaining control of the extension in the Chrome webstore (by forking chrismatic’s version back to himself).
- chrismatic promptly added donate buttons and a “made with love by Chris” note.
- gorhill took exception to this and asked chrismatic to change the name so people didn’t confuse uBlock (the original, now called uBlock Origin) and uBlock (chrismatic’s version).
- Google took down gorhill’s extension. Apparently this was because of the naming issue (since technically chrismatic has control of the repo).
- gorhill renamed and rebranded his version of ublock to uBlock Origin.
A redirect isn’t necessary if you control the DNS servers. If you control the DNS servers, you can MITM the website for any visitor because you can prove that you own the domain to a certificate authority and generate a new, trusted HTTPS cert. (Depending on specifics this may or may not foil the anti-phishing capabilities of Passkeys / U2F.)