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Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

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Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#181

Post by comntr »

solstice wrote: post #110
mehdix wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical problem here is way easier to solve than the social one. You'd want to avoid having hatespeech or some attack being planned on URLs of your blog. This is by definition a tricky problem. Should moderation follow us to the remotest and most deserted corners of the web? Should prying eyes follow humans all the time, even on this abstract ocean of digital content? On technical side I think we'd need some so…

(Re: micropayments) Sigh... Flattr seemed so promising back in 2011.

Data is the payment.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#182

Post by comntr »

pmarreck wrote: post #126
mehdix wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical problem here is way easier to solve than the social one. You'd want to avoid having hatespeech or some attack being planned on URLs of your blog. This is by definition a tricky problem. Should moderation follow us to the remotest and most deserted corners of the web? Should prying eyes follow humans all the time, even on this abstract ocean of digital content? On technical side I think we'd need some so…

> You'd want to avoid having hatespeech I have zero confidence in automated hatespeech blocking ever since I had comments blocked multiple times for fighting racists with reason (which is, honestly, the only way it will be eliminated, just like it worked against homophobia and interracial marriage... I wonder how long it will take before we realize that if you ban it, you martyr it, and you merely send it off to fest…

I think there should be many data servers with different rules. Some will blindly accept and serve any comments. Some will have mods and a buffer of comments waiting for review. Some will review only those comments that are flagged by their scripts. All these data servers should form a well connected network and exchange with comments. What's the incentive to exchange with comments? If a greedy data server refuses to give comments, others will block it. And users will be able to have multiple data sources, if (when) one big data server tries to use its monopoly power.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#183

Post by brokenmachine »

floatingatoll wrote: post #171
brokenmachine wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The printing press has also been nothing but trouble.

The printing press has nothing inherently to do with worldwide instantaneous coordinated global same-day information sharing. A better analogy here would have been the telegraph, as that would at least serve as evidence on its own a rudimentary connection to whatever pithy point you’re trying to make with this reply. Unfortunately, your chosen example does not connect the dots so readily. Please clarify?

>it may be that we incorrectly solved a "problem" that turned out to be a feature keeping humanity from harming itself with its own speech

OK. Explaining ruins the humor but I'll explain.

The pithy point I was making is that a bunch of words on a comment thread is not likely to harm humanity any more than the printing press did.

Or the writing on a toilet stall wall for that matter, now that I think about it.

The larger point I was alluding to is that the people who would call for the banning of text from a printing press are probably the people we should really be worried about.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#184

Post by comntr »

Jaruzel wrote: post #94
rtpg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a chrome extension that went the opposite direction: hit the extension button and you would get a list of hacker news and reddit submissions for that URL. Was super useful for finding some cool comments on a page I’ve since moved to Firefox and gave up on the extension, but it might be an easy port...

You might be able to do with just a bookmarklet into the algolia search for HN. EDIT: I've just created a proof of concept that works: http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/hnlookup/

So it effectively runs arbitrary javascript in the current page? I mean, if I run it on my online banking page, it'll have access to everything. The extension isn't ideal either - access to the current URL is too much - but at least it can't run arbitrary JS in the page itself.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#185

Post by pmarreck »

coldsnap427 wrote: post #164
6cd6beb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely like that on the internet; a lot of people on both sides of the US political spectrum seem to think there are two problems: 1 - Their chosen political party is not pushing far left/right enough 2 - The opposing party is obviously criminally bent on destroying the country. Actually maybe three problems; the third being that "centrists" (anyone who isn't radicalized one way or the other) haven't come ou…

> I guess that might bleed into real-world politics, but it's unfortunate. > All I can say is prepare for some hard times, followed by the US not having the geopolitical 1st place. Maybe it's too stark a warning but unless we start to see each other as something other than demons hell-bent on destroying all good in the world, I don't see how anything productive is going to happen. This discourse has certainly bled in…

Agreed.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/05/takeaways-o...

I don't understand how this isn't the most concerning thing to everyone rational more than tribalist right now. And if I wanted to tear the US apart, this is exactly how I would do it. Slowly and over time. Especially if I was Russia. :P

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#186

Post by comntr »

floatingatoll wrote: post #145
kristopolous wrote: post #13

These were generally called metaweb tech when they were popular about 15-20 years ago. The problem was that everyone had to have a particular author's plugin to see the extra content. Some of them were better than others, allowing cross referencing, citation insertion, and a number of other sophisticated features. I don't know if they still are around. Sites like reddit and hn are really inverted versions of this con…

Is solving this "basic problem" ethical? The implied assumption here is that it's a "basic problem" that most sites do not have a readily-discoverable public commentary board. Sites such as Reddit, HN, and Facebook are popular , readily-discoverable public commentary boards about other sites. This much is true. However, it is incorrect to say that the absence of this is a "basic problem" as stated above. Given the pa…

No, I agree that this problem has to be solved before this idea can hope to get wide adoption. Mr A posts something really evil on Mr B's facebook page. What happens next? Mr B files a complaint to facebook. Since this is a legal matter, the complaint gets escalated to the top. FB realises that this is out of their control and proceeds with a complaint to FBI. Now what if the data server with that comment is hosted outside the US? Right, the browsers will quickly ban this extension. However the owner of the extension can also change the default data server url in the config and the comment will be gone.

However I think that this hypothetical scenario will never happen because the idea will never reach this wide adoption. It'll inevitably be fragmented into a few segments with rules and moderation. Want comments from the theoretical physicist community? Subscribe to sci.data.org in your extension config. Want to know what 4chan folks think? Add unfiltered.comments.com to your config - it'll be an unreadable mess anyway and you'll need to make some non-trivial effort to add that url.

But I think there will be an archive with all the comments for research purposes: physically, it will be a big data server that keeps connections with all other data servers and pulls all the comments it can.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#187

Post by comntr »

brokenmachine wrote: post #178

I wonder, how would this work on, eg an ebay auction or another site where the same content is available at lots of different URLs? The same auction is available at, eg https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/1992-WIDGET-THE-WORLD-WATCHER-NI... https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/113314026367 https://www.ebay.com/itm/113314026367 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/113314026367 , and probably limitless other URLs.

The extension can pull comments from multiple urls. But I think this situation is unique and most of the commentable content is hosted on static urls.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#188

Post by comntr »

afandian wrote: post #10

This is very similar to hypothes.is, apart from the hashing: https://web.hypothes.is/

The idea is very similar, but I can't agree with a few implementation details: - The extension shouldn't need to have access to the page. Inserting an iframe into the page seems wrong. - The extension shouldn't own the comments. It should be a window to the comments, not a gatekeeper. It should be possible to implement alternative UIs and alternative extensions and connect them to the same comments. - The extension should allow to switch the UI and the data server.

I like the inline annotations, but likely it'll need full access to DOM.

Re: Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL

#189

Post by comntr »

cafxx wrote: post #158

"it attaches comments to SHA1 of the URL, to avoid leaking PII" Seriously, SHA1?

Why is this a problem? I even considered MD5, to be honest. Afaik, the only reason MD5 or SHA1 are considered "insecure" now is that it's possible to use sophisticated techniques called differential analysis to carefully craft two binary files that would have the same hash. But if the space of possible inputs is limited (we can't put arbitrary stuff in the URLs), then good luck finding a collision. Discovering a collision with an existing input is a much harder problem (is it even solved for arbitrary data?). In any case, SHA1 here isn't a security mechanism, but is just a way to hide URLs from the data server and organize comments as a nice hashmap. If someone wants to put anything sensitive in the comments, they shouldn't and I've clearly warned about this with a big yellow banner. If someone ever needs security, the only way to go is to use your own data server, or encrypt comments themselves with ed25519+aes256.
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