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Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

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Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#391

Post by orestarod »

alias_neo wrote: post #283
dspillett wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The broken system allowed him to be a dick. OK, so the is more to it than that and he did have a genuine grievance (I forgot exactly what) bit in dealing with that he caused a pile collateral damage for innocent bystanders. (Innocent bystanders who errantly put too much faith in dependency oriented programming which brings us back to the broken system)

It's his work, and he had every right to pull every module he hosts there in protest. If this was a walk out or some other form of protest, nobody would be calling him a dick, I think that's a little out of order. That said, the system is definitely broken. His reaction to the Kik thing is probably where he was at fault, I think it would have been reasonable for him to back down there; companies, in the US at least a…

It's always safe to back down if you don't have the guts to go on, but you can't say it's a fault not to back down.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#392

Post by stevenjohns »

guug wrote: post #389
stevenjohns wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We must” is nonsense on the part of Kik. That’s part of the corporate b/s where people make it seem like things are “out of our hands.” If he was releasing a messenger app called KikAss, then sure, they “must” enforce the Kik trademark. But if I release a brand of shoes called Kik, with an api that allows users to poll how many steps a user has taken that day, that’s not a trademark violation. Trademark violations r…

> Trademarks require intent to mislead Is this a legal requirement?

I meant trademark violations. My bad. I edited the post and added the missing word.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#393

Post by shripadk »

I feel Google, Facebook and Twitter need to take a big step back and stop antagonizing paying users: be it developers or advertisers. A majority of the issues stem from horribly strict enforcement of policies. What these sites expect from us mere mortals is to do a tightrope walk every time we create and launch something. And some of these policies are actually ridiculous. I understand the fallout of Cambridge Analytica has caused all these sites to give more importance to policy enforcement but the solution to that problem does not lie in automating it through use of technology alone. Business and people's livelihood depend on these policy enforcement. God forbid your business Ad account is shutdown for good because you used a word that causes some stupid algorithm somewhere trigger an automatic ban.

It has happened to me. And worst part is you have no recourse. I have spoken directly with Google Execs who were assigned to a client of mine for managing a big ad account. Even they were clueless as to why the system suspended the account. After a lot of digging around I realized that it was because I had used the same credit card in two different accounts. I mean really? Come on! I am lucky I had a Google Exec who was in contact with me because the client was high value. What would small businesses be going through if the same thing happened to them? I shudder to think.

All these sites need to relax with their enforcement of policies. Deploy humans for this. We already have a lot of unemployment due to this pandemic and this would be a great time to payback some of those profits by employing more support staff. AI is good but it is not good enough yet to have such levels of control.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#394

Post by sensible123 »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #388
calpaterson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox personally and originally made the thing for myself. I added Chrome support because Chrome is much more popular (not far from ten times more popular these days :() and people I would like to use this, eg friends and family, mostly use Chrome. I couldn't ask them to switch browsers for my little side project. I have to co-operate with Google's bureaucracy. For what it's worth, so far it seems like Mozill…

I got my retired mother to switch to Firefox without her hardly noticing the difference. And she's happier now that she gets fewer ads. I think we as developers overestimate the resistance to switching.

I think this is because programmers have very specific and personalized workflows for all the tools they use so they assume other people are the same way when in reality a browser for most people is just a tool to get what they want.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#395

Post by acituan »

TylerE wrote: post #382
acituan wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Azer was super unprofessional and nasty during those interactions Does he even have to be “professional“? Even though two of the parties involved happen to be corporations, he owes no allegiance to them and the exchange does not take place in a corporate context. I mean, we are talking about corporate overreach, why should we be assessing his words by corporate standards? “Professional” usually means “don’t sho…

Does he have to be? No. Can others judge him harshly for said decision? Yes.

It’s not the judgment itself, it is by what standard he is judged. Everyone could judge him by their religious, cultural, personal standards. But in a solo dev vs. corporate overreach case judging him by corporatist standards bring a framing that further empowers the overreach.

There was a time when hacker culture was associated with rebellious and playful values. Such an irony on Hacker News we are discussing if he should be penalized for saying “bad words” in the face of corporate unfairness.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#396

Post by justin66 »

otterley wrote: post #355
chmod775 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would have no case if they actually tried to go after him to "defend" their trademark. His mail was just empty threats. You can't just trademark 3 letters in a way so that nobody else can use them. In fact there's hundreds of trademarks that are the letters "kik" in various logos[1]. What they trademarked is a bunch of specific logos containing those letters. Doesn't prevent other people from also using those 3…

BP, BMW, and GE (among countless others) disagree and would be happy to haul you into court to prove to you that you are wrong if you misuse their trademarks. It's easy to be an armchair HN lawyer when you have no skin in the game.

> BP, BMW, and GE (among countless others) disagree and would be happy to haul you into court to prove to you that you are wrong if you misuse their trademarks.

As an attorney, do you think he was misusing the "Kik" trademark?

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#397

Post by sensible123 »

shripadk wrote: post #393

I feel Google, Facebook and Twitter need to take a big step back and stop antagonizing paying users: be it developers or advertisers. A majority of the issues stem from horribly strict enforcement of policies. What these sites expect from us mere mortals is to do a tightrope walk every time we create and launch something. And some of these policies are actually ridiculous. I understand the fallout of Cambridge Analyt…

Humans require salaries and Google is a giant machine for turning attention/intent into money. Adding humans into the loop just creates friction for the money printing part. And as you noted, they care when the person spending money is rich enough. It's everyone else that loses with their system.

I've been reading these stories for as long as I can remember knowing about HN. People don't seem to quite learn that Google is a machine for printing money and unless you're paying them they don't care.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#398

Post by jacamera »

geza wrote: post #211
hanklazard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really sorry to hear that--it looks like a useful extension and I'm sure you've put a lot of hard work into it. Naive question to you and to other extension developers here ... how does Firefox do when it comes to this issue? Is it just that the market share is so much lower that it's not worth developing for FF? I ask this as a happy FF user on mac, linux, ios.

I tried porting the extension over to Firefox when Firefox switched to WebExtensions, and at the time there were tons of incompatibilities, mostly with Firefox's Shadow DOM implementation (HabitLab is a huge and complicated codebase, porting it is non-trivial - I had an issue tracking it at https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab/issues/137 ). I'm sure it's a valid option for smaller extensions however. At the moment I'…

Have you tried again with Firefox recently? I'm the developer of an extension that makes extensive use of the Shadow DOM for UI components in content scripts. I recently ported our Chrome-only extension over to Firefox and had a few minor issues but none with the UI. I'm even using React for Shadow DOM UI components and it's been working well in both browsers.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#399

Post by stevespang »

Seems the Europeans only the only ones exercising power over Google, wouldn't be interesting if developers established nexus in Europe through servers or other means, then started feeding these complaints to Vestager, resulting in rules and laws will be created that punish Google for such behavior, forbid them to act like spoiled children, set monetary damages they must reimburse individual developers.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#400

Post by Iv »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #290
babesh wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like 1994 all over again. In 1994 you had one dominant software monopoly in Microsoft. Today you have several: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook with dominance in individual spheres of influence. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In 1994 Microsoft didn't arbitrarily ban applications on their OS.

They would have loved that though!

I mean Steam was made as a panicked reaction when Microsoft announced its Windows store. People in the industry knew very well what they were trying to do.

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