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Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

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Re: Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

#61

Post by chris_engel »

therandomguy wrote: post #31
vectorpush wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it does suck to be banned from the ubiquitous platform in which you've spent time becoming highly specialized. edit: Apparently he developed a browser plugin that doesn't use Facebook's API, so it looks like this may actually be a decent endorsement.

Highly specialized in facebook API? If you are a half decent developer you can easily pick up any API in few days if not in few hours.

Not on facebook. It feels like IE6 in development. About one billion pittfalls and the documentation is not helpful most of the time.

Re: Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

#62

Post by chc »

Natsu wrote: post #49
chc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the "for life" anothermachine is disputing, it's the "banned." What he received sounds like a simple nastygram. I could send you a letter demanding that you give me your house, but that wouldn't mean that you are obliged to do so.

> I could send you a letter demanding that you give me your house, but that wouldn't mean that you are obliged to do so. Considering that his only two choices are to leave voluntarily or to be forced out and that Facebook can take down his Facebook pages or ban his IPs on their own, I'm not sure what point there is in arguing over whether or not being given that choice qualifies as being "banned."

There is no evidence that Facebook actually would force him out, just that some lawyer decided to include some text in a nastygram. That was the point, as I understood it.

Re: Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

#63

Post by shadowmint »

mbell wrote: post #58
shadowmint wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key issue here is that is was a plugin that acted like a robot on the site. Effectively they only thing that Facebook can do about that sort of application is ban people using it. However, just like the Wow Glider saga they chose to pressure the developer instead. However, unlike that, it was just a browser plugin. No magical API calls, or anything like that. I couldn't care less about micro-transactions, ad view…

Sorry but this post reeks of of personal hatred toward facebook and contains little value. Regardless of the method chosen to attack this issue at the end of the day this hurts both their bottom line and their app developer's bottom line, which hurts the user base as a whole. Clearly your not a facebook user, so frankly, your opinion doesn't matter to them as long as your the minority. Of course they would go after t…

Don't be silly. Of course I use Facebook. Most people do.

I have no time of day for the developers of the spamware that fill it, but that's not the issue here.

A plugin that does not in any way use the Facebook api is just a stand alone application.

This is exactly what Cory Doctorow is talking about with the war on general purpose computing. A company flailing wilding and applying bad (legal) pressure to bare against the issue of people using their computers to do something the company doesn't like (in this case automating game actions) is the wrong solution.

Re: Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

#64

Post by mbell »

shadowmint wrote: post #63
mbell wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but this post reeks of of personal hatred toward facebook and contains little value. Regardless of the method chosen to attack this issue at the end of the day this hurts both their bottom line and their app developer's bottom line, which hurts the user base as a whole. Clearly your not a facebook user, so frankly, your opinion doesn't matter to them as long as your the minority. Of course they would go after t…

Don't be silly. Of course I use Facebook. Most people do. I have no time of day for the developers of the spamware that fill it, but that's not the issue here. A plugin that does not in any way use the Facebook api is just a stand alone application. This is exactly what Cory Doctorow is talking about with the war on general purpose computing. A company flailing wilding and applying bad (legal) pressure to bare agains…

I don't understand your position at all. In essence it appears to be "if they don't use our API we have no recourse at all, its all fair use". Along the same lines any bot that automates any computer game is "ok", even if it destroys an entire industry of professional gaming, any application that scraps web data is "ok", etc. HN even blocks that kind of use.

Re: Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

#65

Post by code_duck »

ig1 wrote: post #38

Facebook terms of usage https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms Section 3.2: "You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission." Seems writing a bot that automatically takes actions on a user's behalf would clearly violate the Facebook terms. Banning bots is perfectly reasonable behaviour…

I can see why they'd want to ban browser plugins that affect their site.

I've seen a few people create things like this which can cause problems for the users, and support. Many people install plugins which affect specific sites, or greasemonkey scripts, and then don't understand what is coming from the actual site and what comes from the plugin. Then, when the site is updated, the plugin/scripts can cause unexpected errors and the users often blame the site, not the third party code they're running.

So, I think that actually plugins like this are irresponsible and I wouldn't want people creating them for anything I owned.

Re: Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

#66

Post by ceol »

shadowmint wrote: post #52
ig1 wrote: post #38

Facebook terms of usage https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms Section 3.2: "You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission." Seems writing a bot that automatically takes actions on a user's behalf would clearly violate the Facebook terms. Banning bots is perfectly reasonable behaviour…

Have you ever read the Facebook TOS fully? I challenge you to find a single game on the site that does not violate one of their extremely vaguely worded clauses. This is basically just a "We can, for any reason, at any time, ban you. Suck it up." That's why I've lost all interest in the Facebook platform. Too much of this nonsense going on.

>This is basically just a "We can, for any reason, at any time, ban you. Suck it up."

It probably had to do with his plugin enabling users to play Facebook games without actually playing them. I'm sure game creators want a human looking at the ads in (and next to) their games, so it's no wonder he was banned.

Re: Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

#67

Post by Natsu »

chc wrote: post #62
Natsu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could send you a letter demanding that you give me your house, but that wouldn't mean that you are obliged to do so. Considering that his only two choices are to leave voluntarily or to be forced out and that Facebook can take down his Facebook pages or ban his IPs on their own, I'm not sure what point there is in arguing over whether or not being given that choice qualifies as being "banned."

There is no evidence that Facebook actually would force him out, just that some lawyer decided to include some text in a nastygram. That was the point, as I understood it.

Why do you believe that Facebook is willing to sick their lawyers on him, but unwilling to shut down his Facebook pages?

Re: Facebook intimidates developer, bans him and his code for life

#70

Post by baby »

I don't know if HN is that stupid...

Here's my story. I made a facebook website using their API in a bad way. EXACTLY like this story, that guy knew he was using facebook's API in bad way. I got 100.000 fans on my facebook app and then they closed it, banned me domain and banned me from using the API again. It doesn't mean I'm banned from using their API again... they're saying a lot of things they don't do... and it doesn't mean also that I can't work for a company that need a facebook developer (and that would be a shitty job).

sorry for my english I'm french.

but this article is sensationalism !

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