Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 405 posts

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#371

Post by eridius »

austincheney wrote: post #370
eridius wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In technology the ability to do something absolutely is the right to so do unless you have already agreed otherwise. That's just plain wrong. There's nothing special about technology that means you get to throw all your existing moral principles out the window. The ability to technically do something does not confer you the right do it, either legally or morally. Maybe if I draw an analogy to patents it might make…

Which moral principle is in violation? You are serving content and then complaining about people reading it. If you are so interested in protecting your IP then why are you giving it to me anonymously? In no way have I altered your means of distribution.

If I choose to serve my IP to Google in full for free, that doesn't mean I'm choosing to serve it to everybody in full for free. Just because you can trick me into thinking you're Google doesn't give you the moral or the legal right to my content.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#372

Post by _em6m »

Oh my fscking god... the comments in this thread are just... It's like trying to explain to a 5 years old why candys are not free...

If it's behind a paywall, it's because the creators want you to pay for the content. It doesn't matter if you can bypass the paywall with a user agent hack or if you must install daemon tools and use 54 different keygens and cracks and patches and firewalls to block ping-home requests. It just doesn't matter because you're tampering the paywall and getting for free what the creators of the content are willing to charge for.

I mean... how damn brain dead do you have to be to not understand that?

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#373

Post by austincheney »

eridius wrote: post #371
austincheney wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which moral principle is in violation? You are serving content and then complaining about people reading it. If you are so interested in protecting your IP then why are you giving it to me anonymously? In no way have I altered your means of distribution.

If I choose to serve my IP to Google in full for free, that doesn't mean I'm choosing to serve it to everybody in full for free. Just because you can trick me into thinking you're Google doesn't give you the moral or the legal right to my content.

Actually it completely does. You don’t own my computer, software, or it’s settings. In accessing your content I am committing no act of fraud or theft since the user agent string is not a qualified identifier.

Are you directly giving it to Google via encrypted tunnel? I am not redefining how any technology works or making any alteration to your distribution or your service. Yet, you are still giving it to me free and anonymous.

Some people think taxes are immoral, but that doesn’t give them the right or ability to redefine the tax code. HTTP is not immoral.

The real issue here is you are lost and confused because you don’t know how to secure your product. Your negligence in accounting for your business, financial model, and IP is not my lack of morality. Fix your technology.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#374

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sfink wrote: post #363
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have telemetry data on performance, user retention, installed addons and how these things correlate. Then why is that not itself an obvious solution? Use that data to provide a default-on blacklist of known-malicious addons. Then you have a blacklist rather than a whitelist, so it can justifiably be more difficult for the user to override it and the user has no motivation to do so for a malicious addon they didn…

As I recall, because people were already programmatically generating endless numbers of malware extension IDs to avoid blacklisting. Blacklisting depends on a limited supply of whatever you're trying to control. UUIDs are not limited. More generally, if you come up with an obviously superior solution to a problem that someone else has claimed is important and difficult, and has spent considerable resources addressing…

> As I recall, because people were already programmatically generating endless numbers of malware extension IDs to avoid blacklisting.

Which is a good reason not to use the extension ID as the sole method to enforce the blacklist, and is why anti-malware software generally uses a signature-based approach.

> More generally, if you come up with an obviously superior solution to a problem that someone else has claimed is important and difficult, and has spent considerable resources addressing, perhaps it would be more constructive to investigate or ask questions to test your understanding of the situation before assuming and asserting that the other people are doing it all wrong?

You're implying this is a novel problem that hasn't been widely studied by everyone and that they're not actually doing it all wrong.

> I do know (I work for mozilla though not in this area) that the step was taken to address real, and very active, threats to security, privacy, and stability.

There are many ways to solve a problem by trading it for a set of different problems. Centralized authoritarian control is exactly that. And those things can be popular in the same way anything that externalizes costs and internalizes benefits can be -- because that type of thing seems attractive to the people not directly paying the cost of it. Until the victims (in this case the developers and users whose apps you prohibit) devise a way to protect themselves. Then you end up in an antagonistic relationship with your users and addon developers. What's the cost of that?

Meanwhile there are other solutions that don't do that.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#375

Post by eridius »

austincheney wrote: post #373
eridius wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I choose to serve my IP to Google in full for free, that doesn't mean I'm choosing to serve it to everybody in full for free. Just because you can trick me into thinking you're Google doesn't give you the moral or the legal right to my content.

Actually it completely does. You don’t own my computer, software, or it’s settings. In accessing your content I am committing no act of fraud or theft since the user agent string is not a qualified identifier. Are you directly giving it to Google via encrypted tunnel? I am not redefining how any technology works or making any alteration to your distribution or your service. Yet, you are still giving it to me free and…

What makes you think that the technical ability to do something confers either the legal or moral right to do that? Just because it's technically possible for you to trick me into thinking you're Google does not mean it's ok for you to do that. You tricked me into giving you something I thought I was giving to someone else; that doesn't mean you have permission to do this, that just means you tricked me. Neither legality nor socially-accepted morality recognizes that successfully tricking someone confers the right to the results of the trickery. In fact, both are pretty explicit about how this is wrong.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#376

Post by __d »

cipherzero wrote: post #367
__d wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones I'm thinking of (eg. NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ, etc) are all username/password. What kind of paywall are you thinking of?

How do you think this add on was working? do you think it was brute forcing the password of all the sites you were thinking of?

I'm less concerned with the implementation than I am with the principle.

In principle, I have reservations about exposing content to search engines but then requiring payment to read it. Especially if it's non-trivial to filter out the sources that require payment.

But a plugin which works around an attempt to restrict visibility of content to those who've paid for it ... I thnk the intent here is wrong.

I think it's ok to have information that's only accessible to a restricted set of viewers.

It's not that it's not possible. It's not that the implementations aren't dumb. It's that the principle of "if I want it, and I can do it, then it's ok" doesn't really hold up, IMO.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#377

Post by __d »

cipherzero wrote: post #366
__d wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. So is that's your fundamental issue with a paywall? Anything that's available to Google (and Bing, DDG, etc) should also be available to you at no cost? Restating that from the other perspective: if the information isn't universally available for no cost, it cannot be looked up via a search engine?

Uh yeah. I'm assuming you know how HTTP works, but if not, _basically_ you send a request to GET content, and the server makes a decision on what/whether or not to return. If that user shouldn't be able to see the content because they haven't logged in then its up to the server to decide. It's crazy to send them the content but tell them not to read it... back to your example would you expect your bank to do that? He…

I agree: it's a crazy strategy. And you're correct: if my bank sent my details to someone with a half-baked attempt to prevent them accessing the data they were given, I'd be getting a new bank.

But regardless of how crazy this scheme is, I don't think it justifies taking advantage of that craziness to unwrap such content.

I think it's reasonable to question the approach of banning the plugin too: the problem is the users' choice to use the plugin, not making it available. But ... when there's no justifiable use for the plugin, and the author clearly intends it to be used to view unauthorized content ... I can see that it's an attractive strategy to just ban it.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#378

Post by happymellon »

GonzaloQuero wrote: post #358
happymellon wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The lack of Chrome-like profiles keeps me off Firefox. I want to have a profile for my work, and a personal profile. Chrome provides that, and Firefox, last time I checked, required multiple hoops to enable and also blocked me from having more than one open. I would even contribute funding to that if Firefox had a "Fund this feature".

Do you need completely separate profiles? If not, containers might be enough for your workflow: https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/multi-account-co...

Does FF have a feature crowdfunding site? I would totally donate $100 a month until the bounty is high enough that someone would actually do it.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#379

Post by TangoTrotFox »

Veen wrote: post #362
TangoTrotFox wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little information is a dangerous thing. --- Sufficiently flawed journalism is perhaps one of the most severe problems in our society. People are fed half truths, and at times simply false information, and then go on to repeat it and base their world views upon as if it were fact. And in the era of social media false and sensational views spread incredibly rapidly while any 'corrections' are basically dead on arriv…

We can all agree that rewriting science department press releases is a bad idea and that journalists often get it wrong. But I wasn't referring to shoddy journalism, naked propaganda, click bait, or low-quality churnalism. My point was that no journalist or publication is perfect, but some are good enough, and what they do is expensive, necessary, and deserving of support.

That wasn't the point I was making at all.

What I was saying is that journalism, in its current state, often runs sensational stories that later end up being false or otherwise unsupported. That report I mentioned was not about the media rewriting a science publication -- the publication itself was published with errors in it. The media just accurately repeated those falsehoods. The problem is that, due to the nature of social media, the sensational stories get let's say a million hits. Later on they either update the story to more accurately reflect the truth or run a retraction. These 'corrections', by contrast get maybe a hundred hits. So you have people who have wildly broken worldviews largely because they take the media at face value.

The following quote from Thomas Jefferson is dated 1807, but it's now more relevant than ever simply because mass media is resulting in mass misinformation: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#380

Post by happymellon »

GonzaloQuero wrote: post #358
happymellon wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The lack of Chrome-like profiles keeps me off Firefox. I want to have a profile for my work, and a personal profile. Chrome provides that, and Firefox, last time I checked, required multiple hoops to enable and also blocked me from having more than one open. I would even contribute funding to that if Firefox had a "Fund this feature".

Do you need completely separate profiles? If not, containers might be enough for your workflow: https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/multi-account-co...

I'm looking at the "containers", but it isn't very self explanatory. So with this, I couldn't have two installs of Bitwarden, one for personal and one for work?
Post reply on HN