Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
1–10 of 288 posts
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#2I don't want to subscribe, I also don't want to see ads or be tracked. I wish there was a universal micropayments way of paying for what I read.
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#3While this is extremely dubious behavior from Mozilla, and reminds me why I stopped donating to them (the moment Firefox started requiring _their_ signature in order to load addons), Mozilla still has the "automated signing API" in place. Supposedly, this API allows to get an XPI signed as long as it passes a series of automated checks. So it's worth a try.
This was the excuse they used anyway when trying to justify their signature requirements were "not a walled garden". I didn't believe it of course.
You can also just mark the addon as "not listed in AMO" when submitting it to addons.mozilla.org and it will not be listed on the store, but it will be signed. More details in https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Distribut...
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#4I don't want to subscribe, I also don't want to see ads or be tracked. I wish there was a universal micropayments way of paying for what I read.
publishers don’t like micropayments because (a) they don’t work, and (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important.
It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores.
What’s potentially workable is a Spotify-style subscription model.
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#5I don't want to subscribe, I also don't want to see ads or be tracked. I wish there was a universal micropayments way of paying for what I read.
I believe this is the idea behind the Brave browser and their Basic Attention Token https://basicattentiontoken.org
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#6The worst bit here is that they aren't explaining exactly which part of the ToS is being violated, and what needs to be done to fix it...
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#7It’s good for Mozilla to take a stance, and drop the pretense that you can have the cake, eat it, and have all your other cookies left over.
Circumventing paywalls is not a crime, but it is also not victimless. The crisis for journalism is already eating at the foundations of democracy on the local level. To blithely ignore this is the triump of short-sighted egoism. And the inability of publishers to prevent you from doing it is no more justification as the old shopkeeper’s failing eyes are a license for you to steal from the produce displayed outside.
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#8I don't want to subscribe, I also don't want to see ads or be tracked. I wish there was a universal micropayments way of paying for what I read.
publishers don’t like micropayments because (a) they don’t work, and (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important. It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores. What’s potentially workable is a Spotify-style subscription model.
It doesn't work, since people faced with paywall moe to competition that only has ads. If adblocking is common enough will try harder to make micropayments just work.
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#9I don't want to subscribe, I also don't want to see ads or be tracked. I wish there was a universal micropayments way of paying for what I read.
Flattr set out do that, many years ago. They still exist. Brave is trying to address that. There's patreon, and many others. Have you tried them ?
Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store
#10While this is extremely dubious behavior from Mozilla, and reminds me why I stopped donating to them (the moment Firefox started requiring _their_ signature in order to load addons), Mozilla still has the "automated signing API" in place. Supposedly, this API allows to get an XPI signed as long as it passes a series of automated checks. So it's worth a try. This was the excuse they used anyway when trying to justify…
I've recently been experimenting with creating an extension, and the automated signing was literally one of the first things I did when I followed the Hello World tutorial. It's very easy to obtain an .xpi that you can distribute to your users yourself.