12 ms·

Google Boots Open-Source Anti-Censorship Tool "Ahoy" from Chrome Store

303 points by davidgerard 8y ago

marenkay 8y ago
There is a certain irony in that.
- resoluteteeth 8y ago
  Not really, google has committed itself to censorship (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730842 for example) so it's completely expected that they would do things like this, and therefore it's the opposite of ironic. Tools for evading censorship are one of the most important things to censor (in order to make sure the rest of the censorship is effective).
snvzz 8y ago
Don't be evil.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  "Don't be evil." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil [2] https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html
- ac4tw 8y ago
  I prefer projects that strive for "can't be evil".
- oneshot908 8y ago
  Missing a comma I think: "Don't, be evil."
- jackhack 8y ago
  Ha! They just set about redefining "evil" as "that stuff that other people do." "Don't be evil" went out the window a long time ago. I can't imagine any new revenue seeking business model being rejected by a social media giant because it "has a whiff of evil." If there is any doubt left that power corrupts idealists, the big social media companies should be exhibit 1. I will admit I find some ironic humor in the recent youtube/twitter/google/facebook love-affair with censorship; it's the thought that these nerds created a global platform and discovered -- shock and horror -- that this world full of people really don't like each other very much and have the audacity to express that view from time to time. Rather than accept that basic truth, they set about trying to change it. The corollary is an old saying about business models that goes like this : if any part of your model requires the user to change a behavior, you will fail. Still waiting for that other shoe to drop.
dagenix 8y ago
The thing that is interesting about Google support is that, from what I can tell, it's primarily provided on a public forum instead of providing any mechanism to contact someone directly. Users of the forums can try to solve an issue, or, they can vote on issues they find important. If an issue gets enough votes, then, someone from Google will jump in and provide what is generaly described as pretty amazing help. It almost sounds like a reasonable system. Except of course that Hacker News is that public forum. And, it sounds like if you can't get enough votes here, you're unlikely to get your problem solved. It will be interesting to see if HN as a Google support forum works in this case.
- zeusk 8y ago
  Support is where customers can get answers or really at-least a response from the company. General populace is not Google's "customers" (in traditional senses - they're not the source of income stream) and it shows in how Google has setup their customer support structure.
- prepend 8y ago
  Comically, they do have their own public support forum that works similarly except someone from google jumps in and says something useless and closes the thread. I’m sure they’d love to close HN threads where they consider the issue resolved as “closed, won’t fix” and find any further discussion not useful.
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    That's the chief reason why I've stopped following links to Google support forum issues. I honestly don't think I've ever seen a single one that was ever given sufficient attention or a reasonable answer, and the vast majority are simply ignored. It comes off as a big FU from Google to pretend to provide support. They clearly don't give a care, and would actually have a better image if they didn't pretend to support anything. And product owners wonder why their seasoned developers hesitate to have anything to do with Google. Hopefully one day Google's prestige with the tech-illiterate will dry up and the fact that they're simply THE GOOGLE stops working for them. But I wouldn't count on it.
908087 8y ago
Looks like they're giving China and similar countries a demo of their service offerings. Silencing of Dissent as a Service
- prepend 8y ago
  You joke, but I suspect this is part of the changes Google is being forced to make into order to launch the censored China versions. There are more publicly visible examples [0] of how China pressures Hollywood to make changes to movies in order to release films in China. Even changes to films not released (eg, Change A in order to release B). I don’t see why they wouldn’t make similar demands to Google, but there’s no way for me to confirm or deny this. Technically it’s pretty hard for Google to prove they don’t censor stuff because of China unless they go fully open data, open source. And they can’t do that. There are few tech companies that can be trusted. I hope Apache doesn’t break down. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/how-chinas-censors-influence-hollywood https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/...
  - 908087 8y ago
    It may have sounded like I was joking, but I wasn't.
    - windows_tips 8y ago
      It didn't.
- hugh4life 8y ago
  I have no idea why you're being voted down. When the western nations got more assertive about regulating the internet then they give ideological justification for more authoritarian governments wanting to do the same. And so the corporations will stop resisting in order to do business with the more authoritarian governments. No judgement. It's a very difficult situation for all involved which include the governements worried about their citizens information being all in the US, western nations worried about disinformation, and corporations that just want to do business.
joeseeder 8y ago
Is there an equivalent to f-droid but for chrome instead of android ?
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  Not that I know of, but since Chrome supports loading extensions from a local directory it shouldn't be too hard to make an app store based on github (and other source code repositories). Using Firefox seems easier though. It also helps to prevent a future where a handful of global platforms have a veto on what software we are allowed to use.
  - exikyut 8y ago
    Well, every manifest.json contains the line "update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx", which I think is present so that enterprise-distributed internal extensions can point at an internal update system. This being said, Chrome won't install .crx files from anywhere nowadays, only the official store. I'm not sure if this can be overridden - the way I think it works is that Chrome can be told to install extensions via group policy or some other admin-centric mechanism, and that once the extensions are installed this is when update_url comes into play.
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      You can always load unpacked extensions in developer mode, but maybe it's not such a good idea to promote this option as a mass distribution mechanism for regular users.
  - ehsankia 8y ago
    > handful of global platforms have a veto on what software we are allowed to use. Wouldn't Mozilla count in one of those global platforms? I'm not sure what this "handful" includes and why it doesn't include Mozilla. It is by many metrics the 2nd most used browser.
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
wpdev_63 8y ago
Another reason to checkout firefox.
yasp 8y ago
Repo of banned plugin https://github.com/revolucaodosbytes/ahoy-chrome https://github.com/revolucaodosbytes/ahoy-chrome How to install plugins in Chrome without going through app store https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-install-chrome-extensions-manually/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-install-chrome-extensions...
- atomical 8y ago
  I realize Chrome is different from Android, but there was a story about Fortnite bypassing the Android store recently and allowing users to download the APK directly. Couldn't someone develop an alternative app store?
  - ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
    There are multiple app stores. There is even an F-droid app store. None of them are pre-installed and userbase is really low.
  - mwilliaams 8y ago
    There already are alternative app stores. Quite a few actually. F-Droid, Amazon has one, and lots of sites where you can just download APKs.
phyzome 8y ago
« Whatever problem Google has with the Chrome version of Ahoy!, the same cannot be said of its Firefox variant. The extension is living happily on that platform and no ToS breach has been advised. » IIRC, Mozilla is also a lot more open about why they took stuff down.
- larkeith 8y ago
  > Mozilla is also a lot more open You could just end the sentence there. Google is notoriously opaque, whereas openness (is that a word?) is one of Mozilla's core values [1]. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
thrillgore 8y ago
Oh man now I definitely plan to install this extension.
- tajen 8y ago
  Being banned has become a credential, a mark of relevance. What a sad world we live in.
drb91 8y ago
They also did this for adnauseum.io. Use firefox! They do not seem to have this conflict of interest problem.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Also, the new Firefox is just better. I left Firefox years ago as my primary browser for chrome, always occasionally using Firefox for testing and some browsing. They finally one me back. Especially since I can sync my browsers including Firefox on Android which allows me to use ublock origin.
hotpotjunkie 8y ago
Maybe Google is trying to get back into China and wants to show Winnie the Pooh that they are willing to play ball on the whole censorship thing.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  unless Google is willing to censor worldwide on request of China, this does not seem plausible?
  - hotpotjunkie 8y ago
    I think so -- Apple didn't remove VPN apps worldwide, only in China (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Why not? Other American companies have censored themselves in order to please communist China. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/taiwan-american-airlines-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/taiwan-american-...
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      I thought airline companies always listed cities and not nations? Where does an airplane "from the USA to Russia" take off and land? Ailine companies are not the core backbone of the digital information society. Google currently plays a significant part of that backbone.
      - reaperducer 8y ago
        I thought airline companies always listed cities and not nations? Nope. Otherwise how would you know if you're booking a flight to Moscow, Russia or Moscow, Idaho? Airline companies are not the core backbone of the digital information society. You are correct. Airlines are the backbone of the global economy. Airlines are far more important than the internet. That's why cities build airports for free, and internet companies have to pay for their infrastructure.
DannyBee 8y ago
It's really interesting to see this story presented this way and nobody here seems to have even bothered to try to find another perspective. So, let's see the other side, i guess: "We have nearly 1500 blocked sites in Portugal, where ~80% are piracy sites, 19ish% are gambling sites, and Uber (I know, right?). The full list is available at our site https://sitesbloqueados.pt/ https://sitesbloqueados.pt/ and we are able to compile this list with info gathered by our fellow users, automatically." from https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7swz4r/iama_developer_of_ahoy_a_browser_extension_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7swz4r/iama_developer... (IE the developer themselves) Yeah, a tool that's used for avoiding blocks on piracy and gambling, i'm shocked to find it was taken down! Regardless of whether you agree, i think it's not uncommon or non-standard, and probably not (unlike some here seem to think) related to chinese censorship or other fun conspiracy theories.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  From your comment it looks like it has everything to do with censorship: Google decided to help the government of Portugal with censorship by removing a popular censorship-circumvention extension.
  - pas 8y ago
    In effect it's not exactly anti-information-prohibition (or pro-communication), but more in the line of anti-regulation. Which is a bit broader than simply anti-censorship. That said, very likely the authors of the extension mainly target censorship, and consider anything else also becoming available as a nice side effect. (Or simply an acceptable trade off. Like the really dark porn and illegal business stuff with Tor.)
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Wouldn't it be amazing if they block Google next? Sorry, you can't access Google without that one browser plugin that Google blocked.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Google is the biggest copyright violator on the planet, it is a bit hypocritical of them to block some open source tool to achieve the same.
guilamu 8y ago
The two latest articles from last week on HN about how Google is prepping to fully endorse China's censorship were posing these questions in the two most upvoted comments : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248 "Why is it unethical to launch a censored search product in China?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524 "What's the slippery slope here?" Well, you have your answer today. The unethical slippery slope is this one: when you start accepting censorship where do you stop? Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. But you have to ban it from everybody right? Otherwise, some people in China could access it with a VPN or a proxy. So here we are. In order to get a "attaboy" from China, Google starts censoring tools globally on their Chrome Store. With great power comes great responsibility would say Ben Parker. So yes, IMHO even companies should have some kind of "morality", some redline they should/would not cross. Google used to have one not so long ago "Don't be evil", but that's ancient history.
- magicalist 8y ago
  > Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. It allows access to sites banned in Portugal.
  - hsribei 8y ago
    I didn't know Portugal was big on censorship. What kinds of sites are blocked?
- skybrian 8y ago
  We don't "have an answer." We can speculate that they're related. If someone gets an answer out of them or it leaks, we will have an answer. Until then it's a mystery. (And even then, are you sure you should believe the answer?)
  - godDLL 8y ago
    Mystery is a detective murder story where the perp is known from the start but only revealed at the last page. This is at best a non-mystery.
DanAndersen 8y ago
Interesting to see the lack of "it's their platform, make your own browser and app store if you don't like it" justifications here.

303 points by davidgerard 8y ago

marenkay 8y ago

There is a certain irony in that.

resoluteteeth 8y ago
Not really, google has committed itself to censorship (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730842 for example) so it's completely expected that they would do things like this, and therefore it's the opposite of ironic. Tools for evading censorship are one of the most important things to censor (in order to make sure the rest of the censorship is effective).

snvzz 8y ago

Don't be evil.

saalweachter 8y ago
"Don't be evil." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil [2] https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html
ac4tw 8y ago
I prefer projects that strive for "can't be evil".
oneshot908 8y ago
Missing a comma I think: "Don't, be evil."
jackhack 8y ago
Ha! They just set about redefining "evil" as "that stuff that other people do." "Don't be evil" went out the window a long time ago. I can't imagine any new revenue seeking business model being rejected by a social media giant because it "has a whiff of evil." If there is any doubt left that power corrupts idealists, the big social media companies should be exhibit 1. I will admit I find some ironic humor in the recent youtube/twitter/google/facebook love-affair with censorship; it's the thought that these nerds created a global platform and discovered -- shock and horror -- that this world full of people really don't like each other very much and have the audacity to express that view from time to time. Rather than accept that basic truth, they set about trying to change it. The corollary is an old saying about business models that goes like this : if any part of your model requires the user to change a behavior, you will fail. Still waiting for that other shoe to drop.

dagenix 8y ago

The thing that is interesting about Google support is that, from what I can tell, it's primarily provided on a public forum instead of providing any mechanism to contact someone directly. Users of the forums can try to solve an issue, or, they can vote on issues they find important. If an issue gets enough votes, then, someone from Google will jump in and provide what is generaly described as pretty amazing help. It almost sounds like a reasonable system. Except of course that Hacker News is that public forum. And, it sounds like if you can't get enough votes here, you're unlikely to get your problem solved. It will be interesting to see if HN as a Google support forum works in this case.

zeusk 8y ago
Support is where customers can get answers or really at-least a response from the company. General populace is not Google's "customers" (in traditional senses - they're not the source of income stream) and it shows in how Google has setup their customer support structure.
prepend 8y ago
Comically, they do have their own public support forum that works similarly except someone from google jumps in and says something useless and closes the thread. I’m sure they’d love to close HN threads where they consider the issue resolved as “closed, won’t fix” and find any further discussion not useful.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  That's the chief reason why I've stopped following links to Google support forum issues. I honestly don't think I've ever seen a single one that was ever given sufficient attention or a reasonable answer, and the vast majority are simply ignored. It comes off as a big FU from Google to pretend to provide support. They clearly don't give a care, and would actually have a better image if they didn't pretend to support anything. And product owners wonder why their seasoned developers hesitate to have anything to do with Google. Hopefully one day Google's prestige with the tech-illiterate will dry up and the fact that they're simply THE GOOGLE stops working for them. But I wouldn't count on it.

908087 8y ago

Looks like they're giving China and similar countries a demo of their service offerings. Silencing of Dissent as a Service

prepend 8y ago
You joke, but I suspect this is part of the changes Google is being forced to make into order to launch the censored China versions. There are more publicly visible examples [0] of how China pressures Hollywood to make changes to movies in order to release films in China. Even changes to films not released (eg, Change A in order to release B). I don’t see why they wouldn’t make similar demands to Google, but there’s no way for me to confirm or deny this. Technically it’s pretty hard for Google to prove they don’t censor stuff because of China unless they go fully open data, open source. And they can’t do that. There are few tech companies that can be trusted. I hope Apache doesn’t break down. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/how-chinas-censors-influence-hollywood https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/...
- 908087 8y ago
  It may have sounded like I was joking, but I wasn't.
  - windows_tips 8y ago
    It didn't.
hugh4life 8y ago
I have no idea why you're being voted down. When the western nations got more assertive about regulating the internet then they give ideological justification for more authoritarian governments wanting to do the same. And so the corporations will stop resisting in order to do business with the more authoritarian governments. No judgement. It's a very difficult situation for all involved which include the governements worried about their citizens information being all in the US, western nations worried about disinformation, and corporations that just want to do business.

joeseeder 8y ago

Is there an equivalent to f-droid but for chrome instead of android ?

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
Not that I know of, but since Chrome supports loading extensions from a local directory it shouldn't be too hard to make an app store based on github (and other source code repositories). Using Firefox seems easier though. It also helps to prevent a future where a handful of global platforms have a veto on what software we are allowed to use.
- exikyut 8y ago
  Well, every manifest.json contains the line "update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx", which I think is present so that enterprise-distributed internal extensions can point at an internal update system. This being said, Chrome won't install .crx files from anywhere nowadays, only the official store. I'm not sure if this can be overridden - the way I think it works is that Chrome can be told to install extensions via group policy or some other admin-centric mechanism, and that once the extensions are installed this is when update_url comes into play.
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    You can always load unpacked extensions in developer mode, but maybe it's not such a good idea to promote this option as a mass distribution mechanism for regular users.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  > handful of global platforms have a veto on what software we are allowed to use. Wouldn't Mozilla count in one of those global platforms? I'm not sure what this "handful" includes and why it doesn't include Mozilla. It is by many metrics the 2nd most used browser.
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago

wpdev_63 8y ago

Another reason to checkout firefox.

yasp 8y ago

Repo of banned plugin https://github.com/revolucaodosbytes/ahoy-chrome https://github.com/revolucaodosbytes/ahoy-chrome How to install plugins in Chrome without going through app store https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-install-chrome-extensions-manually/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-install-chrome-extensions...

atomical 8y ago
I realize Chrome is different from Android, but there was a story about Fortnite bypassing the Android store recently and allowing users to download the APK directly. Couldn't someone develop an alternative app store?
- ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
  There are multiple app stores. There is even an F-droid app store. None of them are pre-installed and userbase is really low.
- mwilliaams 8y ago
  There already are alternative app stores. Quite a few actually. F-Droid, Amazon has one, and lots of sites where you can just download APKs.

phyzome 8y ago

« Whatever problem Google has with the Chrome version of Ahoy!, the same cannot be said of its Firefox variant. The extension is living happily on that platform and no ToS breach has been advised. » IIRC, Mozilla is also a lot more open about why they took stuff down.

larkeith 8y ago
> Mozilla is also a lot more open You could just end the sentence there. Google is notoriously opaque, whereas openness (is that a word?) is one of Mozilla's core values [1]. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

thrillgore 8y ago

Oh man now I definitely plan to install this extension.

tajen 8y ago
Being banned has become a credential, a mark of relevance. What a sad world we live in.

drb91 8y ago

They also did this for adnauseum.io. Use firefox! They do not seem to have this conflict of interest problem.

jjeaff 8y ago
Also, the new Firefox is just better. I left Firefox years ago as my primary browser for chrome, always occasionally using Firefox for testing and some browsing. They finally one me back. Especially since I can sync my browsers including Firefox on Android which allows me to use ublock origin.

hotpotjunkie 8y ago

Maybe Google is trying to get back into China and wants to show Winnie the Pooh that they are willing to play ball on the whole censorship thing.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
unless Google is willing to censor worldwide on request of China, this does not seem plausible?
- hotpotjunkie 8y ago
  I think so -- Apple didn't remove VPN apps worldwide, only in China (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Why not? Other American companies have censored themselves in order to please communist China. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/taiwan-american-airlines-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/taiwan-american-...
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    I thought airline companies always listed cities and not nations? Where does an airplane "from the USA to Russia" take off and land? Ailine companies are not the core backbone of the digital information society. Google currently plays a significant part of that backbone.
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      I thought airline companies always listed cities and not nations? Nope. Otherwise how would you know if you're booking a flight to Moscow, Russia or Moscow, Idaho? Airline companies are not the core backbone of the digital information society. You are correct. Airlines are the backbone of the global economy. Airlines are far more important than the internet. That's why cities build airports for free, and internet companies have to pay for their infrastructure.

DannyBee 8y ago

It's really interesting to see this story presented this way and nobody here seems to have even bothered to try to find another perspective. So, let's see the other side, i guess: "We have nearly 1500 blocked sites in Portugal, where ~80% are piracy sites, 19ish% are gambling sites, and Uber (I know, right?). The full list is available at our site https://sitesbloqueados.pt/ https://sitesbloqueados.pt/ and we are able to compile this list with info gathered by our fellow users, automatically." from https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7swz4r/iama_developer_of_ahoy_a_browser_extension_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7swz4r/iama_developer... (IE the developer themselves) Yeah, a tool that's used for avoiding blocks on piracy and gambling, i'm shocked to find it was taken down! Regardless of whether you agree, i think it's not uncommon or non-standard, and probably not (unlike some here seem to think) related to chinese censorship or other fun conspiracy theories.

zzzcpan 8y ago
From your comment it looks like it has everything to do with censorship: Google decided to help the government of Portugal with censorship by removing a popular censorship-circumvention extension.
- pas 8y ago
  In effect it's not exactly anti-information-prohibition (or pro-communication), but more in the line of anti-regulation. Which is a bit broader than simply anti-censorship. That said, very likely the authors of the extension mainly target censorship, and consider anything else also becoming available as a nice side effect. (Or simply an acceptable trade off. Like the really dark porn and illegal business stuff with Tor.)
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Wouldn't it be amazing if they block Google next? Sorry, you can't access Google without that one browser plugin that Google blocked.
jacquesm 8y ago
Google is the biggest copyright violator on the planet, it is a bit hypocritical of them to block some open source tool to achieve the same.

guilamu 8y ago

The two latest articles from last week on HN about how Google is prepping to fully endorse China's censorship were posing these questions in the two most upvoted comments : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248 "Why is it unethical to launch a censored search product in China?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524 "What's the slippery slope here?" Well, you have your answer today. The unethical slippery slope is this one: when you start accepting censorship where do you stop? Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. But you have to ban it from everybody right? Otherwise, some people in China could access it with a VPN or a proxy. So here we are. In order to get a "attaboy" from China, Google starts censoring tools globally on their Chrome Store. With great power comes great responsibility would say Ben Parker. So yes, IMHO even companies should have some kind of "morality", some redline they should/would not cross. Google used to have one not so long ago "Don't be evil", but that's ancient history.

magicalist 8y ago
> Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. It allows access to sites banned in Portugal.
- hsribei 8y ago
  I didn't know Portugal was big on censorship. What kinds of sites are blocked?
skybrian 8y ago
We don't "have an answer." We can speculate that they're related. If someone gets an answer out of them or it leaks, we will have an answer. Until then it's a mystery. (And even then, are you sure you should believe the answer?)
- godDLL 8y ago
  Mystery is a detective murder story where the perp is known from the start but only revealed at the last page. This is at best a non-mystery.

DanAndersen 8y ago

Interesting to see the lack of "it's their platform, make your own browser and app store if you don't like it" justifications here.