24 ms·

Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

311 points by AndrewDucker 8y ago

realthing 8y ago
here we go -- gearing up to the decade of censorship 2020 and beyond . . . between this and the EU link sharing tax, I am beginning to wonder if the internet really is the last bastion to freedom of speech
- nkozyra 8y ago
  Huh? This is a plugin that was removed from the plugin directories.
  - thefounder 8y ago
    Yeah, just like you would remove a website from a websites "directory" or better just not display a website that breaks the law or better block it at ISP level! Welcome great firewall! Who said this is censorship?
    - nkozyra 8y ago
      You can install this plugin without repercussion. Let's not be dramatic.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Of course it isn't any different in that respect (control by state actors) than any other communication medium. Expecting otherwise is odd.
  - realthing 8y ago
    No it isnt. The whole point of the internet is that it exists apart from nations law. its in the name - world wide web.
- JohnStrangeII 8y ago
  This is not a free speech issue at all, nor are the EU regulations free speech issues. The problem with these laws and their interpretation is that they target the wrong organizations and technologies. If a website is illegal, it needs to be taken down by police. Instead, idiot judges rule that certain DNS entries should be blocked. If you shouldn't be allowed to read some pay-walled journal, then the publisher has to implement proper DRM. Instead, they take down arbitrary plugins from the directories of arbitrary browser makers. It's the publishers' right to ask for money for their products, but it's also their obligation to protect it and ensure that their business model is viable and technically feasible. It's the end of 2018 and lawmakers and executive still don't understand how the Internet works. That's the problem.
  - JeanMarcS 8y ago
    I mostly agree with you, but the problem with illegals websites is often that they are illegal in a country but hosted in another. So you can’t really send your own police taking down servers in other countries. So for the DNS blocking it works because it blocks casual users of those website (I’m thinking torrent or streaming sites essentially). Of course when you know a bit how it works you use international DNS. And if you know even more, you use your own :-)
    - AdrianB1 8y ago
      One country cannot police Internet, otherwise China will shut it down tomorrow. If a site is legal in the country where it is hosted, then it is legal and that's it, connecting to Internet assumes you obey this simple rule.
      - shaki-dora 8y ago
        Well, seems like some people don't actually "obey" this rule you just invented. And, for now, they have that other invented rule on their side, the rule of law.
        AdrianB1 8y ago
kbumsik 8y ago
> Yeah, it got pulled from both chrome's and mozilla's... Maybe we need to change the title?
decasteve 8y ago
This breaks the social contract of the web. If you publish on the web (over HTTP) using HTML (with or without css+js) then you respect the concept of a User-Agent that renders the content on behalf of the user. If you wish to get around this then create another file format and protocol and application/plugin to do so — one that enforces the DRM for the owner. Don’t take agency away from User-Agent.
- shaki-dora 8y ago
  Would you make the same point for an extension that allows users to easily participate in DDOS attacks? Edit: the link, for the willfully dense, is that some protocol specification does not imply its users’ acceptance of any and all (ab)uses possible. It’s completely different only in that you like one but not the other.
  - JoshuaAshton 8y ago
    That's completely and utterly unrelated to what the guy said. He is talking about user-agents and the way you interpret the data you receive from a http(s) request. You're talking about DDOS attacks. There is no logical link here.
  - giornogiovanna 8y ago
    Uh... yes? It's not very relevant, but I guess if someone was making some kind of hacktivist extension that did something like that, I wouldn't just take it down from the marketplace.
- Angostura 8y ago
  Alternatively, the add-ons break the social contract, whereby content creators request payment for their content. If you visit stuff on the web, you respect the concept of a social contract between you and the provide. Don’t try to circumvent their wishes.
  - pedrocr 8y ago
    > Alternatively, the add-ons break the social contract, whereby content creators request payment for their content. The site is free to not emit any content before payment is assured. The reason these add-ons are possible is that these sites are trying to have their cake and eat it to. They want to implement the paywall in the user agent so they can still get their content in Google. At the same time some of them are trying to argue for payments from Google for linking to their content. The situation is a mess but it's not about social contracts at all.
thefounder 8y ago
Perhaps we should make copyright/censorship an issue on the next election otherwise we end-up with the worst things from both worlds: DRM from US and censorship from China.
vbezhenar 8y ago
How is blocking paywalls different from blocking ads? I hope that someone will fork Firefox and remove that code which prevents users from installing any addons.
- Reason077 8y ago
  Good question. Arguably, ad blockers are (in part) responsible for the advent of paywalls in the first place.
  - betterunix2 8y ago
    That is a very small part. Trying to replace subscription fees with targeted ads was one of the greatest mistakes made by the publishing industry. Paywalls should have been put in place years ago, and journalists should always have focused on writing quality articles that people are willing to pay for instead of clickbait "experiences" meant to drive ad impressions.
    - Reason077 8y ago
      Were subscription fees ever the primary revenue source for print newspapers and magazines? I was always under the impression that the majority of their revenue came from ads.
      - betterunix2 8y ago
        It depends on which newspapers you are talking about, but what I said was that newspapers should not have tried to replace subscription fees with ads, because subscription fees were never trivial and were always needed for serious newspapers to be profitable. There is also the issue of online ads generating far less revenue than their print counterparts, and the fact that newspaper ads include the formerly profitable classifieds section which now has to compete with things like Craigslist.
- Sylos 8y ago
  They were told to not anymore host the extension on AMO, but it's still signed by Mozilla (and I doubt they would stop signing future versions), so you can still download and install the extension from elsewhere. Also, Mozilla themselves provide a "fork", i.e. builds compiled with the corresponding flag, that allow unsigned extensions to be installed, after you set "xpinstall.signatures.required" in about:config to false. These builds are Firefox Developer Edition and Firefox Nightly, as well as Unbranded Builds [0] for Beta and Stable. I believe most Linux distributions also compile with this flag, as disallowing unsigned extensions mostly helped against malware on Windows. [0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded_Builds https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
dooglius 8y ago
Does Mozilla need to actually host the extension? I'm guessing that that is the problem here. Couldn't they just cryptographically sign it, and leave the distribution to a P2P technology like BitTorrent?
- betterunix2 8y ago
  I am not sure it would make a difference to the courts.
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    Firefox is just a platform to run addons, like Windows is OS to run programs. Do you think that Microsoft should curate software allowed for users to run?
    - betterunix2 8y ago
      IANAL but my perspective has been that the courts care more about your ability to control what runs on a "platform" than about who hosts what. So if Firefox in its default configuration will only run addons that Mozilla approves, then the courts might not care about where the addon is hosted or how users technically receive it, and could just order Mozilla not to sign the addon. My personal opinion is that curation is fine if users can opt-out of it. There is value in having someone certifying that the software you are installing is not malware, or even that it meets some threshold for quality (e.g. does not drain the battery), but users should have the ability to pick the curator or to have no curation at all. That said, it is a totally separate argument from whether or not the courts would care about how software is distributed, and totally separate from how the courts will view the role of a software curator (and whether or not courts will insist that curators refuse to certify software that does certain things, like blocking paywalls).
      - Spivak 8y ago
        Wouldn't Mozilla just have to say that any add-on that isn't malware is eligible to be signed and that it's a security feature, not a tool for curation of content.
trollied 8y ago
Just a tangent for you all - does anyone envisage a 2nd parallel internet emerging? Not tor-like, an actual completely separate network?
- betterunix2 8y ago
  Eric Schmidt suggested this might happen in the future: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-predicts-internet-split-china.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-p...
- woah 8y ago
  That’s quite a huge tangent. Why? And what could it possibly have to do with the article?
  - realthing 8y ago
    Huge tangent indeed. If only someone would open a thread or mailing list to discuss the idea . . . The harrowing thing is, it really does look as though we were / are in the wild west days of internet comms. The more tech savy business and corporations have become, the more they have looked to monetize and lock down the web. This is not what it was supposed to be.
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    It seems very related to me. This is another thing we're no longer allowed to do on the current internet. Maybe people enough people would rather build a new internet than pay for digital goods.
- DC-3 8y ago
  Possibly in the form of a very strict, very semantic, almost RSS-like subset of HTML? Something that almost resembles the reader view many modern browsers will convert articles into?
  - realthing 8y ago
    One would imagine this has far less to do with data rendering and more data indexing and filtering (web-crawling access). If you read the link, Schmidts comments related to the bifurcation of the internet, he gives a simple example of two separate internets - version "USA" and version "China". It seems in this scenario, the single source of truth for all web data is sandboxed to protect a nations (or the nations citizens) best interests (akin to modern day China, Iran). The new web would look to live in the shadows, where users can submit and view pre-filtered ideas without meddling from gatekeeps (government officials and money men) The issue with this is data access and the sharing of information becomes limited to those with the "know how"( we are all tech literate these days), or more likely, those with the balls to commit a "crime" and disobey the permissions of "their government". This presents an almost dystopian like scenario where people are afraid to share and receive information their government has not green lighted.
totfz 8y ago
This would not be a problem if Mozilla had sided with users for once and allowed us to install xpi extensions from outside their app store.
- INTPenis 8y ago
  Are you saying the extensions are signed? Becuase if they're not I can't imagine not being able to side-load them. And if they are, with the amount of Firefox forks we have, it should be trivial to create one that allows for side-loading unsigned or 3rd party signed extensions. Hopefully without too much source modification, just creating a distribution of Firefox would easiest to manage.
  - fbender 8y ago
    I‘m pretty sure there is an un-branded release version of Fx on the Mozilla website that allows side-loading and allows disabling the signature verification. I don‘t have a link ready and on mobile so I cannot easily check.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  You can if you use the Developer Edition. It's permanently disabled in the normal version because malware would piggyback on the browser to steal passwords and so on. Obviously Mozilla have no problem with people wanting to make their own extensions and so on.
  - Krasnol 8y ago
    Weird, I have 63.0.3 as far as I see the normal version and had no problem downloading and with that updating the November version of "bypass-paywalls" which was also affected from the releases page here: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/releases https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/releas...
    - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
      That means it's signed with Mozilla's signature. Actually, I think extensions can maybe be signed by Mozilla even if they're not on addons.mozilla.org.
jtr_47 8y ago
Maybe it is time we stop relying on a central company to provide our browser software. Maybe it is time for people to build or configure their own personal browser, so that the authority to install add-ons is a personal choice and not dictated by a company. If a website has some shitty paywall on their site or article and that can be bypassed, then that site needs to implement something better. Instead what these companies do is make laws that is a cover for their shitty service or lack of good security.
JoshuaAshton 8y ago
In case the repo gets pulled, I'm hosting a mirror here: https://git.nonagon.games/joshua/anti-paywall-mirror https://git.nonagon.games/joshua/anti-paywall-mirror (edit, by pulled, a pun was not intended. I mean in case it gets removed)
monocularvision 8y ago
The publishers want it both ways. They need to publish their full article content for search crawlers to read but don’t want humans to see it. The idea that this is a form of DRM protected by the DMCA is laughable in my opinion, but IANAL.
- shaki-dora 8y ago
  They mostly just want to survive... But in this case, they specifically want to allow you read maybe a dozen articles per month for free, but also (see above) to eat.
  - giornogiovanna 8y ago
    Then implement technological measures to make sure that this is the case. At the very least, don't just make data freely available to the user and expect them not to read it, just because you visually hid it! And if you're serving non-paywall pages to Google bots, that's kind of against Google's policy, isn't it?
    - mike22223333 8y ago
      Not any more. There were changes.
  - monochromatic 8y ago
    Their business model has been broken for years. It’s not incumbent on me to help them survive.
    - shaki-dora 8y ago
      Yes, but considering you seem to be keen on reading their content: have you considered that their survival may, just possibly, be in your interest?
      - pedrocr 8y ago
hnaccy 8y ago
Another impacted extension: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues/82 https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues...
- zcid 8y ago
  Further down the comments is a dl link: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues/82#issuecomment-443179176 https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues... Even if these extensions can still be installed, without being published on Mozilla's addons site, the average user will be unable to find them. It seems like a really bad precedent for Mozilla to accept this without a fight.
AdrianB1 8y ago
So I am allowed to use Developer Tools in any browser and look directly at the HTML, but not use an extension to do the work for me? What is preventing me to View Source for a "paywalled" page?
- kibwen 8y ago
  DMCA takedown for developer tools coming in 3, 2...
quickben 8y ago
The real problem is Google indexing it. Wasn't there even a rule from Google that you can't serve different content from what the general public is seeing?
- giornogiovanna 8y ago
  Yes! https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355 It's definitely against their policy in my opinion, but I guess you could make a weak case that this is what the public would see if this was their "first visit".
  - justinph 8y ago
    It is not against their policy. They know how to index it and there is schema.org markup for paywalled content. https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/40543 https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/4054...
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  The problem is people having opinions but lacking the most basic facts... This is about "soft paywalls" that allow you to read maybe a dozen articles per months.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - quickben 8y ago
    Google indexes the entire website, often with multiple visits to the same individual page (to get comments, etc). It definitely doesn't stop at "maybe a dozen" pages a month.
giornogiovanna 8y ago
This extension just seems to strip tracking data and pretend to be a Google bot. It baffles me that this is somehow concerning enough to be taken down. And anyway, isn't making exemptions for Google's robots sort-of against their policy? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355
- blakesterz 8y ago
  That's exactly what I thought too, not even " sort-of " it seems "without a doubt" against that policy. It seems really tricky for Google to enforce though. Wouldn't they need to send out bots crawling without the GoogleBot agent? That also seems wrong, somehow.
  - Forge36 8y ago
    It does seem wrong. I wonder if they could double crawl and penalize sites that throw up a paywal
    - Mirioron 8y ago
      They could add the ability to report sites that do this. That way there would be less sites to double crawl.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    If I recall correctly, this rule is why googling for an article and then clicking on it from Google frequently works. The rule is something like "a user clicking from Google can't see something (meaningfully) different than what the Googlebot sees". So you can paywall direct traffic or links from Reddit or internal links, but that first one from Google is supposed to work.
- Confusion 8y ago
  You are not allowed to circumvent paywalls, just like you are not allowed to circumvent locks, no matter how easy they are to circumvent. As far as I have always understood, you may publish a locksmithing guide, even an “entering your home when locked out” guide, but not a “how to commit burglary” guide.
abc-xyz 8y ago
We should encourage everyone to share articles/bypass paywalls using outline.com/similar services. Copy paste article content in comments. It's difficult to empathize with publishers after all the shit they've pulled and continue to pull. Most of them could be hosted for ~$10/month but they'd rather engage in shady practices. The qz.com article on the frontpage right now have 30 cookies (18 of which are third-party) and send 67 third-party requests. https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F1480192%2Fmonarch-populations-in-the-us-west-are-down-86-this-year%2F https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fq... ..and that's a direct link to a fucking article, and I just picked the first one I saw on HN's frontpage.. they're all like this and even much worse. Some (e.g. salon) make around 1000 third party requests. It's hard to imagine it wouldn't be just as profitable for them to host their articles with a clean interface (ala outline.com) that included simple ads e.g. one request to doubleclick, no annoying autoplay videos, and a donate form at the bottom of the page.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  That's sorta like pushing a drowning swimmer down to stop them thrashing around. I mean... it is going to work. Sort of. I also feel sorry for the terrible burden that http requests seem to be for you. Meanwhile, large swaths of the richest nations no longer have local news. I guess it's a wash...
  - abc-xyz 8y ago
    God forbid I care about the privacy of those who're technically incapable of protecting themselves from these evil practices. Edit: as for local publishers, I personally believe they should be government funded and non-profit, but if I had to choose between any publisher (local or otherwise) thriving while violating people's privacy, or not existing at all, then I would surely wish for the latter, and I would hope everyone felt the same way.
    - baroffoos 8y ago
      Australia has a government funded news org and its fairly good.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
I'm not a lawyer. I don't know the particulars of the law. But I presume "blocking", as in the ads are effectively removed, is key. Instead of blocking them, would hiding them, via a div with a higher z-index? Mind you, that doesn't prevent the tracking. But there are other tools for that. I agree. Ads suck. Maybe there's a legal loophole to avoid them some other way?
- eletious 8y ago
  think you misunderstand what the extension does - it hid paywalls, not ads
bovermyer 8y ago
Paywalls exist as a solution to the problem of "how do journalists and other content producers get paid for their work?" Anti-paywall addons are an attempt to get something that isn't intended to be free for free. Ignoring the legality of this for a moment, let's consider: is this moral?
- sparkie 8y ago
  Is it moral for content producers to sell users web browsing habits to advertisers without their explicit consent?
  - jocoda 8y ago
    Whose morality? You either enforce your morals or they don't apply. Without a paywall access is free to all. Sites may pretend that there is some moral obligation that visitors have to switch off ad blockers, but that's only the site's opinion, clearly not one that others typically accept. Build a paywall and sites can manage entry based on whatever conditions they wish. Users either log in for some received benefit or go away. But put up a search engine bypass and they open up access and lose total control. Bypassers are unlikely to agree with the site's desires and viewpoint. Sites either control access 100%, by login, IP, etc, and so enforce their particular morality or they have to accept that their world view is not shared by all. Even should sites manage to get a legal framework to enforce this morality, those laws do not have global scope. Not yet anyway.
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    My position on this very specific question is: "no." But let's not conflate content producers selling user data with content producers selling access to content.
- gohbgl 8y ago
  I think that when you send fake data to a server to bypass a paywall (e.g. sending google UA) then you are using the server without the owner's permission, which makes it immoral. But in general I believe that being a journalist does not mean that others have to pay you. You as a journalist have to figure out a business model that works.
burtonator 8y ago
This is why app stores are fundamentally a horrible idea for the web and I'm surprised we aren't more enraged by them. They put ALL the control of which apps can be used in the hands of 3-4 companies. Sure, you can go out and write your own app and side load it but you're only going to have 1-3k users. Additionally, what if you live in a country that doesn't have these "laws" ? why can't people run my app if they want?
- sandov 8y ago
  I've used this same argument against package managers on Linux many times, but apparently people want to keep doing things the centralized way, because all I get when I do is people telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that package managers and centralized repos are easier to use.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Package managers allow you to very trivially add new repo sources which you often have to do if you want packages newer than the packaged version for your distro.
nextgens 8y ago
I am the author of that add-on ... what would you do in my shoes ? - provide an XPI (that will only benefit the few since the side-loading process is made awkwarder at every point release) ? - fight it ? If so, on what grounds and how ? - something else ?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? That's an entirely serious suggestion. I'm not arguing that what you're doing is illegal. I have all sorts of qualms with copyright and its enforcement myself. If I were "copyright czar", movies would get three years, and newspapers maybe a week. But if we wish for copyright-holders to respect the rights of internet users, it would seem to be a winning proposition to maybe not actively work against their attempts to find a compromise. And a "soft paywall" that allows you to read a dozen or so articles per month without subscription seems to be jus that: a compromise, and a reasonable one at that. What do you expect to be the long-term outcome of bypassing such mechanisms? I have trouble of thinking of anything but "soft paywalls" turning into "hard paywalls". Then, we'll be left with the maybe one or two publications we subscribe to. How can such an outcome be in anyone's interest? I know you can bypass these schemes. Yes, they are laughable. I know ads are sometimes annoying. I know large swaths of the press have earned your scorn because they, like, use the wrong JS framework. Or something. But I still don't understand this attitude that appears to go even further than just "I want it for free" to an almost gleeful appreciation of vandalism destroying the foundations of democratic societies.
  - hobs 8y ago
    I have a few responses to this, but the most basic is: Please dont tell people what to do on their computers. If your business model is not supportable except by other people willfully hiding information on the client computer, your business model is not good. "Avoiding a paywall that's only half implemented" is not "the destruction of journalism."
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
sombragris 8y ago
What an utterly stupid trick. So, I didn't even know those extensions existed. Such arrogant behavior made me search and install one of these. Serves them right.
- Rumudiez 8y ago
  I always appreciate a good example of the Streisand effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
    Also known as "don-t-you-dare-complain-about-this-mob-or-an-even-bigger-mob" (...effect)
ianwalter 8y ago
I would rather have a browser plugin that just removed pay walled content from search results anyway. Or one that redirected me to something I would use like Blendle.
anonymousab 8y ago
How is it different from other user agent extensions? Did it bake in a site list?
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Its marketed as a tool for bypassing paywalls and not just a generic user agent changer
stock_toaster 8y ago
Create a new extension called "block paywall" that prevents users from accidentally visiting paywalled sites.
jpangs88 8y ago
I'm wondering how this is different than add blockers which are allowed in the app stores. In concept it does something very similar: allows the user to circumvent how people get paid for content. I understand that ads can be more dangerous than paywalls but the end result is the same. Is it just that some lawmakers saw one as okay and the other as not?
jimnotgym 8y ago
I'm a bit concerned about the communication here. Last week Mozilla were saying this was an action by a community reviewer.
mosselman 8y ago
How do these add-ons work? For sites with an x-number of free articles a month I have come across an add-on that would clear all local storage for a particular paywalled site. Using a private browsing window would also allow me to view the site paywall-less in those cases, so I didn't need the add-on in those cases.
alexandernst 8y ago
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?
- brokenmachine 8y ago
  >If it's behind a paywall, it's because the creators want you to pay for the content. Their lack of a viable business model is not my problem. It reminds me of those windscreen washers at traffic lights. Start washing my car windows without my permission then expect to get paid? GTFO. If you send data to my browser then I am entitled to read it.

311 points by AndrewDucker 8y ago

here we go -- gearing up to the decade of censorship 2020 and beyond . . . between this and the EU link sharing tax, I am beginning to wonder if the internet really is the last bastion to freedom of speech

nkozyra 8y ago
Huh? This is a plugin that was removed from the plugin directories.
- thefounder 8y ago
  Yeah, just like you would remove a website from a websites "directory" or better just not display a website that breaks the law or better block it at ISP level! Welcome great firewall! Who said this is censorship?
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    You can install this plugin without repercussion. Let's not be dramatic.
maxerickson 8y ago
Of course it isn't any different in that respect (control by state actors) than any other communication medium. Expecting otherwise is odd.
- realthing 8y ago
  No it isnt. The whole point of the internet is that it exists apart from nations law. its in the name - world wide web.
JohnStrangeII 8y ago
This is not a free speech issue at all, nor are the EU regulations free speech issues. The problem with these laws and their interpretation is that they target the wrong organizations and technologies. If a website is illegal, it needs to be taken down by police. Instead, idiot judges rule that certain DNS entries should be blocked. If you shouldn't be allowed to read some pay-walled journal, then the publisher has to implement proper DRM. Instead, they take down arbitrary plugins from the directories of arbitrary browser makers. It's the publishers' right to ask for money for their products, but it's also their obligation to protect it and ensure that their business model is viable and technically feasible. It's the end of 2018 and lawmakers and executive still don't understand how the Internet works. That's the problem.
- JeanMarcS 8y ago
  I mostly agree with you, but the problem with illegals websites is often that they are illegal in a country but hosted in another. So you can’t really send your own police taking down servers in other countries. So for the DNS blocking it works because it blocks casual users of those website (I’m thinking torrent or streaming sites essentially). Of course when you know a bit how it works you use international DNS. And if you know even more, you use your own :-)
  - AdrianB1 8y ago
    One country cannot police Internet, otherwise China will shut it down tomorrow. If a site is legal in the country where it is hosted, then it is legal and that's it, connecting to Internet assumes you obey this simple rule.
    - shaki-dora 8y ago
      Well, seems like some people don't actually "obey" this rule you just invented. And, for now, they have that other invented rule on their side, the rule of law.
      - AdrianB1 8y ago

kbumsik 8y ago

> Yeah, it got pulled from both chrome's and mozilla's... Maybe we need to change the title?

decasteve 8y ago

This breaks the social contract of the web. If you publish on the web (over HTTP) using HTML (with or without css+js) then you respect the concept of a User-Agent that renders the content on behalf of the user. If you wish to get around this then create another file format and protocol and application/plugin to do so — one that enforces the DRM for the owner. Don’t take agency away from User-Agent.

shaki-dora 8y ago
Would you make the same point for an extension that allows users to easily participate in DDOS attacks? Edit: the link, for the willfully dense, is that some protocol specification does not imply its users’ acceptance of any and all (ab)uses possible. It’s completely different only in that you like one but not the other.
- JoshuaAshton 8y ago
  That's completely and utterly unrelated to what the guy said. He is talking about user-agents and the way you interpret the data you receive from a http(s) request. You're talking about DDOS attacks. There is no logical link here.
- giornogiovanna 8y ago
  Uh... yes? It's not very relevant, but I guess if someone was making some kind of hacktivist extension that did something like that, I wouldn't just take it down from the marketplace.
Angostura 8y ago
Alternatively, the add-ons break the social contract, whereby content creators request payment for their content. If you visit stuff on the web, you respect the concept of a social contract between you and the provide. Don’t try to circumvent their wishes.
- pedrocr 8y ago
  > Alternatively, the add-ons break the social contract, whereby content creators request payment for their content. The site is free to not emit any content before payment is assured. The reason these add-ons are possible is that these sites are trying to have their cake and eat it to. They want to implement the paywall in the user agent so they can still get their content in Google. At the same time some of them are trying to argue for payments from Google for linking to their content. The situation is a mess but it's not about social contracts at all.

thefounder 8y ago

Perhaps we should make copyright/censorship an issue on the next election otherwise we end-up with the worst things from both worlds: DRM from US and censorship from China.

vbezhenar 8y ago

How is blocking paywalls different from blocking ads? I hope that someone will fork Firefox and remove that code which prevents users from installing any addons.

Reason077 8y ago
Good question. Arguably, ad blockers are (in part) responsible for the advent of paywalls in the first place.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  That is a very small part. Trying to replace subscription fees with targeted ads was one of the greatest mistakes made by the publishing industry. Paywalls should have been put in place years ago, and journalists should always have focused on writing quality articles that people are willing to pay for instead of clickbait "experiences" meant to drive ad impressions.
  - Reason077 8y ago
    Were subscription fees ever the primary revenue source for print newspapers and magazines? I was always under the impression that the majority of their revenue came from ads.
    - betterunix2 8y ago
      It depends on which newspapers you are talking about, but what I said was that newspapers should not have tried to replace subscription fees with ads, because subscription fees were never trivial and were always needed for serious newspapers to be profitable. There is also the issue of online ads generating far less revenue than their print counterparts, and the fact that newspaper ads include the formerly profitable classifieds section which now has to compete with things like Craigslist.
Sylos 8y ago
They were told to not anymore host the extension on AMO, but it's still signed by Mozilla (and I doubt they would stop signing future versions), so you can still download and install the extension from elsewhere. Also, Mozilla themselves provide a "fork", i.e. builds compiled with the corresponding flag, that allow unsigned extensions to be installed, after you set "xpinstall.signatures.required" in about:config to false. These builds are Firefox Developer Edition and Firefox Nightly, as well as Unbranded Builds [0] for Beta and Stable. I believe most Linux distributions also compile with this flag, as disallowing unsigned extensions mostly helped against malware on Windows. [0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded_Builds https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...

dooglius 8y ago

Does Mozilla need to actually host the extension? I'm guessing that that is the problem here. Couldn't they just cryptographically sign it, and leave the distribution to a P2P technology like BitTorrent?

betterunix2 8y ago
I am not sure it would make a difference to the courts.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  Firefox is just a platform to run addons, like Windows is OS to run programs. Do you think that Microsoft should curate software allowed for users to run?
  - betterunix2 8y ago
    IANAL but my perspective has been that the courts care more about your ability to control what runs on a "platform" than about who hosts what. So if Firefox in its default configuration will only run addons that Mozilla approves, then the courts might not care about where the addon is hosted or how users technically receive it, and could just order Mozilla not to sign the addon. My personal opinion is that curation is fine if users can opt-out of it. There is value in having someone certifying that the software you are installing is not malware, or even that it meets some threshold for quality (e.g. does not drain the battery), but users should have the ability to pick the curator or to have no curation at all. That said, it is a totally separate argument from whether or not the courts would care about how software is distributed, and totally separate from how the courts will view the role of a software curator (and whether or not courts will insist that curators refuse to certify software that does certain things, like blocking paywalls).
    - Spivak 8y ago
      Wouldn't Mozilla just have to say that any add-on that isn't malware is eligible to be signed and that it's a security feature, not a tool for curation of content.

trollied 8y ago

Just a tangent for you all - does anyone envisage a 2nd parallel internet emerging? Not tor-like, an actual completely separate network?

betterunix2 8y ago
Eric Schmidt suggested this might happen in the future: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-predicts-internet-split-china.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-p...
woah 8y ago
That’s quite a huge tangent. Why? And what could it possibly have to do with the article?
- realthing 8y ago
  Huge tangent indeed. If only someone would open a thread or mailing list to discuss the idea . . . The harrowing thing is, it really does look as though we were / are in the wild west days of internet comms. The more tech savy business and corporations have become, the more they have looked to monetize and lock down the web. This is not what it was supposed to be.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  It seems very related to me. This is another thing we're no longer allowed to do on the current internet. Maybe people enough people would rather build a new internet than pay for digital goods.
DC-3 8y ago
Possibly in the form of a very strict, very semantic, almost RSS-like subset of HTML? Something that almost resembles the reader view many modern browsers will convert articles into?
- realthing 8y ago
  One would imagine this has far less to do with data rendering and more data indexing and filtering (web-crawling access). If you read the link, Schmidts comments related to the bifurcation of the internet, he gives a simple example of two separate internets - version "USA" and version "China". It seems in this scenario, the single source of truth for all web data is sandboxed to protect a nations (or the nations citizens) best interests (akin to modern day China, Iran). The new web would look to live in the shadows, where users can submit and view pre-filtered ideas without meddling from gatekeeps (government officials and money men) The issue with this is data access and the sharing of information becomes limited to those with the "know how"( we are all tech literate these days), or more likely, those with the balls to commit a "crime" and disobey the permissions of "their government". This presents an almost dystopian like scenario where people are afraid to share and receive information their government has not green lighted.

totfz 8y ago

This would not be a problem if Mozilla had sided with users for once and allowed us to install xpi extensions from outside their app store.

INTPenis 8y ago
Are you saying the extensions are signed? Becuase if they're not I can't imagine not being able to side-load them. And if they are, with the amount of Firefox forks we have, it should be trivial to create one that allows for side-loading unsigned or 3rd party signed extensions. Hopefully without too much source modification, just creating a distribution of Firefox would easiest to manage.
- fbender 8y ago
  I‘m pretty sure there is an un-branded release version of Fx on the Mozilla website that allows side-loading and allows disabling the signature verification. I don‘t have a link ready and on mobile so I cannot easily check.
TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
You can if you use the Developer Edition. It's permanently disabled in the normal version because malware would piggyback on the browser to steal passwords and so on. Obviously Mozilla have no problem with people wanting to make their own extensions and so on.
- Krasnol 8y ago
  Weird, I have 63.0.3 as far as I see the normal version and had no problem downloading and with that updating the November version of "bypass-paywalls" which was also affected from the releases page here: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/releases https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/releas...
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    That means it's signed with Mozilla's signature. Actually, I think extensions can maybe be signed by Mozilla even if they're not on addons.mozilla.org.

jtr_47 8y ago

Maybe it is time we stop relying on a central company to provide our browser software. Maybe it is time for people to build or configure their own personal browser, so that the authority to install add-ons is a personal choice and not dictated by a company. If a website has some shitty paywall on their site or article and that can be bypassed, then that site needs to implement something better. Instead what these companies do is make laws that is a cover for their shitty service or lack of good security.

JoshuaAshton 8y ago

In case the repo gets pulled, I'm hosting a mirror here: https://git.nonagon.games/joshua/anti-paywall-mirror https://git.nonagon.games/joshua/anti-paywall-mirror (edit, by pulled, a pun was not intended. I mean in case it gets removed)

monocularvision 8y ago

The publishers want it both ways. They need to publish their full article content for search crawlers to read but don’t want humans to see it. The idea that this is a form of DRM protected by the DMCA is laughable in my opinion, but IANAL.

shaki-dora 8y ago
They mostly just want to survive... But in this case, they specifically want to allow you read maybe a dozen articles per month for free, but also (see above) to eat.
- giornogiovanna 8y ago
  Then implement technological measures to make sure that this is the case. At the very least, don't just make data freely available to the user and expect them not to read it, just because you visually hid it! And if you're serving non-paywall pages to Google bots, that's kind of against Google's policy, isn't it?
  - mike22223333 8y ago
    Not any more. There were changes.
- monochromatic 8y ago
  Their business model has been broken for years. It’s not incumbent on me to help them survive.
  - shaki-dora 8y ago
    Yes, but considering you seem to be keen on reading their content: have you considered that their survival may, just possibly, be in your interest?
    - pedrocr 8y ago

hnaccy 8y ago

Another impacted extension: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues/82 https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues...

zcid 8y ago
Further down the comments is a dl link: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues/82#issuecomment-443179176 https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues... Even if these extensions can still be installed, without being published on Mozilla's addons site, the average user will be unable to find them. It seems like a really bad precedent for Mozilla to accept this without a fight.

AdrianB1 8y ago

So I am allowed to use Developer Tools in any browser and look directly at the HTML, but not use an extension to do the work for me? What is preventing me to View Source for a "paywalled" page?

kibwen 8y ago
DMCA takedown for developer tools coming in 3, 2...

quickben 8y ago

The real problem is Google indexing it. Wasn't there even a rule from Google that you can't serve different content from what the general public is seeing?

giornogiovanna 8y ago
Yes! https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355 It's definitely against their policy in my opinion, but I guess you could make a weak case that this is what the public would see if this was their "first visit".
- justinph 8y ago
  It is not against their policy. They know how to index it and there is schema.org markup for paywalled content. https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/40543 https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/4054...
IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
The problem is people having opinions but lacking the most basic facts... This is about "soft paywalls" that allow you to read maybe a dozen articles per months.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- quickben 8y ago
  Google indexes the entire website, often with multiple visits to the same individual page (to get comments, etc). It definitely doesn't stop at "maybe a dozen" pages a month.

giornogiovanna 8y ago

This extension just seems to strip tracking data and pretend to be a Google bot. It baffles me that this is somehow concerning enough to be taken down. And anyway, isn't making exemptions for Google's robots sort-of against their policy? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355

blakesterz 8y ago
That's exactly what I thought too, not even " sort-of " it seems "without a doubt" against that policy. It seems really tricky for Google to enforce though. Wouldn't they need to send out bots crawling without the GoogleBot agent? That also seems wrong, somehow.
- Forge36 8y ago
  It does seem wrong. I wonder if they could double crawl and penalize sites that throw up a paywal
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    They could add the ability to report sites that do this. That way there would be less sites to double crawl.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  If I recall correctly, this rule is why googling for an article and then clicking on it from Google frequently works. The rule is something like "a user clicking from Google can't see something (meaningfully) different than what the Googlebot sees". So you can paywall direct traffic or links from Reddit or internal links, but that first one from Google is supposed to work.
Confusion 8y ago
You are not allowed to circumvent paywalls, just like you are not allowed to circumvent locks, no matter how easy they are to circumvent. As far as I have always understood, you may publish a locksmithing guide, even an “entering your home when locked out” guide, but not a “how to commit burglary” guide.

abc-xyz 8y ago

We should encourage everyone to share articles/bypass paywalls using outline.com/similar services. Copy paste article content in comments. It's difficult to empathize with publishers after all the shit they've pulled and continue to pull. Most of them could be hosted for ~$10/month but they'd rather engage in shady practices. The qz.com article on the frontpage right now have 30 cookies (18 of which are third-party) and send 67 third-party requests. https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F1480192%2Fmonarch-populations-in-the-us-west-are-down-86-this-year%2F https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fq... ..and that's a direct link to a fucking article, and I just picked the first one I saw on HN's frontpage.. they're all like this and even much worse. Some (e.g. salon) make around 1000 third party requests. It's hard to imagine it wouldn't be just as profitable for them to host their articles with a clean interface (ala outline.com) that included simple ads e.g. one request to doubleclick, no annoying autoplay videos, and a donate form at the bottom of the page.

IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
That's sorta like pushing a drowning swimmer down to stop them thrashing around. I mean... it is going to work. Sort of. I also feel sorry for the terrible burden that http requests seem to be for you. Meanwhile, large swaths of the richest nations no longer have local news. I guess it's a wash...
- abc-xyz 8y ago
  God forbid I care about the privacy of those who're technically incapable of protecting themselves from these evil practices. Edit: as for local publishers, I personally believe they should be government funded and non-profit, but if I had to choose between any publisher (local or otherwise) thriving while violating people's privacy, or not existing at all, then I would surely wish for the latter, and I would hope everyone felt the same way.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Australia has a government funded news org and its fairly good.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

I'm not a lawyer. I don't know the particulars of the law. But I presume "blocking", as in the ads are effectively removed, is key. Instead of blocking them, would hiding them, via a div with a higher z-index? Mind you, that doesn't prevent the tracking. But there are other tools for that. I agree. Ads suck. Maybe there's a legal loophole to avoid them some other way?

eletious 8y ago
think you misunderstand what the extension does - it hid paywalls, not ads

bovermyer 8y ago

Paywalls exist as a solution to the problem of "how do journalists and other content producers get paid for their work?" Anti-paywall addons are an attempt to get something that isn't intended to be free for free. Ignoring the legality of this for a moment, let's consider: is this moral?

sparkie 8y ago
Is it moral for content producers to sell users web browsing habits to advertisers without their explicit consent?
- jocoda 8y ago
  Whose morality? You either enforce your morals or they don't apply. Without a paywall access is free to all. Sites may pretend that there is some moral obligation that visitors have to switch off ad blockers, but that's only the site's opinion, clearly not one that others typically accept. Build a paywall and sites can manage entry based on whatever conditions they wish. Users either log in for some received benefit or go away. But put up a search engine bypass and they open up access and lose total control. Bypassers are unlikely to agree with the site's desires and viewpoint. Sites either control access 100%, by login, IP, etc, and so enforce their particular morality or they have to accept that their world view is not shared by all. Even should sites manage to get a legal framework to enforce this morality, those laws do not have global scope. Not yet anyway.
- bovermyer 8y ago
  My position on this very specific question is: "no." But let's not conflate content producers selling user data with content producers selling access to content.
gohbgl 8y ago
I think that when you send fake data to a server to bypass a paywall (e.g. sending google UA) then you are using the server without the owner's permission, which makes it immoral. But in general I believe that being a journalist does not mean that others have to pay you. You as a journalist have to figure out a business model that works.

burtonator 8y ago

This is why app stores are fundamentally a horrible idea for the web and I'm surprised we aren't more enraged by them. They put ALL the control of which apps can be used in the hands of 3-4 companies. Sure, you can go out and write your own app and side load it but you're only going to have 1-3k users. Additionally, what if you live in a country that doesn't have these "laws" ? why can't people run my app if they want?

sandov 8y ago
I've used this same argument against package managers on Linux many times, but apparently people want to keep doing things the centralized way, because all I get when I do is people telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that package managers and centralized repos are easier to use.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Package managers allow you to very trivially add new repo sources which you often have to do if you want packages newer than the packaged version for your distro.

nextgens 8y ago

I am the author of that add-on ... what would you do in my shoes ? - provide an XPI (that will only benefit the few since the side-loading process is made awkwarder at every point release) ? - fight it ? If so, on what grounds and how ? - something else ?

IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? That's an entirely serious suggestion. I'm not arguing that what you're doing is illegal. I have all sorts of qualms with copyright and its enforcement myself. If I were "copyright czar", movies would get three years, and newspapers maybe a week. But if we wish for copyright-holders to respect the rights of internet users, it would seem to be a winning proposition to maybe not actively work against their attempts to find a compromise. And a "soft paywall" that allows you to read a dozen or so articles per month without subscription seems to be jus that: a compromise, and a reasonable one at that. What do you expect to be the long-term outcome of bypassing such mechanisms? I have trouble of thinking of anything but "soft paywalls" turning into "hard paywalls". Then, we'll be left with the maybe one or two publications we subscribe to. How can such an outcome be in anyone's interest? I know you can bypass these schemes. Yes, they are laughable. I know ads are sometimes annoying. I know large swaths of the press have earned your scorn because they, like, use the wrong JS framework. Or something. But I still don't understand this attitude that appears to go even further than just "I want it for free" to an almost gleeful appreciation of vandalism destroying the foundations of democratic societies.
- hobs 8y ago
  I have a few responses to this, but the most basic is: Please dont tell people what to do on their computers. If your business model is not supportable except by other people willfully hiding information on the client computer, your business model is not good. "Avoiding a paywall that's only half implemented" is not "the destruction of journalism."
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago

sombragris 8y ago

What an utterly stupid trick. So, I didn't even know those extensions existed. Such arrogant behavior made me search and install one of these. Serves them right.

Rumudiez 8y ago
I always appreciate a good example of the Streisand effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  Also known as "don-t-you-dare-complain-about-this-mob-or-an-even-bigger-mob" (...effect)

ianwalter 8y ago

I would rather have a browser plugin that just removed pay walled content from search results anyway. Or one that redirected me to something I would use like Blendle.

anonymousab 8y ago

How is it different from other user agent extensions? Did it bake in a site list?

baroffoos 8y ago
Its marketed as a tool for bypassing paywalls and not just a generic user agent changer

stock_toaster 8y ago

Create a new extension called "block paywall" that prevents users from accidentally visiting paywalled sites.

jpangs88 8y ago

I'm wondering how this is different than add blockers which are allowed in the app stores. In concept it does something very similar: allows the user to circumvent how people get paid for content. I understand that ads can be more dangerous than paywalls but the end result is the same. Is it just that some lawmakers saw one as okay and the other as not?

jimnotgym 8y ago

I'm a bit concerned about the communication here. Last week Mozilla were saying this was an action by a community reviewer.

mosselman 8y ago

How do these add-ons work? For sites with an x-number of free articles a month I have come across an add-on that would clear all local storage for a particular paywalled site. Using a private browsing window would also allow me to view the site paywall-less in those cases, so I didn't need the add-on in those cases.

alexandernst 8y ago

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?

brokenmachine 8y ago
>If it's behind a paywall, it's because the creators want you to pay for the content. Their lack of a viable business model is not my problem. It reminds me of those windscreen washers at traffic lights. Start washing my car windows without my permission then expect to get paid? GTFO. If you send data to my browser then I am entitled to read it.