4 ms·

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 th

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.
betterunix2 8y ago
Sure...except that the page content is loaded before any payment is made or confirmed. Websites probably want this to happen so that some user agents will not be blocked by the paywall e.g. search engine crawlers. Basically it sounds like some publishers want to rewrite the rules of the web to neatly and conveniently serve their interests.
Zak 8y ago
These are competing and potentially incompatible social contracts. As a hacker type who's been on the web a good while, I prefer the former: the client decides how to render content, and the server should not send content it doesn't want rendered. This doesn't necessarily prohibit the use of paywalls: the paywalled site just has to be designed so that it only sends content to clients that have provided evidence of payment rather than relying on the content being rendered in a way that prevents the reader from reading all of it. Much as I'm for standards-compliant HTML rendering, I don't want any specific rendering encoded into law.
giornogiovanna 8y ago
Anybody who tries to show me ads clearly respects neither my time nor my money, so why would I respect theirs? Anyway, getting angry at ad-blocking is pretty silly - it's as if someone threw a pamphlet at me while I was talking to them, and then yelled at me because I didn't read it.
nothis 8y ago
"We're sending data to your computer but you mustn't look! Promise!" I'm not sure how the addon worked, if there's some trickery going on, but I'm long waiting for a lawsuit against ad blockers that could get heated.
- jeremyjh 8y ago
  This has nothing to do with ad blockers, or indeed advertising at all. The way it works is they set the user-agent to one used by search engines. The website thinks you are Google, so they give you the content for free because they want Google to index their proprietary content.
  - mathnmusic 8y ago
    How long before Google switches to digitally signed crawling requests?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 8y ago
It's obviously not a "request" if they're making legal threats. And it's not payment they're demanding, it's the ability to track anybody who visits their site, whether or not you agree to be tracked. And it's not part of any social contract I agreed to; the (very short) history of the web is an ongoing negotiation. Paywalls were invented this decade. This plugin is part of that negotiation. Browsers already have a mechanism for authorizing access to content. Many mechanisms, really. If a company chooses to use an unreliable mechanism, I don't think we are morally obligate to roll over and do what they want.
- visarga 8y ago
  > Paywalls were invented this decade. Paywalls were used in adult industry even before the 2000's.
- DanBC 8y ago
  > Paywalls were invented this decade. Compuserve paywalled all of their content way back in the 1980s.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    Sorry, I specifically mean the "soft" paywall, which is the kind at issue here. If these publishers had required people to log in, no browser extension could bypass that.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  This is mostly about "soft" paywalls, allowing you to read maybe a dozen articles per month without paying. There is currently no way I know of allowing this functionality that is meaningfully "reliable". At least not without erecting new barriers such as mandatory registration (and verification). So you, and everyone else, seem to be demanding publishers just switch to "absolute paywalls". You will then have strictly less access than before. How is that supposed to be better?
  - Zak 8y ago
    Prohibiting paywall bypass software violates the principle that the client dictates how web pages are rendered, or requires carving out a special exception just for the publishing industry. Viewed under a magnifying glass, it seems like a good thing to ensure the publishing industry can use soft paywalls, but taking a broader view, I think that breaks the web. I don't think soft paywalls are worth breaking the web, and even more broadly, governments should only regulate what users can do with data willingly sent to their computers in very exceptional circumstances.
na85 8y ago
Why aren't they using proper access control, then?
monochromatic 8y ago
They can request it. I don’t necessarily agree to it.
austincheney 8y ago
HTTP is public by default and SMTP is private by default. The laws respecting this in the US are pretty solid, especially for email. In the US privacy generally trumps public access which allows email to retain its private by default status even if served over HTTP (web mail). That said anybody attempting to make parts of content non-pubic in HTTP without appropriate security restrictions are void the protections of law. The remedy for this is to ensure necessary security is in place so that non-pubic content is limited to account and session, which then puts part of the burden on the end user to ensure they restrict the credentials that provide access. Content, not already covered, served over HTTP without the necessary security in place is not private. There is a clause in the DCMA that makes it illegal to circumvent security controls. The stipulation there is that the security controls in question must be adequate and reasonable. Dropping a CSS model over some content is not a valid security control, and thus has no legal protection. Of course everything regarding DCMA is open to argument at legal expense.
- otterley 8y ago
  Attorney here! (Not providing legal counsel, though.) It’s a common misconception that the word “effective,” as used in the respective legislation, was intended to mean “successful” or “always cause.” Rather, it’s always been interpreted to mean, “is designed to have the effect of.” The fact that the measure is not always successful or is breakable does not make the law no longer applicable; that would be an absurd result. The law isn’t interpreted literally when the result would be absurd; this is doctrine that goes back to at least 1892 and even further back to English common law. See, e.g., Holy Trinity Church v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892). Engineers too often assume that the text of the law means what they think it means. This is one of those cases where a lack of legal education serves them poorly and leads them to incorrect conclusions.
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Quick question. If one group intends a grossly inadequate effort to be a layer of security and another party ignores that effort who is in error? It could be argued that if the supposed security measure is so poorly conceived the bypassing party presumed it to be an error and thus used their software knowledge to mitigate the defect. On one hand there is an intentional barrier to restrict access to content while on the other hand the intention is to serve content and so the bypassing party assists that service intention. I am of the bias that a space of technology cannot be summarily redefined by a single group interest merely to compensate their financial insecurity.
naasking 8y ago
> Alternatively, the add-ons break the social contract, whereby content creators request payment for their content. That's what access control is for. If you don't secure your content, you don't get to whine that someone is reading without paying.
cabalamat 8y ago
> If you visit stuff on the web, you respect the concept of a social contract between you and the provide. If I send a site an http GET request, and that site responds by giving me some data, then that site has given me implied consent to look at the data. If they don't want me to look at it, they shouldn't have given me it.
- kjsthree 8y ago
  ^ THIS! I don’t see how the situation is in any way more complicated. Real-world analogies can get pretty squirrelly but it would be quite literally like the following. Man standing on the sidewalk outside a store yells into the store at the shopkeeper “hey there, can I have some free fish?” Shopkeeper yells back “sure!” and tosses a fish to the man on the sidewalk. Add more yelling back and forth for TLS handshake. At this point, the man on the sidewalk can do whatever he wants with the fish. It was freely given.
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    Off topic: isn't this how user privacy works too though? People complain about companies like Google and Facebook "stealing their data," but it's their browsers sending out the data. If users don't want Google to have the data then they shouldn't send it to Google.
    - ric2b 8y ago
      Yes it is, and that's why several browsers have been working hard to protect user privacy without impacting convenience too much.
    - brokenmachine 8y ago
      This could have implications for Google. Basically this example, if accepted in law, would mean that if you want your data to be private then Google would be expected to respect that, even if you sent them that data in the clear. It's a ridiculous outcome.
- Angostura 8y ago

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.

betterunix2 8y ago

Sure...except that the page content is loaded before any payment is made or confirmed. Websites probably want this to happen so that some user agents will not be blocked by the paywall e.g. search engine crawlers. Basically it sounds like some publishers want to rewrite the rules of the web to neatly and conveniently serve their interests.

Zak 8y ago

These are competing and potentially incompatible social contracts. As a hacker type who's been on the web a good while, I prefer the former: the client decides how to render content, and the server should not send content it doesn't want rendered. This doesn't necessarily prohibit the use of paywalls: the paywalled site just has to be designed so that it only sends content to clients that have provided evidence of payment rather than relying on the content being rendered in a way that prevents the reader from reading all of it. Much as I'm for standards-compliant HTML rendering, I don't want any specific rendering encoded into law.

giornogiovanna 8y ago

Anybody who tries to show me ads clearly respects neither my time nor my money, so why would I respect theirs? Anyway, getting angry at ad-blocking is pretty silly - it's as if someone threw a pamphlet at me while I was talking to them, and then yelled at me because I didn't read it.

nothis 8y ago

"We're sending data to your computer but you mustn't look! Promise!" I'm not sure how the addon worked, if there's some trickery going on, but I'm long waiting for a lawsuit against ad blockers that could get heated.

jeremyjh 8y ago
This has nothing to do with ad blockers, or indeed advertising at all. The way it works is they set the user-agent to one used by search engines. The website thinks you are Google, so they give you the content for free because they want Google to index their proprietary content.
- mathnmusic 8y ago
  How long before Google switches to digitally signed crawling requests?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

wpietri 8y ago

It's obviously not a "request" if they're making legal threats. And it's not payment they're demanding, it's the ability to track anybody who visits their site, whether or not you agree to be tracked. And it's not part of any social contract I agreed to; the (very short) history of the web is an ongoing negotiation. Paywalls were invented this decade. This plugin is part of that negotiation. Browsers already have a mechanism for authorizing access to content. Many mechanisms, really. If a company chooses to use an unreliable mechanism, I don't think we are morally obligate to roll over and do what they want.

visarga 8y ago
> Paywalls were invented this decade. Paywalls were used in adult industry even before the 2000's.
DanBC 8y ago
> Paywalls were invented this decade. Compuserve paywalled all of their content way back in the 1980s.
- wpietri 8y ago
  Sorry, I specifically mean the "soft" paywall, which is the kind at issue here. If these publishers had required people to log in, no browser extension could bypass that.
IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
This is mostly about "soft" paywalls, allowing you to read maybe a dozen articles per month without paying. There is currently no way I know of allowing this functionality that is meaningfully "reliable". At least not without erecting new barriers such as mandatory registration (and verification). So you, and everyone else, seem to be demanding publishers just switch to "absolute paywalls". You will then have strictly less access than before. How is that supposed to be better?
- Zak 8y ago
  Prohibiting paywall bypass software violates the principle that the client dictates how web pages are rendered, or requires carving out a special exception just for the publishing industry. Viewed under a magnifying glass, it seems like a good thing to ensure the publishing industry can use soft paywalls, but taking a broader view, I think that breaks the web. I don't think soft paywalls are worth breaking the web, and even more broadly, governments should only regulate what users can do with data willingly sent to their computers in very exceptional circumstances.

na85 8y ago

Why aren't they using proper access control, then?

monochromatic 8y ago

They can request it. I don’t necessarily agree to it.

austincheney 8y ago

HTTP is public by default and SMTP is private by default. The laws respecting this in the US are pretty solid, especially for email. In the US privacy generally trumps public access which allows email to retain its private by default status even if served over HTTP (web mail). That said anybody attempting to make parts of content non-pubic in HTTP without appropriate security restrictions are void the protections of law. The remedy for this is to ensure necessary security is in place so that non-pubic content is limited to account and session, which then puts part of the burden on the end user to ensure they restrict the credentials that provide access. Content, not already covered, served over HTTP without the necessary security in place is not private. There is a clause in the DCMA that makes it illegal to circumvent security controls. The stipulation there is that the security controls in question must be adequate and reasonable. Dropping a CSS model over some content is not a valid security control, and thus has no legal protection. Of course everything regarding DCMA is open to argument at legal expense.

otterley 8y ago
Attorney here! (Not providing legal counsel, though.) It’s a common misconception that the word “effective,” as used in the respective legislation, was intended to mean “successful” or “always cause.” Rather, it’s always been interpreted to mean, “is designed to have the effect of.” The fact that the measure is not always successful or is breakable does not make the law no longer applicable; that would be an absurd result. The law isn’t interpreted literally when the result would be absurd; this is doctrine that goes back to at least 1892 and even further back to English common law. See, e.g., Holy Trinity Church v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892). Engineers too often assume that the text of the law means what they think it means. This is one of those cases where a lack of legal education serves them poorly and leads them to incorrect conclusions.
- austincheney 8y ago
  Quick question. If one group intends a grossly inadequate effort to be a layer of security and another party ignores that effort who is in error? It could be argued that if the supposed security measure is so poorly conceived the bypassing party presumed it to be an error and thus used their software knowledge to mitigate the defect. On one hand there is an intentional barrier to restrict access to content while on the other hand the intention is to serve content and so the bypassing party assists that service intention. I am of the bias that a space of technology cannot be summarily redefined by a single group interest merely to compensate their financial insecurity.

naasking 8y ago

> Alternatively, the add-ons break the social contract, whereby content creators request payment for their content. That's what access control is for. If you don't secure your content, you don't get to whine that someone is reading without paying.

cabalamat 8y ago

> If you visit stuff on the web, you respect the concept of a social contract between you and the provide. If I send a site an http GET request, and that site responds by giving me some data, then that site has given me implied consent to look at the data. If they don't want me to look at it, they shouldn't have given me it.

kjsthree 8y ago
^ THIS! I don’t see how the situation is in any way more complicated. Real-world analogies can get pretty squirrelly but it would be quite literally like the following. Man standing on the sidewalk outside a store yells into the store at the shopkeeper “hey there, can I have some free fish?” Shopkeeper yells back “sure!” and tosses a fish to the man on the sidewalk. Add more yelling back and forth for TLS handshake. At this point, the man on the sidewalk can do whatever he wants with the fish. It was freely given.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  Off topic: isn't this how user privacy works too though? People complain about companies like Google and Facebook "stealing their data," but it's their browsers sending out the data. If users don't want Google to have the data then they shouldn't send it to Google.
  - ric2b 8y ago
    Yes it is, and that's why several browsers have been working hard to protect user privacy without impacting convenience too much.
  - brokenmachine 8y ago
    This could have implications for Google. Basically this example, if accepted in law, would mean that if you want your data to be private then Google would be expected to respect that, even if you sent them that data in the clear. It's a ridiculous outcome.
Angostura 8y ago