5 ms·

Give the source code to the extension to a developer located in an impossible legal jurisdiction like Afghanistan. Let them publish it. Good luck to Facebook hi

Give the source code to the extension to a developer located in an impossible legal jurisdiction like Afghanistan. Let them publish it. Good luck to Facebook hiring a lawyer and trying its luck in the Taliban's court system. Even before the collapse of the previous government in Kabul it would have been a near impossibility.

Eikon 5y ago
And then, where to publish it? On a website based in an American jurisdiction? On some browser extension store? Great idea.
- walrus01 5y ago
  Individual civilian afghans are not embargoed by US law - it's not Iran. The Taliban are, of course, embargoed and listed in various things like the OFAC list. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghans have gmail accounts, many companies use google workspace or office365, etc. For example.
  - notatoad 5y ago
    I think the point was that having an Afghani publish the source wouldn't really accomplish anything because Facebook could just go after whatever service was used to publish it, instead of the person who published it. An Afghani can access GitHub or the chrome extension store, but those are both run by American companies who will obey Facebook's takedown requests.
    - 14 5y ago
      What about torrenting? Why not offer is somewhere a bit more decentralized?
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
        Now you're into territory where yes, the extension is available, but nobody can find it and only the very technically astute will be able and willing to install it. FB achieves 99.9% of their goal.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      At least that shifts the dangerous legal-financial burden onto google's lawyers, if they want to fight a takedown request to remove an extension from the extension store.
      - colejohnson66 5y ago
        I doubt Google would fight it and would just take it down no questions asked
        jessaustin 5y ago
        A takedown request is only binding on a well-capitalized firm like Google if it is based on some legal rationale that could survive a test in court. It isn't clear that the request under discussion has such a rationale. At the very least Google would take this to some court and force a judge to say something about it. Once a firm grows accustomed to following orders from their competitors, bad times lie ahead.
        int_19h 5y ago
        But why would Google bother to waste time and resources figuring out if it's actually valid or not? They don't seem to do that on YouTube.
        jessaustin 5y ago
        YouTube obeys DMCA with respect to copyrighted media. DMCA is an established system that allows services like YouTube to exist in the first place. The threat letter doesn't mention DMCA or copyright, because this extension couldn't possibly be perceived as infringing on copyright. Instead it speculates about trademarks and TOS violations. There isn't a standardized takedown regime related to those. TOS is not law. It's true that some low-level manager in the chrome web store organization might just submit to this sort of letter. It would be a mistake for such a manager to ever receive this sort of letter. This is for the legal department. There's no way that a competent general counsel would decide that the best strategic move is to just follow the orders of major competitors. Google already employs dozens of lawyers; it's not costly to send a couple to court. In this case, the PR alone would be a huge win. IANAL.
    - tbeseda 5y ago
      Afghan* Afghani is the currency
      - notatoad 5y ago
        oh, TIL. thanks for the correction.
JulianMorrison 5y ago
Do you want a Facebook own-brand drone army? Because this is how you get one.
- notatoad 5y ago
  Meh, given current Facebook PR trends I give it about a week before we learn they've already got one.
  - aaroninsf 5y ago
    Delivery drone can deliver quite a range of things.
    - JulianMorrison 5y ago
      "Our new fleet of stand-off delivery drones and inertially guided gliding packages can accurately drop your purchase onto your front lawn from 31,000 feet"
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Free clay pigeon shooting? Sure!
- jessaustin 5y ago
  So the MVP drones will do what twenty years of trillion-dollar brutality couldn't do? Wow you seem to have an even lower opinion of the effectiveness of USA military than I do... I suspect Taliban would laugh at this idea.
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    I mean #1 you missed the bit where I'm not being serious? But #2, the US military is just fine at blowing up specific named people in specific locations. It's trying to mould an entire nation with their own ideas and traditions into a carbon copy of America that they're not great at. Facebook, I think, would avoid this trap.
FromTheSteppe 5y ago
I'm a developer in Iran willing to do this, email in the profile, just in case the owner wants to and reads this.
- 650REDHAIR 5y ago
  I'll donate to this project.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Donating money to a project in Iran may be legally hairy for Americans. Check the situation before doing so. I am all for helping worthwhile projects financially, but international politics is a mess.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - walrus01 5y ago
      I've seen a case where somebody had their zelle or venmo account permanently removed for sending a small transfer to their friend with the description "for the cubans" - they were paying their buddy back for an order of sandwiches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_sandwich
      - short12 5y ago
        I've never seen a bank or credit card company put in any effort regarding cuban cigars. A few of the best shops are clearly illegal just because of the name alone. But they all accept visa and Mastercard You don't even need to bother with h dark web and cryptocurrency. It will just flat out show up on your bill without issue.
        mthoms 5y ago
        I think they might have interpreted it as "please give this money to the Cubans". Which, AFAIK is (was?) illegal in the US.
mrtksn 5y ago
That's actually... interesting. It's a well established tactic to go to another country and publish your stuff from there if you like to keep annoying a government or institution. You know, Snowden is in Russia, some Russian journalists are in EU countries. It happens all the time since ever. What if someone creates a Telegram group where developers from hostile countries(like US&Iran, UK&Russia, Japan&China) pass each other projects that are not obviously illegal but not feasible due to risk of persecution? In this case, If FB thinks it has a case can try its luck by sending Google a scary looking letter then proceed to compel Google to remove the extension by court order.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Oh yeah, find someone that wants to be a target of a major US corporation in Afghanistan/third world. You forget we have Guantanamo where people were "renditioned" with little or no legal basis either in the US or otherwise, and I believe there are people in Guantanamo that have no publicly provided evidence to be there? All it takes is waiting for some politically opportune reason to enact a little dragnet and getting someone on some CIA list with little evidence, and BAM, You're in something like Guantanamo or even worse (client torture security services, assassination, etc). Yes we withdrew forces, but we've been there a decade and likely have a large network of CIA contacts that would kill or injure a random Afghan civilian. The US Government is a very very very very dangerous entity to anyone in the third world should you get on their radar. They are dangerous to US citizens with the Padilla case, antiterrorism law overreach, no fly lists, and a variety of other harassment techniques. The state department and CIA are power extensions of the corporate elite in the United States. We have toppled regimes for oil... minerals... even bananas. Russia would be far better.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  I have family there, let me know if I can help.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Better yet: anonymous git hosting as a tor hidden service. Now there's nothing they can do but rage at all the "unauthorized" extensions giving users control over their little platform.
manquer 5y ago
Even better fund organizations like EFF to take cases like this and make sure there is legal precedent that gives a strong footing to all developers. Hiding in other countries is a not sustainable solution, they are going to force extension stores to remove it etc payment gateway not to process you, pushing you as a dev to the fringes and silence others The chilling effect is the real aim, they are effectively signaling that they can come after anyone who pisses their business model of.

Eikon 5y ago

And then, where to publish it? On a website based in an American jurisdiction? On some browser extension store? Great idea.

walrus01 5y ago
Individual civilian afghans are not embargoed by US law - it's not Iran. The Taliban are, of course, embargoed and listed in various things like the OFAC list. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghans have gmail accounts, many companies use google workspace or office365, etc. For example.
- notatoad 5y ago
  I think the point was that having an Afghani publish the source wouldn't really accomplish anything because Facebook could just go after whatever service was used to publish it, instead of the person who published it. An Afghani can access GitHub or the chrome extension store, but those are both run by American companies who will obey Facebook's takedown requests.
  - 14 5y ago
    What about torrenting? Why not offer is somewhere a bit more decentralized?
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Now you're into territory where yes, the extension is available, but nobody can find it and only the very technically astute will be able and willing to install it. FB achieves 99.9% of their goal.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    At least that shifts the dangerous legal-financial burden onto google's lawyers, if they want to fight a takedown request to remove an extension from the extension store.
    - colejohnson66 5y ago
      I doubt Google would fight it and would just take it down no questions asked
      - jessaustin 5y ago
        A takedown request is only binding on a well-capitalized firm like Google if it is based on some legal rationale that could survive a test in court. It isn't clear that the request under discussion has such a rationale. At the very least Google would take this to some court and force a judge to say something about it. Once a firm grows accustomed to following orders from their competitors, bad times lie ahead.
        int_19h 5y ago
        But why would Google bother to waste time and resources figuring out if it's actually valid or not? They don't seem to do that on YouTube.
        jessaustin 5y ago
        YouTube obeys DMCA with respect to copyrighted media. DMCA is an established system that allows services like YouTube to exist in the first place. The threat letter doesn't mention DMCA or copyright, because this extension couldn't possibly be perceived as infringing on copyright. Instead it speculates about trademarks and TOS violations. There isn't a standardized takedown regime related to those. TOS is not law. It's true that some low-level manager in the chrome web store organization might just submit to this sort of letter. It would be a mistake for such a manager to ever receive this sort of letter. This is for the legal department. There's no way that a competent general counsel would decide that the best strategic move is to just follow the orders of major competitors. Google already employs dozens of lawyers; it's not costly to send a couple to court. In this case, the PR alone would be a huge win. IANAL.
  - tbeseda 5y ago
    Afghan* Afghani is the currency
    - notatoad 5y ago
      oh, TIL. thanks for the correction.

JulianMorrison 5y ago

Do you want a Facebook own-brand drone army? Because this is how you get one.

notatoad 5y ago
Meh, given current Facebook PR trends I give it about a week before we learn they've already got one.
- aaroninsf 5y ago
  Delivery drone can deliver quite a range of things.
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    "Our new fleet of stand-off delivery drones and inertially guided gliding packages can accurately drop your purchase onto your front lawn from 31,000 feet"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
quickthrower2 5y ago
Free clay pigeon shooting? Sure!
jessaustin 5y ago
So the MVP drones will do what twenty years of trillion-dollar brutality couldn't do? Wow you seem to have an even lower opinion of the effectiveness of USA military than I do... I suspect Taliban would laugh at this idea.
- JulianMorrison 5y ago
  I mean #1 you missed the bit where I'm not being serious? But #2, the US military is just fine at blowing up specific named people in specific locations. It's trying to mould an entire nation with their own ideas and traditions into a carbon copy of America that they're not great at. Facebook, I think, would avoid this trap.

FromTheSteppe 5y ago

I'm a developer in Iran willing to do this, email in the profile, just in case the owner wants to and reads this.

650REDHAIR 5y ago
I'll donate to this project.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Donating money to a project in Iran may be legally hairy for Americans. Check the situation before doing so. I am all for helping worthwhile projects financially, but international politics is a mess.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - walrus01 5y ago
    I've seen a case where somebody had their zelle or venmo account permanently removed for sending a small transfer to their friend with the description "for the cubans" - they were paying their buddy back for an order of sandwiches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_sandwich
    - short12 5y ago
      I've never seen a bank or credit card company put in any effort regarding cuban cigars. A few of the best shops are clearly illegal just because of the name alone. But they all accept visa and Mastercard You don't even need to bother with h dark web and cryptocurrency. It will just flat out show up on your bill without issue.
      - mthoms 5y ago
        I think they might have interpreted it as "please give this money to the Cubans". Which, AFAIK is (was?) illegal in the US.

mrtksn 5y ago

That's actually... interesting. It's a well established tactic to go to another country and publish your stuff from there if you like to keep annoying a government or institution. You know, Snowden is in Russia, some Russian journalists are in EU countries. It happens all the time since ever. What if someone creates a Telegram group where developers from hostile countries(like US&Iran, UK&Russia, Japan&China) pass each other projects that are not obviously illegal but not feasible due to risk of persecution? In this case, If FB thinks it has a case can try its luck by sending Google a scary looking letter then proceed to compel Google to remove the extension by court order.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Oh yeah, find someone that wants to be a target of a major US corporation in Afghanistan/third world. You forget we have Guantanamo where people were "renditioned" with little or no legal basis either in the US or otherwise, and I believe there are people in Guantanamo that have no publicly provided evidence to be there? All it takes is waiting for some politically opportune reason to enact a little dragnet and getting someone on some CIA list with little evidence, and BAM, You're in something like Guantanamo or even worse (client torture security services, assassination, etc). Yes we withdrew forces, but we've been there a decade and likely have a large network of CIA contacts that would kill or injure a random Afghan civilian. The US Government is a very very very very dangerous entity to anyone in the third world should you get on their radar. They are dangerous to US citizens with the Padilla case, antiterrorism law overreach, no fly lists, and a variety of other harassment techniques. The state department and CIA are power extensions of the corporate elite in the United States. We have toppled regimes for oil... minerals... even bananas. Russia would be far better.

rpmisms 5y ago
I have family there, let me know if I can help.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Better yet: anonymous git hosting as a tor hidden service. Now there's nothing they can do but rage at all the "unauthorized" extensions giving users control over their little platform.

manquer 5y ago

Even better fund organizations like EFF to take cases like this and make sure there is legal precedent that gives a strong footing to all developers. Hiding in other countries is a not sustainable solution, they are going to force extension stores to remove it etc payment gateway not to process you, pushing you as a dev to the fringes and silence others The chilling effect is the real aim, they are effectively signaling that they can come after anyone who pisses their business model of.