As a loosely related note, there has been problems in the past where people come up with meanings for hand gestures without knowing the signed language of the region they are in, which leads to people misunderstanding something a person is signing as something completely different. Although probably not a problem in this case, just something to consider if you ever are so inclined to make a manual language.

If anyone was curious in ASL this is basically "B -> M", not that that was on purpose, just a different way this could be interpreted.

> Does the Signal for Help stand for something in a sign language?

> The Signal For Help is not meant to refer to any words, letters, or ideas in American Sign Language (ASL) or other sign languages. It is designed as a single hand motion someone can make during a video call to silently communicate they need support. Deaf community members were consulted on the Signal for Help prior to the launch of the campaign to check in about using this hand gesture.

https://canadianwomen.org/signal-for-help/

Really? I'm not deaf, but I did take 3 semesters of ASL, and knew a lot of deaf people. In my experience, fingerspelling is incredibly common.

It isn't that people spell everything, but is very common to spell a very specific word, especially for something technical, that one of your following signs will represent. You might spell "Macbook M1", and then use the sign for computer in the rest of the conversation.

I've also found that many people that weren't born deaf, but went deaf later, or that had hearing parents that didn't really help them, often don't know ASL well. It was common for someone to not recognize a sign and the other person would spell out what it was.

A funny oddity about spelling and the deaf. You might (at least I did) think that since they spell things out far more often than we do in spoken English that they'd know how to spell well. That is generally not the case unless the person was raised by hearing people.

I knew a couple where the husband was CODA (child of a deaf adult, both parents) but could hear/speak, and the wife was deaf but was raised by hearing parents. She actually could spell well, but he couldn't, and that was very atypical.

Often times, just like when reading, one may not notice every single letter in a given word, but with the sequence of letters, autocorrect, and context, the meaning is usually clear.

It never occurred to me that this could apply to ASL.

edit: https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

(1)https://www.babysignlanguage.com/dictionary/poop/ (2)https://www.handspeak.com/word/search/index.php?id=5860

Regarding the person's expressions, it's common in ASL to employ very dramatic facial expressions to assist and augment the signs themselves to help the "listener" arrive at the correct understanding and feeling.

What? It's a common euphemism for "bowel movement"; one of the most likely things to be spoken as a letter sequence rather than a word.

Mainly names, no?

"Entombment" is spelled with -bm-, but the b is not pronounced. (As is also true of the root word "tomb".)

What if an abuser learns about the signal?

As the signal is shared and becomes known by the public, there is a risk that an abuser might learn about it. People in abusive situations are also often closely monitored by the person harming them, and they may not always feel safe enough to use the signal.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for everyone facing abuse. Everyone faces their own unique circumstance. The Signal for Help is one tool some people may be able to use, some of the time, to indicate they need help without leaving a digital trace.

It is important that people reach out for support if and when they feel ready, and they should do it in the ways that feel safest for them. People supporting them should be ready to help without judgement, and they should follow the lead of the person who needs help.

https://canadianwomen.org/signal-for-help/

In this case, he was driving and presumably looking ahead 99% of the time.

I'm so glad that the signal worked in this case, but you're absolutely correct: the problem with clandestine signals like this is that they need to be somewhat widely known to be effective, but if they become too widely known they become ineffective and even dangerous (since the bad actor would likely know the signal and intent).

I've heard stories about prevented tragedies via "code word" drink orders at bars -- maybe that tactic could be more widely applied (bars, restaurants, hotels, gas stations, etc.)

Source (as an example): https://twitter.com/iizzzzzi/status/788387942242914305

If they would not share until I paid, or did something sketchy other than requesting anonymity then I would probably consider it more on the hostile side, but not just because they didn't want to share their true name.

I think we need to start judging how good a standard is by how easy it is to implement for its intended purpose.

The purpose of IPv6 was to superscede IPv4. 25 years later, only 1/4 of the top sites from this link are IPv6 enabled. That's... well, at some point you have to stop blaming lazy sysadmins or stubborn vendors and start considering that it's genuinely just a bad and hard to understand standard.

In 2050 we'll still be on IPv4. That's how bad I think IPv6 is. Technically impressive? Sure. Viable as an understandable network paradigm and designed for widespread real-life use? Looking like no.

32bit IPv4 gives us 4.2 billion IP addresses (although there are fewer usable addresses due to reservations etc.). If we would have just tacked on another byte we'd have 1 trillion (theoretical) IP addresses. Two extra bytes and we'd have some number I don't even know the name of (~2.7e14).

Changing from 213.113.223.023 to 142.213.113.223.023 is a lot less invasive, both for users and implementations (although increasing the address space isn't necessarily easy, it doesn't require an entire new stack).

Now, these other IPv6 changes aren't necessarily bad and also address real problems as well, but it seems IPv6 changes too much in one step for its own good. In this regard, it's not that dissimilar to Python 3 (except even worse!)

Also: one think that struck me about that list is that sites who do implement IPv6 are all Western, and that none of the Asian (mostly Chinese) sites implement IPv6. You'd expect it to be the other way round because Asian/Chinese would benefit a lot more from IPv6 since they have fewer allocated addresses, and their infrastructure also tends to be newer so legacy hardware is less of a concern. I don't know what this means or why this is the case though.

Perhaps. IPv6 had more goals than just increasing the address space. Some of these goals were interdependent; for example, just increasing the address space without doing something about routing table complexity would have been a recipe for disaster, which is part of the reason why IPv6 uses much longer addresses with a fixed number of bits reserved for the local subnet, and why it also strongly discourages the non-hierarchical routing which has become commonplace in IPv4.

> Changing from 213.113.223.023 to 142.213.113.223.023 is a lot less invasive, both for users and implementations….

I would say 2602:7b:294e:d207::1 isn't much worse to remember or type than a dotted-quintet (based on, but not equal to, one of my real IPv6 addresses). Implementations don't have any issue with 128-bit addresses, and probably prefer that over an odd size like 40 bits due to alignment. Users usually don't have any reason to care about IP addresses; that's what DNS and mDNS are for. Or copy & paste if you absolutely must work with raw addresses.

> (although increasing the address space isn't necessarily easy, it doesn't require an entire new stack)

In practice, it does. You could certainly model it more closely on the original protocol, but the systems wouldn't be interoperable. System calls, library APIs, applications, and GUIs would all need to change. You'd have to rebuild all the routing hardware and redesign any protocols that embed IP addresses. Basically everything that needed to be updated to work with IPv6 would still need to be updated to work with "IPv4+1B". The changes might be smaller but it's the fact that you need to change these things at all that makes the process so difficult.

There are some other changes in IPv6 that are more debatable, like replacing DHCP with SLAAC when we could have probably just used a straightforward IPv6 adaptation of DHCPv4, at least in the beginning. SLAAC strikes me as the sort of thing that could have been deployed separately once IPv6 adoption was well underway. But I wouldn't say that these minor differences represent significant obstacles to IPv6 adoption.

It is interesting that most of Asia is trailing somewhat behind, whereas India is at the top of Akamai's charts for IPv6 adoption[0].

[0] https://www.akamai.com/visualizations/state-of-the-internet-...

What is the sales pitch you would bring to the CEO of a Fortune 500?

When you buy or merge companies, and they both have RFC 1918 addresses, you'll probably have a conflict between the two entities. You'll probably have to implement NAT with-in your own network and hope the two sides don't have to talk to each other that much. (Or you completely re-IP the acquisition.)

With IPv6, either the companies will be using their own PI IPv6 space and/or they will be using unique ULA prefixes, so the chance of conflicts will be very small.

This at least was one of the business cases for Wells Fargo, "the fourth largest bank in the United States by total assets and is one of the largest as ranked by bank deposits and market capitalization":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzTWjNUb4H4

If an internet service needs to distinguish users by IP address, say for spam fighting reasons, then IPv6 will provide finer granularity because the addresses are not shared by multiple users. Depending on how the ISP implements CGNAT, IPv6 may also improve performance and geolocation accuracy.

(They'd also be doing those ISPs a favor, because offloading traffic to IPv6 lowers the operating costs of CGNAT.)

I love IPv6 btw. I just don't think you'll see anything meaningful happen until FAANG drop IPv4 support. Imagine that. People would convert pretty quick if Google couldn't crawl your site or you couldn't buy an iPhone without IPv6...

IPv4 addresses are expensive right now. Registries run out of new allocations years ago, so if you ask them you'll be put in a waiting list[1] hoping one for a block to be recovered. To get one right know you have to go on the market and negotiate a transfer: blocks are selling at ~50$/address right now. The price more than doubled in the last year or so: people are even speculating on it [2].

[1]: https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/ipv4/ipv4-pool

[2]: https://teddit.net/r/investing/comments/qdple3/i_am_planning...

https://www.internetgovernance.org/2021/08/19/a-fight-over-c...

(Although, people rent apartments with break-even periods well beyond 10 years, so maybe 2-3 is still fine.)

This has been happening for years with VPSes.

mDNS helps since you can use hostname.local without having to set up a DNS server. I was going to make a joke blog post about using ipv4 addresses as hostnames so you can "keep using ipv4" while actually using ipv6, but I found you can't have "." in hostnames, so maybe instead use "-".

  [Unit]
  Description=DNS-SD Proxy
  After=network.target network.service

  [Service]
  Type=simple
  DynamicUser=yes
  ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/mdns-discovery-proxy.py home.arpa 35353
  Restart=always
  RestartSec=30

  [Install]
  WantedBy=multi-user.target

  zone "home.arpa" {
    type forward;
    forward only;
    forwarders { 127.0.0.1 port 35353; };
  };

ProtonVPN is also at least a bit better than other commercial VPNs, specifically the "Secure Core" feature is quite good. Proton is one of only like two or three companies I actually trust when it comes to their security and honesty.

The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else. It's complete abuse of process, and really should be dealt with more harshly than it is.

How is this legal in any shape or form? It is a browser extension, running on users' browsers, installed intentionally by his users. This is insane. The level of arrogance and entitlement here is mind blowing.

Yeah. They put a server on the internet but we're not supposed to talk to it. We can only do it on their terms. Gotta control those users so they don't hurt a billion dollar company's business interests.

I remember the pirate bay's responses to legal threats. That's exactly the kind of reply Facebook deserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Here is an old archive link to some: https://web.archive.org/web/20111223101839/http://thepirateb...

The problem here seems to be that the material is unreleased? If that is the case, you can easily fix the problem by releasing it. We'll be more than glad to help you distribute it - free of charge! - to our users.

Thank you for the link. Their responses are hilarious, haha

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92/

I don't think so. Users simply don't have the power to negotiate these contracts. These "take it or leave it" deals are abusive. Especially since many times these platforms have network effects so strong you need to be part of them in order to not fail at life. Under these conditions, nobody can truly consent to anything. These "terms" should not even apply. Nobody even reads them, it doesn't matter what they say because it won't change the fact they need to be on Facebook because of family, work, school, whatever. They click "agree" not because they agree but because the sign up form won't submit if they don't.

So technology that lets us alter the deal is very much welcome indeed. They don't want us using this stuff but their permission is not necessary. Software is gonna interoperate with their site whether they want it or not. They should not even be able to find out that we're doing anything out of the ordinary. From their perspective, they should simply see a normal user agent issuing normal HTTP requests.

Adversarial interoperability. If they refuse to make the site work like we want it to, we'll do the work for them. This should be considered a form of legitimate self defense against their abuse.

Srsly? "Failing at life" would appear to mean dying.

I don't think a social media account is a matter of life and death. FB is basically a kind of entertainment, so if you don't like the T&C you can always join a sports team or a choir, or whatever.

In my country it's simply not possible to communicate effectively without WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. If I refuse to use these things, I might as well simply ostracize myself from society. For some people, it could cost them their jobs, actually putting them at risk of dying.

> FB is basically a kind of entertainment

No. Facebook is communication, jobs, local information, even a market place with local groups where people sell their stuff. It's hard to describe just how thoroughly this company has managed to infiltrate my society and its way of life. People write pop songs about getting blocked on Instagram.

If I modify the DOM with an extension to hide content I don't like am I running afoul of the law? How about using Lynx instead of Chrome?

What constitutes "talking to" a service? Is it data I send to that server, or is it how my computer processes the data I receive and how I interact with it?

Different people are going to have wildly different opinions, and some of them are very troubling to me. Committing fraud is one thing, but simply using a service without exceeding your authority in a way the service provider doesn't prefer seems like something the service provider should handle without the force of law behind them.

There are limits to both tools, and legislatures can enact new restrictions in response to public demand. But none of that is in play in this story.

If the argument upthread was "we should demand laws that prevent Facebook from locking out extensions to their platform", I wouldn't have a rebuttal (I might or might not support those restrictions). But the sarcastic dunk that was actually made, that it was somehow ridiculous that Facebook would have some say over the terms of how their platform was used, was weird and worth commenting on. It's not only not ridiculous, but actually the world as it exists today.

It's less about FB's right to set boundaries, and more about what FB does when they feel the boundaries have been violated. In this case, they've perma-banned the guy and initiated threatening legal action. That action's extreme demands are NOT in FB's TOS, and reflect on FB's attitude of entitlement.

One argument against this is that FB is just doing the "standard legal thing" of demanding everything up-front, and then negotiating. That is true, but I don't think that just because every lawyer tries to bully their clients enemy means they should. And in this case FB is Goliath, swinging hard and fast at David.

And you know what? Fuck Goliath.

It's quite likely that Facebook sent the person an email asking him to stop violating their Terms of Service and he refused.

I could set up some technical mechanism to stop it, such as blocking their phone number. But, if it's easy for them to switch phone numbers, then that won't work well. And I may not be able to just block a whole area code, because there may be people I want to let fax me coming from that area code as well.

My other recourse, then, is threaten to sue them, and, if they continue, to actually sue them. And I would argue that I should be able to do that. Sending me faxes costs me financial resources and ties up my fax machine, so it's hardly zero cost to me, and it makes sense to have some third party to sort out the dispute and decide where the line should be drawn.

I can imagine other worlds with gentler, more even-handed approaches to sorting out these kinds of issues. Unfortunately, most those approaches fall under the general category of "regulation", and the country I reside in, the USA, decided a long time ago to eschew that kind of approach in favor of one that relies heavily on lawyering up and lawsuits.

or say you have to listen to robocalls or els you cant use some unrelated monopolistic service or product?

i like the analogy but the real story is who would use such a tool. if someone feels they need such extreme measures i wouldnt dare deny them this. who in there right mind?

I haven't seen a fax machine in 20 years. I'd be surprised if anyone under 40 knows what they looked like.

Facebook has a public service and one of the options is to Unfollow; someone wrote a browser extension to do this automatically for all items.

Fundamentally, what is the difference between automating this process and doing it manually?

In your example of a fax machine, arguably fax numbers are a private entity; there is no requirement for publishing fax numbers nor is fax automatically publicly listed for everyone to see. A malicious spammer would need to either obtain the fax number from a listing somewhere or brute-force the number, and similarly, the only way to __know__ that a fax has gone is ambiguous. obtain the fax number from a listing somewhere or brute-force the number, and neither is really analogous to what a browser offers.

I think your analogy conflates a few concepts incorrectly, namely that there is some unexpected or undue financial consequence to Facebook for publicly allowing users to Unfollow Groups; if the extension __needlessly__ generated traffic, this is closer to your analogy. But as I can see how the extension works (based on archived copies found on shady sites), it's not undue traffic, it's just expediting the process of manually Unfollowing groups.

Facebook shouldn't have a recourse here as I see it; the automation causes no undue burden on facebook that isn't possible by manually clicking, an arbitrary review of the extension suggests there is no undue stress on the servers that differs in any way from the traffic one might generate if they manually unfollowed groups. Automating the process indeed might be undesirable for Facebook in some way, but fundamentally the same result is achievable with manually clicking, and I think a more substantial evidence of damage is required from Facebook to justify such a threat.

If we take it to a logical comparison, should Facebook have the right to block a mouse + keyboard automation tool that I script to react at human speeds but is pixel-perfect to unfollow groups?

If the answer to this from Facebook is "yes", then the natural question is "what is the similarity between these processes?"; if the answer is "automation", then the natural question is "why is this damaging to Facebook as opposed to me just manually unfollowing??", and I'm not confident Facebook has a reasonable/strong answer to this.

If Facebook is fine with the slower method, then the question becomes "what is the real concern with the faster method? I will skip the logical follow-ups here as the response is already long.

Facebook should __not__ have the right to sue just because they don't like an activity; no one benefits from this; quite the opposite, smaller parties are actively harmed by such behavior as they lack the financial resources or confidence (or both) to respond to such a legal challenge, and this was never the intent of law. One should not need heavy financing to secure their natural rights; if Facebook wants to position that the extension is somehow illegal as per terms of service, I think the duty is on them to demonstrate how it's significantly damaging and how it differs from a dedicated person armed with a cup of coffee and an hour of free time; if Facebook cannot make a significant distinction outside of convenience for the person, then I don't see a basis for legal recourse.

You don't get a say in how I'm using my computer. If you're exposing your HTTP server to the world and letting users access it using their web browsers, you don't get to tell me my choice of web browser (that is, HTTP agent) is not to your liking.

You can do whatever you want with your computer.

But when you use your computer to access a remote service you need to comply with their terms of service.

¹: Technically, I think “ignored” is more accurate; if you're prohibited from reverse-engineering in general, the general prohibition would still apply even though it has a specific exemption. I'm not a lawyer, though.

Apparently it's a thing in the US. People can sign their rights away to these companies. Needless to say, those counter-rights clauses have become standard in every contract. Read one of these abusive contracts and you've read them all. "We reserve all possible rights while you promise not use any of yours" summarizes every terms of service out there.

And in this case, I would argue that this is a case where they should not have the ability to restrict this kind of interaction. If the law disagrees, then the law needs to be changed (and in the meantime, ignored to the extent possible).

The only moral obligation is to not crack the server and take control of it. We won't make the server's processor execute our code. That's the line. Your computer runs your code, my computer runs my code.

Anything else is fair game. Server responds to my HTTP requests, so obviously anything I can do with HTTP requests is allowed. It doesn't matter what I use as user agent since it's the company's own code that's handling those requests.

Ironically, taking over control is exactly what big tech is doing with our computers. They take control away from us and give it to the copyright industry, to the advertisers, to everyone who would very much prefer that we users remain mere passive consumers just like in the days of television. Our computers are slowly becoming appliances.

In other words, either the action is disallowed completely or it's allowed regardless of my choice of user agent.

If I attempt XSS or SQL Injection against a website it is still illegal regardless of whether the HTTP request uses the same user-agent or is similar to other requests.

In this case, we are dealing with the same requests with the same intent, just made with a different browser. As stated previously, you cannot force my choice of browser.

Now please tell me which (real or imaginary) ToS clause this violates and how it could possibly violate it, even hypothetically.

So I never read them. I don't consider them to mean anything. If you operate a public website, that's like erecting a billboard. You can attach ToS to your billboard, but nobody's going to read your ToS; they'll just read your billboard.

I'd like a plugin that can auto-click ToS popups. Like, click any button that says "Accept" (or "So sue me, sucker!")

I understand certain terms (such as saying you can't hit the server more often than a reasonable amount), but much beyond that I push back. If the laws allow them to make such all encompassing demands of how I use their product, well, laws can be changed, and I vote.

One: Facebook is currently being accused of damaging democracy via misinformation and their "anger promoting" algorithm. That affects me, and my leaving Facebook doesn't solve that. Two: there is the monopoly issue (if that is the right word.... the issue I am concerned about lies on a spectrum, unlike many people's usage of "monopoly"). Prior to Facebook having dominance, I used to be in the loop of what my friends are doing, because they used phone, email, etc. Now they all use Facebook and my choice to not use it (which I don't, actually) results in my not being included in a huge number of things. In that sense, I think Facebook has become like a utility, like the phone company of old. I can't just find a social network product that I prefer, and use it instead.... my friends are not on it and other social networks are not interoperable with Facebook. (as phone providers and email providers are interoperable with one another)

Teens who use Facebook products are known to be harmed. Maybe you think they should just not use these products. That will cause even greater harm to their social lives than it causes to mine, since all their friends are using it and being connected with friends is very important to teens. Again, their simply not using the product doesn't address the problem. (and MY not using it especially doesn't help)

I think your comment is like saying "if you don't like constant robocalls, just cancel your phone plan rather than encourage laws to curtail them." Kind of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

So yeah, I'll exercise my right to vote by actually voting. Luckily, many representatives are in agreement with my perspective on this.

There is nothing special about Facebook products that make them harmful.

It's a glorified message board which facilitates the exact same harmful social interaction that is prevalent on other sites e.g. TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat.

This idea that you can ban Facebook and Instagram and suddenly the internet is safe for kids is just ridiculous.

Sure, there is. Addiction. People are addicted to this stuff. They're addicted to likes, reactions, seeing their follower numbers increase. They're addicted to the algorithmic content feeds. Facebook is actively working towards keeping it that way. They probably want to make it even more addictive. They want people using their software at all times in order to collect data and serve ads.

Why else would they C&D an unfollow extension developer? They want people to keep following so they get addicted to the infinite content plus ads feed.

Also, nobody is excusing any of the other sites you mentioned. There's plenty of things wrong with them as well and we'll condemn them for it. We're just focusing on Facebook right now because it's the subject of this particular thread.

> This idea that you can ban Facebook and Instagram and suddenly the internet is safe for kids is just ridiculous.

Who said that? I don't think they should be banned, but I do think they should be regulated or otherwise held accountable. A big part of it might be being more transparent with their algorithm, and giving tools to users to control it more.

I think where we are is akin to back in the days where people realized that, no, we aren't going to ban buildings, but we are going to have building codes. We aren't going to ban food, but we are going to have an FDA. Etc. The free market doesn't address all problems.

The fact that the extensions helps automate some tasks if a different matter. If it were an industrial level scraper that scraped anything public... that could be considered malicious and can cause tangible financial losses.

This extension on the other hand... You can't really justify sending a threat like that. You can come up with excuses but that is it.

It's like Facebook wants people to hate them.

Web site may merely suggest how it is best served.

Really, the user should have all the power. These companies already have what, billions of dollars? That's power enough for them.

In a lot of cases it's also not their client in any sense of the word. Firefox, Chromium, Safari are not Facebook's.

Facebook bans you? You still have all your data intact.

I wonder if Facebook is legally still obliged to provide all its information to the user in the EU even after banning the user, and if they comply.

If they aren't, they should be. Facebook's contracts aren't above the law which says people have a right to their data. Does the law care that the user was banned? I don't think so. Nor should a banishment somehow invalidate someone's rights.

Browser history?

Just because a company offers a service doesn't give you the right to (ab)use it any way you want.

If that were the case hacking would be considered legal.

Sending an HTTP request to the Facebook server is not a crime. Facebook code is still in control. It can ignore my request.

Didn't the US Supreme Court say it did, actually? I know that GDPR and the UK's Copyright Act have something to say about the matter.

It's always subject to the conditions the service provider sets.

Otherwise again it would legalise hacking.

Arrogance and entitlement on Facebook's part though, that I agree with.

So sure there might be a moral argument on what is right or wrong, but the law in practice does not work like that. Unless a judge sets an example by nipping this behaviour in the bud with excessive fees, but good luck seeing that ever happen.

The only way I’d see the neighbour win is if a whale of an activist Party would side with him and make it clear that any legal fight will be taken up with the biggest defence possible, but this is equally unlikely to happen unfortunately.

Through it all though, the fact that the other party demanded something of you instead of politely asked" or humbly requested is not really relevant. What matters is that you got notice. That's it.

Even if they are enforcing their demand by way of banning users that don't comply, that may indeed be illegal. For instance, if Facebook made a demand that gay people may not declare themselves so on the platform or they will be banned, I'm sure they'd pretty quickly find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

But really, right now, something like this just gives Congress new things to grill Zuckerberg on, next time they bring him in. (which is inevitable, I think)

The threat of a lawsuit counts as "teeth," to me. But only if it is significant likelihood that the lawsuit will be successful.

So the way I tend to interpret things is a bit less pedantic: "can they demand?" means (to me) "do they have a way of forcing compliance that is likely be backed by a court?"

This does have the effect of making the word "demand" less of a binary and more of a gray scale.

> How is this legal in any shape or form?

And the answer is, any person or corporation has the power to make an offer not to sue. Consider this post a legally binding offer from me to you, not to sue you for any matter arising out of your reply to my comment. I demand thirty thousand US dollars for the covenant not to sue. You don't have to accept, but if you don't, or you agree but do not pay within 60 days, I reserve the right to sue.

You don't need any more authority or legal power than the power to contract. There is zero legal difference between what Facebook did, and what I just did. If you don't want to accept, I cannot make you. Facebook's negotiating position is only better because they have better lawyers, more money to waste on frivolous lawsuits, and the developer maybe felt they might have done something wrong.

IANAL, but have some experience with this from a business matter, resulting in obtaining advice of counsel.

And, yeah this is not a criminal matter, but a civil one, so you're right that the developer isn't likely in civil breach unless they are using FB resources (e.g. API or SDK) that they access under agreement with FB and are violating.

The irony is that if the FB standard user agreement prevents users from, say, using software to programmatically access the site, then it's the user of the extension who would be in breach with FB.

So, as long as the developer doesn't use the extension on their own FB account, then FB doesn't have much to stand on (and even then the C&D would only be applicable to the developer's use of the extension as a user).

On a related side note, if the extension actually did something not related to a specific account (e.g. scraped a public profile while not signed in), then even the user would likely not be in breach, as there is no affirmative assent (i.e. clickwrap) to terms of use required to simply visit the site.

But, my understanding of the standard for that particular tort would make it difficult for FB to prevail. In particular, the two tests that might be hardest to meet are that FB would have to show damages and they would have to show that the developer's conduct led to the breach.

I'm not sure that merely creating a tool qualifies, especially for the latter. The user is not coerced or compelled by the developer to violate his agreement with FB.

Again, IANAL. Just thinking back to legal counsel I've received (and quite possibly misapplied here). Definitely plenty of gray area in civil law.

EDIT: Thinking back to this specific extension, it may be even harder for FB to prevail on tortious interference. The tool merely automates actions that FB makes freely available to its users. And to some extent all access to a site is "programmatic". So, I wonder how this compares to ad blockers or even other built-in browser capabilities that could "programmatically" alter the user experience when accessing FB's site. Really interesting.

Thus I guess one legal argument would be that the ability of the extension to work proves the developer's use of Facebook the service even though they have been banned. So maybe there is something from that they can build up an argument, although it starts to sound far-fetched enough I might expect a judge to not buy it.

In theory, legality is the Judge's opinion of the law applied to circumstance. To even approach this state is extremely expensive and takes a great deal of time - on the order of years.

So, for the most part we're all on our own. And in that context, legality doesn't matter. At all. What does matter is leverage. The justice system itself is, ironically, most often used as leverage, not as a service for determining legality, but as a threat of the expense and time of getting to that determination.

It's sickening, but that's how it is.

Are you asking how it's legal that you can demand someone to do something?

How is anything legal? Because there's no law against it. There's no law against demanding something. You can demand (almost) anything of anyone you want.

Google banned the Chrome extension "bypass paywalls" for doing nothing bad except annoying Google's friends.

This is why walled gardens are bad. It's not Google's place or Facebook's place or Apple's place or anyone's place to tell me what programs I can run on my own computer.

Such a plugin is beholden to the extension “marketplaces” so it would be good to include instructions on how to self install the extension if chrome bans it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_sandwich

Before I clicked send, I verified that Paypal said they'd send the money without charging a fee. He received it, minus the fee they claimed they wouldn't charge. So, I tried to send another $10 to cover the difference and I got torpedoed into some black hole of no return.

Now I can't use paypal to buy anything without submitting a bunch of documentation, which is super weird considering I don't have to send anything like that to use their competitors' services, so it's never going to happen.

I assume it's some sort of regulation they're attempting to follow, but haven't thought through, but who knows? It's definitely costing them money, but maybe not enough to justify improving the UX.

If they did, half of the accounts in Venmo would be banned already - have you read the comments in the public feed? People know that feed exists, and use it to troll their friends all the time.

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.

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.

Of course I know this is all a joke, but I enjoy taking jokes seriously. It seems that only nations who are carbon copies of USA in the very worst sense could harm their own citizens to enforce TOS of American firms. (For instance, no one would be surprised if Australia did this.) I suspect that even a very extensive drone force would fail to accomplish Facebook's goals in Afghanistan.

Great idea.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghans have gmail accounts, many companies use google workspace or office365, etc. For example.

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.

Once a firm grows accustomed to following orders from their competitors, bad times lie ahead.

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.

if you really want to make a DMCA complaint against youtube they will honour it, but they try to push all requests through their own DMCA-alike system that lets copyright holders file takedown notices, but it doesn't have any legal standing under the DMCA or any other country's copyright laws. the youtube takedown notice system is basically "if you ask nicely we'll take it down".

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.

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.

It seems pretty straightforward to me - the Facebook terms of service say that you won't make scripts that interact with the Facebook site except through approved APIs, the cease and desist is telling him that he is breaking this agreement. There's no lawsuit involved, Facebook will just enforce this themselves by banning the account and making the script not work. It's not a big deal, this probably happens hundreds of times a day for various bots that people make that manipulate Facebook in different ways.

If I own a general purpose computer, and I purchase a connection to the internet, I'm entitled to interact however I desire* with an internet service, or the information it chooses to send me.

It is not entitled to have the information it sent to me displayed in a certain way, and it certainly isn't entitled to bitch when I choose to interact with it in a way different than its preferences.

If that's what it wants, then it's welcome to sell a sealed appliance that only interacts in allowed ways. And we'll see what choices people make.

* With the exception of actions that impact others, e.g. DoS, authentication bypass, malicious hacking

And let's be honest, and I'm the last person to defend FB, but they are not likely to be going to be going after a lone user who has automated something for his own convenience with Selenium or whatever...

Once I decided I wanted to delete a lot of old email from a webmail account. There was no "select all" function so I wrote a one-liner in the javascript console of the browser. When that worked, I automated clicking the "delete" button, and then added a loop to do it over and over. This probably violated a TOS clause somehow, but nothing ever came of it.

Why are you entitled to all these things? What gives you the right to demand that others act in accordance with your desires?

What entitles me to control of my computer? “My computer is mine, and you cannot have it.”.

That being said, I’m somewhat more open to the validity of restrictions for how to interact with the server.

If someone e.g. is running an MMO with e.g. in-game items with real money value, and someone else is like, distributing cheats to get these items immediately, it seems fair that the MMO owner should be able to make them stop (though, like, ideally their game would just be secure?)

But if users are permitted to interact with the server in a particular way, I see no reason to allow requiring that users actually touch their mouse and keyboard while doing things they are allowed to do using their mouse and keyboard.

Lets have a law that requires all large services to expose all account settings though an API(?!)

Basically, 1) you [as usual] get to set up the terms of service that your users must stick to, 2) you get to pick what account options you want to offer to the user. i.e. do you want to receive email notifications yes/no, do you want to upload an avatar yes/no, what url/email/phone number do you want to display on your profile etc 3) You do not own these settings and shall provide an API for the user to change them.

You could extend the concept with things like allowing the download of a contact list with the contacts who have this enabled and the information they chose to share. Or say offer TOS updates though the API.

But the initial goal should be for browsers to offer a uniform settings page for all websites you have accounts for.

Remember that unsolicited email check box just above that for to the terms of service? If you use the site all the time you might want to opt in but who wants to dig though a website looking for it? Maybe in hind sight targeted advertisement is just what you wanted? Maybe a feed of updated settings would be useful.

Or maybe you just want to delete your accounts in a convenient way.

Because it's the only avenue we have. Providing accessibility tends to require creating holes in otherwise user-hostile UX, and big companies can't give up on accessibility due to PR reasons - which makes it a perfect beachhead for people who just want a sane and respectful computing experience.

It is very easy to DoS by accident with software; and while I’m in favour of totally breaking the economic model of FB in this way, doing so definitely has an impact on others (specifically the Other which is FB itself).

And in a choice between user autonomy and service stability, I can't side with the latter over the former.

There is a whole category of law where they just go around suing businesses for not being accessible enough. Quite a lot of money in it.

Messing with this is a lose-lose for Facebook.

Messing with this is a lose-lose for Facebook.

Nah, this sort of thing really happens all the time. Think hundreds of scripts like this automatically disabled each day. This one just flukily got some press attention. Large tech companies will have teams entirely dedicated to preventing scripts from doing things while keeping the site running as normal for regular users.

The actual timeline of events doesn't match what you think would happen. They banned him and then used the threat of a lawsuit to get him to take down the extension/code.

Extension is more like a automated tool. Don't need any permission from Facebook. User can install the tool, and click on a button to unfollow your friends.

Facebook could write TOS for his users not to run a script on their website.

I write scripts (userscripts) all the time. I have a script for Gmail that I use it all the time. Gmail doesn't know that.

I think a lot of people in the software bubble don't realize what a huge sum even $100 is for the average person, the law only affords power and protection to the rich and already powerful.

The doubling—and sometimes even tripling—often originates in the transition from use of one language for legal purposes to another… To ensure understanding, the terms from both languages were used. This reflected the interactions between Germanic and Roman law following the decline of the Roman Empire.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet

> Doublets may also have arisen or persisted because the solicitors and clerks who drew up conveyances and other documents were paid by the word

(Its also why lay people shouldn't write their own contracts, because a lawyer with contract experience won't use words that haven't been tested.)

Desist - Latin to stare (sta-re, not homonym of stair) meaning "to stand", then (still) Latin to "sistere" meaning "to stop" plus prefix de, which in this context is "an order (from top, aka court) to down (aka to you)", then Old French.

Huh.

So this is basically court-enforced stop and yielding to the other party.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet

It would be an appropriate way for Facebook to phrase their C&D considering the forms that cyber-bullying take on the platform

There is no certainty in the legal system, they could very well win even if they are in the wrong. More so when they can employ an army of lawyers and put economic pressure on the system.

He had a lawyer but after burning through a lot of money with carefully-written objections, he decided to just start ignoring them altogether. Which generally worked. These lawyers (and their clients) were just trolling for easy cash and never actually wanted to go to court because their claims were bogus and they would almost certainly lose.

Sometimes, however, the other party's law firm would call him on the phone to follow with their demands. He would let them yammer on for a few minutes, ask some innocent questions, and then finally interrupt them with something like this. "Here is what I have to say to your client's claim... you have a pen and paper ready? I need you to write this down. Okay, good. Here it is: 'Fuck you.' No wait, I'm not done yet. Just let me speak. I want you to also add, 'and go to hell" please. That is my official legal response. Have a nice day." And slammed the phone down.

Take the story with a grain of salt, but he said it worked 100% of the time.

https://prunescape.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reply_Given_in_Arkell...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossa...

2: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cleveland-browns-letters/

It definitely doesn't help their image or any antitrust lawsuit FB might be facing.

Meh. Just show up. Don't hire lawyers. File motions all day to see more evidence.

> The only problem is Facebook is huge and is willing to drag out lawsuits they won't win just to destroy people's lives because they can afford to hold out much longer than everyone else.

Convincing people that America is the land of the free, is the biggest trick the devil has ever pulled.

Note that depending on the country, you might still need authorization to build any structure on your own property.

The neighborhood has an HOA but the HOA actually had no actual rules because they were not properly registering with the county when they made bylaws (where my mom is all HOA rules have to be submitted to the state, otherwise they are not enforceable). Gotta love HOAs.

My plan is to wait until February 2022, and build the ugliest golden Trump mailbox I can slap together. Then, when they ask me to take it down, request an appeal, and film the ensuing meeting. Then, send said video to Fox News et al. Then, run for HOA on a platform of abolishing the HOA.

... I really don't like neighbors telling me what I can and can't do.