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Comment by giornogiovanna | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

It does seem wrong. I wonder if they could double crawl and penalize sites that throw up a paywal

They could add the ability to report sites that do this. That way there would be less sites to double crawl.

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.

There are exceptions for paywalls.

Is there another use case for cloaking?

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.

A paywall is not a lock. It is code that someone else wants to ship to my computer to run. It's up to me to decide what parts of it I run or not.

No, it’s not. The jurisprudence is pretty clear.

the jurisprudence of whom? In my own jurisprudence paywalls are viruses.

The US of course. Look at the list of sites the plugin works for: none of them cares if you ignore their paywall. The likelihood that you would subscribe is negligible. It’s American readers they are after. And for them the jurisprudence is clear. No deliberate subversion of access controls allowed.

If that's the case Mozilla has no business banning the addon for everyone...

Mozilla is subject to US law. Mozilla has no obligation to enable certain addons only for visitors from certain countries.

Folks, you can downvote me, but that doesn’t make what I’m saying false. Look at the law cited in TFA.

It seems that there is a Canadian case that confirms the validity of paywalls as a "technical protection measure". While in the case, the circumvention was social(obtain copy from another subscriber), I doubt circumventing it via user agent spoofing would fare better.

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