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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they're still angry with him about leftpad.</joke>

Yes, it really is the same guy: https://kodfabrik.com/journal/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules. And, joking aside it would be wise to bear in mind that we're reading only one side of the story here. As with leftpad, there's another side to this.

With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you" (https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin...), and then wrought global havoc on npm users. Now he's claiming the Chrome Extension Team "continuously troll developers", and is pulling down something he's created... again.

I only have two data points, so the behaviour here is a coincidence rather than a pattern, but I will guarantee you whatever you think of Google there is more to this than meets the eye.

I'm not without sympathy for the author, but neither am I about to uncritically take his side.

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> With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you"

In response to a threat starting with "We don’t mean to be a dick about it" and ending with "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that", I did say "fuck you" to Kik.

If that makes me the character in your mind, enjoy your imagination.

It seems that lots of people are missing that part. The Kik guys were doing their corporate double-speak b/s about ‘let’s find a solution’ when the only solution is handing over the name. All while threatening with door-banging lawyers.

And he did offer them a solution: $30,000 dollars, to which they promptly - albeit indirectly - replied with fuck you.

The guy made a very valid point:

We must pursue our trademarks or risk losing them. We must. So can we make this amicable instead of hostile?

The maintainer could have requested things like "Okay can I make some blog posts and you help me with some SEO to make sure people are aware of the changes to my project name?" etc. Sounds like Kik was willing to be reasonable and help where they could. Clearly they could have gone in with an opening statement saying "this is the lawyer, I am sending trademark takedown notices, fuck you, go to hell" but they clearly did not.

This is one person trying to make the best of an awkward situation, and one person just saying "duces".

“We must” is nonsense on the part of Kik. That’s part of the corporate b/s where people make it seem like things are “out of our hands.”

If he was releasing a messenger app called KikAss, then sure, they “must” enforce the Kik trademark.

But if I release a brand of shoes called Kik, with an api that allows users to poll how many steps a user has taken that day, that’s not a trademark violation.

Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they could be unintentionally confusing (for example, if Kik has been talking about releasing shoes for a while or if it’s a well known brand of soccer balls).

Neither of these things have occurred, so the trademark doesn’t have to go through a (futile) enforcement process.

This is it, really.

Not long ago I was involved in a company that defended their trademark. The other group said to us 'f- you' and refused to comply. They then continued to do marketing and interviews with our brand name and an almost identical logo. It's like they were trying to dig a hole.

So that behaviour actually just created more evidence of infringement. We contacted their partners and explained the situation and they started pulling their support. They lost half their board members. So eventually their own lawyer said "Hey guys, we really should comply." and that was it.

No money exchanged hands and we only dropped 30k into a lawyer. I assume they sunk money into rebranding, lawyers, new partners, and a whole bunch of things because they were being petty.

> Trademark violations require intent to mislead

No, they don't, only probability of customer confusion.

Criminal counterfeiting charges require intent, IIRC.

If you see the second half of that sentence, with an example of how...

> or they could be unintentionally confusing [to the customer]

We see the second half. Your sentence reduces to:

> Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they do not require intent to mislead.

You are trying to assert that this makes sense and that the second half makes the first half correct. Neither is true.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve by leaving multiple successive comments threads about the same topic. I will reply to this message and will withdraw after this.

——

The sentence reduces to “trademark violations are considered to have taken place regardless of when there is either an intention to mislead or if a customer was unintentionally misled.”

If the grammar was poop and you can’t make a good faith reading of it (to go so far as to follow me around on this post) then by all means feel free to comment away but I won’t be responding to it.

Another expression of your stereotype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23360585

We don't need you to respond. You have made it clear that there is nothing anyone can ever say or do to convince you that you are wrong.

> Neither of these things have occurred

How do you know unintentional confusion did not occur?

> Trademarks require intent to mislead

Is this a legal requirement?

I meant trademark violations. My bad. I edited the post and added the missing word.

As someone else mentioned, your correction is also incorrect. One can violate trademark unintentionally.

No, my correction is fine. It helps if you read the sentence in its entirety rather than stop reading at the comma... you know... where I specifically go on to say "or" followed with a whole bit on how it can be violated unintentionally and give an example of such.

The next sentence also goes on to say that either one of those two needs to take place - again, referencing more than one way a trademark violation could take place.

Maybe my English wasn't clear. English isn't my first or my most recent language, so my grammar sometimes goes a bit funky.

Your correction is not fine. English is my first language, and I am telling you that the way you wrote the sentence makes it incorrect. It's probably your grammar more than your misunderstanding of the facts. Another commenter said the same.

The sentence taken as a whole does not make the wrong part right. That you think we must not have noticed the rest of the sentence demonstrates that you don't know why it is wrong. You are choosing to get defensive instead of accepting a correction to your grammar that you acknowledge as being funky.

> Maybe my English wasn't clear.

What is the effective difference between your English being unclear and the correction being written in a way that makes it wrong?

This trademark thing must be the next biggest popular HN misunderstanding after the whole "act in the shareholders interest" debacle.

Could you explain the trademark misunderstanding in a bit more detail?

According to GitHub [0]:

> Using another's trademark in a way that has nothing to do with the product or service for which the trademark was granted is not a trademark policy violation.

Many people think that if you have a trademark, you have to sue everyone who uses your name no matter what capacity they're using it in, which doesn't seem to be the case. If their usage is unrelated to yours, you have no authority to prevent them from using it however they want.

There are some exceptions to this, like the American Red Cross's logo of a red cross on a white background (nobody is allowed to use this except the red cross in any context, although it isn't always enforced) [1].

[0]: https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...

[1]: https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2012/04/one-cr...

Also people get carried away with how estoppel works. Estoppel is a basic principle in civil law that says if Alice tells Bob it's fine for him to do X, then even if Bob is infringing on Alice's lawful rights by doing X, she doesn't get to come back later and tell a court "Hey, Bob was infringing my rights by doing X".

And that's where it definitely stops, but people get carried away and imagine now if Alice tells Bob, "Enough, I need you to stop doing X by this reasonable time" and Bob says "Fuck you Alice" and keeps doing X the court will rule for Bob. Nope. And they imagine Bob's friend Charlie might show up too, and do X and Alice has to accept that because she told Bob previously it was fine, again Nope. As a result some businesses become convinced that unless they pay lawyers to threaten every hobby project starting with the same first letter as their product the terrible "estoppel" will destroy their business.

Also just as a general principle lawyers are for avoiding disputes first, fixing existing disputes as a last resort. If you're actively paying lawyers to start shit you are probably Doing It Wrong™.

well, friendly solutions don't charge per hour, unlike lawyers...

With regards to the trademark issue:

> and we’d have no choice but to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them.

They aren't threatening him for the fun of it, this is classic trademark stuff.

Also the "solution" he offered them was:

> Yeah, you can buy it for $30.000 for the hassle of giving up with my pet project for bunch of corporate dicks

Would _you_ give this guy $30,000, after he calls you a dick multiple times and tells you in no uncertain terms to fuck off?

No one comes out looking good in this interaction, don't get me wrong, but Azer was super unprofessional and nasty during those interactions. He gets no sympathy from me.

Good luck trying to enforce trademark law for namespace on a public code repository.

It’s “classic trademark stuff” insofar that people classically don’t understand what a trademark is or how it’s enforced.

Consider reading through Github’s policy on trademarks[0] to better understand why a casual fuck off should be given whenever you get misleading, threatening emails.

[0] https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...

I agree with you. And I don't understand this normalisation of threatening.

And just because it's a lawyer does not make things better. If you want me to cooperate, try to be nice. If you threat me, don't be surprise to hear a 'fuck you'.

> but Azer was super unprofessional and nasty during those interactions

Does he even have to be “professional“? Even though two of the parties involved happen to be corporations, he owes no allegiance to them and the exchange does not take place in a corporate context. I mean, we are talking about corporate overreach, why should we be assessing his words by corporate standards? “Professional” usually means “don’t show emotions and suck up the abuse”. I’m glad he was both showing his protest and standing up to the overreach.

Does he have to be? No.

Can others judge him harshly for said decision? Yes.

It’s not the judgment itself, it is by what standard he is judged. Everyone could judge him by their religious, cultural, personal standards. But in a solo dev vs. corporate overreach case judging him by corporatist standards bring a framing that further empowers the overreach.

There was a time when hacker culture was associated with rebellious and playful values. Such an irony on Hacker News we are discussing if he should be penalized for saying “bad words” in the face of corporate unfairness.

Don't be confused by the "Hacker" in hacker news. Paul Graham found a cool label to get impressionable youths to want to work for him, nothing more.

Because they didn't have to pay him $30k. They had a registered trademark and a right to use the name. And in the end, they didn’t have to spend nearly that amount. All they had to do was send a few emails to the npm maintainers.

I’d say they made a logical decision.

The right to use that name in a certain context. Kik was a dick. 30k is a lot, but lawyers would’ve cost way more than that

An initial consult is often free, and even a $500 consult would have been worth every penny because the lawyer would have (correctly) told him to back off and let them have the name.

In any event, escalating - even when you think the other party is being a dick - is never the right answer.

An initial consult is often free

If you're hiring a lawyer off a television commercial in order to make a quick buck off of a fender bender. Corporate law is different.

When I was sued I was able to get an hour with many of the initial attorneys I called. The biggest challenge in most cases was ensuring there were no conflicts.

And as an attorney, if I go back into practice someday, of course I’ll do the same.

I have a hard time seeing your position here. Because of their actions they broke their own build and made a lot of folks in the open source community upset. Was it even worth it to waste the time fixing their broken build? To investigate the failure and replace a dependency of a dependency? To lose credibility in the community they've evidently just decided to become involved with? I really don't see how that's not worth 30 grand. They have a right to use their name but they don't have the right to use someone else's work.

It is a principle of American and English law that the person who uses someone else’s property unlawfully is responsible for the foreseeable injuries caused to others by its use - not the lawful owner of the property.

You are being downvoted because you fundamentally misunderstand and mischaracterise the situation you are referring to.

I am referring to naming an npm module “Kik” that has nothing to do with the service of the same name. What do I misunderstand?

About twenty years ago, I learned a lesson the hard way I received a much more strongly worded cease-and-desist letter. I responded much the same way as you (though without the salty language), and a few weeks later, I got slapped with a multi-million dollar lawsuit for copyright infringement.

You're lucky you were treated as nicely as you were. It could have been a whole lot worse.

Lessons learned:

1. Hire an attorney when you get a takedown notice if you think you are likely to decline, and seek counsel before responding.

2. Telling people "fuck you" doesn't get you anywhere, and it doesn't matter how impolite or wrong you think the other person is.

That's really sad that that's good advice. I can't help but sympathize with him, and with you 20 years ago. Basically, your advice boils down to: "when a larger company tells you to do something, do it".

That's essentially what the lawyers at my friend's company told them as well, as they're dealing with a similar problem. Just because you have lawyers doesn't mean the answer will be any different; you very likely won't be able to deal with a lawsuit from a much larger company.

No need to feel for me. Growing up is about making mistakes, taking your licks, learning your lessons, and moving on. I was on the wrong side, legally and ethically.

If anything, it made me feel both unwise and ignorant, so I addressed that by going to law school and passing the bar. I have a great career and I keep my nose clean.

I also have a different perspective now - one of the creator instead of the consumer. And I disagree that Goliath always has to win. Sometimes the big guy is wrong; and thank goodness we have folks like EFF to help out when they abuse their wealth and power. When the little guy is on the right side of the argument, I will also stand up for them.

Keep in mind, too, that Kik doesn't exactly have overflowing pockets. They can barely pay their bills and nearly shut down last year.

So what happened with with the lawsuit in the end?

I entered a judgment on consent and had to pay restitution to the plaintiffs over a number of years. Most expensive mistake I ever made.

I just wanted to say, thanks for standing up for what you believe in. It took courage to do what you did.

Did it though? This seems to be his MO.

Vote with both of my hands

> I only have two data points, so the behaviour here is a coincidence rather than a pattern, but I will guarantee you whatever you think of Google there is more to this than meets the eye.

You seem to want us to question the narrative based on the likability of the developer, but is it really relevant? Can you really imagine a data point that we don't know that will change the narrative of "solo developer getting steamrolled by corporate machinery"? Because that is what is happening in both cases. I want to be clear, this is not even about the solo developer actually being in the right, it is about the process or lack thereof that takes place to reach the conclusion. You might not like this particular guy, but I guarantee you a more likable guy would be/will be/is being equally strong-armed in these lopsided processes. Transparency, accountability and fairness would make all of us happy and not left guessing who might be right based on who writes the most likable emails or has the most popular brand.

To add to this, I think the reason this particular developer is seen negatively by some is that he does kick up a lot of dust in these situations. Most developers would (understandably) feel like this wasn't worth their time and just silently give in to the bigger company's wishes.

So while his "likeability" is completely irrelevant, how else would we even hear about these issues if he didn't make a big fuss about it? I think that also might explain why we heard of this story twice from the same developer. The truth is people face similar issues every day but no one hears about it. I'm glad that some people kick up a lot of dust and make the issue visible to everyone.

>this particular developer is seen negatively by some is that he does kick up a lot of dust in these situations

Developers are often pushovers (no disrespect, I'm often one myself). Anyone who isn't gets passive aggressively labeled with terms that make them easy to conflate with actually bad people.

Give 'em hell, Azer.

I believe that in the left-pad case, NPM severely violated the overall trust put in their management by handing over a package name (that other people might depend on) without a legal process. Now that NPM has faltered like that once, you basically need to verify yourself that every package that you use is still the same one by the same author, i.e. that NPM hasn't silently transferred the name to someone else.

I maintain quite a few high-traffic packages on npm and have done so for years. Npm is really bad about handling any sort of situation with any amount of grace.

Per my anecdotal experience, they are really good at choosing the outcome that benefits them the most/harms them the least - which wouldn't upset me since most companies do this, but it's Npm's "we're here for the community" type of fake attitude that has always bothered me.

In the links you've shared, I thought the author (Azer) was on the right to behave the way he did. I don't see it as a reason to discount his current experience because of that either.

They would have no case if they actually tried to go after him to "defend" their trademark. His mail was just empty threats.

You can't just trademark 3 letters in a way so that nobody else can use them. In fact there's hundreds of trademarks that are the letters "kik" in various logos[1].

What they trademarked is a bunch of specific logos containing those letters. Doesn't prevent other people from also using those 3 letters in some other way.

In fact when he wrote "kik", my first thought was the he was talking about the German textile discount store - which is the first result for me when I google those letters.

[1]: https://trademarks.justia.com/search?q=kik

What is the cost to defend against a lawsuit where the person suing you has “no case,” especially in the USA where the American rule for lawyer fees governs?

BP, BMW, and GE (among countless others) disagree and would be happy to haul you into court to prove to you that you are wrong if you misuse their trademarks.

It's easy to be an armchair HN lawyer when you have no skin in the game.

> BP, BMW, and GE (among countless others) disagree and would be happy to haul you into court to prove to you that you are wrong if you misuse their trademarks.

As an attorney, do you think he was misusing the "Kik" trademark?

I know this sounds like a cop-out answer, but as an attorney, I would zealously represent my client on either side.

I don't know all the facts here, but I do know that as a practical matter, it comes down to a whole bunch of factors, among them, use in commerce, possibility of confusion, etc. But I can say that judges take a dim view of people who tell others to "fuck off" and who appear not to have a justifiable reason for using a name nor a long history of doing so.

I also know that bullies don't always win - Nissan Computer still owns nissan.com, not the motor company.

I'm tempered to rename my packages with a prefix "kik" just to fuck with them. I don't live in the US, so good luck enforcing their empty threats on me ;)

Actually if anyone behaved poorly, it was npm not Azer.

I'm shocked to see that something like this could happen on npm - where a single threat of getting lawyers involved can get your package transferred away from you. It really wants to make me not publish anything on npm too actually.

Totally agree. I'm shocked to see that people actually think less of Azer because of what he did. Why keep your work on a company that bullies you like that?

Just came here to say the same thing. He didn't need to swear and be so bratty about it, but yeah it seems to me he was not wrong.

"Integrity" is not a desirable trait in this day and age. A developer is of little use if they don't respond to short term individualistic incentives.

Au contraire. A developer with integrity will become a senior with integrity, and when you're dealing with people -- which you will be if you are not already -- you get a reputation for being fair and just. People will not deal anywhere near as favourably if you have a reputation for displaying a severe lack of integrity.

On the other hand we've seen this kind of behavior from Google time and again, even on its flagship platforms like Android and YouTube. The Chrome Extensions store is likely the bottom of the barrel when it comes to priorities, so I have no trouble believing things would be even worse there.

If you're referring to the recent controversy around Pushbullet - I thought that was revealed to be them asking for all access to any HTTP/HTTPS websites you viewed...which is a major security breach.

They removed that permission to limit it to only Pushbullet, and then were able to get back on.

I'm not saying there couldn't have been more hand-holding - but it wasn't exactly like it wasn't for a fairly egregious security breach.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in any Chrome/Android/Store team, or anything even vaguely related to that - this is purely my own opinion).

They removed that permission and were denied again. Only after the story got a lot of publicity did Google decide to accept it.

Did PB fall through the cavernous CS cracks or are they competition?

Chrome + Android are busy building a competing feature and that's part of the narrative about Pushbullet - this was seen as an attempt by Google to kill a competitor through nebulous "rules violations".

If the PB team hadn't gotten it to be as visible as it was, they very likely would have gotten away with it.

I believe Pushbullet needed it's permissions for the features it offered, they even tried removing features and permissions just to appease Google.

Regardless of that, just tell people what they've done wrong, developers are surely jaded by being told absolutely nothing about what or why some faceless mega corp is trampling all over their day.

Is it any wonder people like OP lash out in frustration and just pull all of their work when one has no means to obtain a straight answer? The man has a young child, and that is work enough, but it also puts things into perspective, and honestly, as a father of a months old child, I'd probably respond to this in the same way and think "fuck it, one less frustration" and just pull it too.

I believe Pushbullet needed it's permissions for the features it offered

The PB post describes them removing permissions they realized they didn't need, you can check their writeup. Google's handling of this was poor but PB had real problems.

In this extension's case, we haven't even seen what notices Google sent.

I'm all for enforcing strong privacy rules, in fact, I stopped using PB very quickly after trying it for the first time, because of the _feeling_ of a lack of privacy/security it gave me (based on no actual evidence), so I'm not defending PB.

That said, calling Google heavy handed is an understatement, and there have been several cases which have made it clear that kicking up a fuss online and being big enough to get some attention is the only means for recourse.

I didn't call it 'heavy handed'. I'm just correcting your assertion that PB didn't have unnecessary and overly-broad permissions. This is in their writeup.

This might be okay as long as you give clear and specific points to correct.

But Google just said "you're asking too much permissions". After the first fixes the extension got rejected again, without explanation.

I'm not really trying to re-litigate the whole PB thing. It's just not the case that they got dinged for nothing which is what the comment I replied to was suggesting.

And the other (I think more important) point was that we know even less about whatever happened to Kozmos.

Oh, I understand your point. I was calling Google heavy handed.

FWIW, someone workin on things related to it felt like it was something that needed apologizing for: https://twitter.com/DotProto/status/1261047663669084161

Rejecting a fixed version is not lack of "hand-holding", and far-reaching permissions are not by default a "major security breach" (unless Google has a policy of shipping products with major security breaches built in?)

They were only allowed back on after they've turned it into a big story online.

The perspective of the other side is not hard to guess here: support costs money, it's way easier and cheaper to automate it, and if it hurts a few people here and there no one really cares because there're millions of other users (and no much alternative anyway).

We all know that Google's support sucks, even they know it very well, just they don't give a shit. Everyone's pissed about this for years - anyone who ever tried to debug adsense, gmail or youtube account getting blocked out of the blue, or android app being flagged for no reason has gone through pretty much the same process this guy describes. Internet is full of horror stories of this kind, it's very well documented.

The only difference here is that most of us goes "c'est la vie" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and we continue using their services because - well - everyone else does it, what else could we do... while this guy doesn't mind giving them the finger... which will, and of course he knows that, hurt him much more than Google - but that's a move to be respected imho...

What was the "other side" of leftpad? As far as I remember, the broken system wrought havoc, not the developer who chose to withdraw his modules. I don't think the developer's reasons are much relevant when discussing how reliable their word is.

The broken system allowed him to be a dick.

OK, so the is more to it than that and he did have a genuine grievance (I forgot exactly what) bit in dealing with that he caused a pile collateral damage for innocent bystanders.

(Innocent bystanders who errantly put too much faith in dependency oriented programming which brings us back to the broken system)

It's his work, and he had every right to pull every module he hosts there in protest. If this was a walk out or some other form of protest, nobody would be calling him a dick, I think that's a little out of order.

That said, the system is definitely broken.

His reaction to the Kik thing is probably where he was at fault, I think it would have been reasonable for him to back down there; companies, in the US at least are obligated to protect their IP in order to retain their rights over it (as far as I have understood from various discussions on HN), but perhaps the forceful lawyering got his back up?

Also I have no idea of jurisdiction of any parties involved, I just assume US.

It's always safe to back down if you don't have the guts to go on, but you can't say it's a fault not to back down.

> Innocent bystanders who errantly put too much faith in dependency oriented programming

and who need an external package to leftpad a string... the most fascinating part of that story to me...

> too much faith in dependency oriented programming

Which is why it's a distraction to even consider this particular person's track record.

Even if this same person pulled one critical package a month for the next year, the fundamental problem is still that the ecosystem in general relies on parties with no obligations to manage critical dependencies.

Sounds like he's a pretty prolific developer who's sick of dealing with mega-corporate bureaucracies screwing him over.

You've remembered that the author has written another article at some point that is completely and wholeheartedly unrelated to this story; and the point it attempts to make. Why is this the top comment?

We have a lot more than two data points for Google screwing Chrome extension developers.

He's got a pretty good shitbird radar.

Npm not only didn't realize that this guy was more important to their community and NodeJS on the whole than a one off from Kik, but they sold out to GitHub / M$FT.

All that for something that hasn't been updated in 2 years https://www.npmjs.com/package/@kikinteractive/kik

Nobody can uncritically take his side but what you are implying here is that we should consider him "less" because of an unrelated story.

Why can't you uncritically take his side? Because company good, developer mean? If you want to say kik has a right to the three letter package name so be it but absolutely no one has the right to continue using someone else's work for their own gain. Especially not a company that threatened him with lawyers within three emails.

To me it sounds like both sides had their own (though different) tone-deafness.

"Oh I didn't know there was a company with that name" well, now you know. How would you like to go into NPM and find someone has created a package with your or your company's name?

At the same time Kik's answer of "we're nice people but we're sending the lawyers" does not come across as friendly.

And yes, NPMs response is not surprising. They're going to side with the trademark owner, unless there was a very good reason not to (like the MikeRowSoft case)

Note to npm (or some future package repo site): create package namespaces. Allow renaming and maybe aliases.

> Note to npm (or some future package repo site): create package namespaces. Allow renaming and maybe aliases.

I have a friend who encountered a similar scenario with a company claiming trademark on a name. In their case they simply changed the package name. It was frustrating but it meant everybody was able to move on without any drama. Subsequently, as far as I'm aware, the trademark holder has never even published a package under the original name. So I suppose that makes it doubly irritating, but such is life.

I think your suggestion would have neatly avoided a lot of these kinds of issues in the first place.

In my opinion, the party that behaved the worst in that exchange was npm. Why do Node developers trust such an unprofessional institution?

Perhaps your position might be better understood if you shared your own story about a project that you have invested so much time and energy creating and building. You may have tread a different path when confronted with such obstacles. The community would be enlightened by your experience.

This comment is just straight ad-hominem.

Not true at all. I'm saying we don't know the whole story. That's not to say that what he's saying is untrue but that, without some corroboration, or hearing from the other party (Google), it can't be relied upon.

Granted, all I know of the author is based on what I've seen of his past behaviour. That does make me a little sceptical that his account of events represents the sum totality of truth around the situation. I don't believe that's an unreasonable perspective.

It does not mean the account is false, or that I lack sympathy for him[1], or that I'm unwilling to see or understand his point of view. What I was concerned by is that in the comments I was seeing nothing but unalloyed support, which I did not think was warranted based on what we know. I think I've been pretty clear about that.

I also think it's a shame that he's chosen to yank the extension, but that's obviously his choice and I can understand why he made it.

[1] Different context entirely but I've had my own issues with Google's algorithms, along with the sense of being left in the dark about why. I made some, actually useful, changes but I've still no idea if those are the reason the issues were resolved. Regardless, I'm glad that they have been resolved.

How true!

Your own comments come out as one-sided as anyone can be...

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