Comment by barnabee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barnabee | Hacker News Reader

Someone deleted an interesting comment about adversarial interoperability [0]

I’d love to see and give money to a project to create and maintain easy to use and stable “adversarial interoperability” APIs for as many services and products as possible.

Perhaps companies and projects would not often use these directly because of the risks (hopefully some would, though!) but individuals could drop the library or the URL to a server hosting it into their apps to gain extra features.

If standardised, whole open source apps could be built around them that allow querying and analysis of data from services and aggregating and automating using the services including optimising prices, taking advantage of offers, and using undocumented APIs to the users advantage.

Maybe something architected and incentivised like https://thegraph.com/ for adversarial intercom and undocumented APIs. Building as a network of nodes and funding with crypto would make it harder to attack and take down.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

Do you know Woob ? https://woob.tech/

Holy s*t this is amazing! A set of web-scraper automations!

Wow that is really cool!

Looks excellent.

"pip3 install woob" succeeds but e.g. "woob config-qt" returns "not a woob command". Are the -qt versions not available via pip? I have python3-pyqt5 installed.

Qt applications are maintained and packaged separately:

pip install woob-qt

https://gitlab.com/woob/woob-qt/-/blob/master/INSTALL

Thanks, I'll suggest they add that to https://woob.tech/install

Ahah looking at the logos triggered my frenchness, this things is from the motherland.

So they finally gave in to the complaints about the name (https://lists.symlink.me/pipermail/weboob/2021-February/0016...). woob is excellent but unfortunately its very existence means there is a problem. Hopefully they will gain visibility and problematic services will adopt standard protocols

This is very wishful. What is the incentive to enabling content access which bypasses their business (i.e. ad impressions)?

This is nice, and feature rich. Its available in Homebrew, where I was able to try it out (if I ran Nix I'd been able to use nix-shell for such). However, its France and French oriented. Not the world-wide interface I expected it to be. Bands for example, only contains a metal database. Recipes, 5 out of 6 entries is French. Travel, I don't see German or Dutch or UK or Belgian public transport.

I can't speak for Germany/Belgium/NL but we have actual APIs for public transportation in the UK (trains/tube at least, not so sure about buses).

Thanks! This looks really cool

> Perhaps companies and projects would not often use these directly because of the risks

If you provide a solution to someone’s problem, it will be used all over the place.

The biggest companies won’t use these things, but plenty of smaller companies and individual programmers without oversight would use them without a second thought, at least until they’re caught.

Telegram is a relatively large business and here they are abusing an API exactly like you suggest.

This is a really good idea!

Along those lines: maybe we could use a middleware pattern for APIs, frameworks, etc where the interface/package would be built as a layer above two or more services.

That way the developer could switch between them at any time, or even failover automatically.

So for example, rather than going onto GitHub to download an SDK for something like Mailgun, you'd download a middleware framework built on Mailgun and Sendgrid.

This pattern could be used to identify vulnerabilities in software at the conceptual level, by helping developers to avoid marrying their code to individual providers like AWS. Some mission critical software could even be certified as using all adversarial interoperability frameworks.

It could even help third party services pull themselves up by their bootstraps, if they get added to one of these middlewares. An instant user base without having to rely on marketing or word of mouth.

And could be used to identify monopolies when there's no middleware for a service.

I was advocating for this for years but gave up when I talked to someone at Pager Duty that was just straight out against it. For almost irrational reasons. I kept trying to make the case that for a company like their that literally can't be taken offline without risking huge chunks of the internet why wouldn't they want to run their whole business on an abstracted away platform to, say, switch to Windows if linux had a 0day, etc.

> Too many moving pieces. Too much work.

It still boggles my mind that this is the way we do things. "Patch fast!" Ok cool. That's going to keep working out forever.

I totally agree.

I would love to have applications that are more tools than products and weave together these APIs and middlewares, both in querying and visualising, combining, enriching, analysing, filtering etc. data and also taking the output and actioning it.

With the amount of data and services that are now available online we should have superhuman capabilities but the productisation of the internet has left us stuck in company run silos fighting “user journeys”, undocumented APIs and EULAs.

> Someone deleted an interesting comment about adversarial interoperability

That was me. The comment was rapidly amassing upvotes, which made me feel that not only was the comment preaching to the choir but it had the potential to derail the discussion around the actual issue of Telegram's use of Google's Translate APIs.

I think https://plaid.com 's entire business is pretty much an adversarial interoperability webscraping play for banking. The business exists!

youtube-dl does this for video sites, it works on more than just YouTube despite its name.

teller.io does similar for banks.

I would love to see a coordinated effort along the same lines for things with non public APIs. It is however a huge ask as internal APIs are unstable and constantly changing/actively working against things like this which is a huge amount of work to keep up with.

such APIs could be running on https://fluence.network with an interoperability and composition across different services

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