Google blocked my Chrome extension so I created a website to host it
extensionhub.site
extensionhub.site
[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jorgefsilva/beatthatwall/m...
If you're interested I can show you the source code
I encourage developers here and elsewhere to reward each other for the fruits of their labor, instead of expecting a free lunch.
This doesn’t really solve the old problem that there’s no proof the source code you show is the one that runs on Cloudflare. Couldn’t that code run locally?
If so, you can also do this via a simple bookmarklet:
javascript:location.href='https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:'+location.href;{}
For example, take this NYT article https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/health/life-expectancy-co...
Google cache:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... -- 404
OP's service
https://cfworker-beatthatwall.jayass.workers.dev/?url=https:... -- works.
However, one can adopt your bookmarklet to use OP's service when needed instead of installing extension/userscript that seem to match all the sites.
> <meta data-rh="true" name="robots" content="noarchive, max-image-preview:large"/>
So, OP must be using some other means to retrieve the page.
In the case of NY Times, they're likely just grabbing the non-archived version and performing an operation similar to 12ft ladder.
Google cache fetching seems like it might be an effective strategy for a site like Washington Post that have extremely effective paywall enforcement (till your turn off JS), but also allow Google cache.
Dedicated websites that are independent of a centralised controlling body? What a brilliant idea! Those ol' greybeards were on to something
If the idea is to host other extensions on it as well, I'd suggest putting a little more effort into it so it feels like something that actually has extensions on it rather than blog posts. The page for the extension itself for example has none of the usual links or info about the author of the extension (the date and author feel like they're part of a blog post ABOUT the extension, not info about the extension itself because of the layout) and the actual link for the extension itself is a direct download link in the prose of the article itself.
This may be because I'm European but the complete lack of info about who operates the site (no privacy policy, just a twitter link and a copyright statement linking back to the site itself) screams "scam" to me on top of the impression that this is a blog trying to present itself as an extension store.
Please take this as constructive feedback but if I saw this site in the wild I'd assume it's malware.
If this grow enough in the next few months I will change some things including the TLD.
Adding privacy policy is the next step. Again thanks for your constructive feedback.
Edit: Unfortunately https://12ft.io seems to be down right now, I hope it's temporary.
It’s not good to train users to do this because this is what malicious extensions do. Also, this will produce popup warnings and/or they can be automatically disabled by the browser.
I don’t even run extensions that I have developed myself in developer mode because it’s a PITA.
As long you are careful with the extension you install manually you should be fine.
e.g. from https://windirstat.net/download.html
For installing an unpacked extension:
- Obviously you don't have the benefit of the Chrome store checking for abuse.
- You'll need to read the manifest.json file yourself to see what permissions you're granting, because the warning popup doesn't show up when installing this way.
- There's a few attacks that unpacked extensions can do because they can spoof their extension ID, and Chrome doesn't consider it a bug. See: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=130196...
The extension developer could add a malicious permission + new code to exploit it and it would look the same as using developer mode to add a Hello World extension
Like, what if I want to run a different marketplace for chrome/firefox/safari extensions?
Of course I may be biased because I make some of my living creating content behind paywalls. If free access and ad support were possible, I would choose them first. But they aren't. To me, this extension and the people who support it aren't any different from those who go into restaurants, order food, eat it and then leave without paying. And there will be those who trot out some extreme rhetoric about world hunger or something to justify their actions.
Google is blocking this extension because it's bad for the web as a whole. Don't empower people who destroy the information sources and turn the web into a fact desert. Support those who create knowledge and share it fairly and equally, albeit at a price.
Nobody cares if you want to sell the secrets of the universe for $5000/mo. We care about the bait and switch.
By setting up this bait and switch, you hurt your own paywall - if the search engine can get a full copy, so can I. Want these extensions to stop working? Stop the bait and switch.
The technology does not allow them to do this without sharing it with you as well. But that is ethically irrelevant.
(Of course, we also deserve a good search engine allowing us to remove paywalled sites and seo spam from our results.)
We widely regard the above as unethical.
Adding content to a search engine literally says "you can come read this content!". That is the purpose of search engines. Even Google penalizes paywall behavior and will downrank them - which forces the paywall people to get more clever.
Sorry but don't abuse search engines and users to sell your content. Buy ads like a big boy.
Though I do agree, the bait and switch aspect of finessing seo and such leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Glad google penalizes such behavior
If they don't like it they can not submit to search engines.
According to the law, someone did.
Just because something's available on request from a server does not mean it's up for grabs.
When you give the content out for free to the indexer, you have given a copy to the world. Google search is not your advertising machine - you can pay for that priviledge if you would care for it.
It's actually everyone's business because this creates a web that is less usable for everyone. If publishers were willing to commit and make their paid content server-side for customers only, they would have a stronger case against infringers.
They provide users with an expectation of what information they will receive if they pay for the content.
The fact that this "glimpse" of the content pollutes your web searches is a search engine problem.
It would be trivial to filter sites with paywalled content. But Google refuses to let you do that. Hope someone else will come along and help with that.
I would be a lot less annoyed with these paywalls if they didn't rank so highly on search results, or at the very least indicated they were paywalled on the search page and were easy to filter out.
I don’t get this. They do whatever they want with their content. Editors give free book copies to journalists; that doesn’t gives you the right to have one as well.
The difference is consent.
Google is obeying robots.txt. Google caches a copy of what you serve and gives that out. That is part of the deal.
Nobody does that. The comparison doesn’t hold.
The idea that a single public exhibition of a work is enough to invalidate any future sale of that work is totally silly. Are you gonna bust out the window of a Barnes & Noble because libraries exist?
It’s exactly the same. You give access to an entity that serves to promote your content. The fact that Google’s cache is accessible is a technical implementation detail; Google could remove access to that cache tomorrow and that wouldn’t change anything.
It's intentional to fix the kind of abusive behavior you are engaging in. If you serve content to a search engine, that search engine will reproduce the content.
Search engines are for publically available content.
If you want to advertise, pay for it.
As for the read path, the sites consented to Google indexing their stuff, and Google consents to letting people read the crawler cache. I don't see the issue.
Is it immoral to browse with Javascript disabled? Does morality require foreign code to run on your local system in order for these intrusive elements to actively manipulate (and potentially exploit) you?
Is it immoral to rewrite a url in such a way that access is allowed? See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16906571
In the days of newsprint, ads might have been garish, but they were bound into the media and they could not track you. Advertising now involves so much more surveillance, that I think the majority of the immorality is not with the end user.
ps I have upvoted you.
no extension needed.
And if you want to use Google cache (and Google is your main search engine) just add ? in front of URL and with two clicks (dots->cached) you get to the cached version of Google.
again no extension needed.
Stay safe.
I could use some help with that
According to the original link the URL for the script is https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jorgefsilva/beatthatwall/m....