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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that the app received $1M in preseed funding: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-app-promises-you-an-ad-...

It's also worth noting that the Instagram API is extremely locked down for typical users (which is the reason why there hasn't been a clone like this) as it is limited to Businesses and Creators, but the app demonstrates features not available by the official API: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram

They tweeted that they reverse-engineered the Android API, which would likely get personally you banned anywhere, even without a business: https://twitter.com/TheOGapp_/status/1574811387737407490

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> They tweeted that they reverse-engineered the Android API, which would likely get personally you banned anywhere

The question is - how do we even allow it do be legal? Not being able to reverse engineer applications running on your own devices is some kind of bullshit dystopia, tolerated only because average citizen is not technical enough to realize how dystopian it is.

I have some trouble with "telling a third party developer they can't replace parts of your server-driven app for their own profit is a dystopia."

Are you using any browser extensions that do something with website content?

No, and that isn't equivalent

> No

You either hate yourself or you don't use the Web too much.

> that isn't equivalent

It absolutely is. There's a service out there that's meant to communicate with applications running on my computer. What my computer does is 100% up to me. If this means your business model that relies on locally running code is hurt, that's something you should have factored in into your decision to choose that business model.

> You either hate yourself or you don't use the Web too much.

This doesn't seem like an appropriate thing to say. Good luck to you.

Is the Web going to be sad because of what I said about it?

Let me rephrase: "browsing today's Web as-is is an extremely miserable experience and the fact that you can put up with it doesn't mean everyone else should".

Listen, I really didn’t like the way your machine consumed your resources, so I built my own machine that consumes your resources. You should totally let me do this because it’s what your users want. Oh, and I also told your users to stop paying you because that’s anti consumer.

Meta is wrong in a lot of ways, but this isn’t the right way to fix the problem. Just remove Meta from the equation entirely.

I completely agree that this isn't the right way to fight Meta, but I disagree about "Letting" you build a machine that consumes resources.

It's not OG or Facebook's machine that is consuming Facebook's API Resources. It is software that is running on the User's hardware. The user should be, and generally is, allowed to make any request to Facebook that's not actively malicious - Using whatever software they choose as their user agent. That means a third party client, developed with the express intent of not showing ads. It's my computer, not yours,

I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time.

Here’s the rub though, if you make and distribute a thing, with the sole intent that the thing will be used for stealing something. Is that ok?

If I made a device that could unlock and start a car, that required no knowledge of how the underlying tech worked, and I advertised it as “OGTransportation, transportation like you want it. No car payment, no paying for gas. Just get in and drive”

Not sure I’m feeling the whole argument.

That’s an idealistic view. The pragmatic one is to turn the page back a few years to Cambridge Analytica. There is a good quote from Zuck testifying to Congress in this article https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/11/mark-zuck...

> “When we heard back from Cambridge Analytica that they had told us that they weren’t using the data and deleted it, we considered it a closed case. In retrospect, that was clearly a mistake. We shouldn’t have taken their word for it. We’ve updated our policy to make sure we don’t make that mistake again.”

If there is a third-party server in the middle of you and the service, you kind of have to assume that they are doing something with the data.

It is made worse because some developers aren’t doing questionable things. Others are doing questionable things. But you have no way of discerning between the two groups.

So, it has now become against the TOS to have a third-party make requests on your behalf.

Should we believe in the internet’s ability to be unequivocally good, or should we look at history and realize data protection is a serious problem?

> So, it has now become against the TOS to have a third-party make requests on your behalf.

Me installing a third party FB client on my phone and making request through that is not a third party making requests to FB otherwise browsers would then have to be classified as third party. There is no requirement for a third party client to go through a third party server.

> so I built my own machine that consumes your resources

They designed the machine.

It's the users that are making instances and running it, right?

If the users were building the source code and deploying it to their devices, sure. That’s not what’s happening here though.

This isn’t DeCSS, this is a company trying to build and sell a DVD duplicator that advertises that it rips copyrighted content and also removes the previews.

It's hardly a duplicator. If anything it's a DVD player that removes previews, and that sounds like a great product.

I fail to see how this is different from augmenting a website with Adblock and userscript.

If you don’t want to leak info then don’t expose it on the API, private or not.

It’s different because they didn’t make the information/source code available on GitHub and say “go at it”, allowing each user to choose to violate the TOS. They actively facilitated the behavior and received funding to do so.

Also sites block users with AdBlock enabled all the time, how is this any different?

> how is this any different?

It's not, blocking users with ad blockers is not tolerable either. If you're unhappy with people consuming content on their own computers, find a different business model that you're happy with.

Which social networks will permanently ban you if you ever visit them with an adblocker enabled?

What The OG App did was the equivalent of building and distributing a third-party telephone, rather than everyone having to use one rented from Ma Bell.

This is only true if you also agree that they used a pair of alligator clips and attached it to the copper wires on the pole as well.

The infrastructure has real costs, the api development, storage, and maintenance that they aren’t compensating Meta to use.

In this case, the third-party telephone is allowing unlimited free calls using Ma Bell's infrastructure...

I agree with you that Meta is ass for society. Simultaneously, these third-parties are parasitic. Ultimately everyone sucks here.

The solution to that is to fix your infrastructure to not trust the client, rather than trying to enforce use of a particular client.

The "infrastructure" here is advertising, or rather, the need to fund real world things with advertising because there's no way yet to micrometer what users consume on the internet and get them cough up money for it.

Sure, that might be a problem. But it should be Meta's problem, and they shouldn't be able to make it The OG App's problem or any individual user's problem.

This is the point that Richard Stallman tried to hit over 2 decades ago with Right To Read (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html ) and got close but not quite --- yes, source code is valuable, but even without source code you should still have the "right to read" what your own computer executes, as otherwise it is not truly yours.

In fact I'd go as far as arguing that true software freedom isn't about availability of source code, but what you are legally permitted to even without.

If you want to be able to reverse engineer everything on your phone, then I would say that Android and iOS are not for you.

In Europe, reverse engineering is legal by the means of observation, and decompilation in some cases, as long as you have a license for using a program:

https://vidstromlabs.com/blog/the-legal-boundaries-of-revers...

> It's worth noting that the app received $1M in preseed funding

Guess the investors should have stuck to real estate

Great due diligence on this deal. Who thought it was okay to rip off the old UI and reverse engineer the API?

Investors barely know head from tail, you're expecting way too much. It has to sound cool.

They could've been explicitly looking for this to happen in order to set a legal precedent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33018319

How did they get pre-seed funding for this? Unless I'm missing something, any angel who would invest $1M into a company that is building an alternative, ad-free Instagram client has to be one of the dumbest people around, no?

How could anyone even conceivably think this could go on indefinitely?

I'm asking genuinely because I don't get how anyone could've thought this would end any way other than by Meta putting the kibosh on this.

They could be non-technical people with no experience in software, they could have been misled by the company, or maybe they really thought they could get away with it somehow?

It can be that they're actively looking for this to happen to set a legal precedent legalizing this.

It's not a bad argument - if you are allowed to view content in an official client, it must mean that you are licensed to view said content and that a third-party client which displays the same content should be allowed to do so since you've already got a license for it.

Adversarial interoperability is our only escape of big-tech monopolies.

Several YC companies are doing the same in later stage of funding such as beeple. They reverse engineer and bridge multiple platforms.

Reverse engineering is not illegal and if there is genuine demand for an alternative client, why would investors not fund it?

Eventually, you will become big enough to be next plaid and force everyone to open their APIs.

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