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Comment by floating-io | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this plugin just removes stuff that the site puts over the content to restrict it. It doesn't fool the site into sending the content to the user's computer; it's already done that. Am I wrong in this?

IMO, there needs to be shift in understanding. They sent their information to my computer. Whatever I do with what they sent is my business, not theirs. It's on my computer. And yet they want it to stop.

IMO, if you want it to stop, don't be lazy; don't send it in the first place.

Then a bypass might have CFAA behind it.

These are the same people who want to use my bandwidth and CPU capacity to track me everywhere I go on the web. If they can make legal claims about what I do with the information they send to my computer, I should be able to make legal claims for them using my own computer against me without my consent.

Of course, I'm also more than a little drunk at the moment, so what do I know?

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> IMO, there needs to be shift in understanding. They sent their information to my computer. Whatever I do with what they sent is my business, not theirs. It's on my computer. And yet they want it to stop.

This is the whole thing to me. Companies like YT have no right to force me to see stuff I don't want to, or bypass what I say goes on in my browser (i.e., an adblocker)

If they don't like it, they can not serve my requests. Simple.

This is such a wildly first-amendment-forward take I couldn’t even begin to understand how you could construct a principled argument against it.

The argument against it is that by visiting a site you are initiating an exchange as determined by the site operator. In the case of YT, you are watching a video you want to, and must in return watch ads or pay for a premium subscription. The technical details, according to this argument, are invisible to most people and therefore irrelevant. This is, of course, a stance that only makes sense to someone without a real sense of ownership over their computing devices, i.e. to someone who views computers as appliances that are used to consume services.

I didn't sign a contract, so any exchange youtube perceives from my visit is their own hallucination because I didn't agree to their terms.

Pretty sure today you can't visit YouTube without accepting a ToS.

Sure you can; I do it every day.

If the page content included the content that was supposed to be behind paywall, but you didn't agree to any ToS because you never had seen the paywall, how far in the forest does the pained cry of IP lawyer carry?

Of course you can.

Or else what? I didn't accept anything when I went to youtube.com

Can you force me to keep to an agreement I didn't agree to?

> If they don't like it, they can not serve my requests. Simple.

this can just as easily be flipped around. if you don't like it, why are you requesting the page? no one is forcing you to view ads on youtube. what they are trying very hard to do is make it difficult for you to consume the thing that costs them money serve without also viewing the ads that pay for it.

I get it. I don't like ads either, and I also avoid viewing them whenever possible. I would prefer to pay whatever it costs to serve me the content plus a reasonable profit. but elevating this technical workaround to some sort of moral principle is not tenable. you're not entitled to make up whatever terms you want for consuming the work of others, and it's absurd to think otherwise.

I don't know if I want to see the content or not until I request the page.

What if I go on youtube, but some scammer replaced it with a page that says "your computer is hacked, send BTC to enable youtube, go to scamwebsite.com". My safe browsing add-on should be able to block the content of scamwebsite.com, or even block this message completely if the maintainers act more quickly than youtube

To argue "you visited youtube.com and the scammer has the right to show you the scam message" is not logical, so why should "you visited youtube.com and Google has the right to show you advertisements" hold? You only argued from the act of visiting the website and it costing someone money. It costs the scammer money to serve the requests from billions of people hitting the website, that doesn't change from the perspective of your argument.

You've invented a scenario that doesn't even make glancing contact with reality in order to rationalize your point of view. I'm actually on your side in this argument but not for this totally contrived reason.

The scenario is very real. Ad networks don't review ad content well enough, so scams and other malicious content are sometimes shown to users. This is also why the FBI recommends using an ad blocker [1]. Pretty embarrassing for Google that a public service announcement like this was needed.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-fbi-now-recommends-using-...

It doesn't have to be youtube.com

plenty of sites get hacked and hackers phish their users, it's very real

A closely related way to think about this is that with control comes liability for damages.

If the content provider wants to argue they deserve control over What calculations and things my computer does, then they ought be liable for any crashes or scams or exploits that come from that.

I find there's a lot of frustrating internet crap that boils down to someone demanding power without responsibility.

You’re conflating controlling what a merchant sends with controlling how a consumer receives. Both parties control their own side of the transaction. This is why the delivery driver can’t make you raise your pinky while eating their fancy pizza. Same deal when the delivery is bits not chips.

You would have a point if those "ads" were advertisements.

But no, those "ads" are not advertisements; they are malvertisements. Ads are viruses (whether for the digital or human brain), full stop.

Until ads stop being malicious, I have no feelings of guilt for blocking and bypassing them. Fuck them and all the people who enable them.

> the thing that costs them money serve

At this point I don't actually think it costs them anything.

This seems like a terribly one-sided transaction that doesn't seem to apply to basically any other consumer-business relationship. To continue the delivery driver analogy from another comment, does a pizza place have the right to dictate whether I can cover up ads on their pizza box when it comes to my house?

I think an important distinction here might be the difference between consuming content versus re-publishing it.

1. If I buy a newspaper and I cut out all the ads, that's perfectly fine. (Except in a corporatist dystopia.)

2. If I make a business buying newspapers, cutting out their ads, and then reselling the results, then that could easily get me in trouble for copyright and trademark infringement.

3. If I sell a device people can operate on their own newspapers that automatically cuts out all the ads, that should be fine.

So when it comes to some of these paywall avoiding services, I think the question is they're doing number 2 or number 3.

If I knock on your door, you have a choice to ask who I am first, and decide if I should come in, or you can simply let me come in and look at things. You can't then sue me I look where you don't want me to look. You can kick me out, and you can improve your security. But you're suing because you still want me to be there, you want my attention. Well, my terms are I look at everything or nothing.

Regarding visiting your website? Well, it's on the public internet. Don't be on it if you don't want random visitors.

As for ads, I get it, ads are the easiest way to generate revenue, fine. But can we agree that they've gotten to the point of being immensely profitable and then some, yet advertisers still want you to believe that:

1. They need to abuse your rights and steal your private info so they can survive?

2. That YT really needs to show you 10 ads on a 3 minute video?

3. They deserve to litter every pixel of your browser with ads and you deserve nothing?

> But can we agree that...

This is another concept that seems to be lost on so many people. The vast majority of people, myself included, have no problem with a reasonable amount of unobtrusive ads

The problem is it's just gotten worse - more ads, more tracking, more manipulation. Yet consumers are the ones at fault for getting sick of it. Hmmm...

> if you don't like it, why are you requesting the page

Also, why is this sort of argument only applied to websites? If I go to a store and avoid looking at ads, people aren't going to paint me as the asshole. And if the store had people holding ads in front of my face in an attempt to force me to view them, I would hope people would say that's unreasonable.

> you're not entitled to make up whatever terms you want for consuming the work of others

But YT is, even though they're not the ones creating the work?

Anyway, I am in fact entitled to do so - just as creators are free to set their terms, and we're both free to decline each other's terms.

Even though drunk, I think you have articulated valid points. Visiting a website is not making a binding promise that your user agent will execute all scripts that are served. In fact, if you consider a11y needs, the web could never work that way.

I don’t think publishing information can come with a conditional license on how the information is processed (“the reader shall not skip ahead to the ending of this book”).

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but this plugin just removes stuff that the site puts over the content to restrict it

Most of the time those plugins get the same view as what you would see from Google. Those plugins can't bypass any real server side login obviously.

And I'd argue that showing some different content to Google or with some heuristics to users is basically kind of fraud anyways.

And yet what we see progressing with the likes of Win11 and WEI is that they're working deliberately and tirelessly to make the majority of the PC landscape into appliances like phones. Perhaps someday I will be arrested for connecting to the internet with a pre-TPM machine.

Arguably Microsoft is funnily enough on side of consumers in that, comparably to many others, because their business incentives match up with ensuring that there has to be a way to be a real owner of the machine.

They did bend to allow Protected Video/Audio Path, but those aren't backed by TPM - they are backed by Intel ME, they are most probable reason AMD PSP isn't open source, they are part of the reason HDMI 2.0 can't be supported properly with open source components.

But so long as Microsoft wants to have certain high-paying customers interested, it's going to offer and push systems with more owner control than some.

Sure... enterprise and gov customers. But I think their moves with win11 show that they view most windows users as products, not customers. Even Apple lets big customers sideload apps, but not the product class of customer.

Apple explicitly makes it so that they keep the keys to the machine in ways you cannot deal with.

Microsoft, in order to support enterprise and government clients, pushes certain policies onto hardware manufacturers. While it's not the same as pushing it for everyone, enterprises being at times stingy means you can acquire relatively cheaply hardware that is "certified" for Microsoft Windows Enterprise - where Microsoft certification requires certain owner-friendly policies (including complete removal of vendor keys from secure boot and resigning everything with your own).

The argument works in real life too:

Ads are stealing our attention. They shouldn't be allowed to do that.

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