Dear Mozilla community: I screwed up. Big time. | Hacker News Reader

Dear Mozilla community: I screwed up. Big time.

hackademix.net

124 pointsrobin_reala40 comments

Wow. That's a display of humility and responsibility you just don't see very often. Though the original conflict was avoidable and unnecessary, an apology like this - for anything - shows real character. Kudos.

NoScript has for a long time automatically changed the users default choice from: "block all Google Ads" to "block all Google Ads except NoScript ones". And, the feeling I get from that blog post is that the NoScript author still considers that program behavior acceptable. For this reason, the conflict was probably not avoidable.

So, while it was a good apology, I am not sure that the author has learned the entire lesson. Never-the-less, it is a mistake made and a mistake fixed, and the author is probably a better developer for it.

would he have apologized thought if he hadn't gotten caught? doesn't sound like it.

I really don't know all of the details on this situation, so perhaps this doesn't apply... but it does occur to me that often people don't realize they've crossed the line until somebody (maybe many somebodies, if they're stubborn) points it out to them.

i think that's true, but in this case i think he knew that he wasn't being honest the whole time... which is partly why he apologizes so profusely.

I don't agree, from the blog it makes it sound like it really became an arms race - he was more interested in 'winning' than in serving his users.

Once he was outed, he realized what he'd done and came to his senses.

Sometimes you need to be caught to realize the magnitude of what you've done.

I have respect for this developer.

I would have been really pissed off too, in his situation. Especially as that AdBlock Plus list deliberately broke the functionality of his site (not just ads).

He did something understandable, realised it was a mistake, and admitted it openly within hours, with a genuine apology (Sony, I'm talking about you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology#The_Sony_.2... )

I have no idea what this is about, but I have never seen so many people overreacting so vigorously.

I guess you didn't see much of the GoGaRuCo sewage flow last week, eh?

I wish all apologies were so engaging. Great post.

Man that guy pushes a lot of releases. And all these require a restart of FireFox right?

His addon is why I still use Firefox.

And you can restart whenever. It doesn't have to happen immediately.

For that reason (frequent restarts from updating plugins) and my desire not to be strapped to Firefox because of 'essential' plugins I try to keep my add-on number low.

You can restart at your leisure.

If you don't restart to update the plugin, theres no point in updating in the first place. So its still forcing you to restart.

He could have restarted in his spare time.

If I were in the same situation as he was in, being bullied by EasyList and ABP, I probably would have done the same thing.

see my post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592788

This is bullshit, he admits he realised that in addition to installing AdBlock, users had to deliberately get EasyList, then he goes on to conveniently assume that said users (who had to make 2 very deliberate decisions to get there) didn't really want the full effect of EasyList, basically because it doesn't suit his business model. It was never a misunderstanding, and it didn't escalate unreasonably, NoScript was abusive from the outset, they were just subtle about it.

I choose to use ABP and (prior to this) Easylist.

I didnt choose them to inhibit my web experience - and the filters they employed broke noscript for me. It rendered some aspects of the site unusable. That is serious hijacking IMO.

Removing the adverts from Noscript would have been easy to do: fix the ABP flaw. Instead he decided to insert content into the ABP plugin via Easylist that targetted and destroyed the site. That was both a deliberate attack and a breaking of the trust I put in ABP.

Sure Giorgio also made the same mistake: but he apologised and retracted the updates and, in the heat of anger, I can forgive him. If the ABP team write a similar apology I will forgive them too. But it seems they dont plan too: which is disgusting.

No one likes to break a website, but... given the options of breaking the website's Javascript features, or letting NoScript perpetually undermine the Easylist2 filter, there wasn't much choice for Easylist2.

Easylist2 has nothing to apologise for. If anything, staunchly defending the integrity of their list was a good thing.

Except EasyList wasn't doing anything wrong to begin with. It contained entries that should have blocked the ads, without resorting to domain-specific (obviously individually targeted) rules. It was only due to a flaw in ABP that these rules didn't apply.

When asked by the ABP author to implement domain-specific rules against NoScript's site, the correct response from EasyList ought to have been to point out that it wasn't their problem to fix.

Had ABP just fixed the bug, NoScript's ads would have disappeared but the rest of the site wouldn't have broken, and although the NoScript developer might have been pissed at his loss of revenue stream, the problem wouldn't have necessarily escalated -- there wouldn't have been the clear gloves-off challenge that implementing a specific rule targeting NoScript's ads represented.

There's a lot of overreacting and general stupidity in the whole chain of events (and good reasons why maybe you shouldn't push 'emergency' releases except after a few hours of calm consideration), the core of the problem was someone looking for a lazy way to avoid fixing a software bug.

Just for the record I wasnt suggesting Easylist 2 needs to apologise: the developer of ABP is the one at fault :)

Would have been much simpler to just serve ads from your own domain, or through a proxy etc to thwart adblock, without the need for any client side shenanigans.

The blocks, I believe, basically disabled most of his site period.

I know I visited it late in the afternoon when I heard there was a load of issues and had trobule navigating - and certainly could not install NoScript from the site (oh, obv this is with ABP and Easylist2 installed)

That was most likely the end result of the Easy List update war. Had the NoScript author not entered into such a battle, only the Ads would have been blocked.

I dont know: you see he does have a point about choosing what to block. Given a choice I would allow ads to be displayed on noscript sites because:

a) I trust the site owner not to show me crap b) It is his revenue stream and I am willing to support causes I like

The best solution was for ABP to fix the flaws that allowed the ads on noscript to slip through the filters. Instead the maintainer chose to rope Ares2 into updating Easylist2 to deliberately target the site.

Whatever the motives or the arguments for each side that smacks of the "wrong way to do it" to me :)

Yes, I agree that fixing ABP would have been a much better solution to the problem. At the same time though, NoScript specifically targeted ABP, so it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that ABP specifically targeted NoScript (through EasyList2).

The whole "choose" business is just word play that can be slanted either way. And it's misleading, because the conflict was over NoScript's obtrusive default setting, not the ability to choose what you wanted to block or unblock after the fact.

Judging by the info given in this blog post, this instead looks to be the cause of the update wars.

According to his side of the story, AdBlock went to great lengths to block ads specifically on his site, which is what prompted him to eventually take such extreme countermeasures.

Ok from all this what emerges is: ADs blocking extensions may destroy one of the few viable business models not only for web services, blogs, ..., but for this kind of software too. This is not very smart.

When you see a web page is a mix, in different ratios, of content and ads: too much ads for you? Switch to another, more balanced resource. The web is full of content after all. If the content of a specific web site is particularly good either accept the ads or accept to pay for an ads-free site (if it is possible) or go away.

This is a smart response. Some addons have millions of users. That's a lot of users, and there should be a better way to get some compensation.

Is anyone else getting a Google Ad in the left sidebar? I'm running Firefox with AdBlock and I am wondering why am I getting it.

i can replicate that.

he's using obfuscated URLs from his site to dynamically add the google banners. ABP apparently doesn't catch that.

this is just wrong. there is no other way of putting ig.

there are the URLs that ABP shows:

http://hackademix.net/EGBxd3Vx;dCI,d39/;d3x1Y2l,;dHlzcWR5;f3...;

http://hackademix.net/HHR9f3d9;eHlxdWQy;cnloM0tP;dyhMdmso;J0...;

http://hackademix.net/RCwlJy8l;ICEpLTxq;KiEwayEj;KyYMFnwm;fw...;

http://hackademix.net/UDc/Pzc8;NTE0I343;fjQ/JTI8;NTM8OTM7;fj...;

http://hackademix.net/WSk4Pjw4;PWt3PjY2;PjU8KiA3;PTA6OC0w;Nj...;

http://hackademix.net/egobHR8b;HkhUHRUV;HRYfCQMU;HhMZGw4T;FR...;

http://hackademix.net/ewsaHB4a;H0lVHBQU;HBceCAIV;HxIYGg8S;FB...

> this is just wrong. there is no other way of putting ig.

What a load of crap. I don't really like ads, I don't want to see ads, and I never click ads, but there's no law that says "you must make it easy for firefox addon developers to block parts of your website".

Get a grip.

Interesting technique to circumvent AdBlock. Might be useful!

But AFAIK AdSense program policy does not allow cloaking. I guess that includes URL obfuscation.

A bit cheeky I guess. First screw around with ABP, then write a apologetic blog post about it, get it on HN and Reddit and use the same technique to display the Ads. Wonder how many ad impressions he got out of it. The only problem, I dont think anyone uses ABP is going to click the ads even if you manage to show it to them!

Holy cow! That web page is wider than my Macbook.

He removes ads from other sites (ads that are used to generate revenue) and yet he uses ads to generate his own revenue. Hypocrisy at its finest.

NoScript's purpose is not to block ads. It blocks javascript, which happens to block some ads if they are not whitelisted (Google ads are whitelitsted by default).

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