
Google Boots Open-Source Anti-Censorship Tool "Ahoy" from Chrome Store - davidgerard
https://torrentfreak.com/google-boots-open-source-anti-censorship-tool-from-chrome-store-180810/
======
dagenix
The thing that is interesting about Google support is that, from what I can
tell, it's primarily provided on a public forum instead of providing any
mechanism to contact someone directly. Users of the forums can try to solve an
issue, or, they can vote on issues they find important. If an issue gets
enough votes, then, someone from Google will jump in and provide what is
generaly described as pretty amazing help.

It almost sounds like a reasonable system. Except of course that Hacker News
is that public forum. And, it sounds like if you can't get enough votes here,
you're unlikely to get your problem solved.

It will be interesting to see if HN as a Google support forum works in this
case.

~~~
prepend
Comically, they do have their own public support forum that works similarly
except someone from google jumps in and says something useless and closes the
thread.

I’m sure they’d love to close HN threads where they consider the issue
resolved as “closed, won’t fix” and find any further discussion not useful.

~~~
ravenstine
That's the chief reason why I've stopped following links to Google support
forum issues. I honestly don't think I've ever seen a single one that was ever
given sufficient attention or a reasonable answer, and the vast majority are
simply ignored. It comes off as a big FU from Google to pretend to provide
support. They clearly don't give a care, and would actually have a better
image if they didn't pretend to support anything.

And product owners wonder why their seasoned developers hesitate to have
anything to do with Google. Hopefully one day Google's prestige with the tech-
illiterate will dry up and the fact that they're simply THE GOOGLE stops
working for them. But I wouldn't count on it.

~~~
Analemma_
Not that this is an excuse, but one reason Google's support doesn't drive
people away is that it's not like the competition is doing any better:
Microsoft and Apple _also_ both have infamously useless support forums. Seeing
"technet.microsoft.com" in the search results for a Windows problem is
practically a guarantee that "you won't find the answer here", and Apple's
forums are just full of pages of people pleading for, and not getting, an
official response.

~~~
josteink
> it's not like the competition is doing any better: Microsoft and Apple also
> both have infamously useless support forums

But Microsoft has actual support. People you can call. Product-teams you can
reach if your issue is of a technical nature.

They’re fantastic.

Google has none of those things.

~~~
lithos
If you spend enough on cloud services they do.

~~~
existencebox
I realize your comment was probably tongue in cheek; but to give a deadpan
answer/personal plug; My team (Azure Notebooks) utilizes github as a primary
issue-reporting mechanism, and we publish our primary help email-list, both of
which are triaged by Actual Devs, and the vast majority of our communication
is via non-paying users.

We're admittedly a smaller fish in this ocean, and large projects will have a
harder time getting 1:1 touch (Naturally, and I can't fault them for having to
be more proactive about protecting their time, and google may have tried to do
a similar "Tradeoff calculation"), but I want to assure that at least from
where I stand, we really try as a general statement to make ourselves
accessible and accountable to our users.

(Typical disclaimer, don't speak for the company, etc, etc)

------
guilamu
The two latest articles from last week on HN about how Google is prepping to
fully endorse China's censorship were posing these questions in the two most
upvoted comments :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248)
"Why is it unethical to launch a censored search product in China?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524)
"What's the slippery slope here?"

Well, you have your answer today.

The unethical slippery slope is this one: when you start accepting censorship
where do you stop?

Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the
logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. But you have to
ban it from everybody right? Otherwise, some people in China could access it
with a VPN or a proxy.

So here we are.

In order to get a "attaboy" from China, Google starts censoring tools globally
on their Chrome Store.

 _With great power comes great responsibility_ would say Ben Parker. So yes,
IMHO even companies should have some kind of "morality", some redline they
should/would not cross. Google used to have one not so long ago "Don't be
evil", but that's ancient history.

~~~
skybrian
We don't "have an answer." We can speculate that they're related. If someone
gets an answer out of them or it leaks, we will have an answer. Until then
it's a mystery.

(And even then, are you sure you should believe the answer?)

~~~
guilamu
Well, we do not have a "definitive" answer yet, but still. The plugin-in is
open source and does not violate any of the Chrome Store TOS. No one at Google
gave them any explanation for the ban nor answering any of their emails nor
those from TorrentFreaks.

[https://torrentfreak.com/google-boots-open-source-anti-
censo...](https://torrentfreak.com/google-boots-open-source-anti-censorship-
tool-from-chrome-store-180810/)

------
yasp
Repo of banned plugin [https://github.com/revolucaodosbytes/ahoy-
chrome](https://github.com/revolucaodosbytes/ahoy-chrome)

How to install plugins in Chrome without going through app store
[https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-install-chrome-
extensions...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-install-chrome-extensions-
manually/)

~~~
atomical
I realize Chrome is different from Android, but there was a story about
Fortnite bypassing the Android store recently and allowing users to download
the APK directly. Couldn't someone develop an alternative app store?

~~~
mwilliaams
There already are alternative app stores. Quite a few actually. F-Droid,
Amazon has one, and lots of sites where you can just download APKs.

------
phyzome
« Whatever problem Google has with the Chrome version of Ahoy!, the same
cannot be said of its Firefox variant. The extension is living happily on that
platform and no ToS breach has been advised. »

IIRC, Mozilla is also a lot more open about why they took stuff down.

~~~
larkeith
> Mozilla is also a lot more open

You could just end the sentence there. Google is notoriously opaque, whereas
openness (is that a word?) is one of Mozilla's core values [1].

[1] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/manifesto/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/)

------
drb91
They also did this for adnauseum.io.

Use firefox! They do not seem to have this conflict of interest problem.

~~~
jjeaff
Also, the new Firefox is just better. I left Firefox years ago as my primary
browser for chrome, always occasionally using Firefox for testing and some
browsing. They finally one me back. Especially since I can sync my browsers
including Firefox on Android which allows me to use ublock origin.

------
DanAndersen
Interesting to see the lack of "it's their platform, make your own browser and
app store if you don't like it" justifications here.

------
wpdev_63
Another reason to checkout firefox.

------
DannyBee
It's really interesting to see this story presented this way and nobody here
seems to have even bothered to try to find another perspective.

So, let's see the other side, i guess:

"We have nearly 1500 blocked sites in Portugal, where ~80% are piracy sites,
19ish% are gambling sites, and Uber (I know, right?). The full list is
available at our site
[https://sitesbloqueados.pt/](https://sitesbloqueados.pt/) and we are able to
compile this list with info gathered by our fellow users, automatically."

from

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7swz4r/iama_developer...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7swz4r/iama_developer_of_ahoy_a_browser_extension_to/)

(IE the developer themselves)

Yeah, a tool that's used for avoiding blocks on piracy and gambling, i'm
shocked to find it was taken down!

Regardless of whether you agree, i think it's not uncommon or non-standard,
and probably not (unlike some here seem to think) related to chinese
censorship or other fun conspiracy theories.

~~~
zzzcpan
From your comment it looks like it has everything to do with censorship:
Google decided to help the government of Portugal with censorship by removing
a popular censorship-circumvention extension.

~~~
jjeaff
Wouldn't it be amazing if they block Google next? Sorry, you can't access
Google without that one browser plugin that Google blocked.

------
joeseeder
Is there an equivalent to f-droid but for chrome instead of android ?

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Not that I know of, but since Chrome supports loading extensions from a local
directory it shouldn't be too hard to make an app store based on github (and
other source code repositories).

Using Firefox seems easier though. It also helps to prevent a future where a
handful of global platforms have a veto on what software we are allowed to
use.

~~~
ehsankia
> handful of global platforms have a veto on what software we are allowed to
> use.

Wouldn't Mozilla count in one of those global platforms? I'm not sure what
this "handful" includes and why it doesn't include Mozilla. It is by many
metrics the 2nd most used browser.

~~~
larkeith
Mozilla has nowhere near the scale of Google. Google could, if they wanted,
functionally kill a website or business by blocking their site, removing them
from maps, disabling their Gmail addresses, and kicking them off Google Docs,
and even in the unlikely event of massive public backlash (realistically only
possible if the story goes viral), they have the resources and userbase to
easily weather the storm - it is infeasible for most people to abandon
Google's services, even should they be so inclined, and there is no other real
way to impact their decision-making.

Meanwhile, Mozilla has a single browser with a minority of the userbase.
Negative user feedback is much more important, as Firefox is much more easily
replaced (no Google login or linked services), and they have nowhere near the
scope of potential impact that Google does, let alone resources to back it up.

~~~
jjeaff
And don't forget that Mozilla is also a non-profit organization that doesn't
have quite the same goals as Google/alphabet, the for profit mega Corp.

------
snvzz
Don't be evil.

~~~
jackhack
Ha! They just set about redefining "evil" as "that stuff that other people
do." "Don't be evil" went out the window a long time ago. I can't imagine any
new revenue seeking business model being rejected by a social media giant
because it "has a whiff of evil." If there is any doubt left that power
corrupts idealists, the big social media companies should be exhibit 1.

I will admit I find some ironic humor in the recent
youtube/twitter/google/facebook love-affair with censorship; it's the thought
that these nerds created a global platform and discovered -- shock and horror
-- that this world full of people really don't like each other very much and
have the audacity to express that view from time to time. Rather than accept
that basic truth, they set about trying to change it.

The corollary is an old saying about business models that goes like this : if
any part of your model requires the user to change a behavior, you will fail.

Still waiting for that other shoe to drop.

------
hotpotjunkie
Maybe Google is trying to get back into China and wants to show Winnie the
Pooh that they are willing to play ball on the whole censorship thing.

~~~
DoctorOetker
unless Google is willing to censor worldwide on request of China, this does
not seem plausible?

~~~
reaperducer
Why not? Other American companies have censored themselves in order to please
communist China.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/taiwan-
american-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/taiwan-american-
airlines-china.html)

~~~
DoctorOetker
I thought airline companies always listed cities and not nations? Where does
an airplane "from the USA to Russia" take off and land?

Ailine companies are not the core backbone of the digital information society.
Google currently plays a significant part of that backbone.

~~~
reaperducer
_I thought airline companies always listed cities and not nations?_

Nope. Otherwise how would you know if you're booking a flight to Moscow,
Russia or Moscow, Idaho?

 _Airline companies are not the core backbone of the digital information
society._

You are correct. Airlines are the backbone of the global economy. Airlines are
far more important than the internet. That's why cities build airports for
free, and internet companies have to pay for their infrastructure.

~~~
DoctorOetker
I was not assessing relative importance, I was assessing relative power,
jurisdiction and authority regarding the flow of _information_. If we want to
know of which things Brussels (the city) is a capital, we look it up on
Wikipedia, not on an airlines website. We might discover it is the capital of
the _Brussels Capital Region_ , of _Belgium_ as a nation and de facto a
capital of the EU institutions...

------
marenkay
There is a certain irony in that.

~~~
resoluteteeth
Not really, google has committed itself to censorship (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730842)
for example) so it's completely expected that they would do things like this,
and therefore it's the opposite of ironic.

Tools for evading censorship are one of the most important things to censor
(in order to make sure the rest of the censorship is effective).

------
thrillgore
Oh man now I definitely plan to install this extension.

