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Social Fixer Falls Victim To Facebook Legal Threats
rueger writes "The author of the very excellent Social Fixer browser plug-in is bowing to legal threats from Facebook and removing the core functionality that made his tool so great. I like Social Fixer a lot. It makes Facebook at least three or four times more usable. The author, Matt Kruse, says 'Any threat of legal action is a big deal. I am a one-man operation. If I were sued for whatever reason, I would find it very difficult to defend myself, even if it was without merit. I would be risking my personal life to maintain a tabbed news feed for users. As much as I'd like to be your Robin Hood, I just can't do that to my family.' Bizarrely, when he asked Facebook why they don't also threaten Ad-Block, the Facebook rep claimed to have never heard of it." Kruse has some surprisingly nice things to say about his interaction with Facebook, too. Reader Daniel Dvorkin points out this commentary at BuzzFeed which points out Twitter's similar policies.
It started as a GreaseMonkey script, why can't that particular functionality be open sourced? The few times a month I'm forced to go on Facebook I make sure my Social Fixer is up to date, especially since I want to be signed out of chat automatically. Having all the games and apps on a separate tab is nice too. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I didn't jump on this fast enough--is there a way to get a fully functional copy now?
It cost less than $50 to form an LLC in my state, which insulates your personal assets from business ones.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Whoa, that name was oddly familiar, and then it hit me - he ran the first ray-tracing competition, back in the great POV-Ray era.
http://www.mattkruse.com/raytracing/?bwf0d=12778
If they don't know what AdBlock is...wow, that's just sad.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
As if we really needed another one. What a joke of a company.
Based on the products they put out, I don't think it's equal. Some significant functionality appears to have never been tested. It's probably patented, though.
Don't mention what the fuck it does or anything.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I use Social Fixer all the time and while I haven't used any of the exotic features like tabbing that people are so enamoured with, I can see how they could be a great boon to some users. But I feel that Kruse is being naive in asking people to respond to his comments about Social Fixer and Facebook's demands. When his Social Fixer page was eradicated, he and his admin staff were suspended by Facebook. By venting their spleen on his current page, users are identifying themselves and do you really think Facebook will think twice about deleting a couple of hundred or thousand of disgruntled people? Of course not. Thats why I don't reply to the Social Fixer forums on Facebook. God knows who is monitoring the conversations!
My web domain.
Clearly justice is denied when one party can use the threat of a lawsuit to compel another to capitulate, simply because they can't afford to defend themselves. Everyone knows it works this way. Why don't more people object?
"It makes Facebook at least three or four times more usable"
You know what makes Facebook more usable? Not using Facebook.
Yes, I just burned Karma.
First they create an API to help engender an ecosystem that attracts developers to improve the platform and thus bring in more users. Then after the ecosystem is established and FB goes IPO for billions they start pulling the rug from underneath the third-party developers that helped get them there. FB deserves a fate worse than MySpace.
QUIT USING FACEBOOK!!!
i dont have a facebook account, no twitter account. no myspace account, i refuse to sign up to some lamer social network and spill my guts about my personal life to the world, if you knew my real name and googled it you wont find any information about me, no photos of me, because i refuse to upload that information to the internet, you have to learn to use the internet without letting the internet use you
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The solution to this is obviously to avoid facebook/twitter and all that shit like the plague.
Regardless, how can they sue somebody for doing a fucking greasemonkey script? "This software tinkers with our webpage" seems to be their logic. Well, so does every browser on planet earth. HTML is a declarative language, you REQUIRE a user agent to interpret your webpage. Essentially, you are telling the user "well, here is this information, and we think it should be displayed sort of like this". That's it. The user can either parse the code on his own (aka just read the source), or write some code to do it, or use somebody else's code to parse it. How are the actions performed by this script any different from what any browser does?
If you publish a website, everytime it's displayed, you are acting as GUESTS in my computer, no the other way around, and you'll play by my rules.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Okay, where is the most effective place to send hate mail or equivalent to Facebook? As many of you know, FB is almost impossible to contact directly or actually speak with a live person despite them employing thousands of them. Even their telephone number only leads you to a number of different messages and voice mail boxes that appears to mostly be dead-end bit buckets.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The power of herding users is being bought from power-users by corporations (for the cost of nice cushy jobs, salaries and stocks).
by making Facebook "3-4 times more usable", it reduces the time people spend stuck with burdensome Facebook advertising and workflow to access desired material. In other words, it reduces Facebook's revenue for advertising from those links and burdensome clickthroughs. _Of course_ they object, and _of course_ they feel he's in violation of his terms of service or even more severe contract violations for interfering with what they try to sel to the advertisers and customer tracking companies, who actually pay Facebook's bills.
Why is there surprise that Facebook's legal staff and management would threaten the tool author over this?
I remember Kruse being very dismissive then.
Also FB Purity is a much better extension.
http://www.fbpurity.com/
Facebook's motto seems to be Let's Be Evil. Time after time, what they do is really not friendly, not nice, not fair, not good. It's evil and based on my experiences with them, I'd say they like it that way.
It's been a while since this quote was apropos:
The tighter you grip, the more systems slip through your fingers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The problem he had with his website is he was sending all communication, even non-critical stuff, over SSL.
Everything after the user has logged in is "critical" by this definition. Otherwise, Eve can clone the user's session cookie with tools similar to Firesheep.
I explained to him that he shouldn't have it check for updates via SSL
Without SSL, a man in the middle can lie that no updates are available and proceed to exploit the client's unpatched software. The only way I can think of to authenticate the presence or absence of updates without SSL is some ad-hoc way of signing timestamped responses from the update server.
Maybe he should make his own damn social network. Seems like he has a better idea about what people want from one.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Examples of this working are x264, libavcodec and mplayer, for example. All of these probably break large numbers of patents and are quite high profile and I'm sure they are a thorn in the side for the video and audio format cartels. But they are doing just fine, and have been doing so for a long time. If they had been closed one-man projects by somebody in the USA, they life expectancy would probably be much shorter.
I don't see any advertisement on facebook at all, and I'm just using Adblock Edge + the rule facebook.com##div[class="ego_column"]. SocialFixer does more than just block advertisements, but if all you want is to get rid of then adblock already does a very good job at it.
Blocking on higher levels has some advantages too, though. For example blocking individual HTML elements. On facebook, I've needed this block facebook.com##div[class="ego_column"] to get rid of the last half of the advertisements. You're right that Adblock Plus sold out. That's why it was forked. I use the fork called Adblock Edge.
True.
With me, any site which blocks ad blocker gets visited exactly once.
Not through some personal policy or soap box theory, but simply because it's too big a pain in the ass to screw with my browser settings, and the internet is permanently filled with alternative options. It is extremely rare that a site will have something which is actually so unique that I can't get it somewhere else in under three seconds.
Using it may be illegal, especially if you're facebook user and accepted their TOS, which may forbid it. But writing software and distributing it without having a contract with facebook, should not be subject to anything facebook can do?
And in source code form, it think, it was proven that its free speech.
a good reason not to visit them again.
If the site is important, there will be adblocker plugins for them. disabling their adblocker checking JS. Of course there may be a blocker-blocker, but in the end there will be more enthusiasts, which block the ads, than efford in blocking the blocker.
why not just use an older version?
They could just disable the app, right? Why bother with legal threats?
Everything else: stop pontificating. It's a free platform, they can do what they like with it.
I read Matt Kruse's blog post last night. Then I read the BuzzFeed story. I think Facebook is using Social Fixer as a test case. If they can successfully shut down apps like Social Fixer while mostly ignoring user complaints, they can become more like WalMart and less like...um....I can't think of a company or product that hasn't gone this route. I guess this is happens to all successful companies or brands. Apple's shine is definitely off since Jobs passed away. The biographies and commentaries about him aren't what I would call glowing. They read more like MSNBC criticizing Democrats, or FoxNews criticizing Republicans. You get the picture.
I think this is what happens to great, popular, or successful brands. The question is, will we look back on Facebook the way we now look at GM?
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
They have threatened the creator of F.B. Purity (a mozilla plugin). I think they'll have a more difficult time actually legitimizing their claim, as this is a plugin that runs on the customer's system, which FB cannot, ever, claim ownership over. But they will probably try! And yes, the article about his experience is valid - why not go after Adblock? Can you imagine. The risk there is legal precedence, which I don't believe really exists concretely (yet. But someone could add here to correct me). If they brought this legal action through the courts and a decision were made in favor of the user (the desktop), that affects everyone. I'm sure this isn't the last of this!
why not just use an older version?
You can be sure I'm never updating my copy of Social Fixer again!
obviously facebook has some mod points. Can anyone dispute this on a factual basis? The point is, Facebook likes to jerk its users around as much or more than they're trying to claim this person would be doing.