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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
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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
That's a great theory, which will survive about 5 seconds when an army of corporate lawyers come after you under the United States' legal system. Corporate shields are good for some things, but they are not completely judgement-proof, and the US does not have a general loser-pays policy to guard against bringing cases of questionable merit against people without the resources to defend themselves effectively.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As if we really needed another one. What a joke of a company.
Facebook makes about $16/year/user in English-speaking North America—and it's believed that about 10% of all web traffic is ad-blocked. I'm guessing there are some other people at Facebook who are aware of this situation!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
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?
Who advertises on FaceBook? Send it to them. And tell them why.
Caution: This may not be effective. Some companies believe that any publicity is good publicity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I use Facebook and Adblock and block almost every ad they carry. Right now, that nukes the entire set from the right hand bar. Facebook knows perfectly well how many people block those easy to filter right hand side ads. It's low enough that they don't care, because they have a few ways to give you internal ads instead.
What they are doing now is putting more and more ads in the main section instead. If for example I click to "Like" a post from a group, the minute I do that it rewrites the page to add an inline "If you like that you might also like..." set of ads. These aren't blocked by Adblock because they're all internal links toward other pages on Facebook. As they get more an more infrastructure for that sort of thing, they don't have to leave their regular content to serve you an ad. That makes eliminating ads an increasingly tricky game of detection and rewriting the middle of the main page. And that's exactly the thing that Social Fixer did that Adblock doesn't try. That's why Matt Kruse is being targeted while Adblock isn't. He's the only popular source for code that can block all their ads, even the internally directed ones, and that they won't tolerate.
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.