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Comment by mattigames | Hacker News Reader

False, how a website is rendered on a device I own is not enforceable (legally speaking) by a acceptable use policy or any website policy; otherwise people would just use that to deter ad-blockers browsers extensions instead of all the shady tactics commonly used.

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That is not that absurd, they actually tried that. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-trial-adblocking/...

Axel Springer (not to be confused with Springer, the publisher for scientific papers) is still trying to sue btw, they're trying to go for the angle that Adblocking prevents freedom of the press since it takes away their funding.

And tbh, Axel Springer isn't the most surprising entity to sue for this, the entire publication house is a bunch of asshats, who have been cited for being the most deplorable journalists and in one case someone argued that one should be as mean and rude as legally possible to employees of Axel Springer.

They have also succesfully sued the producer of an Anti-Anti-Adblocker since their Anti-Adblocker was considered DRM by the court (IIRC).

I don't think Slack would ever go after end-users who install something like this. But they could go after the creator, who presumably created a Slack account in order to be able to build the extension, and who therefore must have agreed to the T&Cs. This could include a no-reverse-engineering clause that prohibits the sorts of things that this extension does.

Do you know about an instance where something like that already happened?

Which part? Not going after users or T&Cs that include a prohibition on reverse engineering? If the latter, yes this is pretty common.

I mean suing someone who created a web extension alleging reverse engineering is against ToS

I don't personally know of anything that specifically. But I'd imagine that in most cases, things would unfold as they did here — with the creator pulling the extension rather than risk losing the lawsuit.

This just starts a death spiral though. Slacks next step is to start detecting the objecting code and banning users from using the web interface that are found using those tools.

There are a bunch of folks doing this already for ad blockers.

Is there any company that have had positive results using such tactics?

It seems anyone who tries gets such a backlash and end up losing more than what they gain, plus they expose themselves to have false positives (e.g. one image didn't load due connection issues but slack falsely assumed it was an extension blocking it)

Try using Slack in a browser on Android. It doesn't work. I find that really objectionable. They don't (last time I asked) distribute an APK. Instead they directed me to a pirate APK site, so I don't believe it's for security.

What browser are you using and are you upto date. Many sites don't work on mobile chrome.

I find it hard to believe they would redirect you to a pirate site. Are you sure it was a pirate site and not just a third party site hosting apks

Firefox on Android. Per my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874566 it was a mirror site, though I didn't save the chat log so I can't remember which one.

Try using Slack in a browser on Android. It doesn't work.

It does work on Firefox for Android, if you enable Request Desktop Site. It's not optimized for small screens, though.

I tried exactly that a few weeks ago and couldn't get to the messages interface.

Worksforme :)

I just checked with Firefox Focus on Android, and the 'launch' button is missing. Even if I go to the `/messages` URL I am redirected back to the account splash screen. That's my default browser, especially as I only wanted to log in for a minute to check on something on my personal device.

It does work with Firefox on Android (not Firefox Focus), if you check 'desktop mode'. Weird that you should have to fake the user-agent string to access it.

Sites like APKMirror aren't pirate sites, as they only host APKs that are free of charge. Also, if you're using Android without Play Services but still want to download Play Store apps, you can use the "Yalp Store" app from F-Droid.

I'm not making a moral judgement, maybe 'pirate' was the wrong word. It probably was something like APKMirror, and my point was the chain of trust is broken (you have decide to trust that site and its provenance model) vs an HTTPS download from the Slack domain.

Yalp Store is a great app! Incidentally, it violates the Play Store ToS (this is even written in their FAQ[0])

[0] https://github.com/yeriomin/YalpStore#faq

Oh no, we might have to use one of the thousands of other chat apps with identical or superior functionality but inferior marketing teams.

People who work at companies that use slack don’t have a choice.

You kinda do. What do you think we did before slack? Change can happen the same way; convince the people with power to make the decision to use something else. There's always some resistance because you have to get many people to change - start with your team, convince others to join another service.

We use slack and I still have to use 4+ other forms of communication at work daily (jira, confluence, outlook, github). Sometimes we use video chat services and conference calls as well. There are days where very little happens via slack, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that anything beyond pinging for simple things (hey look at this jira ticket, have you done this?) is wasted effort.

That’s not the case at all. Your “ownership” of the device isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. If you’ve signed an agreement with Slack not to modify their product, then you don’t get to modify their product.

Blocking ads is not quite the same thing as modifying a product - but I don’t see any obvious reason why an EULA which forbids ad-blocking wouldn’t be enforceable. Though it would be deeply unpopular.

You are not modifying slack (their product), when you request a website all they are sending you its a bunch of characters, including characters inside CSS or JS files, rendering those its up to your machine, you are not legally binded to render those in a specific way, otherwise screen readers would all be completely illegal, all threads of not modifying your local render of a website always end poorly by the people doing such threats, examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2r3uok/we_developed_a...

https://www.quora.com/Is-AdBlock-legal-If-not-specifically-w...

> You are not modifying slack (their product)

Their product are the bits they ship to you and the code they run on their servers.

You're modifying a part of their product.

Since you can't modify their product, you also obviously shouldn't be able to use any web browser to view slack because those browsers take those bytes they ship you and interpret them in the context of the browser windowing system (its userChrome.css for example)... that's also clearly modifying the experience they delivered to you.

You also shouldn't be able to use a computer monitor that has color settings different from the web designers working at slack. If you accidentally have a monitor with slightly less blue than theirs, well, you just modified the slack UI to be a little less blue. Obviously a ToS violation and you shouldn't use them at all.

God forbid if you zoom in on the page to modify their product's resolution/size.

He he, too funny you mention zooming. I've had a bug report going for a while where their emoji sprite sheet gets all messed up if you run at smaller zoom levels. I think they still haven't fixed it properly. :)

Because people who zoom do not deserve to be on the internets.

I hope your eyesight stays 20/20 for the rest of your life.

Jerk.

He was being sarcastic... I think.

No you are modifying that rendered part. A website can't control what you do with the output.

They don't sue adblockers because they wouldn't win.

>Blocking ads is not quite the same thing as modifying a product

Explain.

> Blocking ads is not quite the same thing as modifying a product

I was going to comment something similar, but in trying to come up with details and examples to explain my point, I realized I couldn't, I so I decided they aren't really different with respect to modifying a product. What makes them different is how the product was modified, but that presupposes modifying the product and that's not really the way the question has been posed.

Blocking ads is removing the revenue mechanism, and is akin to patching out account verification for a desktop product (assuming the webapp/webpage has some AUP stating that the ads are required to be viewed as part of the service).

Modifying a program takes many forms, from removing authentication mechanisms to fixing bugs or adding enhancements, so while the legal system may or may not acknowledge those differences, it's at best an overly broad description of the case in question.

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