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).
There are a bunch of folks doing this already for ad blockers.
It does work on Firefox for Android, if you enable Request Desktop Site. It's not optimized for small screens, though.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2r3uok/we_developed_a...
https://www.quora.com/Is-AdBlock-legal-If-not-specifically-w...
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.
Jerk.
Explain.
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.