First, respond to every inquiry by telling them the price is USD$70,000,000.00. And stick to that price. Many of these sleazy companies get their leads from the same "lead generators," who will eventually take you off their lists because they know your terms are unreasonable. It doesn't work for everyone, but when I did it to spammers trying to buy my mailing list, it significantly reduced the volume of inquiries.
Second, put a page on your web site listing all of the offending companies, with links to the letter you received.
Apr 1, 2021 - Company X promised $3-5k/month if I alter your search results. Link.
Apr 3, 2021 - Company Y promised $1-5k/month if I promote thier product on other people's web pages. Link.
A lot of people on HN will claim "O, noes! Lawyers! Libel!" I wouldn't worry about it. These people don't have the money for lawyers, are usually in geographies without legal systems, and don't want their names and other information exposed in a public legal filing. Plus, all you're doing is stating facts.
There's a W C Fields joke that ends, "Madame, we've already established what sort of woman you are, now we're just haggling over price."
If they actually do come up with $120,000,000 - will at that point nobody will be surprised that you cashed out. They might be mad, but they won't blame you.
"It'd take more than 10-SWE-years to build a clone, so we should take his offer"?
Similar to why Disney paid billions for Star Wars: the company was easily capable of replicating the product; the issue was replicating the brand. That brand has a proven track record of multi-generational appeal.
These creative endeavours have a soul, or an essence, for want of a better term. You can replicate a game or a movie and it will feel utterly soulless compared to the original, even if you can't visibly notice a difference.
You could reproduce Minecraft but even the most infinitesimal divergence from the original will make it feel fake. Maybe the controls have a different 'feel', or the way the scene is rendered feels a bit off. It's just not Minecraft any more. There are just so many quirks and details that will be lost in the translation, or even patched over if they're seen as bugs.
It's no different if you ported a game from Unity to Unreal and then to CryEngine. I'm sure that with a blind comparison you would be able to 'feel' the difference.
And the same for films. The way these things were created has a lot of influence over the end result.
On the other hand, it's exactly what can make a remake or remaster so successful. The Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes that followed Resi 7 were phenomenal! Not totally faithful to the originals, didn't try to be...they just took an older game and gave it a new life.
People don't go to Starbucks because it's the best, they go to Starbucks because mocha frappucinos in Lima and London taste exactly the same. Any divergence, even an infinitesimal one, makes the frap feel fake.
The secret ingredient isn't orange peel, it's $4 billion a year in marketing.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-the-cocaine...
According to Business Insider, the beverage company has a deal with the Drug Enforcement Administration to get coca leaves so that the world can get its Coca-Cola fix. The DEA lets Coca-Cola import coca leaves from Peru and Bolivia in order to get the part of its secret recipe, which it hides behind the term "natural flavors" on the ingredients list.
I mean how many kids do you see walking around in "Cube World" T-shirts? CastleMiner? FortressCraft? Take your pick: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/lx5g3/complete_l...
The looks on people's faces are incredible.
People still blamed me.
Libel is for false statements. If you've got a real email from the company then it's not false.
There are differences: in the USA the statement is assumed true, and must be proved false if libel is to succeed. In the UK the statement is presumed to be false, and the libel will succeed unless proved true.
I wonder what the GDPR has to say about publishing a private email?
I imagine either party in an email conversation have the right to publish the email, unless some terms were agreed in advance or the subject is expressly personal.
In my opinion extensions have to be one of the worst sources of spyware these days. I am now extremely conservative with what extensions I use, and definitely would only use extensions from open source projects or companies that I trust.
Something needs to change. As long as extensions have such weak sandboxing along with such poor app review, Google/Mozilla etc will keep willingly shipping spyware unbeknownst to their users.
At least some mechanism of creating and verifying reproducible builds would go a long way.
I completely agree. There are a number of features I would really like to use in Firefox that are available only as extensions and I continue to resist installing them.
In fact, the only extension I use is uBlock origin - which is based on a fairly rich social and community history behind that project and its author ...
And uBlock Origin is in that list.
We need to pull people together who have a passion for making the world's computers just work and build a brand around simple extensions and apps that are TRULY FREE. As in, they don't have features removed that you can only unlock through a paid version, they don't have ads, they don't sell tracking data, source is open, and anyone can support them through optional donations, but they don't nag you for anything.
Stallman distinguished between free as in freedom and free as in beer. I don't think he went far enough.
I'm more radical because we are users first, all of us, and only by using great software are we able to be makers.
And I think about my typical experiences as a user. Often, using a piece of software that was pretty great, then suddenly out of nowhere, a popup, it was a free trial and the full version costs some exhorbitant amount. Or the software that was suddenly bought out and shut down. Or the "five star" app that is already full of spam.
Then I contrast that with those programs that just don't ask for anything. You keep expecting it, but it's just genuinely something truly free that works. They weren't optimizing revenue, they were optimizing function. That feeling of finding that perfect FOSS or community developed app, it's just sublime.
Some user had a problem they wanted to solve, once they solved it, it was just a gift to the world, implicitly asking people at most to think about paying it forward.
We should make stuff that emulates our ideal experiences, not our worst experiences. We should spread that same kind of joy we've felt. If one in a thousand pays it forward, the options spread. The oak tree doesn't waste time trying to extract revenue from every squirrel, it knows one in a thousand will bury an acorn somewhere and build the forest.
And it's especially needed now. There was a time in the early internet where there was just abundant freeware on the internet. Postcardware, donationware, people genuinely trying to make an entire open source ecosystem.
Then we got app stores. "Curated," but not for that ultimate sublime user experience. Curated for sustainable profit back to the marketplace. Curated to make the biggest revenue earners find the exact bottom line of scumminess without getting banned, and encourage them to duplicate that model, then inspire copycats flooding the entire app ecosystem.
I know the rebuttal, devs need to get paid. Sure, I'm not an absolutist; this path isn't for everyone or every project. But I've worked with some people who make many of their contributions as free as possible, and they include some incredibly talented and hardworking folks who might be a little bit crazy. The thing that unites them all is that they're passionate about making the world a better place. They are lucky to have the freedom to do it, but it's still praiseworthy that they use that freedom for everyone, when it'd be easy not to bother.
I know there are free cycles in the system out there where people code out of a desire to help. Just need to have a unifying purpose, a call to action, that's how so many of the great movements like open source originally started. Just have to have 1% of people believe in it, then so many incredible things happen.
Absent any counterargument, I stand by the premise that app stores and extension marketplaces are teeming with junk, that curation has failed as a model.
It wasn't always like this. It doesn't have to be like this.
We just need to build something better.
Maybe the above path isn't the way. Ok, what do you think would be a better way to fix the current system?
Paying $0.20 per user to buy that seems extremely low.
Also, on the sandboxing/app review of extensions, does anybody know how well Apple vets Safari extensions? (I guess that could be hard if the evil parts are time-triggered, certainly if the code also is obfuscated (possibly in the name of minification)
Ghostery anyone?
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/59wiln/is_ghostery...
I feel like this is another prong in the story about threats to sustainability of open source done the way it used to/has been done previously.
It is. It’s very easy to generate big money with ad replacement or proxies.
During interview it became clear that their "product" was actually bundled malware that replaced google's and other ads in the browser. Evidently hot founder guy was using this startup as cash cow for his other ventures.
There was some noise in the press about it a couple years later and founder guy defended himself saying he sold the company and wasn't responsible, except it was already malware when I interviewed and he was still owner so I know it's bullshit.
This seems like a fairly benign monetization scheme, it’ll hurt some sites that depend on ad revenue but not any more than adblockers.
Monetization is the process of converting user value into money. If you don't provide any value it's not monetization it's just mining.
Eventually the photo hosting service itself solved the problem that my extension was solving, but pretty much everyone who'd installed the extension still had it installed.
At some point, a company offered to buy it from me for a couple thousand dollars -- I was 18, and it seemed like a miracle! They asked me to add some code to the extension, and I assumed their intentions were good. I added their code, which I now realize was some sort of tracking/advertising program...and my extension promptly got taken down by Google.
Quite the learning experience!
... said the venue owner to the musician.
It’s a frighteningly common invit^H^H^H^H^H^H exploitation providing free labour to owners of gathering places benefitting from that labour (like bars and browsers and operating systems and social networks, etc).
It's not an iron-clad given that the musician provides value to a venue.
Musicians who are confident they can bring business to a venue negotiate with confidence and get paid.
Those who play for free are ones who don't have that confidence.
What you accept is what you cost. That's the market rate.
How about this argument. Say I have a restaurant. Typically that means there is some landlord, and I pay them utilities and rent in exchange for using the space. Now some guitar-strumming, crooning ape wants to perform in the same space. If he and I are to be considered part of the same organization, we are on the same level of the "org chart". We are sharing the space and doing our thing. Why would I pay him anything? He should pay part of the rent and utilities. Or, why not the other way around?
Let's reverse it. Suppose a musician has a venue where he performs every night, and people come. Paying people. Suppose I want sell hot-dogs and sandwiches there, and he lets me do that. Why the fuck should he also pay me anything? He would be right to ask me to pay some sort of rent.
Now if I give the hot dogs and sandwiches for free, so that many more people come, and those people pay to get into this music venue, then there is a case that I'm increasing the business, and doing it out of my pocket. Still, that is my problem; I shouldn't be doing such a thing. Maybe I know what I'm doing! Or maybe I'm trying out new product to see how people like it or whatever (market research).
If the venue owner does the approaching (as in the context of the post raising this sub-thread) like Apple, Microsoft or Google approaching extension developers) it's questionable.
If the musician (or the extensions developer) approaches the venue owner, it's an entirely different story.
One has exploitation written all over it, the other not so much.
The context of the great-great-...-parent post suggests the exploitative version.
Owners are allowed to do a lot of things that would be considered exploitative in an employment relationship: they can work excessive hours, below minimum wage, etc.. If they're a genuine owner getting their share of the upside, it's fair enough.
> Now if I give the hot dogs and sandwiches for free, so that many more people come, and those people pay to get into this music venue, then there is a case that I'm increasing the business, and doing it out of my pocket. Still, that is my problem; I shouldn't be doing such a thing. Maybe I know what I'm doing! Or maybe I'm trying out new product to see how people like it or whatever (market research).
You're not allowed to do form relationships that are indistinguishable from illegally-exploitative employment, for the same reason you're not allowed to run the shell game even if you do it 100% honestly. You'll find a lot of similar rules around charities that don't make sense on the surface, but are the only way to have a regulatory regime that protects people: you're not allowed to volunteer for or donate to the same organisation you work for, volunteers aren't allowed to be paid, volunteers can't do the exact same activities that they do for the charity but for a non-charity business...
The situation being called out, is the very situation that flows from your hypothetical restaurant owner's contemptuous disregard for the "guitar-strumming, crooning ape".
The one thing that makes the context different is if the venue wants very specific musicians, and all of their choices are pros who expect to get paid. The venue can't get any of the musicians it wants without paying and that's that.
If a venue is not picky about musicians, it can easily get free ones. So many free ones that if three of them cancel, it can still call a fourth to come over.
I disagree that an alternative exists. Pay them for their time. They're enriching your business, or at the very least, providing you with their time and expertise.
> If a venue is not picky about musicians, it can easily get free ones
The way you talk about musicians (see also; you "ape" comment earlier) sounds like you don't value them as people.
What? Not necessarily at all. Say I have a bar that is completely dead on a Wednesday night, due to it being Wednesday night and it being in some off part of town.
I could advertise that I have some free jam space for musicians, a drum kit and a PA with a few microphones and maybe some guitar/bass amp or speaker cabinet. Maybe people will show up to make some noise. Those same people (and maybe a few of their friends) will buy a few drinks, and that's where the "enriching my business" part comes in.
Nobody is required to buy a drink, and so this is a better offer than them having to actually rent equipment and room.
So your analogy doesn't work.
Because a music venue without musicians insn't
But the implied flow of money doesn't follow from that.
Suppose I own an empty space with a little stage, a PA sound system, and some 100 chairs. I put a down payment on this place, paid for equipment and upgrades and have to pay property taxes, utilities and mortgage. If nothing happens there, I lose money out of my own pocket. I intend for it to be a music venue. I meet the definition of a music venue owner.
Some musicians have contacted me and would like to have a concert there.
Should anyone pay anyone? Who should pay whom?
How is this for logic: "A house isn't a home without a family! If you want me to move into this house with my wife and three kids to make it a home, you're gonna have to pay me!"
For many musicians it is not a career, but a hobby. A outlet for creativity. (That is me) In which case we choose venues that are like us. Our most recent gig was at our local Musicians Club https://youtu.be/URwzKL8pjQo?t=819
For others it is a important part of their income, so they should be paid.
Who should pay? If the punters pay a door charge the band should get it (that is the tradition here) if not then, yes, the owner of the venue pays it.
If the bar had no drinks, it could hardly be called a bar. Similarly, a resturant with no food is hardly a resturant.
In that meantime, where the reason to go there is missing, these are all just rooms with the potential to be something later. The same goes for the music venue; it's just a big room that could be a music venue if there were actual musicians there.
The "open mic" is on Tuesday nights, because nobody goes there then, so there is no harm to the business, and the people who come to have open mic fun might buy drinks.
This isn't universal, of course. But not all payment comes in liquid form!
Say, $5 per active user; non-exclusive license: I can maintain my fork of the extension, and use any of the code in new projects.
Trying to sandbox an extension that can modify arbitrary webpages in arbitrary ways is near futile.
Just don't let them create script elements, or add any URLs that don't come from within the extension bundle itself. Browsers already have to do a ton of bookkeeping to track the origins of requests anyway. Doesn't seem hard, you just have to be thorough.
For example, you could patch some of the original script of the page and wait for it to be run.
There could also be hierarchies of extension permissions, because they don't all need to be able to do everything.
Rhetorical questions: Do you want to support this thing? How much time does it take? Is this effort you want to spend? Are you not monetising this for a purpose? Are you happy with that purpose (obviously yes)? Do you still enjoy spending time on it? Do you see that time as well spent? Are the expectations from your side still being met? Are the expectations from everyone else still reasonable?
After all those questions, the basic answer is probably: you don't want to monetise it because it will wreck the actual purpose for which its intended or alternatively there isn't much of monetisation possibility due to its nature. But you can't spend more time on it because you have other Things to Do, like making money from other ways.
(At least this is my impression based on my experience)
Aww man, I'm really sad to here that RecipeFilter won't be coming to Safari anytime soon. I really got my hopes up after it was in the keynote!
Since Apple distributes extensions in the App Store, have you though about charging a buck or two for the Safari version? I know everyone says this, but I'd pay...
Do they ask you to do that for free or is there a monetary amount they tack on?
Once you burn your reputation by "selling out" the first time. Who will trust your new forked version?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
The added benefit with AnyList is that you can import ingredients directly into your grocery list from the extension. Been a huge time saver for me
I normally abhor "social" features being tacked on when they aren't useful but I'd pay for all the apps over again for this feature. Thankfully the API is pretty straightforward. This repo of mine [0] is super dated but it was still working the last time I played with Paprika's API.
I've toyed around with setting up a little web app that my friends can log-in with their paprika creds (I know, I know, but I'd tell them to use a 1-off password for this) so that they can use the web app either push or pull recipes from each other.
Thankfully you can send the full paprikarecipe file via email and import it but it's a little clunky and things like Discord (which my friends use to chat) doesn't like file extensions over 12 characters (IIRC) so it just cuts off the rest of the extension characters leaving you with a file you can't open (without fixing the extension). I have some initial work to setup an AWS SES address that people can send recipes to that will then drop a preview and link to download (not an attachment, it would be hosted on S3) the recipe into a "recipes" Discord channel we use but it's still a WIP.
My wife and I work around that by simply using the same paprika account for cloud sync...
Paprika is a huge time and sanity saver for me - it'd be totally possible, but much harder for me to cook for big events without it!
If you're not paying attention you can miss that it really needs 4 cups.
I thought that was the paid Cloud Sync feature was for. Does it not work for that?
This is what capitalism looks like, folks. Someone "built it" so they now privately "own it", no matter how big it gets. It's not put into the hands of an organization. The profit motive is quite strong, which is why someone can be "corrupted" by very tempting messages like this. If you had a lake or a forest privately owned by one or two people, and they had a lot of debts, they could easily sell it to polluters and loggers.
Some people scoff and say "socialism has been tried, it never works." I admit that socialism simply trades one class of elites (the capitalists with a lot of shares) for another (the bureaucrats with a lot of political clout). BUT! I would like to say that socialism is not the only alternative. The other alternative is decentralized systems with no private ownership. I'm talking about science, open source software, and so on. There can be a Merkle tree of version updates (e.g. git version control) and each one can have various reputable organizations (like Zagat for software) building their reputation vetting it. Then, each community would run their own app store (think Wordpress plugins) which would work with these reputable organizations. There would be no heroes, no celebrities, no tweets at 3 am to 5 million people, no pulling from repos without peer review, no scientists instantly believed after publishing on arxiv.org .
Congratulations for building a popular extension, fancy_pantser. You live in a world where you it's really bad to "criticize the profit", and where building it means you are responsible for it no matter how big it gets, but then we are all depending on your integrity and ability to rebuff life-changing amounts of money to not mine our data. We can pass laws to punish people after the fact, or we can gradually change our culture by rejecting "immediate gratification" of updates that are not vetted, just as corporations have done with bleeding edge vs stable Linux distros etc. Unfortunately, the Web has made it so that anything can be updated at any time, with no sysadmins or reviewers in the loop. It's a wonder more malware isn't silently everywhere already.
aka anarchy. that turns out to be worse.
The 'project' maintaining the software may be centralized, but all its users "own" the software in the sense that the don't need to ask permission to the maintainer, and they can create their own modifications.
Mackknovist Ukraine, Spanish Republic, and Zapitista country now...
All were/are quite different. Worse than what?
You can have each individual community choose what OpenStreetMap tiles to use, what to censor etc.
Like HN does. What if HN was kicked off a host? They would put the backups somewhere else and repoint the DNS.
What if ICE seized their domain? Then we could move domain name resolution to a DHT.
What if AT&T refused to carry it or charge extra? The signal could route packets along other lines. No single point of failure.
It’s not just about banning 0% or 100% but the prices and friction imposed by privately owned rentseeking infrastructure monopolies. Why in a span of less than 10 years, VOIP has caused international calls that used to cost $3 a minute to turn free and have video!
The weird thing is that when A wants to connect woth B you think there has to be a one-size-fits all C that can block it.
No it is not!
The cost of using this extension is your information, and there are other products available that do the same thing at a lower cost. Based on the most fundamental concept of economics (supply and demand), "The Great Suspender" should fail as a product very quickly.
It's a fair comment, but only if you actually read it.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I am not accusing you of being that person, not anyone else. I am just tired of people not seeing that upholding the current situation is as political as criticizing it. This discussion made me try to put it in words.
That’s why there will be a third party in the USA that unites disaffected progressives on the left with disaffected paleoconservatives on the right. A lot of people are fed up with the divisions.
I welcome counterpoints and debate but as you can see — there are just silent downvotes instead
Do you think people on HN want to engage with your comments when you're saying they're foolishly clinging to a religious belief?
By the way, this was a decent point: "[W]e are all depending on your integrity and ability to rebuff life-changing amounts of money to not mine our data." Maybe this thread would be different if you stayed with points like that instead of accusing people of harboring religious beliefs that pulls the wool over our eyes, preventing us from seeing things your way.
To be fair you inserted "foolishly clinging", and are now blaming them for something they did not actually say.'
Capitalism is highly akin to religion - they're not the first and will not be the last to draw that comparison, and plenty of words have already been written on the topic. If your response to reading "capitalism is a national religion" is to assume you're being insulted, perhaps consider that the statement may be more true than you think.
On a daily basis, I will get requests to sell the extension. Once or twice a week, I will receive an offer to add "a couple lines of code" to my extension which are always generously described as "allowed in the Chrome Web Store" by little fly-by-night organizations that only even have a landing page half the time and usually have throwaway-looking gmail accounts. Out of curiosity, I've asked a few what their code does and they never fully describe it, but it either collects analytics to ship home (my extension runs on all sites, so it's appetizing to them!) or places paid results at the top of any search results, for which I can make "thousands of dollars a month based on the number of North American users I have".
Here is an example email I received yesterday. It's a good example of how they call it "an SDK" and looks like one of the more legit ones (they registered a domain to send email from, at least).
Finally, I am also hounded by teams at Microsoft and Apple, who want me to port the extension to their new plugin ecosystems so it can be featured/showcased. I worked with Apple on one similar thing for an extension and it caused such a huge jump in support and feature requests from users that I was overwhelmed, so I am not keen to do it again until I have more free time. They can't understand why I don't want to grow by tens of thousands of users a week, but I'm just one person and don't make money from it whatsoever.