Give the source code to the extension to a developer located in an impossible legal jurisdiction like Afghanistan. Let them publish it. Good luck to Facebook hiring a lawyer and trying its luck in the Taliban's court system. Even before the collapse of the previous government in Kabul it would have been a near impossibility.
This is so awesome! Is this the start of a new thing / movement I wonder?
Such a plugin is beholden to the extension “marketplaces” so it would be good to include instructions on how to self install the extension if chrome bans it.
Donating money to a project in Iran may be legally hairy for Americans. Check the situation before doing so. I am all for helping worthwhile projects financially, but international politics is a mess.
I've seen a case where somebody had their zelle or venmo account permanently removed for sending a small transfer to their friend with the description "for the cubans" - they were paying their buddy back for an order of sandwiches.
Paypal actually did this to me for hiring an indonesian kid to sketch a t-shirt design for $50.
Before I clicked send, I verified that Paypal said they'd send the money without charging a fee. He received it, minus the fee they claimed they wouldn't charge. So, I tried to send another $10 to cover the difference and I got torpedoed into some black hole of no return.
Now I can't use paypal to buy anything without submitting a bunch of documentation, which is super weird considering I don't have to send anything like that to use their competitors' services, so it's never going to happen.
I assume it's some sort of regulation they're attempting to follow, but haven't thought through, but who knows? It's definitely costing them money, but maybe not enough to justify improving the UX.
That sounds more like urban legend than a true story. Neither Zelle nor Venmo (and it's a strike that you can't specify) have an obligation to cancel accounts based on comments.
If they did, half of the accounts in Venmo would be banned already - have you read the comments in the public feed? People know that feed exists, and use it to troll their friends all the time.
I've never seen a bank or credit card company put in any effort regarding cuban cigars. A few of the best shops are clearly illegal just because of the name alone. But they all accept visa and Mastercard
You don't even need to bother with h dark web and cryptocurrency. It will just flat out show up on your bill without issue.
ah, had a discussion with a friend about sending money with Iran in the comments. he said his poker buddies used to donate 10% of the winning for someone to help orphans in iran. in the paypal transfer he wrote "for the good work you do in iran". his account got banned and money never got returned. later his account was reinstated but money never was returned.
That's actually... interesting. It's a well established tactic to go to another country and publish your stuff from there if you like to keep annoying a government or institution. You know, Snowden is in Russia, some Russian journalists are in EU countries. It happens all the time since ever.
What if someone creates a Telegram group where developers from hostile countries(like US&Iran, UK&Russia, Japan&China) pass each other projects that are not obviously illegal but not feasible due to risk of persecution?
In this case, If FB thinks it has a case can try its luck by sending Google a scary looking letter then proceed to compel Google to remove the extension by court order.
"Our new fleet of stand-off delivery drones and inertially guided gliding packages can accurately drop your purchase onto your front lawn from 31,000 feet"
So the MVP drones will do what twenty years of trillion-dollar brutality couldn't do? Wow you seem to have an even lower opinion of the effectiveness of USA military than I do... I suspect Taliban would laugh at this idea.
I mean #1 you missed the bit where I'm not being serious? But #2, the US military is just fine at blowing up specific named people in specific locations. It's trying to mould an entire nation with their own ideas and traditions into a carbon copy of America that they're not great at. Facebook, I think, would avoid this trap.
No they really are not any good at accomplishing any military objective. The Afghan War was originally pitched as "kill this specific person". Within a month of the start of hostilities, that person had relocated to a different nation. Somehow the war went on for another decade, before an ObL impersonator who had been held by ISI for years less than a mile from PMA Kakul was ceremonially executed as an elaborate reelection campaign event. Somehow, the war also went on for another decade after that.
Of course I know this is all a joke, but I enjoy taking jokes seriously. It seems that only nations who are carbon copies of USA in the very worst sense could harm their own citizens to enforce TOS of American firms. (For instance, no one would be surprised if Australia did this.) I suspect that even a very extensive drone force would fail to accomplish Facebook's goals in Afghanistan.
Individual civilian afghans are not embargoed by US law - it's not Iran. The Taliban are, of course, embargoed and listed in various things like the OFAC list.
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghans have gmail accounts, many companies use google workspace or office365, etc. For example.
I think the point was that having an Afghani publish the source wouldn't really accomplish anything because Facebook could just go after whatever service was used to publish it, instead of the person who published it.
An Afghani can access GitHub or the chrome extension store, but those are both run by American companies who will obey Facebook's takedown requests.
At least that shifts the dangerous legal-financial burden onto google's lawyers, if they want to fight a takedown request to remove an extension from the extension store.
A takedown request is only binding on a well-capitalized firm like Google if it is based on some legal rationale that could survive a test in court. It isn't clear that the request under discussion has such a rationale. At the very least Google would take this to some court and force a judge to say something about it.
Once a firm grows accustomed to following orders from their competitors, bad times lie ahead.
YouTube obeys DMCA with respect to copyrighted media. DMCA is an established system that allows services like YouTube to exist in the first place. The threat letter doesn't mention DMCA or copyright, because this extension couldn't possibly be perceived as infringing on copyright. Instead it speculates about trademarks and TOS violations. There isn't a standardized takedown regime related to those. TOS is not law.
It's true that some low-level manager in the chrome web store organization might just submit to this sort of letter. It would be a mistake for such a manager to ever receive this sort of letter. This is for the legal department. There's no way that a competent general counsel would decide that the best strategic move is to just follow the orders of major competitors. Google already employs dozens of lawyers; it's not costly to send a couple to court. In this case, the PR alone would be a huge win.
if you really want to make a DMCA complaint against youtube they will honour it, but they try to push all requests through their own DMCA-alike system that lets copyright holders file takedown notices, but it doesn't have any legal standing under the DMCA or any other country's copyright laws. the youtube takedown notice system is basically "if you ask nicely we'll take it down".
Sure, the YouTube (not Chrome Web Store which is a completely different organization) system requires far more of creators and far less of "owners" than DMCA specifies with respect to copyright. We're still talking about copyright. The extension under discussion cannot be construed as violating copyright, or even facilitating violation of copyright. That's why even the crazy overblown threat letter doesn't mention copyright. It probably would have, even if it did so without justification, if the end goal had been to take down a YouTube video. The end goal in this case was actually to take down a Chrome extension, which is only similar in the sense that the people who make such a decision also work for Alphabet.
Now you're into territory where yes, the extension is available, but nobody can find it and only the very technically astute will be able and willing to install it. FB achieves 99.9% of their goal.
Oh yeah, find someone that wants to be a target of a major US corporation in Afghanistan/third world.
You forget we have Guantanamo where people were "renditioned" with little or no legal basis either in the US or otherwise, and I believe there are people in Guantanamo that have no publicly provided evidence to be there?
All it takes is waiting for some politically opportune reason to enact a little dragnet and getting someone on some CIA list with little evidence, and BAM, You're in something like Guantanamo or even worse (client torture security services, assassination, etc).
Yes we withdrew forces, but we've been there a decade and likely have a large network of CIA contacts that would kill or injure a random Afghan civilian.
The US Government is a very very very very dangerous entity to anyone in the third world should you get on their radar. They are dangerous to US citizens with the Padilla case, antiterrorism law overreach, no fly lists, and a variety of other harassment techniques.
The state department and CIA are power extensions of the corporate elite in the United States. We have toppled regimes for oil... minerals... even bananas.
Even better fund organizations like EFF to take cases like this and make sure there is legal precedent that gives a strong footing to all developers.
Hiding in other countries is a not sustainable solution, they are going to force extension stores to remove it etc payment gateway not to process you, pushing you as a dev to the fringes and silence others
The chilling effect is the real aim, they are effectively signaling that they can come after anyone who pisses their business model of.
Better yet: anonymous git hosting as a tor hidden service. Now there's nothing they can do but rage at all the "unauthorized" extensions giving users control over their little platform.
