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A browser extension that acted as an anti-censorship tool for 185,000 people has been kicked out of the Chrome store by Google. The open source Ahoy! tool facilitated access to more than 1,700 blocked sites but is now under threat. Despite several requests, Google has provided no reason for its decision.
Last December, TF reported on SitesBloqueados (Blocked Sites) a web portal run by Revolução dos Bytes (Bytes' Revolution), a group of anti-censorship activists in Portugal.
Internet censorship is common in the country, with more than 1,700 sites banned from regular Internet access for reasons ranging from copyright to gambling. The process does not require intervention from the courts so Revolução dos Bytes decided to keep an eye on things with its Ahoy! Chrome and Firefox extension.
"Ahoy! basically bypasses any traffic to a blocked site through our own proxies, allowing the users to navigate in a free, uncensored internet," team member Henrique Mouta previously told TF.
Not only is Ahoy! able to unblock sites, it can also detect newly blocked domains and feed information back, so that its unblocking abilities are always up to date.
Things had been going well. After servicing 100,000 users last December, Ahoy! grew to almost 185,000 users this year. However, progress and indeed the project itself is now under threat after arbitrary action by Google.
"Google decided to remove us from Chrome's Web Store without any justification", Henrique informs TF.
"We always make sure our code is high quality, secure and 100% free (as in beer and as in freedom). All the source code is open source. And we're pretty sure we never broke any of the Google's marketplace rules."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Magic Oddball on Saturday August 11 2018, @10:29PM (1 child)
I know it's likely considered nitpicking, but Firefox is a descendant of SeaMonkey, not the other way around.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 12 2018, @04:14AM
Really?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that neither is descended directly from the other, but they share some code due to some aspects of common ancestry. My understanding is that Firefox was an independent project split off in Mozilla to provide a stand-alone browser, rather than the (bloated, for that time) Mozilla Suite. Firefox was released in 2004, though it had been in development for some time.
Mozilla ceased development on the suite, so a community took up developing the integrated suite, which became Seamonkey in 2005.
They both came out of Mozilla originally, and in some sense I guess since Firefox derived some browser code from previous Mozilla stuff (including the suite), and since Seamonkey developed out of the suite, maybe one could say Firefox is partly descended from Seamonkey's predecessor. But since Firefox was a deliberate departure from that model designed to run faster and optimized to be independent, is it really a "descendant"?