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posted by chromas on Saturday August 11 2018, @12:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the ██████████ dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by The Shire on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:25PM (2 children)

    by The Shire (5824) on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:25PM (#720315)

    Did you look at the list of sites they are "uncensoring" ? It reads like a who's who of piracy, porn, gambling, and criminal activity. I didn't review all 2,000 sites, but scrolling through that list I didn't see anything that looked remotely like a site that would embarrass a government.

    This appears to fall directly under the rule that no addon engage in breaking the law, and this "anti-censorship" addon seems to be directed more at facilitating crime than exposing "the truth".

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:39PM (#720316)

    It reads like a who's who of piracy, porn, gambling, and criminal activity.

    Oooh ... do they have a newsletter?

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by aiwarrior on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:51PM

    by aiwarrior (1812) on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:51PM (#720319) Journal

    As a Portuguese, I would say that in general we have a pretty strong laws against libel (in a negative way), so it does surprise me that the list is "harmless".
    On the other hand we consider ourselves a "country of soft manners" so it may be just that the laws exist but nobody cares unless it is egregious (in our hymn egregios is actually a good thing:D).
    More surprised I am about some Portuguese civil society organization tracking this kind of things, it is extremely unusual. I bet that they are connected to piracy ;). There was a website called wareztuga[https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wareztuga] that had such a good quality that almost everybody in Portugal used it. Of course it was illegal but literally 1 in 10 from 10 to 40 year old people had an account, and nobody did anything for years. It was disbanded by the site's administrators themselves (see the soft manners?) when Netflix arrived to Portugal.

    The translation from the powers that be were: Access to culture is important and, illegal access to it is tolerable. As the platforms for broad access did not exist in Portugal nobody ran against them. As Netflix arrived, with quite a fair price and good catalog (better than the one in Poland which does not have Futurama), likely the powers-that-be contacted the site administrators and gave them the chance to go on their own foot. And as the culture goes, so they did (bons costumes/soft manners).