Battle of the Firefox extensions

[charlie]

Did you know that an extension can deliberately alter the workings of another extension? The author of NoScript has been accused of injecting undeletable entries into AdBlock's whitelist to preserve his homepage's ad revenues:

http://adblockplus.org/blog/attention-noscript-users

AdBlock users are clobbering NoScript's Mozilla page with bad reviews:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/722

I'm a huge NoScript fan, it's one of my few must-haves. But, unless the story is way different than the way the AdBlock guy tells it, Maone needs to quit his underhanded shenanigans. Like, yesterday.

[RoyGBiv]

1. Hrrmmm ...

This not good.

People are so stupid. NoScript is so incredibly popular and is maintained so well, I'm sure than he could simply post an appeal for people to whitelist certain entries in order to help with his costs, and enough would do it to keep him happy.

Or, he could piss off the user base and cause people to start looking for alternatives.

[charlie]

2. Yeah, no kidding

Free software can be a trying and thankless endeavor, I'm sure the impulse to extract some measure of compensation is hugely tempting. It's too bad his brain took off to lunch and he went for it. I mean, really went to lunch -- what screams louder than obfuscated code in a piece of open source software (even squirrelier, obfuscated script, which is de facto open whether it's licensed as such or not)?

He's avoiding culpability now, saying a rebuttal would take time away from the fix he's coding. It's too bad, an apology can end this brouhaha quicker than he'd imagine.

[RoyGBiv]

4. Coders ...

Sadly, in my experience, coders have a distinct lack of communication and people skills.

I worked, very briefly, for a friend who wanted me to document the code he was writing. The problem was he wouldn't even give me a flowchart showing me how the program functioned. Being an old hacker, I can generally figure this sort of thing out, but not with a piece of software that interacts with a medical coding database with thousands of codes not even most of the people who use them understand.

He's a great friend who was a nightmare to deal with when he was in his so-called "coding zone."

He ended up writing his own documentation and then promptly losing the contract for the software because no one could figure out how to use it.

He blamed the users.

[charlie]

5. Lol

There's always One True Way and everybody belongs to their own sect.

CmdrTaco should add "Smart People Acting Stupid" to his "Stuff That Matters" tagline. Have you ever seen a Slashdot thread that wasn't engorged with a massive hammer-and-tong derail after the first 10 posts?

[RoyGBiv]

6. Never ...

Of course I tend to read at +5 nowadways, which I'm sure results in me missing some good stuff occasionally as people blow their mod points on "wit" at the expensive quality, but so much of that garbage is just garbage issued forth from the mighty electronic pens of basement dwellers.

I think Slashdot's (and possibly DU's and pretty much every other popular web forum) should adopt a new banner graphic that includes that LOLCat of the cat sitting in front of the computer screen with the caption something like, "OMG! Someone is WRONG on the Internet!"

[charlie]

7. *closes confessional door*...

Emblazon it on my head, it'll keep me out of trouble. Or at least, save me from overboiling the pasta, neglecting the laundry... or floating through the day febrile on 30 minutes sleep. </sheepish> :D

Web wankery, distilled to its essence:

http://www.eegra.com/show/sub/do/browse/cat/comics/id/9

[RoyGBiv]

8. TO THE INTERNET!

That ... is awesome.

I have a little tear now. :)

And, ya know, I can criticize all I want, but I AM HERE. :)

(and I just spent half an hour over at a gaming forum explaining to a bunch of dweebs the concept behind a critical hit)

[charlie]

3. The story went to #1 on Reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8h4zo/noscript_security_or_malware

...and has 24 diggs on Digg:

http://digg.com/security/Adblock_Plus_and_a_little_more_Attention_NoScript_users

Now every mouthbreather with free floating anger issues will be stalking him. Time to explain and apologize, or go into hiding for a month. Poor guy, I do feel sorry for him.