Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind)
Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind)
It lets you use their web site, their data, their servers, their work to serve your purpose and function. There will soon be an army of hackers enhancing every site you use. Whether that site likes it or not.
Babak Nivi posts a good explanation of Greasemonkey from a no-need-to-be-javascript-savvy frame of mind. I like what I’ve seen in greasemonkey so far, and I think Nivi’s metaphor of mashing up websites is a good one.
Here’s a concern of mine, though. I’m more than slightly worried about Nivi’s 2nd prediction. A year ago who would have thought that something like Greasemonkey (or AJAX) would come along. I’m sure there were people who did, but my point is that Nivi’s statement:
And how are they going to stop me? Sue the guy that made the Greasemonkey script? Block my IP address from using Netflix?
fails to take into account the ingenuity of developers or the foolishness of corporate legal departments.
Netflix may just find a way to block Greasemonkey scripts; it’s far from unimaginable. And if they do it, will that “solution” propogate across more and more commercial sites? What happens to the usefulness of Greasemonkey then?
And what about lawsuits? Some unwise CEO of a business that sees itself as getting trampled by Greasemonkey could very well pull an RIAA, and even if not successful could make thing annoying for a while.
I guess my point is that I hope for Greasemonkey script writers to be sensitive to the potentially copyright-infringing (like Nivi’s 5th script idea of BitTorrentizing Netflix pages) nature of their scripts.
via Greasemonkey, Ajax, and the future of the web | MetaFilter
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May 11th, 2005 at 1:55 pm
Greasemonkey Lightning
Cori’s got me trying Greasemonkey today. I’m reeling with the possibilities. Here’s Cori’s sum of it’s future and a few concerns he have, in response to this prophetic piece. The only auto-scripting tool I’ve used is ActiveWords, which I now
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:12 pm
Two things I should mention:
1. Greasemonkey hooks into Firefox at the Chrome level (The ultra-privileged Javascript that much of the browser is written in) and so it’s impossible to truly beat it. It gets access to the site’s code before the JS is run and it’s hooks ignore any site-level attempts to obfuscate the DOM. (thanks to XPCNativeWrappers)
2. BitTorrentizing NetFlix isn’t the only thing out there. I’ve seen at least two scripts to provide direct links to The Pirate Bay and Mininova from IMDB movie entries.
Cheers
December 4th, 2005 at 9:08 am
Hi Stephan;
I think when I published this Greasemonkey wasn’t hooking in to Firefox quite as deeply, but I haven’t been paying as much attention to the developer’s mailing list as I might, so I could be wrong.
In any case I think that reinforces my point about script writiers needing to be savvy about how they infringe - I could definitely see lawsuits in the works - not that do anything other than be a headache, but….
December 4th, 2005 at 11:03 am
True. The lawsuits may be an annoying risk, but in the end, it’s just data flowing to the user’s computer and the browser is just a parser.
What the sites will eventually have to learn is that the customer can do whatever they want once the data hits their computer and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. (Contrary to what the big companies would have you believe, lawsuits are actually counter-productive because they make people say ‘Whoa! You can do that?!’)