For a few hours I booted up something that is supposed to be the new version of the extremely old project “Content Filter for Facebook”. However, the name has been changed at least two times (the name I just mentioned was the first one, which almost got banned due to a trademark issue; I wasn’t allowed to use Facebook in the name). When it first got renamed after the first trademark issue, I gave it the name “NETFILTER”, since my plans was to make – specifically – an extension for Chrome that filtered content. The platform was Facebook.
Just very recently I realized that targeting only one platform was more about thinking inside the box rather than outside I changed my mind. I started a project (in JIRA) with the plan to make it bigger. The target was already more than just “stupid tests” those days. And for a few hours ago, one of the more important reasons for this project became fascism and fake news.
Lazy as I am, I kept this in my mind for a long time. “I have no time right now”. And I actually don’t. And most of the time I can’t motivate myself to go further. Today, I was trying to fool myself. Many of my projects are initiated with the question “Is it even possible to do this?“. Saying this and convincing myself that the project is “just an experiment” is often what initiates something bigger. And today, it happened. I created, actually due to the disovery of some quite scary fascist videos on Youtube, the first embryo for “Network Tools 3.0”. The current version is an alpha release, so I borrowed the old “Content filter”-source and named it 2.1.0.
So, how do it look? Well. It’s a quite simple base, since I want to start easy on this. The reason; there’s not much prepared yet. There is no scraping tools live, and netcurl is still in development. So the easiest way to boot this project is to make most of the variables local. Adding for example blacklisted sites to the extension will be done via Google-API’s. So there’s no sharing going on yet. This is also done for “other secure reasons”.
As you can see above, the embryo is a tiny overlay box in the upper left corner. It’s currently clickable. When clicked, a larger box will be opened. Actually, it’s the same overlay box that expands to a full screen. In this mode, which will be upgraded in short, we’re supposed to do something. In the example, the extension asks the user if he/she wants to blacklist the page. This was however only a test, to see how we later on should attack the problem. The purpose here, is to see how far we can go, compared to the first prior obsolete releases where it rather opens up a menu context when right clicking the mouse. Blacklisting elements that was was OK, but it won’t cover the new purpose as elements and clicking was quite limited. Instead I want to give me – and eventually others – to give more options.
If we for example don’t want to blacklist the host, we might want to flag the site as trusted, untrusted, etc. Maybe we don’t want to do this with the entire host. Maybe we just want to target a static uri within the site. The target may also be a specific URL withing the page in a specific element, and so on. This was nearly impossible to make nice with menu contexts as the options were too many.
So, this is basically the start. Nothing happens on the click, and the overlay should actually be completely invisible to not interfere with anything at the site. This extension should be completely silent until asked to work with something.
