Because they've had takedown requests sent to Firefox, then Gitlab, then Github.

Give me a minute to find my post about this from before with sources to prove this as well as links to the internet archive to show it's true. It continues to surprise me this is questioned in a piracy forum when the whole reason it got taken down was due to copyright related takedown requests.

**EDIT: here it is: lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2685379…

Reproduced comment follows:

Magnolia's Twitter Account: https://x.com/Magnolia1234B \
Nitter Link: nitter.tiekoetter.com/Magnolia…

Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_P…

It used to be on the official Firefox Extensions repository until DMCA takedown notices made them take it down.

web.archive.org/web/2021042921…

It used to be on gitlab until DMCA takedown notices made them take it down.

web.archive.org/web/2022032009…

It used to be on github until DMCA takedown notices made them take it down.

web.archive.org/web/2024061108…

It moved to gitflic.ru not because it's sketchy, but because of copyright enforcement.

It's kind of like sci-hub, in a way, it can only actually survive in a country that doesn't respect the US copyright cabal.

That being said, I've never audited the code, but it's open source (MIT-license) and signed by Mozilla as noted on its gitflic page:

PS although the add-on was removed from Mozilla’s add-on store (AMO) (because of DMCA Takedown Notice) it’s still signed and manually checked for security by Mozilla (hence the delay in signing).

Bypass Paywalls Clean – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

Download Bypass Paywalls Clean for Firefox. Bypass Paywalls of (custom) news sites

^{web.archive.org}

Ok, it does look like it's checking for list updates, just more often.l than I expected. I went into the settings and disabled as below and the calls stop. So all good!

"check update opt-in
Check for update of version (on startup and when opening options):
check update enabled: NO"

I took a cursory glance through the source code (for the Firefox version, at least), and I'm not seeing any calls to the gitflic.ru URL outside of the update functions (there appear to be two different places where these might be triggered) and one function for importing custom sites:

// Import custom sites from local/online
function import_url_options(e, online) {
  let url = '/custom/sites_custom.json';
  if (online)
    url = 'https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_updates/blob/raw?file=sites_custom.json'  + '&rel=' + randomInt(100000);
  try {
    fetch(url)
    .then(response => {
      if (response.ok) {
        response.text().then(result => {
          import_json(result);
        })
      }
    });
  } catch (err) {
    console.log(err);
  }
}

"optional_permissions": [ "*://*/*" ],

Which seems to grant the extension access to all URLs, so maybe that's why the HTTP request is able to fire on any given website rather than just the ones explicitly defined in the regular permissions array. Though this is speculation on my part; I've only ever written one or two complex Firefox extensions. I'm not sure if the "optional permissions" array can be declined upon installation (or configured in the extension settings after installation); perhaps access to the wildcard URL can be revoked so that this update call isn't occurring constantly.

All looks okay to me, but this was a very quick audit.

I'll paste a comment that illustrates it better than I could

Imagine this scenario - you're a corporate with 1000 sites and maybe 5000 networking devices. You have a rolling replacement program for those devices as they become end of life, and as that progresses you reach a point where all of them can work with IPv6. So you switch off IPv4 and work only with IPv6.

Then your corporate acquires another entity, say consisting of 100 sites with 500 devices. All of those devices need checking that they can work on IPv6 and a significant number need replacing at maybe an average of £5000 per device. With IPv4 you can still integrate the legacy kit into your estate without swapping any of it out, with IPv6 only you can't.

For an end user, a small startup, or similar sure go ahead and use IPv6, but there are significant obstacles for larger estates, which is one reason IPv4 isn't going anywhere soon.

While moving away from IPv4 isn't really pressing anymore, there are still avoidable annoyances in v4 land.

Just yesterday a friend and I had a lot of fun getting our laptops to connect to a public network. Why? Because IPv4 doesn't have many private ranges and not only did the address of their captive portal conflict with the address space of a VPN we're both in, the address of their DNS server also conflicted with the default address space my friend's Docker setup operated in.

Figuring that out was a riot.

Only if Chrome announces that the IPv6 version will be the default and the IPv4 version must be manually activated in the future.

All companies announce migration to IPv6