“Actors who are asking me to add some tracking code are mostly interested in reselling users’ data,” Anashkin said. “Actors who want to purchase it outright will stuff it with malware depending on their level of greed: hijacking affiliate links, tampering with search results, showing popups with shady websites, etc.”

Anashkin’s experience appears to be fairly common. Developers have discussed these solicitations in online forums and several have written blog posts about selling extensions or partnership offers.

  • EROLoLICON
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    2321 year ago

    It happened to the original uBlock and then the developer made uBlock Origin.

    • @drbi
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      11 year ago

      And we are so thankful for that. Ublock origin is epic.

    • @psyc
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      391 year ago

      Was not expecting that many

    • @[email protected]
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      331 year ago

      Props to Oleg/hoverzoom for maintaining and updating this list for all to read. It’s my first time seeing any document of this kind really. Quiet chilling

    • @[email protected]
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      161 year ago

      I prefer to feel proud that there are still people who don’t fall for that and have values. And there always will be.

    • @Slowy
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      121 year ago

      Wow that is genuinely chilling

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      1/25/2021

      We’d love to have redacted sponsor Hover Zoom+ in a similar manner to how we’re partnering with Dark Reader. See attached for how that partnership has come to life, but we’re honestly super flexible on implementation. We’d essentially love to pay you in exchange for helping us drive users to redacted.

      So wtf does this mean? Is Dark Reader hammered as of 2021?

  • @Dougas
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    1141 year ago

    The extension in question is Hover Zoom+ for those who don’t want to click the link

    • @Dazza
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      111 year ago

      What does it do? Like a magnifier for your mouse?

      • kamen
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        131 year ago

        If I remember correctly it zooms in images that you point at (quicker than opening the image in a new tab). I’ve been using Imagus for that.

        • LUHG
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          51 year ago

          Ahh. Is imagus next? But this Dev seem legit. Might use his to be safe now.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    I get these offers almost daily for my Chrome extension, and have done for years. I couldn’t do it to the users, but they wouldn’t be making the offers if some people weren’t accepting.

    • @burkybang
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      41 year ago

      Exactly. I don’t get them as often as daily, but I have gotten a bunch. I just mark them as spam and move on with my life. Not only would I never sell my hard work to a shady company, but I’d also never willfully harm my user base. It’s like scam calls I suppose. To me, routine scam calls are blatantly obvious, but since I still get them so frequently, they must be fooling some people.

  • @Potatos_are_not_friends
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    771 year ago

    My coworker had a liver transplant. The few months leading up to it, he was really really sketchy. He said a few things that came off like he was ready to sell company secrets to find some random backalley liver.

    Desperate life issues can lead to desperate decisions, like selling out. And it’s hard to even be mad in those circumstances.

    • @RivenRise
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      211 year ago

      I wouldn’t blame them for selling out for less as much as it would suck for the people who use the product. If I had a family to take care of I would definitely sell out for a big check. Gotta take care of my own first.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        It sounds fair, but only if we are talking about really important things under “take care of my family” and not another PS5 or a vacation.

  • Sparking
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    611 year ago

    They need to name and shame the people reaching out. They keep reacting them.

  • Altima NEO
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    561 year ago

    The day he sells out, I’m gonna be like, “you were the chosen one, Anashkin”

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    The trick is to sell it at a high price and immediately fork. Get paid and fuck off.

    Then do it again and again and again. Infinite money glitch. Don’t worry about getting sued after a bit you’ll be rich enough to be immune from prosecution.

    • brianorca
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      261 year ago

      The sell contract would probably include a full license transfer of all copyright, and probably a non-compete clause.

  • @nostalgicgamerz
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    531 year ago

    The extension in question btw is Zoom+ for people that don’t want to click

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    That’s why I’m avoiding any extension I know I really don’t need.

    I’ve already burned myself once, when Nano Defender sold out and turned into a cookie-stealing malware. By the time it was one of few adblockers that were not being blocked by adblock killers. They’ve pushed a malware update through the Chrome web store, and started exploiting stolen cookies immediately.

    It was a difficult day, where I had to explain to few of my exes that someone hacked their Instagram account due to an ad-blocker I’ve set up for them when we were dating few years ago.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      And it’s very unlikely to happen, since our governments are very interested in spying us / buying our data.

  • @[email protected]
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    251 year ago

    Great suspender, ublock (not origin) and some other extensions that i cannot think of have fallen to buyouts

    • kamen
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      251 year ago

      Not just extensions, sometimes it’s entire software companies. Opera Software got bought a few years back.

  • poVoq
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    181 year ago

    And now, please make the mental leap to overly-large Lemmy instances…

  • @ArbiterXero
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    181 year ago

    …… if you’re using chrome, Google baked these things in anyways sooo……