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Extensions available officially for major browsers are put through a review process first, and installing unofficial extensions requires going out of your way a
by jimmaswell 11y ago
Extensions available officially for major browsers are put through a review process first, and installing unofficial extensions requires going out of your way and there are multiple warnings given. The article conveniently doesn't mention this. FUD.
- JadeNB 11y agoAs aboodman points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000966): > The extension system could try to detect such things, but there are a variety of ways for bad extensions to work around the detections. A computer proveably (in the mathematical sense) cannot detect all forms of bad behaviour; and the security history of all the software in the world proves (in the historical, not mathematical, sense) that neither can the best programmers, let alone overworked reviewers who see mostly benign or trivially malicious code and so are not experienced in finding subtly malicious code.
- jimmaswell 11y agoFirefox extensions are human-reviewed. Unfortunately Chrome's aren't unless their automated system detects something so for Chrome these concerns are more valid. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/AMO/Policy/Reviews https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/AMO/Policy/Revie...
- TheCowboy 11y agoThis may be outdated, and Google might have improved the process, but the problem I found is that trying to report the extension didn't seem to have any effect. I had an experience awhile ago where I found a Chrome extension that was inserting its own ads among Google search results. It was subtle enough that most people probably would never notice it happening, inserting an ad in a place where you would expect Google display an ad in results.