I don’t see the harm of monetizing something great. You could also say that its a way to reward the good work.
Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
71–80 of 374 posts
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#72And if you run a website you get constant emails like this: Hey There, I wanted to reach out and see if accepts guest post contributions or link insertion in existing posts? If so, I'd love to hear more about your guidelines and any specific topics of interest. Thank you for your time, and I'm looking forward to your response. Best Regards, These ones are definitely spammed out en-masse, my site doesn't even have a b…
> My site also has some Windows software downloads on it, and I occasionally get emails for bundling dodgy installers. Most of these tend to be "residential proxy" services looking to sell access to users' internet connections. I wonder what these people are thinking? Like, TOR operators know the risks with connection sharing - most particularly: pedos using their service to share CSAM. But everyday people?! They hav…
Prey on users who don't know the difference. Sell the residential proxy service to scammers who use high-reputation residential IPs to commit crime or fraud or other shady things.
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#73The root problem here is that there's no legitimate way to monetize browser extensions. Extensions are meant to be simple, so it's hard to sell premium features. Extensions usually don't "own" any space to embed ads in.
There used to be. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/money/ "The web has come a long way in the 11 years since we launched the Chrome Web Store. Back then, we wanted to provide a way for developers to monetize their Web Store items. But in the years since, the ecosystem has grown and developers now have many payment-handling options available to them."
Another failed Google product...of course every company has huge back catalogs of deprecated products but the sheer % of fails by Google is almost unbelievable.
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#74Stuff like this is why Google is pushing manifest v3.
How does manifest v3 combat this?
Without the additional constraints manifest v3 puts on what code an extension can run at runtime, an extension author can just slip some "grab some code from a server I control and eval it" logic into their extension, which Google can't vet. That makes it possible for an extension that was fine yesterday go to "harvesting your PII to send to a company that is building an AI based on your click frequency" today with no change indicated; just a silent "Oops I'm malicious now" shift.
All cards on the table: Google does a not-great job of protecting against intentional malicious changes last I checked, i.e. they'll pass through a lot of new extensions and extension updates that do shady stuff behind the scenes. But without some lockdown on arbitrary code execution (which Mv3 provides), the problem is theoretically impossible to solve.
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most galling offer we saw on the mobile app side was something that would turn on the user's microphone, and listen for ads on tvs around them to track what they'd been exposed to offline. Adtech is such a thoroughly gross field.
So your app already had microphone/audio permission granted for legitimate reasons or were they going to do the pop-up after the update?
Nah, we didn’t ask for any permissions at the time iirc, except gps if/when people wanted to use that to hop the map to the right spot.
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#76Maintainer here. My extension is pretty much unmonetizable so any offer I receive would require some degree of a moral sacrifice. The least intrusive offer I've seen so far is to put a reciprocal link to somebody else's extension inside of mine, kind of like DarkReader is doing on their website. Even though it won't compromise any of my users data, the reason I'm not doing this is because it indirectly endorses that other extension and I don't control what they do with their users data.
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#77ChatGPT for Google was #1 on HN earlier this year. Check out the GitHub repo now: that person sold the extension. I had a small side project extension, ~25,000 installs & free to use. I got enough inbound interest trying to "help me monetize" that I thought it would be worth cataloguing all the different unsavory avenues: https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/the-ugly-business-of-mone...
The most galling offer we saw on the mobile app side was something that would turn on the user's microphone, and listen for ads on tvs around them to track what they'd been exposed to offline. Adtech is such a thoroughly gross field.
Why broadcasted ads which are the same for everybody? Is it trying to track effectiveness of these ads?
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#78And if you run a website you get constant emails like this: Hey There, I wanted to reach out and see if accepts guest post contributions or link insertion in existing posts? If so, I'd love to hear more about your guidelines and any specific topics of interest. Thank you for your time, and I'm looking forward to your response. Best Regards, These ones are definitely spammed out en-masse, my site doesn't even have a b…
> My site also has some Windows software downloads on it, and I occasionally get emails for bundling dodgy installers. Most of these tend to be "residential proxy" services looking to sell access to users' internet connections. I wonder what these people are thinking? Like, TOR operators know the risks with connection sharing - most particularly: pedos using their service to share CSAM. But everyday people?! They hav…
I think these services are used mainly for scraping sites which try to hide their data (think LinkedIn). They don't offer any protection to those that are breaking the law, afaik. So I would expect that there isn't much risk of putting their victims ("endpoints") in trouble with the law.
Not condoning it of course, it is still an ugly practice.
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most galling offer we saw on the mobile app side was something that would turn on the user's microphone, and listen for ads on tvs around them to track what they'd been exposed to offline. Adtech is such a thoroughly gross field.
Why broadcasted ads which are the same for everybody? Is it trying to track effectiveness of these ads?
Why not? Your cable company would like to charge you extra if you mute the ads or use the bathroom during ad breaks. That's just capitalism.
Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most galling offer we saw on the mobile app side was something that would turn on the user's microphone, and listen for ads on tvs around them to track what they'd been exposed to offline. Adtech is such a thoroughly gross field.
But every time this comes up the threads are flooded with people saying it doesn't actually happen and the ad companies just work out what you're interested in by what you're browsing.
Two different things. The popular conspiracy theory is that the phone listens to and presumably transcribes your conversations, sending them to a third party. The example the OP gave is specifically listening for TV content: they’ll have hashes of known ads/shows/whatever to compare against rather than do something like live transcription.
Don’t get me wrong it’s shitty and gross. But they are different things.