Title says "how" but it doesn't explain anything.
It just lists that they run two malicious Chrome extensions.
Talk about clickbait.
How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>> Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal business has a good chance of making their revenue dry up fast. Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by ethical issues
> Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by ethical issues There are plenty of examples. See the recent case of Papa John's. The stock imploded by 50% over a few months in an ethical scandal related to the founder (John Schnatter) saying the N word among other things. Schnatter had criticized the NFL's handling of the kneeling protests that went on in relation to Colin Kaepernick, say…
I wonder if their reaction was counterproductive in that the more they try to apologize or do promotions the more people are reminded of the incident because of which they are doing the promotions.
Maybe if they had implemented a strict "no comment" policy and just hunkered down and be completely ignored it, people would have forgotten about it.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#33Title says "how" but it doesn't explain anything. It just lists that they run two malicious Chrome extensions. Talk about clickbait.
Was thinking exactly that.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#34Is there anything actually illegal about this? What laws are broken?
The Computer misuse act(UK) GPDR (EU) are just two
We have no idea what data they're actually storing, and everything the extensions does is stated in the description of the extension, I'm not a lawyer but I don't think the Computer Misuse Act is being broken here. We have no idea on the data they store so who knows if GDPR is.
But there's also the fact that they are not a EU or UK company, they are Chinese. Where the laws are far more relaxed about things like this.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
These extensions do not simply change the default search in the browser. They actively hijack searches on the Google and Bing homepages. Test it yourself in a sandbox. A user who literally types in Google.com or Bing.com into their browser address bar intends to conduct a search using Google or Bing. Their intention is very clear. It is not to have their search hijacked and taken to a "private" search engine. They al…
It's still sort of doing what the extension says it is going to do. On the extension page it says "Keep your searches private by redirecting searches that may be tracked to Search Encrypt, a privacy-focused search engine... For your privacy, Search Encrypt intercepts the requests if it's on our list of sites" So it says it hijacks right in the description. On their website for their "search engine" it says "The Searc…
your searches are not private though, since one they're decrypted on searchencrypt.com, they're logged as per chinese government reporting laws.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#36DDG uses Bing results (+ some tweaking) for their search results.
Per their description here: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...
They use Yahoo ad search syndication to put their own ads against them.
They also insert their own affiliate links onto results.
How is that materially different than what's happening here? That this company presumably doesn't have a backend search API agreement with Bing?
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes? They're completely different scenarios. One is setting the default search engine, the other is actively subverting the user's intention.
The user’s intention is to proxy the search results so it is anonymized. Based on their chrome extension description it seems to do that. It works not unlike duckduckgo. Spinning it as some Anti-Chinese national security thing is probably unnecessary.
the searches are logged to a server in China. They're not private
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#38There is something poetic about Google allowing a Chrome extension to hijack search queries.
I'm loathed to install things like Grammerly, or Honey precisely because of fears like this.
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#39> Genimous Technology Co Ltd, a public company traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under the symbol 000676, is the 12 billion CNY ($1.7 billion USD) company that is behind these extensions If you're brave, short this. Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal business has a good chance of making their revenue dry up fast.
>>> Shining a light on an edge of ethical/legal business has a good chance of making their revenue dry up fast. Any previous case ? Having a hard time believing that a stock is driven by ethical issues
Check out Cootek - Chinese app developer that went public about a year ago (main app is TouchPal keyboard). They were engaging in "malicious and disruptive behavior" to drive their revenues (Buzzfeed broke the story) and Google banned them from distributing their apps on Google Play. Stock is down from >$9 before the news broke to $5 today.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/google-b...
Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire
#40Title says "how" but it doesn't explain anything. It just lists that they run two malicious Chrome extensions. Talk about clickbait.
> Genimous Technology Co Ltd, a public company traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under the symbol 000676, is the 12 billion CNY ($1.7 billion USD) company that is behind these extensions [1]. Their ownership is concealed through shell companies setup in offshore jurisdictions like Polarity Technologies Ltd in Cyprus and EightPoint Technologies Ltd in the Cayman Islands, but can be traced through analysis of the browser extensions terms of service and contact information [2, 3]. Based on public filings, in the first 6 months of 2019, Genimous made 900,296,410.76 CNY ($125 million USD) from its overseas division, which generates its revenues from ads on search results pages [4, 5 (page 15 of the PDF)] for a $250 million yearly run rate.