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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#321

Post by toomuchtodo »

iso1631 wrote: post #296
toomuchtodo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather pay people and websites for content. I already do this today for journalism orgs and a handful of high value substacks, I'm happy to pay for more. I'd pay for HN. Free does not scale (with the caveat being orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them and can self fund alongside donations; this, of course, is a model others can adopt), people need to eat, pay f…

I run into occasional articles, often linked from here, for say economist or ft.com or new york times I'm not signing up for a subscription for that journal, but paying a small amount for access to that one article is a no brainer. I don't subscribe to a newspaper either, but I'll happily buy one. The New European did this a decade ago using "agate" (named after the smallest font you'd get in a newspaper), top up wit…

While this works for some cohort of consumer, it doesn't work for organizations that need consistent cashflows to pay for consistent expenses, and so, those willing to subscribe on a recurring basis carry the economic burden of sustaining such operations.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#322

Post by spopejoy »

fasterik wrote: post #272
haswell wrote: post #14

The headline seems pretty misleading. Here’s what seems to actually be going on: > Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers. This does seem invasive. It also seems like what I’d expect…

>this is why I run ad blockers. It's important to note that this isn't fixed by ad blockers. To avoid this kind of fingerprinting, you need to disable JavaScript or use a browser like Firefox which randomizes extension UUIDs.

Yes, but FF also prevents the extension scanning. It's scandalous that Chrome allows this!

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#323

Post by b112 »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #289
b112 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads Not sure on that. It was far, far better before what drives ads today. I've gotten more value from random people's static HTML pages in 1999, than I ever have from something in the last 25 years. This just led me to think of news sites, and how they've turned mostly into click-bait farms in the last decade to 15. Gives me pause. Didn't the king of "doing it…

I would love to get something more akin to a monthly print issue of BYTE, Omni, Starlog, Reality Hackers, WIRED and Dr Dobbs Journal without blinky, shouty ads that cause the content to re-render every 10 seconds. I would pay money for that.

E-ink is getting cheaper and cheaper, there's a lot of 6" screen devices for $100. If it dropped to $100 for a 11" screen, that would be a respectable size for a magazine. I cite eink as most are distraction free, or can be, and are very easy on the eyes.

Such content would also suck with flashy ads too.

It's pretty easy tech I think, it's just never hit a flash point. But it could.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#324

Post by abustamam »

array_key_first wrote: post #304
surajrmal wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed ont…

It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield. I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month. Why does YouTube pr…

This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks.

There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#325

Post by ozgrakkurt »

jamespo wrote: post #292
toomuchtodo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather pay people and websites for content. I already do this today for journalism orgs and a handful of high value substacks, I'm happy to pay for more. I'd pay for HN. Free does not scale (with the caveat being orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them and can self fund alongside donations; this, of course, is a model others can adopt), people need to eat, pay f…

Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders, who even without ads or tracking will try and find another way not to pay.

There is no substance to this statement.

> Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders

Citation needed.

> who even without ads or tracking will try and find another way not to pay

Why is this relevant? People try to get free stuff all over the place and I don't find it makes my life difficult.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#326

Post by lejalv »

haswell wrote: post #167
andersonpico wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is probing your browser for installed extensions not "scanning your computer"? Calling the title misleading because they didn't breach the browser sandbox is wrong when this is clearly a scenario most people didn't think was possible. Chrome added extensionId randomization with the change to V3, so it's clearly not an intended scenario. > vs. something inherently sinister (e.g. “they’re checking to see if you’re…

> How is probing your browser for installed extensions not "scanning your computer"? I think most people would interpret “scanning your computer” as breaking out of the confines the browser and gathering information from the computer itself. If this was happening, the magnitude of the scandal would be hard to overstate. But this is not happening. What actually is happening is still a problem. But the hyperbole underm…

> making people focus on the wrong things and actually obscuring the severity of the problem, which is certainly not limited to LinkedIn.

No, LinkedIN has much more sensitive data already. Combined with which the voracious fingerprinting, this stands out as a particularly dystopian instance of surveillance capitalism

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#327

Post by p-e-w »

armadyl wrote: post #204
acheron wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a Chrome thing. It’s a safe bet that if you use Google products you don’t care about privacy anyway. “Google product collects info about you: news at 11.”

> This is a Chrome thing. This is blatant misinformation. Firefox (and all of its derivatives) also does this. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1372288

And this bug was reported eight years ago, with no serious attempt to fix it since.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#328

Post by KellyCriterion »

surajrmal wrote: post #256
lastofthemojito wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is why I run ad blockers. It's pretty wild that we live in a world where the actual FBI has recommended we use ad blockers to protect ourselves, and if everyone actually listened, much of the Internet (and economy) as we know it would disappear. The FBI is like "you should protect yourself from the way that the third largest company in the world does business", and the average person's response is "nah, that w…

Don't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed ont…

yes, Google AdSense was like the cambrian explosion allowing tons of businesses to get traction in the early days.

There is a story of this PlentyOfFish founder (who exited to Match.com for 500m cash) that in the beginning he got 3-4 USD per click

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#329

Post by spopejoy »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #69

>The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not mention it. OMG is literally every article written with LLMs these days I just can't anymore. It's all so tiring.

> It's all so tiring.

What's tiring is a comment like this. If you don't like the article don't read it -- and don't comment.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#330

Post by kbelder »

array_key_first wrote: post #304
surajrmal wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed ont…

It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield. I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month. Why does YouTube pr…

But there's no method or structure in place to pay a website a fraction of a cent. Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention.

I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.

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