How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire • Hacker News Board

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#41

Post by chrissnell » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #36

DDG 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…

The user is intending to search with Google but the query never touches Google or shows any Google results. That's why it's different.

Thanks for the DDG link, though. I had no idea.

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#42

Post by dumbfounder » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #35

dumbfounder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Private is a BS term, can mean just about anything. If it's private from the US gov but not China, that might be "private" enough for some, obviously not for others. But it's also nowhere near certain your assumption is true.

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#43

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

jfoster wrote: post #22

This doesn't feel completely clear cut. Users installed the add-on expecting their search to change. It changes their search. Presumably it's at least preventing Google & Bing from then knowing who made the search. Whether it's truly anonymous seems a bit of a stretch. (how do they define it?)

[deleted]

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#44

Post by ga-vu » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #40

ga-vu wrote: post #31

Title 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 b…

That's just a description of the company, probably copy-pasted from some stock market site.

When someone says "how they built an empire" I expect to read their history and modus operandi.

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#45

Post by whoanow » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

I used to work for a company that did desktop search hijacking. Looking back I can't believe how normalized it was internally.

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#46

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #38

There 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.

[deleted]

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#47

Post by seapunk » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

I can't read this article.

Error 410 This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#48

Post by domador » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

Hmm... I'm unable to access and read this article. Medium displays a 410 error and an ominous message: "This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules." Given the subject matter, I'm starting to get a little suspicious about why this article was taken down.

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#49

Post by alt3red » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

domador wrote: post #48

Hmm... I'm unable to access and read this article. Medium displays a 410 error and an ominous message: "This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules." Given the subject matter, I'm starting to get a little suspicious about why this article was taken down.

I just noticed that as well. You can still read the article by doing a google search and looking at the cached version.

Re: How a Chinese Company Built a $250M Search Hijacking Empire

#50

Post by robtherobber » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

domador wrote: post #48

Hmm... I'm unable to access and read this article. Medium displays a 410 error and an ominous message: "This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules." Given the subject matter, I'm starting to get a little suspicious about why this article was taken down.

Maybe try https://web.archive.org/web/20191211012207/https://medium.co...