551–560 of 811 posts
For people focusing their comments on this particular extension + the permissions it asks for, please take a quick look at the numerous recent posts in the official forum for Chrome extension developers to see it's not an isolated issue: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chrom... It's a systematic issue that isn't specific to anything Pushbullet is doing and it's been like this before the pandemi…
I think folks are drastically missing the forest for the trees here. This is just one minor example of the INSANE process that is now the Chrome Approval Process. I've seen extensions go for many months getting random rejections with no reason given. This forces developers to GUESS as to what is wrong. Want to try and develop according to a roadmap or timeline- forget about it. There is no "app store" approval proces…
After 2nd to 3rd rejection if it will require a human to intervene Google will have to hire half the earthlings to deal with crappy spammers that will simply spam google store with their extensions. The answer is not human interaction, the answer is automation tool to give more details as what was detected and didn't pass.
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Are you making a good faith suggestion that it's possible to build a business around a browser extension and not support Google Chrome? They have something like 70% market share dude...
Chrome’s market share would drop if extension authors moved to an alternative. As it is, it sounds like Google’s doing this itself by breaking popular extensions.
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But you're completely ignoring the point that even without the all http(s) permission they will still be kicked off the store, so that has nothing do do with the issue at hand. If localhost is the issue, Google could literally respond exactly the way you did and the problem is gone, "why do you need http://localhost/?" This isn't about permissions at all. This is about communication and whether it's worth putting eff…
That's the thing I'm sympathetic to - having fixed the bug , it's frustrating that it's not clear what the next steps are. But given that they had the bug, Chrome was absolutely in the right to deny them the first time. And while I don't like Chrome's position that they're too busy to explain to everyone what they're doing wrong, if extensions that go "oh hey, we don't actually need access to literally every website,…
Sure, but if that bug gets fixed, why reject the fix?
Also, if that's the bug that was the concern, it would certainly be nice to have something in the email along the lines of "We don't want extensions to ask for access to every website anywhere on the Internet, so please narrow your http and https permission request."
> they're too busy to explain to everyone what they're doing wrong
If a human flagged this, how much longer would it have taken to add the sentence above to the email? Or even write that instead of the useless generic boilerplate that's in the email?
If, OTOH, an automated bot flagged this (which is what I suspect, and what others seem to suspect too), why didn't whoever wrote the automated bot put at least some kind of clue in the script that writes the email? Something like "if bad thing #6 is found, add text XYZ to the email".
Uh, yikes: > As I looked at the permissions and what our extension actually needs to operate, I noticed a great opportunity to reduce our permissions requests. We do not need to request access to data on https://*/* and http://*/* . Instead, we can simply request data access for https://*.pushbullet.com/* , http://*.pushbullet.com/* , and http://localhost/* . This is a huge reduction in the private data our extension…
Why would anyone think it is appropriate for google to reveal their hand, and allow blackhat operators to build apps up to the max limit of permissions? (If they were revealed by google via white glove customer service).
If goog did provide guidance on permissions, goog would literally have to audit every app in the store, or come up with a way to separate bad actors from good ones.
So, Im sorry. No. If its between 1 hacker's inconvenience or in extreme case , livelyhood....and the retirement savings bank account of many grandmas, i am going to side with grandmas.
Google is doing many things wrong. Keeping the "red line" of allowable permissions secret, from data-hungry developers.... is not one of them.
Another happy PushBullet user here. Extremely useful for receiving text messages from my phone while on my laptop, especially for web apps that insist on sending security codes that way instead of TOTP. This sort of behavior from Google really is infuriating. How they can just decide to boot an app from the Chrome Store that is installed by over a million users is mind-boggling. It's a pity that Chrome doesn't allow…
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That's the thing I'm sympathetic to - having fixed the bug , it's frustrating that it's not clear what the next steps are. But given that they had the bug, Chrome was absolutely in the right to deny them the first time. And while I don't like Chrome's position that they're too busy to explain to everyone what they're doing wrong, if extensions that go "oh hey, we don't actually need access to literally every website,…
I can only assume that this isn't the result of a human flagging Pushbullet like this; I expect it's an automated system. And if that automated system can make a decision to flag the extension, it could also include in the email specifically what caused that flagging to happen. At this point I'm really starting to become unsympathetic to the idea that they can't tell you what you're doing wrong because it'll enable p…
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If it did, it'd be easy for malware authors to work around the scanner. The system we've got right now isn't great , but I've yet to see any better ideas.
Couldn't malware authors start from the other direction? Create a no-op extension with no permissions and gradually add things until it's no longer approved.
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Google has effectively created a private monopoly on any Android applications related to Covid-19. And the last time this sort of information was posted to HN the comments section was a race to see who could do the best apology for Google. This policy by Google is hurting people and businesses. Meanwhile, Apple has a similar policy but all they do is just take extra care when reviewing your app. I suggest you port yo…
Google is very explicitly limiting COVID apps to those published by reputable public health orgs: https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/40578311?hl=en
Which includes helping people print warning labels. Gotta protect people from that. But the malware is fine.
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> "no support and no service" model? this is one of the reasons why Google cloud will lose to AWS in the long run. AWS is customer obsessed, Google is not.
It's so difficult to imagine a) getting ahold of someone at Google who can actually help you, and b) having some sense of assurance that they will actually help you. "Google deleted my X" posts always rise to the top on HN because they elicit a strong emotional response from developers. I think it's worthwhile to reflect on why that happens. For me, it's because I absolutely despise seeing an algorithm have control o…
They officially dropped the "don't be evil" motto some time ago, so yes.
> they make their real money selling ads, and allocate support resources accordingly
Of course. Every company allocates support resources the same way: to their paying customers.