At least once a week I get emails from people
- offering money to add their "tracking" code
- wanting to purchased the extension outright
What they clearly want is access to my modest install base to push questionable code onto. I certainly am not going for these offers, but I could certainly see someone less financially secure giving in to it, and that scares me a little.
The idea of paid malware insertion in smaller packages is kind of troubling in general. How often just in life in general do we just trust opaque binaries to be clean.
> At least once a week I get emails from people
My extension (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/privornot/fnpgifcbm...) currently says it has ~915 users. Usually the offers I get are in the $100-$200 range, but it's maybe once every 1-2 months I get an offer.
I'm guessing they go by keywords + user count (or something, maybe "last updated" too?) , as my extension is very country and context-specific, and I'm not getting that many offers (thankfully). More people reaching out saying thanks, which are better emails to receive anyways and some asking for the source code, which I'm happy to provide :)
https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-twitter/issues/38...
Some of them work in the open, I've had emails from the people behind this scam:
https://palant.info/2024/10/01/lies-damned-lies-and-impact-h...
- What security problems are we trying to prevent with automatic updates? The worst-case would be allowing an untrusted third-party to run arbitrary code on your computer.
- How did we fix it? We allow a different untrusted third-party to run arbitrary code on our computers.
Toss in a healthy dose of developers using "security updates" to enshittify a product, or even just screwing up releases from time to time and introducing more attack vectors than they fixed, and automatic updates don't look very attractive.
Did they ever give you an idea of what they are ready to pay?
I don't seem to have saved any of them but I do recall one offering me $6,400 for my extension because there was a small voice in the back of my head whispering "that's a lot of money..."
Most of the ones wanting me to install code offer ongoing payments.
Wild market though, and I applaud developers who reject the offers. I'm sure that small voice becomes a lot louder if you built an extension that now has 100k users.
At some point they signed on with a monetization scheme that:
- Redirected you through its sales attribution url any time you accessed a store (which bounced you to the site's front page instead of your search result)
- Rearranged your search results to put its affiliated stores at the top
- Marketed itself mainly to retailers as an ad network with no mention of browser extensions anywhere.
If it werent for the annoying redirect I probably would have never noticed that something was wrong.
Why hasn't there been a major data theft yet exploiting the permissiveness of the Chrome extension ecosystem, it's a disaster waiting to happen...
So it seems the Google TOS bans competition in search monetization using their "open source" browser. Isn't it odd that an "open source" browser is apparently designed to provide a monopoly on search monetization by the nice people who give it to you for free?
And being 80% or so of all searches: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...
It seems like Peter Thiel's claim that google is a search advertising monopoly masquerading as a (competitive, non-monopoly) technology company might be spot on.
That's not a very deep insight, it's been pretty obvious since they bought out DoubleClick in 2007.
If you want a POV on the most recent one involving Doubleclick, listen to the first part of this podcast with Brian Kelley of App Nexus - a competitor to Google ad tech.
Thiel is openly advocating monopolies, and says competition is for losers.
I think he's just calling GOOG out for their marketing, and noting their market strategy to deflect attention away from their monopoly.
I, for one, have never heard anyone publicly mention this besides Thiel. Have you?
I wish more people understood this.
That said, if a 60 minute talk can provide even one useful insight that's useful, I'd say it's a win. And I think his "zero to one" talk had at least two or three.
Honestly, I concluded GOOG was an advertising company pretending to be a "tech" company some time ago, but if I say it I'm a "troll", if Thiel says it, well it might be true, right?
I'd assume at least a dozen things are more important than advertising inexpensive Chinese made socks to Americans. But I could be wrong.
If by highest you mean, "most lucrative" then yes, I agree.
Ime he's a walking personification of "jack of all trades, master of none".
That's the perfect trait for a VC (broad knowledge is critical to identify market trends), but it has its flaws such as extreme simplification of complex topics.
That said, you can rightfully argue that this is why you are investing in egghead founders - so they can deal with solving those problems and logic gaps.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...
Their technology products are free/low cost ways to get you to voluntarily opt in to their surveillance advertising model.
Doesn’t GCP bring in big bucks?
Not to mention gsuite. If your company don’t use Microsoft office they use gsuite.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...
the much smaller black box is GCP. Much smaller. much much smaller.
Otherwise I agree (even if it means agreeing with Peter Thiel in this case).
Maybe my vernacular is off, "source available" ?
ah "licensed freeware"
"The people overseeing the security of Google’s Chrome browser explicitly forbid third-party extension developers from trying to manipulate how the browser extensions they submit are presented in the Chrome Web Store. "
I assumed that this explicit prohibition would be a "TOS". I could be wrong. Maybe it's somewhere else or called something else.
Oh, you mean like google ads and android app ads? Because both think I'm either Chinese or Korean, despite being neither.