There's a startup making botnets using Chrome extensions?

So, you're telling me that they succeeded in crippling adblockers, but failed to prevent malware like they claimed? That's interesting. And you're also telling me that despite only succeeding to cripple adblockers, their intention was not to do that, and instead their intention was to do the thing they're failing to do? Very interesting. Thanks for being the rational voice in the room, Theo.

14:48 if anything, this tells me that their objective IS to neuter ad blockers, because they managed to break uBlock under MV3 while keeping the doors open for sketchy things like Mellowtel

dont worry manifest v3 will surely help prevent this and was totally worth the damage to ublock origin and consumers as a whole

it's straight up magical how crippled the chrome extensions API is when you want to do something useful and yet how much malicious things it allows

Was always against Extensions for years. We fought XSS a lot just for Google to come and be like here is a way to do XSS that devs can't stop, only the user can if they edit their extensions and block it. FFS

find someone who loves you as much as theo loves editing website text with developer mode for his thumbnails

Mellowtel is pretty cool imo, I'll look into it for my extensions! Great video as always

It's crazy they have to do this to get data, they are not the bad guys. Honey is evil for example. This is different. Internet data should be free and open to everyone at every scale.

As someone who’s built a few web scrapers this is… well just crazy. It’s like the holy grail of scraping but also incredibly scary. I hate that I can’t think of a more effective way to do this than what the devs have done

I made my chrome ext and i didnt think about in these terms but technically i turned myself into a botnet for my own website. My chrome ext scrapes the job details of Linkedin posts that you apply to and sends it to my job tracking website so you dont have to manually enter the details.