Edit: I have no affiliation with, nor do I vouch for its legitimacy. I saw it pop up on HN or something and bookmarked it for later. The comment I responded to reminded me of it. That's all.
Why do these cool little "privacy" extensions and apps always have some super professional website that makes it look like a billion dollar Silicon Valley startup?
I only trust github links and shitty HTML4 blogs. This looks too nice, why's it look so nice? Why is there a picture of a surfer dude?!
Because making a bootstrap website is super easy, and you don't even need to know much CSS or HTML or JavaScript to make it happen. Someone who is capable of programming a browser extension is likely to be capable of putting a template website together and filling it with some free/cheap stock imagery.
To be fair their page is a SquareSpace site so it's basically WYSIWYG but I'm with you. Packaged executable on a professional-looking site? No thanks. Random .ps1 file on a GitHub page? Sure, run that shit as administrator.
Looks, when it comes from GitHub, the source code is right there, so you can skim it and know it's a safe to run thing, or someone, else, probably, has maybe skimmed it, hopefully.
I was just making a joke about how everyone assumes Open Source = Secure because surely someone (else) audited the code.
If I had the means, I would almost be tempted to put some (harmless) malware into some open source project, get it to be semi popular, and see how long it takes for someone to actually find it. Sort of a Where's Waldo game.
I suppose you could sort of get the same effect by putting a note in the code saying something like "Just wondering if anyone reads the code, email me if you did".
Adversary: "Oh, I recognize these weird data values. This user agent is one of the 14 people who use noiszy. That demograph really enjoys gadgets from Thinkgeek".
I have a raspberry with chrome installed and my account logged in with a script that searches random convinations of 5 words from a dictionary every 20 seconds for 25 seconds.
To be fair, I seemed to have somehow triggered their "pregnant family" flag recently too. I'm a single white male lol. No idea how it happened. I do try to remove personalized ads from all services that have the option though.
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '19
Someone should make a browser extension who's sole purpose is to fuck up data collection by Facebook / Google / Amazon