tl;dr Add-on developer ansh sold out the extension to new owners. Commited updates 1.8.8 to the Mozilla repository, but nothing on GitHub containing the malware. The malware was a custom implementation of the mellowtel scraper mentioned in the arstechnica article. It had the opt-in functionality disabled and other “bugs” which caused excessive bandwidth usage. Please be aware there is no independent verification whether not more possible harm was caused than the mentioned mellowtel scraping.

By jiffyreader, the from the github link provided:

"Hey all,

Sorry for the delay in answering here. I was waiting for the dust to settle a little bit before clearing things up.

I tried to explain the timeline and sequence of actions in the last messages. Many of you want to know the reasons behind them.

I saw that developers were earning a lot from turning their products into proxies for scraping and were being paid by proxy providers like anyIP or brightdata. Usually they pay more for mobile proxies. So I decided to try a similar idea. I saw that Jiffy Reader had already tried with mellowtel but had stopped after a while. I thought I could monetize it by making a custom integration and bought the plugin. I tried the open source version of mellowtel but changed the code in order to make it native (refer to the Single Purpose policy issue above) and removed some of the limits in the library. In the process I introduced bugs and caused issues to a lot of you which triggered the malware report. The reason why these bugs were not immediately clear and I couldn’t solve them is because they showed up based on some specific requests/websites (google search or pdf download, etc.) and device conditions (pdf viewer open/scrolling a tab with videos) which I didn’t have a way to replicate and solve.

As I remarked before, the plugin didn’t steal any cookies/credit cards/password or personal data and you can check the network output logs or any VPN logs to confirm. You are still free to change passwords/auth sessions but JiffyReader didn’t collect or leak any of this personal information.

Ideally, I wanted to keep the product running/improving it and using this forked version for monetization without affecting users negatively. But in my eagerness to have the version accepted by the review team I changed the code to not display the opt-in and out page immediately and that removed a lot of user control. And I think I introduced some bugs (but from an arstechnica article that @concernedcitizen2 has also linked it looks like the original library had some issues on its own, so it could also be due to that).

For GDPR, I haven’t collected any data from this bandwidth sharing monetization (including IPs which I don’t store). The privacy policy on the website refers to google analytics, to the Crisp web chat and to any contact information the user might pass to us. The public pages that were scraped didn’t have to do anything with the websites a user might be visiting. The same goes for Meucci.js which just monitored xhr/ajax requests INSIDE the session-less frame, not outside, so again it didn’t revolve around any user data. You can look at the mellowtel library since I used a lot of that code

Sorry for the issues and concerns I’ve caused with these actions.

I will be committing all changes to this repo and removing all the flawed forked code. I will also send a new version for the same to FireFox, Edge and Chrome again. Going forward, I will always keep the open-source version in sync with the submitted version.

If anyone wants to reach out, you can do at jiffyreader007@gmail.com. I feel like it’s not good to keep this discussion on this repo and I’ve created a separate Discord in the meanwhile: https://discord.gg/cjwS8vmR3R

I’m really sorry for this and having removed a useful plugins that so many people used. Thanks for your understanding."

Here is the full list of extensions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vT1XgBs25gRlg5e3nYCAff967WMtZZTO-TB3rR9zszaJpTpCVFg8j7FkBxnHb3tw3aHGjKBGSxYyLgV/pubhtml?pli=1

deleted by creator

The Deep Fake Detector probably can’t keep up anymore with the recent AI advances.

As an individual you can’t be expected to do that and there are many good reasons not to do it, as you could suffer from consequences. As part of a society, all of your actions do shape the social environment around you in small ways. But when the interests of you as an individual with those actions of society clash, you do bear the responsibility of what happens in that society. In my opinion this would apply even to those who have worked against unethical actions, because taken for a bigger scope at a nationwide level, it wouldn’t be feasible to exclude those from reparations either way. Even if the “good” would get compensated with a lower tax, they will economically feel it either way, as the “bad” around them are still sanctioned. And then the ethical dilemma is what could be considered “good” or “bad” at all.

Now taken this generalized context back to marginalized groups, if everyone would be obligated to be an activist, it would punish those unable to cope with the additional stressors activism could entail. Then, the question is who is actually marginalized and who is not, the rich 1% is a minority, but definitely not in “need”. There are people labeling themselves as things which they are not. (Some “leftist queer” folk are more rightwing in their deeds, than actual conservatives.) I also believe those who fight for the rights of those that person itself doesn’t belong to, adds nuances, you can quite often see ideological shifts in people depending on their income. Which gives the question on whether a truly fair solution between groups is attainable, and probably an unsolvable optimization problem, so compromises must happen.

Every policy you go for, will eventually have some people discriminated against in some ways or even actively harm them. No matter what your stance on HRT and medical transition is, there will be some people who should not have done it in the first place, or should have to alleviate their gender dissonance. And whatever line you draw in the sand, there will be something wrong with it. Expecting everybody to strictly enforce some kind of policy by activism, is an ethical burden we can’t place on an individual, but which we involunatarily bear by its consequence.

tl;dr

"The grass has been cut as short as possible, and loose, dried grass has been removed from affected areas.

“Prior to tomorrow’s sessions, the grass will be dampened, and specific response teams will be stationed around the track.”

This is on-topic, because it happened at Microsoft’s event.

I hope a driver makes the public statement “Women are allowed to drive”, then slams 10 000€ on the table, and excuses for stating something which doesn’t align with FIA’s neutrality rules.

To be fair, there are few select sites which have tighter advertising control.

I went for all three and got many more downloads in the background. That was the right choice.

Screenshot of my adblock disabled experience on overtake.gg a sim racing community hub.

Highly doubt, because it censorable by FIA.

From personal experience susceptible people get paranoid schizophrenia like symptoms with cannabis use immediately, which should be a warning. From a scientific angle there are statistic links, but not a proven causal link. But we do know it reduces hippocampal volume which probably isn’t healthy, and hyperemetic syndrome tells that it does have negative lasting effects.

Truth is, you probably should not do it, but likely it’s not going to wreck you either. Nobody knows for sure what will happen to you.

It is overlooked because filesharing gets you into trouble and Plex is for various reasons the much more evolved alternative.

There is the psychological factor that Windows behaves more like malware with their forced full screen overlays to shove the Edge into your ass. Over and over again. Microsoft doesn’t take No for an answer like an abusive partner.

No, because the headline has no information on what it is. And when I opened the site indeed it is devoid of informational content.

Hate the clickbait article naming. Downvoted.

It doesn’t if you pay for it.

Not quite correct. They didn’t start charging for API usage. They banned it and pretended it could be paid for with completely absurd prices nobody could reasonably afford.

Go to the outer status page. The router should display whether it has an internet connection to your provider. If no, then your router/modem has no credentials or another issue preventing access.

If it shows as working, then you can narrow it down to incorrect DNS and IP routing. Perhaps dynamic IP allocation is set to off or another configuration error or bug, in which case you might need to reset all the router settings. Then, is it only broken for a single end device?