frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

Open in hackernews

Browser extensions turn nearly 1M browsers into website-scraping bots

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/07/browser-extensions-turn-nearly-1-million-browsers-into-website-scraping-bots/
25•chha•10h ago

Comments

paulryanrogers•9h ago
Extensions and VPNs have been doing this for years, it's not a secret. Where I worked we paid a proxy/scraping company that also offered 'stealth' scraping using residential IPs. They got those IPs using techniques like these extensions.

Chrome web store changed its policy years ago to prohibit these with the rationale that an extension should have a single purpose. Apparently their scanning tools aren't enforcing the policy strictly enough.

mmsc•9h ago
Indeed, it's not a secret and it's not just extensions and VPNs, but everything you could imagine. Lots of applications that advertise themselves as "ways to make money for your unused internet bandwidth" are available which do this -- openly.

This type of software is bundled into system executables as well - just like the "free antivirus and browser toolbars" of yesterday, these are the new bundled software.

If a company has an "internal network" (lol) that consists of security that can be described as Swiss cheese, then this stuff is a massive gap there.

josephg•9h ago
> Extensions and VPNs have been doing this for years, it's not a secret.

Its not a secret in the industry, but I bet money that most of your users have no idea this is happening. They almost certainly wouldn't install those web extensions if this information was widely known.

As a rule of thumb, if you need to do something in secret to get away with it, its probably not ethical.

paulryanrogers•6h ago
It's supposed to be in the terms of service. Otherwise it is indeed fraud/abuse. Though I'd agree that most users don't read the fine print.
nerdjon•9h ago
I have to wonder, how long until the browsers just natively do this.

Gets around the AI blockers that CloudFlare is pushing with the added benefit of seeing information that a crawler would never see.

Just hide it behind an "AI Browser" that just sends everything your browser sees to the cloud anyways for processing...

Throw in some vague "privacy" promise for good measure.

(I realize this is being more sneaky and doing stuff in the background, but my question remains)

Cthulhu_•9h ago
This may already be happening to a point; I forgot what it's called but in Chrome you can opt-in to sharing analytical data, which is used by Google's page speed insights tooling and/or Lighthouse to measure your site's performance by a wide range of devices and internet connections.
xnx•9h ago
I'd be OK with an open reciprocal crawling network for non-personal/private pages as it would be a distributed force against walled gardens.

I'm very against this being done surreptitiously/deceptively and on private content (emails, chats, etc.)

mdaniel•6h ago
I ran an extension that automatically submitted pages to the Internet Archive as I browsed them, but managing the allowlist/denylist turned into a major hassle, so I eventually just installed the extension into a "public browsing" profile, but as is often the case it turned into "I don't feel like switching to that profile" and it fell by the wayside

But, in the same vein as your comment, I have long wished for Common Crawl to really lean into their mission, and not just publish monthly snaps of whatever their bots can see but do what you said and accept .har or .warc files from anyone and serve the ... hourly? ... .warc via Bittorrent

riedel•8h ago
I wonder why nothing like F-Droid did ever take off for browser extensions. Even if tons of stuff is open source, the standard distribution format are zip files with unknown content. And browser vendors never lived up to their promise that they even checked the most basic things. Also the whole manifest mess is rather a means to secure ad revenue and not to protect users.
mdaniel•6h ago
I can think of 2 pragmatic reasons:

1. If one wished to use .xpi/.crx (akin to F-Droid's install pathway) then the user would have to teach the browser to trust the signature of them. F-Droid doesn't suffer from this because each .apk is self-trusting, meaning it is signed, and that signature conveys lineage (v1.0 is owned by the same publisher as v1.1, so safe to upgrade), but the operating system doesn't have to be informed about any chain of custody for the .apk cert

2. I am not aware of any self-hosting extension registry, even from Mozilla, and extra lol for Chromium. If such a thing existed, the browser would have to allow the user to add "trusted extension registries" (along with their trusted CA chain). It would actually be snazzy if they went the Helm/Homebrew route and just leveraged OCI distribution (aka docker registry) for that, since it would open up almost unlimited self-hosting options, including publishing right from GitHub Actions to ghcr.io

riedel•4h ago
IMHO it would be rather easy to overcome this by forking. I anyways have used forks like librewolf, betterbird and recently Zen for Mozilla stuff due to all this telemetry (I guess you will need not care about malware if the browser already contains so many trackers)
mdaniel•6h ago
I'm shocked that command-f "honey" didn't return any hits

Attention-Induced Trading and Returns: Evidence from Robinhood Users (2022)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jofi.13183
2•sandwichsphinx•2m ago•0 comments

Silent Group Reminders

https://sgr.deanware.com
1•deanandreakis•2m ago•0 comments

Beauty Comes from Absence

https://kejk.tech/thoughts/beauty-comes-from-absence
1•freediver•3m ago•0 comments

Deanware

https://info.deanware.com/
1•deanandreakis•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pangolin – OSS tunneled reverse proxy (self-hosted Cloudflare Tunnels)

https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
2•miloschwartz•7m ago•1 comments

Daylight Year Clock

https://daylight.franzai.com/
1•franze•10m ago•0 comments

Men cleared in 1994 killing that sent them to prison for decades

https://apnews.com/article/wrongful-convictions-new-york-boles-collins-dna-ca9e60e5267b9f65c0b392ad3fcb46b0
1•geox•10m ago•0 comments

Smart Ring Development (Part 2) - Hardware Design

https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/smart-ring-development-part-2
1•tyhoff•12m ago•0 comments

AI Product Image Suite with Flux Kontext

https://snap-z.com/
1•bixantil•13m ago•0 comments

How to Dismantle a Democracy, Legally

https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/how-to-dismantle-a-democracy-legally
4•DyslexicAtheist•16m ago•0 comments

HPβCD Induces Rapid Regression of Atherosclerosis and Hyperlipidaemia in Adult [pdf]

https://www.gavinpublishers.com/assets/articles_pdf/2-Hydroxypropyl--Cyclodextrin-Induces-Rapid--Regression-of-Atherosclerotic-plaque-and-Reduces--Hyperlipidaemia-in-Adult-with-Cardiovascular-Disease.pdf
3•prmph•17m ago•0 comments

Two top BCG executives lose leadership roles over Gaza project

https://www.ft.com/content/6ffdd9ae-4a1b-4b41-a812-41ab55c05daa
4•frankfrank13•18m ago•1 comments

Mistral AI releases Devstral-Small-2507

https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Devstral-Small-2507
3•diggan•20m ago•0 comments

KSAT – Vegard Sandengen, Rust Engineer [audio]

https://corrode.dev/podcast/s04e07-ksat/
1•Jtsummers•20m ago•0 comments

State for Virtual Cell Challenge

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1QKOtYP7bMpdgDJEipDxaJqOchv7oQ-_l
1•alexcos•21m ago•0 comments

The FBI Is Using Polygraphs to Test Officials' Loyalty

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/us/politics/fbi-polygraph-kash-patel.html
11•detaro•22m ago•6 comments

Lifespan.io: Cyclarity Launches Human Trial to Cure Atherosclerosis

https://bakarlabs.berkeley.edu/lifespan-io-cyclarity-launches-human-trial-to-cure-atherosclerosis/
2•prmph•25m ago•0 comments

Information on Contrails from Aircraft

https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/Contrails
2•anigbrowl•27m ago•1 comments

From Cloud Native to AI Native: Why Your AI Architecture Needs a Reality Check

https://brianchristner.io/from-cloud-native-to-ai-native-why-your-ai-architecture-needs-a-reality-check/
3•vegasbrianc•27m ago•0 comments

Sweatshop Data Is Over

https://www.mechanize.work/blog/sweatshop-data-is-over/
1•Tamaybes•30m ago•0 comments

Fresh Tariff Games Are Leaving Small Businesses Dazed

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-10/fresh-tariff-games-are-leaving-small-businesses-dazed
4•petethomas•30m ago•3 comments

The Dangers of the Artificial Intelligence Hype Machine

https://lithub.com/on-the-very-real-dangers-of-the-artificial-intelligence-hype-machine/
2•Bluestein•36m ago•0 comments

Metabolic engineering of Yarrowia lipolytica through gene expression tuning

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2426686122
1•PaulHoule•39m ago•0 comments

Living Fossil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil
1•flykespice•40m ago•0 comments

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (1999)

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/netrev.html
1•marcodiego•42m ago•0 comments

Bluesky is rolling out age verification in the UK

https://www.theverge.com/news/704468/bluesky-age-verification-uk-online-safety-act
5•donohoe•42m ago•5 comments

Maxar Legion satellite captures image of Chinese satellite at 1.9 cm resolution

https://xcancel.com/AJ_FI/status/1943410200506986982
2•ironyman•45m ago•0 comments

Meta advisor warns AI slop is "inevitable" & doesn't know what to do about it

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/meta-advisor-warns-ai-slop-is-inevitable-doesnt-know-what-to-do-about-it-3222339/
5•Michelangelo11•46m ago•2 comments

A Structured Approach to Coding with AI Agents

https://machinedreams.blog/posts/uper-how-to-orchestrate-an-army-of-software-engineers/
1•flowingfocus•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Please check out my Free OpenAPI audit tool

https://devunus.com/free-tools/api-audit
1•helen_devunus•50m ago•0 comments