Ads upon ads upon ads
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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I've lost all of my faith in mobile gaming ecosystem ever since I saw that talk of the two guys that created a bot for generating and uploading as many slot machine games to the playstore as possible, just generic pull a lever, see an ad and that's it, based on a random keyword like "owl slot machine" or "bathtub sloth machine" with pictures pulled from google images, that let the bot run for a few months and then found out that they made literally thousands of dollars of ad money.
I see Google's review process for apps on the Play Store is as bad as their review process for extensions on the Chrome Web Store. Every couple of months ago, a new batch of malware is found on CWS, and you almost never see that with Firefox's add-on marketplace, even when accounting for Firefox-based browsers having a much smaller userbase. And I've noticed that when it does happen, Mozilla is much quicker in laying down the banhammer than Google. Hell, Mozilla banned a browser hijacker named FVD Speed Dial, whilw Google has it featured on CWS to this day. ~Cherri
When I was looking for a good ad-blocker a few years back, I remember stumbling upon something like... Nano Defender? I'm not sure what was the name, but it was one of the few succesful anti-adblocks that managed to get past most of adblock killers, and was generally recommended on Reddit.
After a few years, the guy sold the extension to some Indian company that promptly infected it with credential stealing malware, which compromised most of my and my GFs accounts. Ever since that, I just don't use any extensions apart from ublock and Bitwarden, since it's just a huge security risk.
But I'm slowly building up the willpower to finally switch to Mulvad Browser + VPN, I really like the approach they took to fingerprinting - just use Tor Browser, don't need any extensions, and it's bundled with a VPN - so every other user has exactly the same fingerprint and IP as you, thus making you untrackable even by the most soffisticated methods. (Well, apart from the ones that uses ML to fingerprint you based on your typing and mouse habits...). But I have already gotten used to Librewolf, and it would mean getting rid of Bitwarden extension, and that's -effort- :(