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Google.com pages found to have access to hidden Chrome API allowing hardware info such as CPU usage to be viewed (simonwillison.net)

submitted 5 months ago by dantheclamman to c/technology

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

h/t @[email protected] https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/112757810519145581

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Remember this thumb rule -> if it's not open-source, you are allowing the software to do whatever it wants to do.

No regulation, law, support group is going to help you. You are digging your own grave.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I agree, but... This was in open source software. Chromium. Not just Google Chrome. https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/422c736b82e7ee763c67109cde700db81ca7b443

hangout_services/thunk.js (via) It turns out Google Chrome (via Chromium) includes a default extension which makes extra services available to code running on the *.google.com domains - tweeted about today by Luca Casonato, but the code has been there in the public repo since October 2013 as far as I can tell.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servicesthunkjs/

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

This is included in the chromium source code which is public

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/128.0.6586.1/chrome/browser/resources/hangout_services/thunk.js

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If it's any software you didn't write yourself or audit every line of...

For a typical Linux distro that's tens of thousands of packages...

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I am no expert on code-auditing. But I'm slightly at peace that there are 100s of experts looking at the code because it's open-source. But i also understand mistakes can still happen. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best solution so far.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There's some truth to that, but bad actors have managed to slip things through in the past. It happened recently with xz.

I guess my point is that we put a lot of trust in strangers when we run any code on our systems. Open or not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

True. We can also not run code at all and be perfectly safe.

I wish there was a comparison. Number of 0days in open source and 0days in closed source for comparible projects and a measure for time to mitigate the 0days.