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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday July 05 2018, @01:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-extensions-gone-bad dept.

The web browser extension "Stylish" steals all your browsing history. The change happened after the project had been sold several times and the latest set of owners have supplemented the otherwise very useful code with surveillance capabilities start around January 2017. Currently it aggregates profiles on its users based on their complete browsing activities. The extension's user base had been about 2 million prior to this news.

Before it became a covert surveillance tool disguised as an outstanding browser extension, Stylish really was an outstanding browser extension.

[...] Unfortunately, since January 2017, Stylish has been augmented with bonus spyware that records every single website that I and its 2 million other users visit.

Related: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1472948
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/2-million-users-impacted-by-new-data-collection-policy-in-stylish-browser-add-on/

[Both Google and Mozilla have blocked Stylish as an extension at this point. An alternative extension Stylus was created from the last known version of the extension from the original author. -Ed]

[Update: 20180706_115313 UTC] Per a comment to this story, there is a replacement for stylish available for Pale Moon:

Stylus fork mentioned in TFS is a WebExtension, and old versions of Stylish were also taken down, so finding and installing it would require manual intervention, and searching for last-known-good version.

Luckily, one of the Pale Moon developers created a compatible XUL-based fork, Stylem [palemoon.org] (release thread [palemoon.org]). It directly imports all Stylish userstyles, so just disable Stylish, enable Stylem, restart browser, and that's it. Worked without a hitch.

Earlier on SN: Stylish and Userstyles.org Having Corruption Issues (2016)


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:23AM

    That kinda thing happens when you get a bunch of code monkeys and nerds of various other stripes running the nuthouse. I have yet to meet a decent coder who didn't have at least some very ADHD-like tendencies.

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