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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: 1, Offtopic) by requerdanos on Thursday July 05 2018, @07:23PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 05 2018, @07:23PM (#703168) Journal

    The web browser extension "Stylish" steals all your browsing history.

    No, it doesn't. It makes an unauthorized copy in violation of your privacy and of your wishes, which is bad enough.

    Not all bad things have to be called "stealing", which is a word meaning depriving someone of something by taking it away from them without having the property rights to do so.

    Have they stolen your exclusive right to control your own data? Arguably, yes. But they didn't steal the data.

    This is not differential calculus, rocket science, the three-body-problem--seriously, there is nothing all that hard about this.

    Stealing is a thing. It is usually bad.

    Unauthorized copying is a thing, but a different thing. It, too, is frequently a bad thing.

    There are many, many other bad things, limited only by the imagination of mankind (and that is not much of a limit).

    Not all of those things must be called "stealing" to recognize them as "bad things". Only one of those things may be properly called stealing. I would let you guess which one, but I note that this site has a lot of really bad guessers in this area, so I will spell it out: It's stealing. Anything else "bad" would be called by its distinct name, and recognized as bad because it's bad, not because idiots wrongly call it stealing.

    This comes up again and again. Some of you people need to make a note of this, and perhaps pass it on to others. You know who you are.

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