1448988 - Extention modifies how google results are displayed, adding ads.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Blocklist Policy Requests, defect)

Description

[ClassCusername]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180315233128

Steps to reproduce:

Install latest version of "YouTube Best Video Downloader 2"

Now removed from mozilla.com but can still be found here.

https://bvd2.nl/

Used to be here

https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/youtube-download-mp3-mp4-1080p/




Actual results:

Screenshot of effect:

https://i.imgur.com/RHOQvDa.png

Adds ads to google result.


Expected results:

Pretty self explainatory, someone on reddit said it could be blacklisted so this doesnt affect other users who may not have noticed it / cant figure out how to fix.

Discussion can be found here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/87a21e/hello_just_noticed_a_new_style_of_ads_when_using/

Comment 1

[jscher2000]

Attachment: XPI v8.5.1 (adds content_script/content.js, not present in v8.5)

From 8.5.1 manifest.json:

  "content_scripts":[{
    "all_frames": false,
    "run_at": "document_start",
    "matches": ["*://*.youtube.com/*"],
    "exclude_matches": ["*://*.youtube.com/embed/*"],
    "js": ["data/communication.js", "data/content_script/inject.js", "data/content_script/youtube.js"]
  },
  { 
    "matches" : [ 
      "http://*/*", "https://*/*" 
    ], 
    "js" : [ "data/content_script/content.js" ], 
    "run_at" : "document_idle", 
    "all_frames" : false 
  }],

From 8.5 manifest.json:

  "content_scripts":[{
    "all_frames": false,
    "run_at": "document_start",
    "matches": ["*://*.youtube.com/*"],
    "exclude_matches": ["*://*.youtube.com/embed/*"],
    "js": ["data/communication.js", "data/content_script/inject.js", "data/content_script/youtube.js"]
  }],

The new content.js script is the ill-behaved one.

See also: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1210834

Comment 2

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Injecting advertisements is not sufficient to warrant blocklisting. Doing so without an opt-in is enough to take it down from AMO, which is what was done after we learned about it.

The developer might still upload a new version that addresses these issues, which would fix the problem for current users. For now I don't think there's any further action to take.

Comment 3

[Nameless Voice]

I would think that once a developer pulls something like this once, they should have their rights to upload extensions to AMO revoked.