942287 - Spam Youtube watch requests from FF addon

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, defect)

Description

[Gowri Ramkumar]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1700.19 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

After loading the extension just hit any page with annotations in the video, or a playlist in the related. 
Example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX3k_QDnzHE

From the user agent - 
Mozilla 5.0 / Firefox 24.0
Mozilla 5.0 / Firefox 25.0


Actual results:

We found that one of the FF addons -  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/download-flash-and-video/
is generating a lot of Spammy watch requests.  It appears that the extension has code that ends up making bad youtube.com requests at a very high rate (>10k qps).

Request you to  to remove this addon as soon as possible.

More  details from Youtube investigation  - 
The extension "Download Flash and Video" or alternately "Flash and Video Download" (not be confused with "Flash Video Downloader") has several points in it's code where it looks for the video id, but determines it's the video id with var.indexOf("video_id") != -1, so if "video_id" is anywhere in the string it assumes it's the id. Notably, annotations and related playlists both contain "video_id". The code then takes the id, appends it to "watch?v=" and requests it every 4 seconds until it's successful.


Expected results:

No spam requests.

Comment 1

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

The developer has been informed about this bug.

Comment 2

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

Version 1.45 has just been approved on AMO, which should fix this problem for all current users. It will take a couple of days for updates to propagate, however.