It's not clear to me what "[dupe]" means on HN anymore
It is being used, e.g., by this commenter, where the URLs and the target page content for each submission differ
Moreover, HN allows duplicate submissions under some circumstances, where the URLs are exactly the same. If the submissions are relatively far apart in time sometimes the moderator or a commenter will reply with "Previous discussion". More recently, a "past" link was added. Many times however the duplicate submissions are close together in time and there are no comments
Perhaps "[dupe]" as used here means "duplicate topic". But that seems like a pointless label as there are multiple submissions about the same topic every week on HN
As someone who archives all active HN story URLs, titles, etc. in an SQL database daily, I can locate duplicate submissions very quickly. Most do not have any indication of "[dupe]" in the title or comments
"What is not a question is that a criminal investigation is now open."
Good. These companies deserve each and every stone thrown at them, and much more.
It isn’t exactly. They created a list of known extensions by their id and a file which is known to exist in that extension. The site iterates over each pair and tries to load that file, if it doesn’t error it knows the extension is installed. It’s a clever and difficult manual process, but it does bypass the security trying to prevent this kind of thing.
I read that their reasoning is it exists to block users that use known scraper extensions which bypass their terms of use. But don’t entirely buy that.
This is how I interpreted the original question and indeed it makes no sense, JavaScript from a website should not be allowed to interact with extensions like this.
It's actually the extension injecting itself into the webpage, often to interact with it. (I imagine much of this is just looking for global ExtensionName objects.)
Actually, the article is clear about what is happening technically, and it’s both. Chrome does, in fact, allow the page to make requests for resources stored in the extension bundle, and this is one of the two fingerprinting methods that the article describes.
Chrome exposes these files via a URL that you can fetch in javascript like you would any other file on a normal website. These local extension files usually contain code, styles or images that your browser needs to run the extensions.
Because extensions can and often do contain stuff like images or JS bundles that they inject into a target page's DOM. Not allowing a tab's context to load files from the chrome-extension:// namespace would break a lot of things.
"Chrome extensions can expose internal files to web pages through the web_accessible_resources field in their manifest.json. When an extension is installed and has exposed a resource, a fetch() request to chrome-extension://{id}/{file} will succeed. When the extension is not installed, Chrome blocks the request and the promise rejects.
LinkedIn tests every extension in the list this way."
Is that information available to websites? I figured they were doing some kind of novel hackery to self-detect extensions based on behaviour that would only happen if X extension was installed.
But that would be a lot of work for 6,300 extensions. Unless someone offers that as a service?
Here's the most relevant section I could find from the original source:
"Chrome extensions can expose internal files to web pages through the web_accessible_resources field in their manifest.json. When an extension is installed and has exposed a resource, a fetch() request to chrome-extension://{id}/{file} will succeed. When the extension is not installed, Chrome blocks the request and the promise rejects.
LinkedIn tests every extension in the list this way."
Hmm, can one fake-install extensions that randomly return yes/no to those queries ? It's pretty clear which files linkedin (and other sites doing the fingerprinting) is testing, one can observe it as the OP author points out.
It should also be interesting to see which other sites test those very same files, has anybody looked yet ?
friends, WHEN you are asked to implement something like this at your job, which will you choose: object (& hold ground, loose job) OR comply (& keep job)
as practitioners, where do we hold the line between telemetry and surveillance?
I choose not to work at places like linked in, meta, or any place that accepts Saudi or Israeli funding. It makes it a little harder to find a job, but i sleep better at night.
For similar reasons, I have been working in the public sector (Australian state government) for the past 5 years and couldn’t be happier.
I’m lucky that I’m in a team which is hands on and does a lot of very interesting things. From building CRUD apps which are used in management and response to bushfires (wildfires) to more interesting things like building a datalake which amalgamates and stores weather data from multiple sources to building near real time CDC pipelines and making our transactional data available to our in house team of data scientists who then use that data to do fascinating stuff that eventually results in for example making sure that our response to bushfires takes into account the impact and safety of endangered species.
And when I look at the underlying data and the trends and and projections of just how bad bushfires are going to get in the next 30 years and how we must be so much nimbler and smarter just to survive, the work takes on a whole new level of meaning.
Don’t get me wrong, there are times the internal bureaucracy absolutely drives me mad. And I am aware that I could be earning much more in the private sector. But I get to work with a team who are really passionate and enthusiastic about their job, and I get to sleep at night knowing that unlike my previous jobs, this time I am not just making someone who is already uber rich, richer.
If you had told the teenage Utilitarian me that I would one day work for, and enjoy working for, government, I would have thought hell must have frozen over.
Anyway, for those in this situation, some anecdotes. I've outright refused to do questionable things and kept my job. I've also played incompetent so the sharks look elsewhere. Point being... options exist, don't negotiate [only] with yourself.
Would be remiss if I missed the opportunity to quote Louis Rossman: "don't accept the premise of assholes"
There have been several spywares developed in Israel and that have been used by them and other governments against civilians, below are just a few examples. Why wouldn't you lump Israel in?
I think it's also an option to anonymously tell the world what will happen. That way you keep your job and still people are at least aware. Unless if you are one of like 3 people who know about it and they would immediately know it was you.
I wonder the same. Maybe it's made by people who feel like they wouldn't easily find another job and need the job for healthcare or financial reasons (living paycheck to paycheck)? And it's ordered by managers in similar situations, whose managers want to see increased revenue and don't care how? Somewhere in the chain it feels like there should be someone who says 'wtf are we doing'. It's strange
To answer your question though: I'd object of course, I'm very lucky to be well enough off that I can currently make that choice without serious repercussions. Do you think someone would come out on HN and say "oh sure yeah I have no morals!", at least without it being a throwaway where you'd have no idea if it's real?
This is fairly standard practice for device fingerprinting. LI is probably using this to protect its platform from scraping etc, and extension lists have sufficient enough entropy to help identify users and form a useful component of a fingerprint.
Its already pretty easy to oneshot an extension aiding scraping and LI can do nothing about it. I've seen people build and install a local chrome extension in a couple of days and have an AI inject itself into devtools and scrape pretty much any website. And that was a few months ago. I don't think there is an easy way to defend against such things anymore. Its a matter of time that defensive programming measures like this become useless.
Is this a hallucination? I can't find this quote anywhere else.
> According to browsergate, Milinda Lakkam confirmed this under oath, saying, "LinkedIn took action against users who had specific extensions installed."
None of our new hires the last few years had anything to do with Linkedin though. As for myself, I deleted my account around the time when it started to try to look like a Facebook feed.
I get why people without jobs need a LinkedIn, but I don't get why they post there constantly. Like reposting stuff, writing random thoughts, posting rocket ship emojis, has anyone ever gotten a job that way?
I've heard it makes you more visible on things like search results. Linkdin, of course, is trying to encourage interaction on their site so sounds believable that they'd do that, but i've been lucky enough to not need to care.
That makes sense. I'm curious if it's proven though. Guess I'm lucky to have a job and credentials, recruiters are contacting me despite 0 public LinkedIn activity.
A big part of its detection relies on finding known extension resources at URLs of the form `chrome-extension://{extension_id}/{file}`
An extension installed from the Chrome store has the same `extension_id` for every user. But, if you just extract the source for that extension, and then load it yourself, you'll get a NEW extension_id. Same extension with the same functionality, but its extension_id will be completely new so impossible for LinkedIn to query.
Granted this won't evade the second type of detection LinkedIn employs, it'll help you evade quite a bit. I often clone extension source code anyway since it mostly protects me from malicious extension updates (by effectively disabling updates).
This is re-posted article from the author's Substack that does a pretty bad job of explaining the situation. The second link in the article is supposed to take you to a "GitHub repository tracking the extension list" but it goes to a GitHub page for a plugin that hasn't been updated in 9 years.
It has a lot of hallmarks of LLM writings ("It's not this, it's that" and feeling like a lot of empty words rehydrated from an outline) while missing the real updates in the story like the German affidavit filed by a LinkedIn engineer who worked on these tools.
A key piece of information that this article omits is that the list of extensions being scanned for doesn't include anything you'd recognize or anything you'd even think to install. It's full of data extraction tools, scrapers, AI spam and recruiting tools (remember all those automated spammy LinkedIn messages you got?), and plugins masquerading as simple things that have been pulled from the extension store for violations.
A lot of articles have been trying hard to distract from this fact by highlighting that the list of extension includes things like a plugin designed to simplify web pages for neurodivergent users or an "anti-Zionist political tagger" to imply that they're trying to do fingerprinting based on those attributes, but they neglect to mention that those plugins were pulled from the extension store most likely because they were data exfiltrators dressed up as simple plugins to get people to install them.
But read that site carefully and actually try to click the links. In this section they're trying to direct your attention away from all of the AI spam and data extraction tools with this section:
> The scan doesn’t just look for LinkedIn-related tools. It identifies whether you use an Islamic content filter (PordaAI — “Blur Haram objects, real-time AI for Islamic values”), whether you’ve installed an anti-Zionist political tagger (Anti-Zionist Tag), or a tool designed for neurodivergent users (simplify).
But click the links. They've all been pulled from the store. Extensions like that are often bait to get people to install scrapers that will use your computer and LinkedIn login to extract data and send it back to their servers.
So regardless of where you stand on probing for the presence of these scammy extensions, you should at least understand the facts rather than the story that companies like this are trying to sell you to drive traffic to their product.
> But click the links. They've all been pulled from the store.
I did that with the first five extensions in the list; only one was removed from the store. So you should qualify this statement.
Maybe they are all scammy extensions, and maybe this is a weird LLM-driven astroturfing campaign, but let's try to at least root our arguments in a shared reality.
You're misunderstanding what that's in reference to. It's not about all of the extensions in the list being removed. It's about the 3 that are specifically called out in the text above the list to scare people into thinking they're being profiled for things that could put them in danger.
DDG searches say this is something for linkedin. - I had two tabs for linkedin open but left behind as I opened other tabs to research.
So I had not reopened these tabs in over 9 hours and they are still just humming along sucking down almost 10% of cpu and a couple gigs of ram for what?
This is firefox with ublock origin - quick searches saw malwarebytes browser guard considered it (protechts.net) malware for a bit and then took it off the list of things it blocked / warned about.
Not sure this is related to the scan mentioned, but it may be related to the overall concerns about data and unknown usage of resources.
I'm considering blocking this at the dns hosts level at this point.
Thanks for flagging this, I was literally seeing the same thing with protechts.net in my activity tab this morning as I was trying to understand why firefox was aggressively draining my battery.
Just as invasive as Akamai bot manager on every other site you visit. Akamai is so jam packed they can likely identify you from the mouse movement data alone. The LinkedIn discourse feels forced, the problem is so much worse than what you're seeing here.
Interesting, so would Safari prevent this? I tried moving to Safari and honestly loved everything except I use my google accounts now for authenticating with to many services and that was a pain compared to chrome.
I honestly kind of forget the exact annoyances because it has been some time. I want to say I had to reauth every time I wanted to SSO with my google account because it doesn't allow/deletes third party cookies.
> Hundreds of job search extensions are in the scan list. LinkedIn knows which of its users are quietly looking for work before they've told their employer. … Extensions tied to political content, religious practice
Why are these even extensions to begin with? A legit job finding service can be a website, no extension required. If they are nefarious extensions that fake ad clicks or mine cryptocurrency, that they are job search, or political, or religious in name/nature only serves to get rubes to install them. This entire ecosystem is goofed up.
> Users who had no idea their software was being inventoried, no idea the inventory was being used against them, and no way to know it was happening because none of it appears in LinkedIn's privacy policy.
As if users are actually reading the privacy policy...
I use firefox with uBlock Origin's matrix turned on linked in and its cdn is explicitly black listed globally on it. I see links like ~`licdn` or some shit appear with a lot more frequency on webapps in the matrix now a days. I would recommend you all install it and block it actively.
But how is this supposed to help against scraping? This is ridiculously ineffective against scraping. Just pretend to have a standard set of extensions and you are good to go.
> Update to our terms and data use As of November 3, 2025, we are using some of your Linkedin data to improve the content-generating Al that enhances your experience, unless you opt out in your settings. We also updated our terms. See what's new and how to manage your data.
Frankly, it is unacceptable to tell a user "oh we have been using your personal data for 5 months already and will continue to do so unless you explicitly opt out". Are there any transparent alternatives to LinkedIn (not the trust me bro variant)?
Same way they do it now. Cold applying, word of mouth/referrals, networking events, etc. Personally my first industry job in like 2012 originated from a networking mixer that I showed up to after seeing a promotional online. My unpaid internship/mentorship before that was a word of mouth from my mom asking her friend's husband which I suppose might count as a connection.
But that application goes to a recruiter. Guess if you mean the site shouldn't have recruiters doing the cold-calling, idk maybe, but then the game is in getting the recruiters to read your application. This is different from having connections.
I think OP was referring to applying direct with the company doing the hiring. This is how I landed my first several jobs in tech, no recruiters involved.
Gotcha. Ok the companies themselves reached out on LinkedIn to me. It wasn't those third-party recruiters like "I recruit for Tesla, Apple, Sigma, IBM..." I ignored those emails. But it was still a recruiter within the company, not a technical manager or IC.
Back in the day, CACM use to have job listings at the back. There was always DE Shaw advertising. Sending in printed CVs and cover letters was the slow and painful way to do it.
If you write a decent covering letter and enclose a CV (resume) and get it to my desk, I might be inclined to be interested in you.
That's how things used to be done. Recruiters did exist but you generally got off your arse and impressed a potential employer with a well laid out CV as an invitation to call to interview.
Nowadays it appears that people want to circumvent all that complicated effort bollocks. You simply spray yourself across some social media wankery and let's face it LinkedIn is the supreme example of wankery and some grateful employer will pick you up.
The next time you are considering buying a record player to engage with the past in some sort of misty eyed histrionics session, why not buy a pen and paper and write a letter and impress someone with your turn of phrase? Enclose a CV (resume) for maximum effect.
... "Nurse ... nurse ... my dried frog pills have started dancing on my eyeballs ... nurse ... "
It's tough to generate revenue that isn't through ads.
That said, if the users could organize into special interest groups and create a walled-garden with default no ads, and then gate-keep advertisers to a permitted white-list.
You want the unemployed to pay? Or do you want the employers to pay? If you want the employers to pay, how do you attract enough attractive unemployed to your site?
If by some miracle someone managed to create this, and a critical mass of people somehow discovered it and used it, at some point they'd burn out, sell it, and it would turn into the same shit that we see everywhere else.
Yeah that's the thing, slight fee vs more annoying site doesn't matter that much. LinkedIn got me a job. Sure I had to give a burner email for them to ddos, but so what. If I were to use another site, it'd be because that's where recruiters are, not cause it's a nicer site.
Anyway if you magically copied the entire LinkedIn network to a clean, no-nonsense site and wanted $5/mo to be active on there during the time I'm seeking a job, I'd pay that. And it'd be more if it had better opportunities. I guess there's LinkedIn Premium, but eh not convinced on that.
Also a lack of LinkedIn account makes you more suspicious and less likely to get hired. So this is additional value in having an account. For appearances.
Yeah I recently heard about people working multiple jobs at once - I wasn't surprised - with work from home being a thing and many jobs at big companies being not overly strenuous, you can get away with it.
A previous coworker had been not especially good at his job and left after two months, and a little later I went looking for his LinkedIn to see where he'd ended up. Couldn't find him but didn't give it much thought. A friend told me that he was working at a company up the street but was also working another job at the same time, and the penny dropped - you can't have LinkedIn and be working two jobs at once and reasonably expect to get away with it or get hired again.
Call me crazy but both Google and MS started doing weird things like that since about the dinner at Trump. Did you know that Google Chrome now happily asks you to store your ID/Passport information on top of all the information they offered to store for the last 10 years or so? Why now? Why this crazy "enhanced" feature? (https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/e...)
I am far from conspiracy theorist but, god damn, if you take a few steps back from all the current madness and look at what's happening from a perspective, then YES, they're collecting all that data and it up to specific people and their IDs. I don't even want to guess how deep are Palantir and AI chat in this.
This is a good example of why post summaries are considered off-topic on HN. If it becomes the top comment (which it often does if people agree with it or are riled up by it) they'll reply to the summary rather than posting their replies as root comments to the main thread, creating a split between replies to the top comment and root replies.
Also, please don't use a title for the HN submission that's different from the title of the original post. The guidelines are specific about this.
I guess that's what they're hoping for. With my admittedly biased opinion of the average linkedin user, about 99% will have the default set of extensions installed and so will not be very useful. Those users might have other identifiers of course, so who knows.
i just don't open the main page with the feed. i practically don't notice it's there. i have the messages view open, and i check notifications. i also don't follow anyone (except my contacts)
Wasn't this specifically some lame-ass attempt to combat some click fraud or something these extensions were doing? And aren't these articles specifically coming from the person doing the fraud (which is why they know about the extension scanning)?
To be clear, LinkedIn shouldn't be scanning your browser extensions, but still. The ultimate problem is that browser extensions are a powerful malware vector and there's a huge market of people buying little utilities off of solo developers to enshittify them.
> Wasn't this specifically some lame-ass attempt to combat some click fraud or something these extensions were doing?
No. That you believed that was just an unfortunate consequence of HN's kneejerk tendency to upvote middlebrow dismissals to the top comment, which resulted in people rushing to craft apologetics for what is in reality bonafide scumminess on LinkedIn's part, which itself resulted in confabulations like the claim that, "It was all extensions related to spamming and scraping LinkedIn last time this was posted"—which is simply untrue.
[dupe]
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613981
It's a different primary source though
It's not clear to me what "[dupe]" means on HN anymore
It is being used, e.g., by this commenter, where the URLs and the target page content for each submission differ
Moreover, HN allows duplicate submissions under some circumstances, where the URLs are exactly the same. If the submissions are relatively far apart in time sometimes the moderator or a commenter will reply with "Previous discussion". More recently, a "past" link was added. Many times however the duplicate submissions are close together in time and there are no comments
Perhaps "[dupe]" as used here means "duplicate topic". But that seems like a pointless label as there are multiple submissions about the same topic every week on HN
As someone who archives all active HN story URLs, titles, etc. in an SQL database daily, I can locate duplicate submissions very quickly. Most do not have any indication of "[dupe]" in the title or comments
This is the same source - 404 story lists browsergate.eu (linked by Chris) as the original source
28 days ago, 1897 points, 812 comments
"What is not a question is that a criminal investigation is now open." Good. These companies deserve each and every stone thrown at them, and much more.
Why is my Chrome telling random websites which extensions I have installed?
It isn’t exactly. They created a list of known extensions by their id and a file which is known to exist in that extension. The site iterates over each pair and tries to load that file, if it doesn’t error it knows the extension is installed. It’s a clever and difficult manual process, but it does bypass the security trying to prevent this kind of thing.
I read that their reasoning is it exists to block users that use known scraper extensions which bypass their terms of use. But don’t entirely buy that.
So the follow up question, is why is a random website, allowed to try and load arbitrary files?
This is how I interpreted the original question and indeed it makes no sense, JavaScript from a website should not be allowed to interact with extensions like this.
It's actually the extension injecting itself into the webpage, often to interact with it. (I imagine much of this is just looking for global ExtensionName objects.)
Actually, the article is clear about what is happening technically, and it’s both. Chrome does, in fact, allow the page to make requests for resources stored in the extension bundle, and this is one of the two fingerprinting methods that the article describes.
>JavaScript from a website should not be allowed
Agreed 100%.
Chrome exposes these files via a URL that you can fetch in javascript like you would any other file on a normal website. These local extension files usually contain code, styles or images that your browser needs to run the extensions.
Why is it not a CORS violation?
The browser needing access and a random website having access are quite different. Seems like a big ol' pile of vulns waiting to happen.
Because extensions can and often do contain stuff like images or JS bundles that they inject into a target page's DOM. Not allowing a tab's context to load files from the chrome-extension:// namespace would break a lot of things.
Firefox at least randomizes extension IDs per install. Chrome hands all of that to extension devs, basically a "your problem now".
Does the same scan is happening on firefox? Random websites invoking extensions do seem to be a security hole to me.
This was posted before and it seems that Firefox randomizes the extension URLs.
Here's the relevant bit from the original source:
"Chrome extensions can expose internal files to web pages through the web_accessible_resources field in their manifest.json. When an extension is installed and has exposed a resource, a fetch() request to chrome-extension://{id}/{file} will succeed. When the extension is not installed, Chrome blocks the request and the promise rejects.
LinkedIn tests every extension in the list this way."
Can ask the same question about so many horrible security blunders web browsers have made over the decades.
They are only blunders if they aren't being used as features by someone
Is that information available to websites? I figured they were doing some kind of novel hackery to self-detect extensions based on behaviour that would only happen if X extension was installed.
But that would be a lot of work for 6,300 extensions. Unless someone offers that as a service?
Brave explicitly blocks this
Last time this was discussed the consensus was Brave does not block it. Brave's fingerprinting protection does not include extensions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904361
because Chrome lets sites probe "installed", and LinkedIn turns that into telemetry.
So that websites can track and identify you "for improved personalized advertising" in exactly this way.
Browser fingerprinting is massively valuable to Google's surveillance/advertising apparatus. This is all working exactly as intended.
Chrome always makes tracking easier. It’s their blind spot, because google.
Chrome is a browser produced by an advertising company. Its reason for existence is to track you.
Not that I disagree but Google's tracking motivation in making the browser seems irrelevant to why it lets competitors do this fingerprinting
They want fingerprinting to work for everyone because the more effective it is, the higher the value of the ad inventory they sell.
Here's the most relevant section I could find from the original source:
"Chrome extensions can expose internal files to web pages through the web_accessible_resources field in their manifest.json. When an extension is installed and has exposed a resource, a fetch() request to chrome-extension://{id}/{file} will succeed. When the extension is not installed, Chrome blocks the request and the promise rejects.
LinkedIn tests every extension in the list this way."
Hmm, can one fake-install extensions that randomly return yes/no to those queries ? It's pretty clear which files linkedin (and other sites doing the fingerprinting) is testing, one can observe it as the OP author points out.
It should also be interesting to see which other sites test those very same files, has anybody looked yet ?
It seems like it shouldn't let code originating from the site (as opposed to from the extension) to access that.
I'm not sure you'd need to directly fetch to determine if they resolve. One could probably inject an img tag and see if it resolves.
friends, WHEN you are asked to implement something like this at your job, which will you choose: object (& hold ground, loose job) OR comply (& keep job)
as practitioners, where do we hold the line between telemetry and surveillance?
I choose not to work at places like linked in, meta, or any place that accepts Saudi or Israeli funding. It makes it a little harder to find a job, but i sleep better at night.
For similar reasons, I have been working in the public sector (Australian state government) for the past 5 years and couldn’t be happier.
I’m lucky that I’m in a team which is hands on and does a lot of very interesting things. From building CRUD apps which are used in management and response to bushfires (wildfires) to more interesting things like building a datalake which amalgamates and stores weather data from multiple sources to building near real time CDC pipelines and making our transactional data available to our in house team of data scientists who then use that data to do fascinating stuff that eventually results in for example making sure that our response to bushfires takes into account the impact and safety of endangered species.
And when I look at the underlying data and the trends and and projections of just how bad bushfires are going to get in the next 30 years and how we must be so much nimbler and smarter just to survive, the work takes on a whole new level of meaning.
Don’t get me wrong, there are times the internal bureaucracy absolutely drives me mad. And I am aware that I could be earning much more in the private sector. But I get to work with a team who are really passionate and enthusiastic about their job, and I get to sleep at night knowing that unlike my previous jobs, this time I am not just making someone who is already uber rich, richer.
If you had told the teenage Utilitarian me that I would one day work for, and enjoy working for, government, I would have thought hell must have frozen over.
In years to come you will be so thankful that you took that path.
As they say, better to be a poor master than a rich slave.
I wouldn’t lump in Israel in, but good for you.
I got you covered, boo. I will! For sport.
Anyway, for those in this situation, some anecdotes. I've outright refused to do questionable things and kept my job. I've also played incompetent so the sharks look elsewhere. Point being... options exist, don't negotiate [only] with yourself.
Would be remiss if I missed the opportunity to quote Louis Rossman: "don't accept the premise of assholes"
There have been several spywares developed in Israel and that have been used by them and other governments against civilians, below are just a few examples. Why wouldn't you lump Israel in?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragon_Solutions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytrox#Predator
It's just that I'm an American, so I don't want to work for Israel. If we're making cyberwarfare tools for the US, sure.
There's a third choice. Say you'll do it but do it poorly, or drag your feet forever. Hard to prove you intentionally did a bad job.
If that's the game you're playing tho, maybe time to find another job too ;)
I think it's also an option to anonymously tell the world what will happen. That way you keep your job and still people are at least aware. Unless if you are one of like 3 people who know about it and they would immediately know it was you.
I wonder the same. Maybe it's made by people who feel like they wouldn't easily find another job and need the job for healthcare or financial reasons (living paycheck to paycheck)? And it's ordered by managers in similar situations, whose managers want to see increased revenue and don't care how? Somewhere in the chain it feels like there should be someone who says 'wtf are we doing'. It's strange
To answer your question though: I'd object of course, I'm very lucky to be well enough off that I can currently make that choice without serious repercussions. Do you think someone would come out on HN and say "oh sure yeah I have no morals!", at least without it being a throwaway where you'd have no idea if it's real?
Honestly I would implement this. Chrome's fault for telling every website what extensions are installed. User isn't harmed anyway.
How do you feel about burglars exploiting bad locks? Known flaw, so the owner had it coming? Insurance will make them right in the end?
Nobody is getting burgled here
cool perspective++
This is fairly standard practice for device fingerprinting. LI is probably using this to protect its platform from scraping etc, and extension lists have sufficient enough entropy to help identify users and form a useful component of a fingerprint.
Its already pretty easy to oneshot an extension aiding scraping and LI can do nothing about it. I've seen people build and install a local chrome extension in a couple of days and have an AI inject itself into devtools and scrape pretty much any website. And that was a few months ago. I don't think there is an easy way to defend against such things anymore. Its a matter of time that defensive programming measures like this become useless.
Is this a hallucination? I can't find this quote anywhere else.
> According to browsergate, Milinda Lakkam confirmed this under oath, saying, "LinkedIn took action against users who had specific extensions installed."
Huh, kind of. That's not the actual quote. Note I haven't followed the chain further back than this:
https://browsergate.eu/the-evidence-pack/
Edit: nice! I just notice indent-formatted text is now wrapping on mobile browsers. (Or at least ffm.) I wonder how long that's been fixed...Saying 'I may have taken a shower' instead of 'I took a shower' makes my wife use her disapproving look.
True - also when you put something in quotes I think it should be a quote.
Well, I deleted my Linkedin account and life is better now.
That's big talk coming from someone who currently has a job. getting a job without a linkedin account isn't that straightforward.
None of our new hires the last few years had anything to do with Linkedin though. As for myself, I deleted my account around the time when it started to try to look like a Facebook feed.
I get why people without jobs need a LinkedIn, but I don't get why they post there constantly. Like reposting stuff, writing random thoughts, posting rocket ship emojis, has anyone ever gotten a job that way?
I've heard it makes you more visible on things like search results. Linkdin, of course, is trying to encourage interaction on their site so sounds believable that they'd do that, but i've been lucky enough to not need to care.
That makes sense. I'm curious if it's proven though. Guess I'm lucky to have a job and credentials, recruiters are contacting me despite 0 public LinkedIn activity.
One trick to evade some of LinkedIn's detection:
A big part of its detection relies on finding known extension resources at URLs of the form `chrome-extension://{extension_id}/{file}`
An extension installed from the Chrome store has the same `extension_id` for every user. But, if you just extract the source for that extension, and then load it yourself, you'll get a NEW extension_id. Same extension with the same functionality, but its extension_id will be completely new so impossible for LinkedIn to query.
Granted this won't evade the second type of detection LinkedIn employs, it'll help you evade quite a bit. I often clone extension source code anyway since it mostly protects me from malicious extension updates (by effectively disabling updates).
This is re-posted article from the author's Substack that does a pretty bad job of explaining the situation. The second link in the article is supposed to take you to a "GitHub repository tracking the extension list" but it goes to a GitHub page for a plugin that hasn't been updated in 9 years.
It has a lot of hallmarks of LLM writings ("It's not this, it's that" and feeling like a lot of empty words rehydrated from an outline) while missing the real updates in the story like the German affidavit filed by a LinkedIn engineer who worked on these tools.
A key piece of information that this article omits is that the list of extensions being scanned for doesn't include anything you'd recognize or anything you'd even think to install. It's full of data extraction tools, scrapers, AI spam and recruiting tools (remember all those automated spammy LinkedIn messages you got?), and plugins masquerading as simple things that have been pulled from the extension store for violations.
A lot of articles have been trying hard to distract from this fact by highlighting that the list of extension includes things like a plugin designed to simplify web pages for neurodivergent users or an "anti-Zionist political tagger" to imply that they're trying to do fingerprinting based on those attributes, but they neglect to mention that those plugins were pulled from the extension store most likely because they were data exfiltrators dressed up as simple plugins to get people to install them.
An updated list is available here: https://browsergate.eu/extensions/
But read that site carefully and actually try to click the links. In this section they're trying to direct your attention away from all of the AI spam and data extraction tools with this section:
> The scan doesn’t just look for LinkedIn-related tools. It identifies whether you use an Islamic content filter (PordaAI — “Blur Haram objects, real-time AI for Islamic values”), whether you’ve installed an anti-Zionist political tagger (Anti-Zionist Tag), or a tool designed for neurodivergent users (simplify).
But click the links. They've all been pulled from the store. Extensions like that are often bait to get people to install scrapers that will use your computer and LinkedIn login to extract data and send it back to their servers.
So regardless of where you stand on probing for the presence of these scammy extensions, you should at least understand the facts rather than the story that companies like this are trying to sell you to drive traffic to their product.
I suggest cutting through the ragebait journalism and reading more directly from a recent source, like this affidavit filed in Germany by a LinkedIn engineer familiar with the project: https://browsergate.eu/downloads/Lakam-affidavit-redacted.pd...
> But click the links. They've all been pulled from the store.
I did that with the first five extensions in the list; only one was removed from the store. So you should qualify this statement.
Maybe they are all scammy extensions, and maybe this is a weird LLM-driven astroturfing campaign, but let's try to at least root our arguments in a shared reality.
You're misunderstanding what that's in reference to. It's not about all of the extensions in the list being removed. It's about the 3 that are specifically called out in the text above the list to scare people into thinking they're being profiled for things that could put them in danger.
All 3 of those have been removed.
and,
recently while trying to decipher why computer was at 98% memory and 65% cpu
one of the culprits is https://li.protechts.net taking 2GB ram and 8% cpu.
DDG searches say this is something for linkedin. - I had two tabs for linkedin open but left behind as I opened other tabs to research.
So I had not reopened these tabs in over 9 hours and they are still just humming along sucking down almost 10% of cpu and a couple gigs of ram for what?
This is firefox with ublock origin - quick searches saw malwarebytes browser guard considered it (protechts.net) malware for a bit and then took it off the list of things it blocked / warned about.
Not sure this is related to the scan mentioned, but it may be related to the overall concerns about data and unknown usage of resources.
I'm considering blocking this at the dns hosts level at this point.
repost of my comment 28 days ago
Thanks for flagging this, I was literally seeing the same thing with protechts.net in my activity tab this morning as I was trying to understand why firefox was aggressively draining my battery.
Just as invasive as Akamai bot manager on every other site you visit. Akamai is so jam packed they can likely identify you from the mouse movement data alone. The LinkedIn discourse feels forced, the problem is so much worse than what you're seeing here.
Interesting, so would Safari prevent this? I tried moving to Safari and honestly loved everything except I use my google accounts now for authenticating with to many services and that was a pain compared to chrome.
Even better! Moving to firefox fixes this.
Chrome for some reason (still!) gives extensions static ids. Firefox has the id change per firefox instance.
Seems to only happen Chrome per the dev of Wipr (a great safari privacy extension) https://mas.to/@mipstian/116341745221356805
I would imagine using any non-Chromium browser would cause it to fail to find any Chrome extensions, yes.
Sure, but Safari may or may not leak Safari extension signals in a similar fashion. I haven't actually investigated.
Well if you’re a logged in to Google don’t you just SSO everywhere?
I honestly kind of forget the exact annoyances because it has been some time. I want to say I had to reauth every time I wanted to SSO with my google account because it doesn't allow/deletes third party cookies.
Yeah it's something like this. I have multiple Google accounts and am somehow always logged into the wrong one.
Aside from the gross privacy invasion it specifically looks for Muslim/Islamic related extensions.
Having a lot of connections working at Microsoft and Western tech industry, I'm not surprised with the targeting of Muslims.
Muslim/Islamic extremist recruiters used Adobe's Express platform for terrorist / extremist recruitment.
No idea if if LinkedIn has the same issue though.
Why doest the browser even allow it?
Runtime of extensions should be blackbox to a website IMO
> Hundreds of job search extensions are in the scan list. LinkedIn knows which of its users are quietly looking for work before they've told their employer. … Extensions tied to political content, religious practice
Why are these even extensions to begin with? A legit job finding service can be a website, no extension required. If they are nefarious extensions that fake ad clicks or mine cryptocurrency, that they are job search, or political, or religious in name/nature only serves to get rubes to install them. This entire ecosystem is goofed up.
Seems to do this in Microsoft Edge, too.*
* I use Edge bcs of the vertical tabs — Safari's equivalent is a poor substitute. Firefox didn't seem to have vertical tabs last time I checked.
They do now - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-sidebar-access-tool...
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/features/vertical-tabs/
See also "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions" (812 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613981
> Users who had no idea their software was being inventoried, no idea the inventory was being used against them, and no way to know it was happening because none of it appears in LinkedIn's privacy policy.
As if users are actually reading the privacy policy...
Fun to have to spin up a whole VM just to use a particular website!
I use firefox with uBlock Origin's matrix turned on linked in and its cdn is explicitly black listed globally on it. I see links like ~`licdn` or some shit appear with a lot more frequency on webapps in the matrix now a days. I would recommend you all install it and block it actively.
Its disgusting.
But how is this supposed to help against scraping? This is ridiculously ineffective against scraping. Just pretend to have a standard set of extensions and you are good to go.
I did that and got logged out of LinkedIn.
Now the 1000s of spammy chrome web extension requests when I opened LinkedIn makes sense
I saw the following from linkedIn this morning
> Update to our terms and data use As of November 3, 2025, we are using some of your Linkedin data to improve the content-generating Al that enhances your experience, unless you opt out in your settings. We also updated our terms. See what's new and how to manage your data.
Frankly, it is unacceptable to tell a user "oh we have been using your personal data for 5 months already and will continue to do so unless you explicitly opt out". Are there any transparent alternatives to LinkedIn (not the trust me bro variant)?
I am building corvi.careers, its a job search engine not social network tho
now it makes sense with the 1000s of spammy not found requests to chrome extensions i was seeing on linkedin and had claude code debug.
Can someone here please create a LinkedIn replacement for developers that
1. Doesn't have the spam
2. That doesn't look like it's from 2008
3. That only developers / engineers / tech folks can join
4. Doesn't try to log into your email to steal your contact list
5. That doesn't track you or your extensions / browser fingerprint
6. That doesn't have a bunch of fake "linkedinmaxxing" garbage content
7. that doesn't have marketers and recruiters, etc.
8. ...
Just type about:blank in your browser, and you'll get what you're asking for ;)
This is not going unappreciated :)
I thought the whole point of LinkedIn was getting a job, but that would run afoul of #7. You can ignore the rest of the crap on their website.
How ever did people get jobs before recruiters? /s
Well, how? Recruiters got me job offers when I graduated college. I had no connections otherwise.
Same way they do it now. Cold applying, word of mouth/referrals, networking events, etc. Personally my first industry job in like 2012 originated from a networking mixer that I showed up to after seeing a promotional online. My unpaid internship/mentorship before that was a word of mouth from my mom asking her friend's husband which I suppose might count as a connection.
You search for job advertisements, and then send in an application!
But that application goes to a recruiter. Guess if you mean the site shouldn't have recruiters doing the cold-calling, idk maybe, but then the game is in getting the recruiters to read your application. This is different from having connections.
I think OP was referring to applying direct with the company doing the hiring. This is how I landed my first several jobs in tech, no recruiters involved.
Gotcha. Ok the companies themselves reached out on LinkedIn to me. It wasn't those third-party recruiters like "I recruit for Tesla, Apple, Sigma, IBM..." I ignored those emails. But it was still a recruiter within the company, not a technical manager or IC.
Back in the day, CACM use to have job listings at the back. There was always DE Shaw advertising. Sending in printed CVs and cover letters was the slow and painful way to do it.
If you write a decent covering letter and enclose a CV (resume) and get it to my desk, I might be inclined to be interested in you.
That's how things used to be done. Recruiters did exist but you generally got off your arse and impressed a potential employer with a well laid out CV as an invitation to call to interview.
Nowadays it appears that people want to circumvent all that complicated effort bollocks. You simply spray yourself across some social media wankery and let's face it LinkedIn is the supreme example of wankery and some grateful employer will pick you up.
The next time you are considering buying a record player to engage with the past in some sort of misty eyed histrionics session, why not buy a pen and paper and write a letter and impress someone with your turn of phrase? Enclose a CV (resume) for maximum effect.
... "Nurse ... nurse ... my dried frog pills have started dancing on my eyeballs ... nurse ... "
Cold applying by letters or just walking in and asking for an application
Applying to jobs posted in the newspapers
Getting a job across the border is easier with LinkedIn...
Stack Exchange sort of tried to do this. It never seemed to get off the ground.
IRC has existed for decades.
I met some of my girlfriends through irc :)
..said no IRC user, ever
And it's a ghost town.
I suppose that depends on where you go and what you expect. Older communities are better populated than younger ones. (Not age-wise but topic-wise).
where's a good irc chat these days?
Seriously. We need some kind of federated replacement. Who is building this?
Be the change you want to see mate.
It's odd, yeah?
We have the ability to vibe these things over a weekend, yet getting to the critical mass/tipping point of adoption is something else.
Whatever happened to: if you build it, they will come?
It only took a weekend to build a social network preAI
If you want it to happen, we should talk requirements - what would you want from a LinkedIn NextGen?
- A professional profile page
- Contacts
- Introductions/referrals
- Ask my (sub-)network?
Anything else?
A way for you to make money that isn’t ads / harvesting my data.
Exportable format so I can leave if needed.
It's tough to generate revenue that isn't through ads.
That said, if the users could organize into special interest groups and create a walled-garden with default no ads, and then gate-keep advertisers to a permitted white-list.
I dunno, I'm just spit-ballin
You want the unemployed to pay? Or do you want the employers to pay? If you want the employers to pay, how do you attract enough attractive unemployed to your site?
Employers pay, unemployed will go where there are places to get jobs. But this assumes employers are unsatisfied with LinkedIn somehow. Are they?
Works for baseball fields, not websites
in movies, not RL
It's called "The Web"
sifa.id aspires to that.
Wishing Guido (gui.do) the best.
I feel like Github became this in the last 10-15 years.
Yes. But now we need a replacement for what the old GitHub used to do.
You need a new type of corporation.
Only a Public Benefit Corporation will get the software to a usable state and refuse enshittification
Well the challenge is also gatekeeping. Gotta keep non-technical people or intentions off of it for #3
If by some miracle someone managed to create this, and a critical mass of people somehow discovered it and used it, at some point they'd burn out, sell it, and it would turn into the same shit that we see everywhere else.
Not if you organize it as a non-profit with stated purpose that explicitly address exactly that… and is run as a public service for the public good.
Might have better success with a Public Benefit Corporation instead of a nonprofit. I’ve considered starting some myself.
Now do OpenAI...
what exactly do you want this for? I think HN satisfies all of these (#2 - HN has a mid 90's aesthetic)
Maybe that's what the new Friendster should be
How much would you pay for this?
Yeah that's the thing, slight fee vs more annoying site doesn't matter that much. LinkedIn got me a job. Sure I had to give a burner email for them to ddos, but so what. If I were to use another site, it'd be because that's where recruiters are, not cause it's a nicer site.
Anyway if you magically copied the entire LinkedIn network to a clean, no-nonsense site and wanted $5/mo to be active on there during the time I'm seeking a job, I'd pay that. And it'd be more if it had better opportunities. I guess there's LinkedIn Premium, but eh not convinced on that.
LinkedIn is a cesspool, but it’s almost worthless to me without the recruiters.
They’re basically the only reason I’m there.
Also a lack of LinkedIn account makes you more suspicious and less likely to get hired. So this is additional value in having an account. For appearances.
Yeah I recently heard about people working multiple jobs at once - I wasn't surprised - with work from home being a thing and many jobs at big companies being not overly strenuous, you can get away with it.
A previous coworker had been not especially good at his job and left after two months, and a little later I went looking for his LinkedIn to see where he'd ended up. Couldn't find him but didn't give it much thought. A friend told me that he was working at a company up the street but was also working another job at the same time, and the penny dropped - you can't have LinkedIn and be working two jobs at once and reasonably expect to get away with it or get hired again.
That really depends on the field. Only one position asked about my LinkedIn. And that was because they had you apply via the site.
I didn't apply, because fuck that inside out.
Can you create it?
> 3. That only developers / engineers / tech folks can join
Is at odds with
> 6. That doesn't have a bunch of fake "linkedinmaxxing" garbage content
Almost all of the shit-tier AI-generated AI evangelism has been from "tech folks" connections. It's all the exact same content.
Except for #2 I think you're looking for Hacker News.
didn't see your comment when I said basically the same thing. #2 is good though, bc HN has a pre-2008 look
You’re already looking at it, buddy.
This looks like it's from 2008
and thank god too. Modern design is bloated crap.
Looks older than that, which is great
Call me crazy but both Google and MS started doing weird things like that since about the dinner at Trump. Did you know that Google Chrome now happily asks you to store your ID/Passport information on top of all the information they offered to store for the last 10 years or so? Why now? Why this crazy "enhanced" feature? (https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/e...)
I am far from conspiracy theorist but, god damn, if you take a few steps back from all the current madness and look at what's happening from a perspective, then YES, they're collecting all that data and it up to specific people and their IDs. I don't even want to guess how deep are Palantir and AI chat in this.
This is complete and utter conspiracy nonsense.
This kind of tracking has been going on for decades
[flagged]
This is a good example of why post summaries are considered off-topic on HN. If it becomes the top comment (which it often does if people agree with it or are riled up by it) they'll reply to the summary rather than posting their replies as root comments to the main thread, creating a split between replies to the top comment and root replies.
Also, please don't use a title for the HN submission that's different from the title of the original post. The guidelines are specific about this.
Can you confirm that the title is correct and that it encrypts rather than hashes?
Both are concerns, but sending interpretable data is a more serious concern.
I scanned through the article and did not see an example of the header it added.
It says RSA public key encryption in the article, so I’m going to assume that it’s not a typo.
And certainly fingerprint you right?
Probably mostly for abuse prevention. Lots of extensions like this one:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-data...
The "abuse" is that one doesn't have to copy paste for hours.
I guess that's what they're hoping for. With my admittedly biased opinion of the average linkedin user, about 99% will have the default set of extensions installed and so will not be very useful. Those users might have other identifiers of course, so who knows.
I’m pretty sure it’s not 99% you would wonder how many differences there are along with user-agent resolution and ip range...
I think 99% are identifiable
Ideally about 99% of LinkedIn users are using their professional name, occupation, and location.
Oh man time to see if there is a chrome Bonzai Buddy extension
can, but how? Have you verify all 6278 and what they do?
sounds like you haven't heard of fingerprinting yet and how specific it is
Reversible encryption wouldn’t be required for fingerprinting. They’re doing something even more sinister here.
LinkedIn without the news/post feed would be fine
There’s an extension called News Feed Eradicator that does that for you.
Wonder if it’s on their list of extensions to spy on!
We should be good if the Eradicator extension eradicates the script that scans for extensions.
i just don't open the main page with the feed. i practically don't notice it's there. i have the messages view open, and i check notifications. i also don't follow anyone (except my contacts)
And the useless notifications
Having a notification that just shows me an ad for "LinkedIn premium" should be a crime.
Wasn't this specifically some lame-ass attempt to combat some click fraud or something these extensions were doing? And aren't these articles specifically coming from the person doing the fraud (which is why they know about the extension scanning)?
To be clear, LinkedIn shouldn't be scanning your browser extensions, but still. The ultimate problem is that browser extensions are a powerful malware vector and there's a huge market of people buying little utilities off of solo developers to enshittify them.
> LinkedIn shouldn't be scanning your browser extensions.
Correct
Yes there are other problems in the world and we can JAQ the messanger too.
> Wasn't this specifically some lame-ass attempt to combat some click fraud or something these extensions were doing?
No. That you believed that was just an unfortunate consequence of HN's kneejerk tendency to upvote middlebrow dismissals to the top comment, which resulted in people rushing to craft apologetics for what is in reality bonafide scumminess on LinkedIn's part, which itself resulted in confabulations like the claim that, "It was all extensions related to spamming and scraping LinkedIn last time this was posted"—which is simply untrue.
This is pure speculation. It is a million times more likely that this data is strictly used to combat scraping and fraud.
You saw speculation, and you raised with speculation and hyperbole!