ad-accelerator VS little-rat

A few months ago I made a free open source extension to speedup youtube ads that I shared here & hit the front page. Within a week a guy (who commented on my show hn thread) copied it and promoted his version on reddit which went viral and has 300k+ Users [1]

But why copy a free open source extension instead of just contributing? Well... a few weeks later he was trying to sell it on multiple sites for 5 figures. Maybe they still own it but I couldn't help but notice that the registered developer for his extension on the chrome store has also changed since it was originally published.

[1] https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator/blob/main/lessons_pos...

> They "probably" had your idea in the back of their mind for 10 days, and didn't remember that?

That was just a cheeky response they gave me after I reached out on Sunday (8 days after my post).

> Document their timeline, versus the timeline you made and continue to make your updates.

They first posted theirs 4 days after my Show HN which went viral on r/webdev. I assumed they had just come to it on their own and I didn't realize they had seen & commented on my work until Sunday (8 days after the Show HN).

I mention this in the referenced post https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator/blob/main/lessons_pos...

>Is there a feature you could add? Like muting the sped up ads?

Muting the ads was in the original. But in terms of another feature another member of the community contributed a PR that adds support for Hulu.

Great idea! We need a lot more visibility into what extensions are doing. I made little-rat [1] last year, to detect network calls coming from other extensions. Love to see more tools like yours!

[1] https://github.com/dnakov/little-rat

It says 1.0 in the extensions manager, but it was downloaded fresh this evening by clicking on the 'ZIP' link in your readme.md on here:

https://github.com/dnakov/little-rat/tree/main

2: https://github.com/dnakov/little-rat

I recently installed the Little Rat chrome extension, which I found here on HackerNews.

https://github.com/dnakov/little-rat

And what I found is that the Midnight Lizard chrome extension is monitoring my browsing-- sending home screenshots.

You can see examples here: https://ibb.co/JQvgt3p

Apparently my browsing data is being ingested by a company called "Mark Monitor Inc." (based on WhoIs search for the domain the data is sent to -- https://www.whois.com/whois/ytimg.com )

Nifty - but please do this more carefully:

https://github.com/dnakov/little-rat/blob/main/popup.js#L36

I do not want to have to worry about whether another extension can inject xss into yours with a crafted request/id/name.