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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

Can't get past the paywall but am I the only one who is a bit alarmed that a fact checker employs such a plugin via a work machine? If you need to alter words in text of news you read in order to find it palatable you aren't really a person living on reality's terms.

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I installed a Cloud to Butt extension and sadly now I am unable to comprehend anything but buttocks. I look at the sky and there are buttocks everywhere. In the immediate moments after installation, I suddenly found myself floating in the void. Existence had no meaning because reality had no meaning. In this darkness, I found a kind of formless peace that was shattered soon enough by a stormbutt of extraordinary proportions. Death had no meaning, but I was forced into life, a life that remained divorced from reality, but lived beside it.

Others were alarmed and concerned and disturbed by this, but I chose (if choice can have meaning under these circumstances) to not live my life under a butt, even if it meant that I must have my head in the butts.

Weather forecast? Butty with a chance of meatballs! :O

Or you have a sense of humor :)

Personal machine, sure. I get it. Media people can read news for entertainment purposes.

This wasn't a personal machine though, this machine is used to check facts for the New York Times. Lots of people will believe something the NYT publishes with no further investigation, this is a important job. If I was doing that, I'd do my best to keep an open mind, and definitely not install a plugin that reminds me of my biases on every page.

(I think in this case it was Wired, not NYT)

Personally I blame Google for the proliferation of a lot of this stuff. It syncs extensions across browsers and automatically signs you in on Chrome when you log onto Gmail. Or did, anyway, it’s been a while since I used it. Either way, infuriating default behaviour.

> automatically signs you in on Chrome when you log onto Gmail. Or did, anyway, it’s been a while since I used it.

This is still the case, at least as of a few months ago. It is possible to disable the "feature", thankfully, but the option for it is hidden away and not easy to find.

The option is pretty easy to find, just search for Firefox and install that instead ;p

I am more concerned about the security implications. No work environment should be allowing use of non-business critical extensions which tamper with web content.

(PS. If you work anywhere that allows arbitrary Chrome extensions, I hope your cyber incident insurance is up to date!)

Browser extensions have incredibly privileged access to your post-decryption web content, and if you can install cloud-to-butt, you should assume your environment is already compromised.

On my managed Chromebook, I can install Chrome Extensions, but all but approved extensions work on intranet pages.

My significant concern would remain in this configuration that if anyone in your organization views or enters sensitive or personal information into non-intranet pages, that that information would still be subject to easy compromise.

What about internal services or tools hosted by cloud providers?

Bear in mind, a malicious cloud-to-butt Chrome extension could even replace the download URLs on trusted websites to download content from malicious sites when you click them.

Is it really a commentary on the individual in question, though, or the state of reality?

We live in a BYOD world. They probably mix work on business and personal machines.

> We live in a BYOD world.

This is true for phones, where it wasn't before.

But for computers? The only company I've worked for where I brought my own computer had a total of three employees.

Having done incident response for many companies which allow byod for laptops, I can attest that this was already common before the pandemic and the trend has only accelerated.

One particularly fun outbrief included the head of their desktop support org talking about how much better their satisfaction scores were with the users when they were allowed to use laptops they had personally chosen. Chose metrics that align with your goals or reap the outcomes.

From personal experience at Microsoft, it's pretty common for laptops these days.

Six or seven years ago, I was getting sick of Windows and wanted to switch to Mac – but the corporate standard was a Dell laptop, you had to go through a special exception process to get a Mac, and my manager told me he'd been trying for a bunch of his reports and had been struggling to get the exceptions approved – so I just bit the bullet, bought one out of my own pocket and used it as my main work machine.

And this wasn't some little three people shop. This was Oracle.

I just assumed that people are installing said plugin on their machines as a prank when they walk away from the machine and leave it unlocked.

ha! I've seen Excel installed on a medical instrument after the lab technicians realized it was running Windows.

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