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Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the instances of this happening was the result of the original extension writer trying to boost his bottom line. (And not the work of shady malware marketers).

It's easy to convince yourself you have been cheated when you know your extension has over 1M+ downloads and you only have ~!$100 sent to your donation button.

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I forked an extension released under MIT license because of this -- original author pushing shady updates.

After I re-released it on the Chrome Store, now I get emails trying to buy "my" extension from me.

That sounds like a fine grey-hat tactic. Fork existing extensions, generate several thousand fake installs. Then sell to the first bidder. Rinse & Repeat and you'll make a profit and turn the market for second hand extensions into a market for lemons.

If it happened enough the buyers would start being more cautious. The bar for minimal installs will go up and more proof will be expected. Soon enough the buyer's intentions will be clear to any extension owner.

I wouldn't be so optimistic.

> The bar for minimal installs will go up and more proof will be expected.

Or the Store would be flooded with infected cloned extensions that some idiots will install anyway.

> Soon enough the buyer's intentions will be clear to any extension owner.

That's not the problem: developers could trivially be informed of this risk when they submit their extension on the Store.

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