Comment by simonw
6 months ago
Paste this into a Chrome DevTools console on a Google site - sure looks like a special API to me:
chrome.runtime.sendMessage(
'nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome', {
method: 'cpu.getInfo'
}, response => {
console.log('CPU Info:\n', JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
}
);
For what its worth, I'm on Brave (chromium based) and this also works there, so it appears to not necessarily be only Chrome but potentially any chromium browser where they haven't specifically blocked/disabled this
Arguably, Chromium is more important to Google than Chrome is.
By controlling the engine, they have de facto control over the standards.
By keeping Chromium open, they incentivise forks. Most people who don't want to use Chrome because it's Google's or for some other reason will use one of the forks or Chromium-based browsers.
By keeping this illusion of choice, Google extends its control.
This does not work (as expected) on `ungoogled-chromium`.
[flagged]
You're welcome to read the five lines of code I shared yourself before you run it!
You're literally running their program already. They're already running arbitrary code on your machine.
People are running it because they think Google is trustworthy, so telling about abuses might be useful in order to erode that trust and let people know they shouldn't run anything from that company