Comment by stefan_

It's a nice story but it doesn't plausibly have any remote connection to this. I'm sure the people running the GCV platform with a custom Linux distro have some other way of reporting machine stats than literally "put our custom extension into every Chrome install ever".

You can try it for yourself, just

    chrome.runtime.sendMessage("nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome", {"method":"cpu.getInfo"}, (resp) => { console.log(resp); });

on any *.google.com page.