July 23rd, 2024

Button Stealer

Anatoly Zenkov created Button Stealer, a Chrome extension gathering buttons from websites users visit. It's a local tool for fun button collection without data sharing, respecting user privacy. Installation enables button accumulation.

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Anatoly Zenkov has developed Button Stealer, a Chrome extension that automatically "steals" a button from every website users open. The extension allows users to collect these buttons as they browse the internet, offering a fun and free experience. Button Stealer operates locally without sending any data externally, ensuring user privacy. Interested individuals can easily install the extension to start accumulating their collection of buttons.

21 comments

By @purple-leafy - 9 months

Issue with this “benign” extension is that it will be using

“host_permissions”: “<all_urls>”

In its manifest means it can basically do anything on any webpage you visit, scrape data etc.

As an extension developer, no thanks. “Fun” pointless extensions like this that have no real utility, but funnily enough require broad permissions, are dangerous

By @skybrian - 9 months

This is the app version of a phishing email. Give us access to everything on every website you visit, just for some eye candy.

By @Hamuko - 9 months

I'd be worried about installing these sorts of extensions in case someone decides to offer the developer a lucrative amount of money to buy it and then uses it for less-than-fun purposes. Not sure if they'd need additional permissions for it, but at least the current content script is ran against "https://*/\*" already.

By @koito17 - 9 months

Is there a particular reason this uses Chrome-specific APIs instead of the standard WebExtensions API? I have considered experimenting with web extensions, but wondering what the practical limitations of the standard API are compared to the browser-specific APIs.

By @kickofline - 9 months

github: https://github.com/anatolyzenkov/button-stealer

By @elitepleb - 9 months

reminds me of https://adnauseam.io/ 's clicked ad view https://adnauseam.io/img/adnauseam_vault.png

By @graypegg - 9 months

I love the idea but the <all_urls> access is a bit scary.

This could be recreated in a bookmarklet ideally, though it would require saving the button html snippets into a file that you'd have to make downloadable with some Blob weirdness.

By @coalio - 9 months

I worked on something similar before that serves the same purpose, except that it steals css/scss and it's not an extension but rather a CLI tool, you can find it in github as coalio/rfscss

By @kmoser - 9 months

Does it store the HTML/CSS for creating the buttons so you can easily repurpose them (which would be quite useful), or are they stored as images (which would be fun but less useful)? If the latter, how difficult are they to extract from the page that shows them all?

By @sweca - 9 months

This sounds like a great way to find inspiration for UI UX designs

By @josefritzishere - 9 months

Why would you intall this? Who wants a collection of buttons?

By @odo1242 - 9 months

Is there a Firefox version?

By @jer0me - 9 months

“It's fun, useless, and free!”

By @impure - 9 months

ICH WILL MEINE 5€!

By @rgbrgb - 9 months

cool! i want this for safari please. is that an easy port?

By @peanut_worm - 9 months

cute idea but im not installing this malware lol

By @ape4 - 9 months

In addition to all the security concerns mentioned, you don't really need it. You can google or ask a chatBot to make you custom button.

Button Stealer

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