Re: Gnome weather extension as malware?
On 04/30/2014 09:29 AM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
Is anyone running the Gnome weather extension? I have disabled it
and
my system is running better. Or rather FIrefox is working 'right' again.
This extension gets its weather information from the Norway weather
service, and you can't change this. I had noticed that many places I
was going to in Firefox took a long time to reply. It was as if Firefox
was hanging, and other Firefox windows were not responding either.
I finally fired up wireshark and I was seeing that requests for things
like apis.google.com (or some such) was being routed through a .no site
(by reverse lookup on IP address). Perhaps this extension was altering
Firefox's proxy settings.
I don't have the time or resources to do a serious review, but I am
pointing this out and perhaps others may have noticed this as well. Or
are suffering and not knowing it. This may be accidental or really
actually malicious; just don't know.
I just fired up Wireshark and set it to monitor all HTTP traffic from my
machine to any address. I'm not seeing anything untoward with respect to
the Weather extension, although I wonder if it's necessary for it to
check in every 15 seconds. FWIW, I'm not using any extensions from the
repo; I've installed them all directly from the Gnome extensions site.
There are no slowdowns with either Chrome or Firefox.
--
-- Steve