Gnome weather extension as malware?

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 04/30/2014 10:44 AM, Steven Stern wrote:
> 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.

Maybe that was all I was seeing.

>    FWIW, I'm not using any extensions from the
> repo; I've installed them all directly from the Gnome extensions site.

I also installed from the Gnomes extensions site.
>
> There are no slowdowns with either Chrome or Firefox.
>
I will keep monitoring the situation and see if any slowdowns develop.  
Then maybe turn the extension back on (maybe check if there have been 
any updates?).