In other words, there a great many developers who are likely to be open to someone else buying up their creation and their user base.įomenko is the sole director of the iNinja VPN, another service that obfuscates the true Internet address of its more than 400,000 users. The service is free for limited use, but subscribers who pay a monthly fee can get access to more resources, such as older extension versions and details about their code components.Īccording to, the majority of extensions - more than 100,000 of them - are effectively abandoned by their authors, or haven’t been updated in more than two years. These days, Nguyen is focusing more of his time on, which provides detailed information on more than 150,000 extensions. “They didn’t like that the extension might be using their browser as a proxy for going to not so good places like porn sites.”Īgain he relented, and removed the Infatica code. “I gave Infatica a try but within a few days I got a lot of negative user reviews,” he said. More importantly, the deal would net him at least $1,500 a month, and possibly quite a bit more. It restricted the company to routing web requests through his users’ browsers, and did not try to access more sensitive components of the user’s browser experience, such as stored passwords and cookies, or viewing the user’s screen. Then came Infatica, whose code was fairly straightforward by comparison, he said. Nguyen said he ignored multiple requests from different companies offering to pay him to insert their code, mainly because the code gave those firms the ability to inject whatever they wanted into his program (and onto his users’ devices) at any time. “I had spent at least 10 years building this thing and had no luck monetizing it,” he told KrebsOnSecurity. ModHeader users protested loudly against the change, and Nguyen removed the ads - which he said weren’t making him much money anyway. When Nguyen found himself spending increasing amounts of his time and money supporting the extension, he tried including ads in the program to help offset costs. Hao Nguyen is the developer behind ModHeader, an extension used by more than 400,000 people to test the functionality of websites by making it easier for users to modify the data shared with those sites. Infatica prices its service based on the volume of web traffic a customer is seeking to anonymize, from $360 a month for 40 gigabytes all the way to $20,000 a month for 10,000 gigabytes of data traffic pushed through millions of residential computers. The end result is when Infatica customers browse to a web site, that site thinks the traffic is coming from the Internet address tied to the extension user, not the customer’s. Infatica’s code then uses the browser of anyone who has that extension installed to route Web traffic for the company’s customers, including marketers or anyone able to afford its hefty monthly subscription charges. An extension maker who agrees to incorporate Infatica’s computer code can earn anywhere from $15 to $45 each month for every 1,000 active users.Īn Infatica graphic explaining the potential benefits for extension owners. So when a company comes along and offers to buy the extension - or pay the author to silently include some extra code - that proposal is frequently too good to pass up.įor its part, Infatica seeks out authors with extensions that have at least 50,000 users. Yet extension authors have few options for earning financial compensation for their work. But here’s the rub: As an extension’s user base grows, maintaining them with software updates and responding to user support requests tends to take up an inordinate amount of the author’s time. Some of these extensions have garnered hundreds of thousands or even millions of users. Singapore-based Infaticaio is part of a growing industry of shadowy firms trying to woo developers who maintain popular browser extensions - desktop and mobile device software add-ons available for download from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla designed to add functionality or customization to one’s browsing experience. This story examines the lopsided economics of extension development, and why installing an extension can be such a risky proposition. A company that rents out access to more than 10 million Web browsers so that clients can hide their true Internet addresses has built its network by paying browser extension makers to quietly include its code in their creations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |