45 replies

1. jeff (sane) Mastodon 2 min later

   @zachleat@fediverse.zachleat.com gotta give the botnet backdoor access to your browser so they can verify that you are a Real Adult ™️

2. catraxx Mastodon 2 min later

   @zachleat People use OpenClaw ...

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 6 min later

      @catraxx yeah…

3. Matthias Andrasch Mastodon 3 min later

   @zachleat you can install it in a separate chrome profile + it needs initial permission to "Visit Website X" first

   Only used it to test local websites while developing with claude code

   But yeah, all AI tools and their permissions are kind of scary ;)

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 6 min later

      @mandrasch do you think folks are using it in a separate profile? The marketed tasks all mention access to automate private info

      1. Matthias Andrasch Mastodon 12 min later

         @zachleat depends on wheter they use cowork (bit like openclaw) or if they only develop stuff

         But i get your point 😁

         To be fair: From a security perspective: we installed third party npm packages all the time with wide ranging permissions, etc. pp. in the past years.

         But how to use all of this securely - if this is even possible - will be a topic.

         Skills were compromised already 🤷‍♂️
         https://snyk.io/de/blog/toxicskills-malicious-ai-agent-skills-clawhub/

         1. Matt Wilcox Mastodon 14 min later

            @mandrasch Lol... some of us avoided npm all along for that reason... @zachleat

            1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 15 min later

               @mattwilcox @mandrasch whoa, you’ve never used npm?

               1. Matt Wilcox Mastodon 33 min later

                  @zachleat Dabbled with it, decided no. Many many many years ago. It exists for me purely as a single thing - a "our CraftCMS build needed Nesting in CSS and we didn't want to use SCSS via CodeKit anymore..." but I've not looked at that in years and it does nothing else. Can't wait to rip it out entirely for pure CSS soon :) @mandrasch

               2. Amber Weinberg Mastodon 1 hr later

                  @zachleat @mattwilcox @mandrasch neither have i! I refuse to use anything that requires a build process. Seems superfluous and unnecessarily heavy.

                  1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 1 hr later

                     @amber @mattwilcox @mandrasch I am curious what tools/stack y’all do use!

                     1. Amber Weinberg Mastodon 1 hr later

                        @zachleat @mattwilcox @mandrasch just use Nova as my IDE, WordPress as my CMS, push and deploy via Git. Code in plain HTML/CSS/PHP.

                        KISS has never led me wrong in 20+ years!

                        1. Matt Wilcox Mastodon 2 hr later

                           @amber @zachleat @mandrasch 100%

                           I am so happy I never went with any of the fashions of the time. No coffee script. No type script. No Vite. No node/bun/whatever new thing “saving us” from the problem with the last “it saves us!” tech.

                           Here I am, still making great sites that perform better than most others out there; and I haven’t had to “have a toolchain” or “rework my tooling” or “audit my dependencies for malware” or “migrate deployment providers” once.

                           1. Amber Weinberg Mastodon 2 hr later

                              @mattwilcox @zachleat @mandrasch the rough part seems to be though is finding work that also values this. I’ve been looking for months now, and everybody wants react or typescript.

                     2. Matt Wilcox Mastodon 6 hr later

                        @zachleat CraftCMS (Twig/PHP/MySQL), Zed/PHPStorm, raw JS, and what is actually raw CSS but punted through PostCSS purely because of nesting and a desire to support old browsers still. LAMP stack server. GIT for deploy, couple of shell scripts. That's it. @amber @mandrasch

                        1. Bart Vandeputte Mastodon 15 hr later

                           @mattwilcox @zachleat @amber @mandrasch same as Matt, but with @getkirby CMS, so I can scrap the mysql dependency as well 👍

            2. Matthias Andrasch Mastodon 16 min later

               @mattwilcox don't shoot the messenger! 🤓 I'm not saying that any of this is great @zachleat

4. dan sinker Bluesky 3 min later

   the thing that truly astounds me is people that should know better regularly giving a bot access to shit it should not have access to.

   1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 7 min later

      move fast, leak everything

5. Michael Bluesky 5 min later

   Isn't this just a slightly less sophisticated version of those guys who used to call my parents saying they were from Microsoft and there was a virus?

   1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 8 min later

      I… did people fall for that

      1. Michael Bluesky 20 min later

         My dad used to keep them going saying he was following their remote access instructions but it just wasn’t working. He was nowhere near a computer.

         1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 22 min later

            time is money!!

         2. Craig Hermanson Bluesky 46 min later

            Your dad wasn’t the only one. I kept fake ‘Microsoft Support’ on the line a few times while out shopping for groceries or making dinner, etc. Man, were the scammers angry at me for wasting their time and did it ever feel good. They seemed to stop calling me.

6. Joe Steinbring Mastodon 11 min later

   @zachleat I don't even like using an AI model that isn't fully on-device (I still do it, though). I don't think that I would trust a Claude browser extension.

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 17 min later

      @joe yeah even an on-device model could still do some very bad things with the right prompting or prompt injection

7. David O'Brien Mastodon 16 min later

   I don't use Chrome, but I wouldn't touch this with 2 bargepoles duct-taped together.

   @zachleat

8. Snugug Bluesky 32 min later

   I was hopeful this was better than using the Playwright MCP which is much more safe (runs in a sandboxed Chrome instance) but alas no.

   1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 43 min later

      woof.

9. Private reply Bluesky 32 min later
   1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 55 min later

      those browser bars were such an 88×31 vibe

      1. Private reply Bluesky 1 hr later
         1. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 1 hr later

            just rename this `.mp3` file to `.exe` and run it to hear the music

10. Cory Birdsong Mastodon 1 hr later

    @zachleat a complete and total disregard for security is sort of inherent in using basically any of these LLM tools running in trusted contexts (on your computer, in your browser)

    1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 1 hr later

       @cbirdsong I’ve experimented with a few things but in a sandboxed non-administrator user account with a fresh browser install and no active or secure browser sessions

       1. Cory Birdsong Mastodon 3 hr later

          @zachleat setting aside the moral/ethical issues with LLMs (which you shouldn’t), it seems like there is basically an impossible problem here. in order to allow them to do anything useful, you have to expose them to sensitive information, but it is currently impossible to truly secure them against prompt injection, so you should never expose them to sensitive information.

          1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 3 hr later

             @cbirdsong well said!

11. Mastro.{js,ts} Bluesky 2 hr later

    The trick is not to use Chrome for any normal browsing 😎

12. Max Fenton Mastodon 3 hr later

    @zachleat Seems insaaaaaane to me.

13. Cordt Bluesky 5 hr later

    Skipped. Waiting to see who gets drained first.

14. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 3 days later

    oh… well, Claude’s desktop app preemptively configures any current and future local browsers to allowlist these extensions just in case you might use them some day: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

15. Zach Leatherman Bluesky 3 days later

    Claude preemptively configures any current and future local browsers to allowlist these extensions just in case you might use them some day? HM… www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthrop...

    1. Der Twitterich Bluesky 3 days later

       Bye bye Claude.

16. Jed Schmidt Bluesky 3 days later

    i do. i don’t use chrome otherwise tho, so stakes are lower.

17. Harris Lapiroff Mastodon 3 days later

    @zachleat I use it in its own limited chrome profile where I give it access to only the things it needs to do what I ask.