CNET You’re Killing Me!

And thanks for letting me vent more publicly.

You know, it was additionally irritating because the article I was responding to was about an Android Google Maps thing where they posted links to random file sharing sites to download the APK for people to sideload. I wrote what I thought was a helpful explanation regarding why, as this is the prestigious CNET brand and not, say, XDA, doing that was a bad idea, relying on random sites not to send malicious code (or eventually make dead links).

So Chromium crashed when the signon pop-ups popped up. I thought I had copied what I had written just in case, in anticipation of that, but that didn’t work out.

Now the vexing and cruel twist of this is that I am trying to give them constructive feedback for their articles regarding security risks to their users linking to dodgy or unknown file sharing sites for people to download a sought-after file for their phones, most of whom I’m certain didn’t even read the permissions when doing so, yet meanwhile I am getting blasted with 150 externally-hosted javascript files to read the CNET article!

In addition to slowing me down and crashing my browser and my brilliant comment with it, all that javascript from so many sources, like the linked file sharing sites, is a real vector of attack they create for their visitors. I’ve heckled them about this in the past, didn’t work obviously.

Hey, I like leaked APKs as much as the next guy, so my suggestion to them was not to provide links as they did but to make the savvier of their audience who didn’t need a disclaimer to know the risks scurry through the web and find the file themselves.