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aclap-dev / vdhcoapp

Companion application for Video DownloadHelper browser add-on
GNU General Public License v2.0
1.72k stars 280 forks source link

What does this app download automatically in the background? #74

Closed sparkie3 closed 3 years ago

sparkie3 commented 4 years ago

/opt/net.downloadhelper.coapp/bin/net.downloadhelper.coapp-linux-64 This application is downloading in the background. What, exactly is it doing, as I have not given it any commands?

sparkie3 commented 4 years ago

Just wanted to update this. I have a pretty slow connection, so I noticed it using the bandwidth. Around 200kb/sec. Seems that I was on reddit, and it had something to do with their media autoloading. It closes when I close that page. Has a toggle switch of some sort from the browser been considered to prevent this kind of behavior?

r3nk0o commented 4 years ago

Bump.

EDIT: Nevermind, found the explanation in the FAQ:

Video DownloadHelper is a browser extension software. As such, it relies on an interface provided by the browser (API) to its extensions to do the job. Chrome and Firefox (>=57) provide exclusively an API called WebExtensions that do not include a number of things required by Video DownloadHelper to do all the tasks. In particular, WebExtensions has no real support for writing files properly. After many discussions with Mozilla (the Firefox editors) engineers, it appeared that the only solution for providing the service was to install an external application aside of the browser.

Fortunately, WebExtension provides the ability to launch a specific application and communicate with it, it's called Native messaging. This is a secure interface that ensures no other extension can take advantage of the coapp for performing any malicious activity.

So we developped a specific native application we called Video DownloadHelper Companion Application, or coapp. To ensure this application could be trusted by everyone, we released this application in open-source, i.e the program code can be read by anyone to check it is harmless. The source code of the coapp is available here.

mi-g commented 4 years ago

For the records, if you want to monitor the traffic between the extension and the companion app, you can use the Weh Inspector extension.