I'm increasingly suspecting there was nothing actually wrong with the extension, and Theo and others may have simply demolished an open-source developer's reputation primarily because they found him difficult to collaborate with.
This is nuts.
Edit: the whole repo has been put to private.
My bank does this for my suspicious transactions, with a near %100 false positive rate.
Seems common sense and usually remedied by a text to a bot.
https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/discuss...
(As throw16180339 said, please email hn@ycombinator.com with these things - that's the only way to be (mostly) sure I'll see it.)
Source?
> disrupted
Source?
A member of the community did a deep security analysis of the extension and found multiple red flags that indicate malicious intent and reported this to us. Our security researchers at Microsoft confirmed this claims and found additional suspicious code.
We banned the publisher from the VS Marketplace and removed all of their extensions and uninstalled from all VS Code instances that have this extension running. For clarity - the removal had nothing to do about copyright/licenses, only about potential malicious intent.
Expect an announcement here with more details soon https://github.com/microsoft/vsmarketplace/
As a reminder, the VS Marketplace continuously invests in security. And more about extension runtime trust can be found in this article https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/extension-runtime-...
Thank you!
I had to manually delete the extension's folder in %USERPROFILE%\.vscode\extensions and delete the entry from the json (%USERPROFILE%\.vscode\extensions\extensions.json).
VSCode 1.97.2, commit e54c774e0add60467559eb0d1e229c6452cf8447
> A member of the community did a deep security analysis of the extension and found multiple red flags that indicate malicious intent and reported this to us.
> As a reminder, the VS Marketplace continuously invests in security
If you’re relying on the community to alert you to the issues in the marketplace, perhaps you’re not investing enough in auditing popular extensions yourself?
I would also suggest that the trust model for VSCode is fundamentally broken - you’re running arbitrary third party code on client machines without any form of sandboxing. This is a level of security you would not deploy into Azure, so why is “run arbitrary 3p code on someone else’s machine” appropriate for VSCode?
While I appreciate the work that the VSCode team does and I use it, the lack of any form of sandboxing has always bothered me.
Mitigations like running in a VM might protect your dev workstation. But not code you put into production that relies on third parties.
Reminder that the Open-VSX extension registry exists: https://open-vsx.org
Idk if they removed the malicious theme (or if they have it at all), but if MS isn't doing anything beyond just responding to user reports, you might as well switch to an open registry that probably does the same level of security work, and avoid giving them yet another monopoly.
I think that's sort of unfair. Of course MS should be relying on the community! That's arguably the best single practice for detecting these kinds of attacks in open source code. Objectively it works rather better even than walled garden environments like the iOS/Android apps stores (which have to be paired with extensive app-level sandboxing and permissions management, something that editor extensions can't use by definition).
The reference case for best practice here is actually the big Linux distros. Red Hat and Canonical and Debian have a long, long track record of shipping secure software. And they did it not on the back of extensive in-house auditing but by relying on the broader community to pre-validate a list of valuable/useful/secure/recommended software which they can then "package".
MS's flaw here, which is shared by NPM and PyPI et. al., is that they want to be a package repository without embracing that kind of upstream community validation. Software authors can walk right in and start distributing junk even though no one's ever heard of them. That has to stop. We need to get back to "we only distribute stuff other people are already using".
More and more, I am starting to think I need to run my development environment (for both work and personal projects) in a VM.
I am on MacOS, so UTM or Parallels would work pretty well I think. Sadly, I think my work explicitly forbids us from running VMs or accessing our services from them.
Sure. As a general rule, you get what you pay for.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=t3dotgg....
Hi Isidor, excited for this! At Open VSX, we'd love to take a look and potentially flag the extension as malicious on our side as well. Are you aware of the version range that the malicious code was included in? I'm asking because https://open-vsx.org does not have any version published since the extension went closed-source.
I downloaded the file, and unzipped it, but on a cursory glance I only see obfuscated code nothing malicious.
[0]: !!!WARNING MAY BE MALICIOUS!!! https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/pu...
The publisher account for Material Theme and Material Theme Icons (Equinusocio) was mistakenly flagged and has now been restored. In the interest of safety, we moved fast and we messed up. We removed these themes because they fired off multiple malware detection indicators inside Microsoft, and our investigation came to the wrong conclusion. We care deeply about the security of the VS Code ecosystem, and acted quickly to protect our users.
I understand that the "Equinusocio" extensions author's frustration and intense reaction, and we hear you. It's bad but sometimes things like this happen. We do our best - we're humans, and we hope to move on from this We will clarify our policy on obfuscated code and we will update our scanners and investigation process to reduce the likelihood of another event like this. These extensions are safe and have been restored for the VS Code community to enjoy.
LINKS: Material Theme https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Equinuso... Material Theme Icons https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Equinuso...
Again, we apologize that the author got caught up in the blast radius and we look forward to their future themes and extensions. We've corresponded with him to make these amends and thanked him for his patience.
Scott Hanselman and the Visual Studio Code Marketplace Team - @shanselman
- build an open-source thing
- wait till thousands or millions of people are using it
- change the license and close down the source
- implement malicious code
- push an update
- profit! you now have your malware running on millions of systems
I did a thorough combing of the code base when I forked. Just did another audit and still not seeing anything suspicious. Gutting all of the opencollective and changelog code to be 1000% sure.
The extension file is still available to download directly from MS.[0] (Which, why if you pull it from users are you still allowing downloads first of all.)
I downloaded the file, and unzipped it. On a cursory glance I see obfuscated code but zero "red flag" level code, has anyone seen the malicious code claimed?
[0]: !!!WARNING CLAIMED TO BE MALICIOUS!!! https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/pu...
We do not plan to add a permission model in the next 6 months.
The only sane way to contain the blast radius is to run is to run code-server in a container (or in a VM) and use it through a browser tab.
Luckily, the UI works perfectly, hotkeys and everything. They did an awesome work there.
Anyway, thank you for the update.
https://www.wired.com/story/gravy-location-data-app-leak-rtb...
The maintainer went off the deep end last year. He pulled the (originally apache 2) source offline, then started threatening to sue people for hosting alternative versions, including them in other IDEs, etc. Genuine lunatic.
Out of an abundance of precaution, I've taken the following action on my fork:
1. I have the VS Code team auditing it as we speak, and I've given them full permission to immediately pull it from the marketplace & force uninstall it from users if they find ANYTHING malicious.
2. I have audited the code base thoroughly (nothing seemed malicious)
3. I have removed ALL code related to changelogs, analytics, Open Collective and html rendering.
The only thing that seemed slightly concerning was the html + sanity loader for changelogs, so I gutted it entirely. Two PRs removed almost all the deps and over 7,000loc (mostly package-lock)
Repo is here if anyone else would like to audit https://github.com/t3dotgg/vsc-material-but-i-wont-sue-you
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vscode/comments/1eq40o2/has_the_mat...
VS Code is maybe the best product Microsoft has ever released, largely because the extension market. If Microsoft polices the marketplace more, you can probably expect VS Code quality to degrade.
Here's my argument: More scrutiny of the marketplace will lead to less extensions overall (the scrutiny process will reduce the number of extensions overall as barrier to entry will be increased). Less extensions available will create an incentive for Microsoft to add features to VS Code directly. The more features MS adds, the more bloated VS Code will become.
So then, more security auditing in the extensions marketplace will lead to a more bloated VS Code.
All that said, it would be nice if there were better security controls in the extensions marketplace, I just don't trust Microsoft to do anything in a way that actually improves their products for the people who use them.
he sucks at tech and has driven away everyone good at it. I don't use his software, but I hope he gets out of this episode soon (and learns he didn't invent material!)
Pantone would like a word.
These aren't mutually exclusive.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=t3dotgg....
At least that one wasn't literally just colours.
Found the obfuscated code here https://web.archive.org/web/20250226020241/https://github.co...
It’s assumed that your contribution will be licensed with the current license (generally). Maintainers can change the license but that wouldn’t affect prior contributions. Basically anything up to that license change would still have the original license. This is what makes forks possible when popular software changes their license.
In order to go back in history and change a license, you need either the consent of your contributors or a document that would grant you the power to do that. A CLA could (but not all CLAs will) grant a maintainer to change a license at will back in time.
Other famous software that has seen a license change: Redis and Terraform. In those cases the license changed but already released software is still available with the old license and that old license allows for forks.
https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/commits...
I'm not sure why the initial commit already says "official", but that's almost a decade ago.
Of course, it's also nice that it's possible to theme the software to such a degree and improve usability and accessibility in some cases, just that the feature requests about limiting permissions need to be addressed.
In this case, this is one of the most extreme instances of people installing lots of dependencies. The moment I realized something was different in me was left pad, I already felt that couldn't be me.
The log4j incident hit me different, it COULD have easily been me. A security vulnerability is like death or a terminal illness in my eyes. Successful companies that scale do so without incidents, If you are running a company and you have a vuln you are out of the race. So I tightened up a lot after that.
I realize something similar with sex I just can't fathom putting my whole life on the line just to have sex with somebody and then have nothing to show for it, no relationship, nothing.
And today we see this, people are really risking their companies, their reputation, their pride to have pretty colors on their IDE.
I used to fight it, try to convince people, of course I still keep the pride of being different and weary, but in the end, you will likely be fine, and I only hold a statistical advantage, both are valid strategies of going about life I guess.
The reason he forked it in the first place is, as he said himself, because he's famous.
> reading the review responses by the creator, I don't really trust it anymore. Being rude to others who are concerned over the recent move to closed-source (and without warning!) is pretty disheartening.
> So, uh, the guy who made the VS Code Material Theme is threatening everyone who uses it in their products. He seems to have forgotten it was originally licensed under the Apache License, 2.0.. He wiped the commit history to make it look like it was always his weird fake license.
Real messy. It’s always shocking to me how little people realize - or care - how their behavior - especially their treatment of others reflects on them.
https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-even...
An absolute failure of contemporary programming language design.
Software firms need to think harder about what kind of guarantees the languages they use can give them - which part of a project's code can access which (and how many) resources - access to other project components, filesystems, the network, and the amount of process memory and CPU time they are allowed to consume. The current default answer is usually "any place has authority to access everything else, and a simple infinite loop will use up all the system's resources"
obviously its obfuscated by the guy originally
I've seen literally nothing malicious in it so far.
!!! WARNING CLAIMED MALICIOUS PACKAGE !!!
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/pu...
Is the original source code still uploaded somewhere?
I mean, when I use Vim and Emacs, the benefits clearly flow to users and the developer community. Back when I paid for the IntelliJ license - I knew exactly how their revenue model worked. Yet whenever I download and use VSCode, I don't really know what's Microsoft's grand plan here, does anyone else do?
Same reason Xcode is free.
EDIT: Did some research and looks like it is different code by different developers, so we should be good.
however, I found this from the malware creator's website itself: https://framerusercontent.com/images/G17CYe9tTL2GP1Rw4mUI8YC...
===============================================================================
Language Files Lines Code Comments Blanks
===============================================================================
CSS 2 142 119 0 23
TypeScript 32 2026 1650 243 133
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HTML 2 59 49 1 9
|- JavaScript 2 2 2 0 0
(Total) 61 51 1 9
===============================================================================
Total 36 2227 1818 244 165
===============================================================================
So the question remains: what the hell is there to maintain (that takes more than a couple minutes every $godknowshowlong)? I've published and maintained waaaaay more substantial open source projects for years without expectation of any financial contribution.
What's wrong is the bait and switch, as these projects end up being popular because of their FOSS nature.
just did a pass and removed everything that was not necessary - it's even less code now lmao
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeScript 23 50 169 1307
Markdown 6 129 0 224
YAML 2 8 6 52
INI 1 1 0 7
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 32 188 175 1590
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------That said, I do agree that dependency management and reliance is a Problem these days. left-pad was the camel that broke the proverbial camel's back for many people, and it made people realise how ridiculous dependencies in at least NodeJS land has become. It was already silly in Java land since the 2000s, but more from the layers of abstraction and overhead that frameworks like Spring add (which is ironic because Spring was originally conceived to be a lightweight alternative to J2EE, but that's a thread on its own).
I know the general community atmosphere in the Go ecosystem is adverse to adding dependencies and frameworks; it has a good standard library which was complete enough and which isn't yet fully bogged down by design by committee like Java and JS were (to their credit things are moving again), and its users are like "you know, plain Go is good enough", so they are much less likely to add frameworks or DSLs like assertion libraries.
I'd like to know if the same thing is happening in the Rust ecosystem, I've never ventured there before.
That couldn't be me, because I don't use Java, PHP, Windows APIs, or `xdg-open`. The closest I come to Java-esque "include ALL THE BATTERIES" is the occasional Python script, but I won't use `http.server`. (Incidentally, I don't get very much done.)
> I don't use Java I didn't use Java either, but whatever I was using at the moment (Python) could have been anything, if I stayed in my other job or gotten a different one I could very well been using Java and been the one that installed the thing.
>Python script, but I won't use `http.server`. (Incidentally, I don't get very much done.)
Interesting, I use http.server or the Tcp socket server thing, but I consider myself to be in the extreme, there's still people that use Flask (and I do partake ocasionally) or things like Django, Spring, Next,etc... Same with binaries like Apache, Nginx.
I mean you gotta use something, and if you go too far on the deep end, you get the risk of introducing the vulnerabilities yourself, (in addition to the risk of getting nothing done as you mentioned). I know my limits I wouldn't implement cryptography for example.
> "You" (or "Your") shall mean an individual or Legal Entity exercising permissions granted by this License.
This covers not just the users, but also the "author" here who exercises the permissions granted below:
> 2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.
> 4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:
> (a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and
So let's interpret that. Regardless of the whatever intent to re-license the code exists in the mind of the author, in order to distribute the code which was contributed by others, the only legal means to distribute this code must comply with the requirements of the license. Technically they could remove all code contributions which were contributed by others (I've done this in the past, it's a pain to do right), or seek permission from the others to add additional grants that are not included in the Apache license here (I've seen various projects do the post-facto CLA thing for this). But that has not happened here.
So (in my opinion) the github repo of the author is a currently infringing the copyright of all the other contributors. Any one of whom could enforce it or raise a DMCA take down notification on the repo.
So given that we're talking about material that is in breach of copyright, it's likely that being able to enforce a license on that as a consumer is not really a thing which is possible as the conditions on what must be included bind the person distributing the material not the person receiving it.
https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/activit...
The founder of Bikram Yoga, tried to copyright a sequence of yoga poses, even though similar sequences have existed for for thousands of years. Monster, the energy drink maker, went after business for using the word "monster" in totally unrelated contexts. Disney trademarked "Hakuna Matata" (a Swahili phrase roughly equivalent to "no worries") after using it in The Lion King, prohibiting African businesses from using a common idiom in their own damn language. Don't get me started on Happy Fucking Birthday.
So I run a small game that has a couple thousand active users, and part of that is allowing users to chat via written text. The amount of vitriol some users spew just amazes me. If they acted like that in person, I expect they would get punched in the mouth quite often. I also have a suspicion that some of these people are literally mentally ill, and online is basically where they live.
They hide it mostly to their family, but other human beings are treated like NPCs.
For example I live in the south of France and people are literally crazy on the road but they still avoid accidents by some kind of miracle. These are people from all sex, color, and age. The good middle-aged white father becomes a fucking moron when his car is turned on. The young new mom who pretends to love her children is speeding on the road like an idiot.
Society accepts that or turns its head the other way not to look at it, but it’s definitely around us and I see it every time I go to work.
My consideration on this is:
A lot of software that at least I write privately is rather a manifestation of some deeper values/opinions that I have. So in some sense the software is just the tip of an iceberg, a manifestation of something deeper. The software might isolatedly be independently useful for other people, but this is not is essence. Its essence is the deeper values/opinions that made the software to be created.
In this sense, it is rather the rational thing to expect that most discussions of the software are strongly intertwined with the values/opinions of the programmer, because these form the bottom of the iceberg of the software.
P.S. Just to be clear: I am not the kind of person who does personal jabs or passive aggressive snipes.
People are willing to pay for nice things. Especially if it takes longer to create it yourself.
A theme is more than a list of colors. Monokai Pro contains custom designed icons and color filters too, and some code logic to sync it all up. It needs continued updates, as editors keep evolving with new UX/UI elements.
Free themes are a dime a dozen.
Paid themes means someone's incentivized to keep working on it and adding icons, &c.
I'm comfortable working without any syntax highlighting at all. It's not that I go to the effort of turning it off, I just don't really care that it's there. I used to use Sam as my daily editor - got used to plain black text pretty quick. It's all a matter of preference.
I suck at colors and want nice themes. I'm glad people better at this than me take time to make nice things.
But, I don't want to ever manage licenses for my theme. My dotfiles need to fetch it automatically or it's out.
https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/commit/...
Not getting very much done isn't because I practice secure software development. It's easy to write secure software that works. I don't get much done because I try to find new ways to write secure software: experimentation and tool-building takes up a lot of my time, when I should really be writing hacks, documenting them, and moving on.
Never roll your own crypto, unless you understand systems programming on that platform/arch very well: modern systems have all the side-channels, and take great pains to subvert your attempts to mitigate them.
These colours are their trademarks but I believe they don't own the colour in all domains.. probably just food? If you wanted to make a car company logo that colour you'd be ok?
[1] https://threatpost.com/researchers-show-how-popular-text-edi...
I think Xcode may be the exception but Xcode plugins also can’t do much.
I am more curious as to why one would buy the theme and related merch.
No, I counter that the real problem is that some people are either incredibly bad at communicating their real intent, or incredibly good at communicating their inner asshole nature.
The commits which have the real unadulterated history of the theme are available by taking the same actions on the PRs (browse repo), as they point at commits in other repos where that history has not been erased not the main repo where it has.
I suspect this probably indicates that the GitHub repo was recreated in 2023 with a modified version of the source with the Apache license and a history that was rewritten to not contain the commits where the license was MIT. This aligns with what people are saying about the historical perspective on this.
Is this the person’s first time having an idea of theirs taken (appropriately or inappropriately)? Their sense of right and wrong may be just fine (speaking of value systems), but their reaction is intense.
There’s either more to the story or baby just experienced a little bit of life, and it hurts.
Edit:
From the maintainers:
Today we found Sublime Text authors just stole the WHOLE repository publishing the theme again, under their name, by replacing ANY reference of original authors with their names.
We opened a pull-request to restore the original theme made by us with all the credits. Let's see if they accept it, or they want to keep the stolen repository.
As I suspected Watson, the persons perceives theft.
Because he said so?
You can append a Github repo to the URL to open it: https://vscode.dev/https://github.com/facebook/react
* Any specifics on the (potential) impact for affected users?
* What they should do to get it removed?
Edit: There does seem to be a little bit more information available over at Bleeping Computer[1], but the precise nature of what the malware does is unclear at this time other than that it may be some type of "supply chain attack". It would be good to hear more about the specifics.
1: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/vscode-extens...
It doesn't seem to be pretty smart and safe going rogue with such public exposure no? Unless it is a completely fake persona, of course.
Hmmmmm.
Some of it may be because of this. However, I also think that the absence of risk of being mouth-punched contributes a lot. I feel like lots of people are deeply hateful, distrusting and angry in real life, and the risk of social and legal repercussions is the only thing that's keeping a lid on their disregard for others. I think that if this danger of consequences was removed, they would do unspeakable things.
It's certainly reasonable to expect that there are at least some mentally ill people in any decent-sized community, but the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[0] suggests -- and I agree -- that there are many people who just turn into complete assholes when they are anonymous or semi-anonymous, and can hide behind their computer, tens or hundreds or thousands of miles away from the people they interact with.
I don't know the demographics of your game, but this is especially true of teenagers. (But not exclusively true.)
[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
It's just a card game, and I expect that the average age is actually quite a bit older. Which is one of the reasons why I am quite surprised at the rhetoric used, because I would have thought that "adults" wouldn't behave that way. I was very wrong.
The interesting thing about his implementation is that seeing e.g. Chinese being replaced in-line as it's translated feels way more amazing than knowing a translation has occurred in the background. He's hidden the time difference between paying for a service or running it yourself behind an animation.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1717290/Subspace_Discover...
Assuming that the editor never removes/adds/changes anything then yeah, it's basically free. But since most editors are somewhat of a moving target, it does take a bit of maintenance to make sure everything continues to look right as things update.
The worst part with maintaining a theme/colorscheme is that you can't really rely on automated testing to catch most of the issues, unless you start doing snapshot testing comparing PNGs or similar, and is the biggest time-sink when a new editor version been released.
You can even prepare ringtones on your phone with the iOS version of GarageBand.
Yeah, so only-iPhone users are out of luck since the majority of people don't have a Mac. Last time I used Android you needed the file and the phone itself, you select the audio file and you're done.
You can incorporate MIT/BSD code in a proprietary project, but that imported code itself remains BSD/MIT licensed. For many projects, this is a technicality, but no, you can't claim copyright on MIT/BSD code that isn't yours.
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Note the "deal in the Software without restriction" and "sublicense" permissions and the virality of the terms that require the permission notice must be included with all copies.
One problem with this however is if someone has removed the license from the software like what has happened here, then that software really has no license because the license doesn't specifically state that it applies to derivatives. The Apache 2.0 license is much clearer on that subject of derivative works.
But also nothing preventing you from doing it.
MIT can be relicensed, for sure.
The MIT license is not very long, and it contains this sentence:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Which clearly state that you can't remove that license to put your own.
At the very least, the author has delusional notions about the greatness of their source code and they worry about piracy, meaning that there is a high probability of stupid bugs and that they would be difficult to notice because of the obfuscation.
Of course in this case the default assumption should be that there is something malicious to hide.
You could instead "append" your name to the copyright notice though, which is legal.
https://github.com/t3dotgg/vsc-material-but-i-wont-sue-you/c...
https://github.com/t3dotgg/vsc-material-but-i-wont-sue-you/p...
> I did a thorough combing of the code base when I forked. Just did another audit and still not seeing anything suspicious.
https://opencollective.com/material-theme
that's pretty good, especially for a vscode theme.
The issue is not someone wanting to be financially rewarded for work, however small. That's completely different from saying you need money to "maintain" what is essentially configuration for colors. That's a deceptive use of that word.
Let's call this what it is: a grifter asked people to pay him for the privilege of hacking them.
Morally wrong, legally not so much. If it is under a permissive license (and it was MIT originally as others have pointed out) you can always cut a proprietary version.
That doesn't take away the right to use the permissively licensed code of course.
Of course, but then, the legality of it is irrelevant.
Free markets work because consumers can exercise their freedom to choose, and in such instances it's easy, given that the reason for why many such projects see wide adoption is their FOSS nature.
That only works if the consumer is fully informed.
In the case of bait & switch sometimes the switch happens without them being informed and/or without giving them chance to cancel/uninstall/whatever.
It sounds like they went out of the way to remove that copyright notice. Am I misinterpreting that part?
Genuinely curious since this stuff affects me....
If he edited the repo history to edit the licence that is.
If everyone is crazy on the road, it's best to reduce the exposure to the road. Speeding decreases time spent on the road. Speeding on the road is genius, not stupid.
As long as government claims the right to a monopoly on violence, it is reasonable to hold them to far, far higher standards than anyone else, including corporations. There is only so much damage one company or one cartel can do, but with government, the downside is unbounded. As I suspect we're about to see for ourselves.
LoC is a red herring. And the fact that thousands of people decided to introduce his LoC as a dependency in their local development environment makes the point.
I'm surprised to see supposed software engineers get this wrong. We tend to dismiss look&feel type things as low effort which is funny because very few of us could make a make a good theme if we tried, yet it's "just" a matter of picking colors.
It's also funny to see a "supposed software engineer" shit on other's tools and post veiled personal attacks based on a single Internet comment. If I were you I'd probably insinuate you've never worked on any large code base so don't know LoC definitely correlates with complexity as a rough first signal (not to mention I included a rough analysis of actual code as well), but I shouldn't do that based on a single comment. Anyway I've maintained plenty of open source code bases large and small, popular (>10k stars, yes that's not a very good metric but it's also a useful first signal) or not, so I'm pretty well equipped to evaluate maintenance burden.
Society as a whole could easily avoid this by funding open source/free utilities to the point where malware makers need to spend significant cash to outbid yearly community support, but unfortunately maintaining anything available online for free is a thankless job that barely covers the electricity required to maintain the code.
In this case too, the developers behind the theme seemed to want to monetise their work, which had attained almost 4 million installs, in the past, but found themselves with a rather unwilling customer base. I don't know if they snapped and uploaded something malicious or if they're intentionally making it hard for forks to copy their work, but either way the lesson learned is that if you want to make money you should just abandon your free projects and start something else.
GGs if you want a buck for the VSCode theme you made.
I know I'm in the minority, but I block ads because of memetic hygiene. I don't want to deprive artists but I'm not sitting through adslop for a podcaster's sake.
As long as we won't have to pay 2 USD for an extension!
but no need to single them out.
Plenty of bait and switch later free apps turned freemium, or malicious, out there.
If you dig into the code on GitHub [1] , you can see it's the same author as the Material Theme. But I'm not sure how the marketplace folks are supposed to track that.
0 external and harmful dependencies
closed source = no more toxic community and youtubers talking shit about things they don't know.
Looks like we're good now.
Of course, 'git' is also an insult.
It would never be offensive or used with sexual connotation. It's kind of like the equivalent of wiener.
I guess Copilot functionality trumps "Security above all else" now.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-sec...
Now they are all “copilot” “features”.
AI features is one of the bigger innovations in editors in years, I fully understand the enthusiasm, especially given it can be linked to an earnings model. That said, before AI stuff I would've expected them to push integration with Github and Azure more.
Probably the sublicense wording that many techies confuse with relicensing.
Also sloppy wording in discussions like HN where "relicense" is sometimes used as a shortcut for "combined with a compatibly-licensed work in a larger work that can be used under the whole-work license".
That is not the case with other licenses.
If cars could go at mach 3, then you'd want to avoid roads entirely: it's not feasible to avoid obstacles at that speed, and you certainly don't want to get hit by shockwaves or – worse – actual cars travelling at such relative velocities. So no, you would have worse problems in this hypothetical.
> Their customer, a government, did the murdering.
Using stuff the corporation made and profited from.
Max Weber died in 1920, get some new economics.
Meanwhile, remind me what corporations built Stalin's infrastructure?
https://github.com/Dramaga11/vsc-material-theme/blob/main/LI...
VS Code isn't some kind of hobby project by a couple of dudes on laptops with nothing but the best interests of the community at heart. It's a flagship IDE produced by one of the most valuable tech companies in the world, released for free as a loss leader in service to very specific corporate goals.
When a tech behemoth releases a free IDE as a loss leader and it drives out all of the scrappy open source projects one by one, I think it's reasonable to hold that tech behemoth to tech behemoth standards rather than scrappy open source project standards.
Which is why I'm pretty confident in first party packages and don't install third party plugins from random authors.
You’d end up with Apple-style reviews and then people complaining about them. You can’t really win.
Raymond Hill (of ublock fame) wasn't really impressed with how it is performed, but it's still much better than nothing (which is what MS apparently does).
VSCode is an IDE in name only, it's a glorified text editor, and pretty mediocre one at that. I in "IDE" stands for "integrated", like what you'd expect from JetBrains' products. Or even the real visual studio.
I made the point elsewhere, but this seems to fail in the face of Debian and Red Hat and Canonical who have been publishing mostly-secure distros of exclusively open source software for decades now.
There's a reason why MS and NPM get caught by this sort of shenanigans, but it's not "open source".
No, the reason Linux is safe and modern distributors aren't is the "packaging" step. Debian volunteers package software that they understand to be high quality via existing community consensus. You can't just show up to Fedora and say "ship my junkware app", you need to convince the existing community that your stuff doesn't suck.
And that's worked extremely well for decades now, going all the way back to 2BSD being shipped above V7 Unix. The reason MS and NPM et. al. abandoned it isn't just pure experience[2]. They don't want to wait for their repos to fill with good software, they want all the software in it now so that they don't get beaten by whoever their competitors are.
And this is the inevitable result. If you allow anyone to distribute software to your users then you allow everyone to distribute software to your users. And everyone includes a lot of bad people.
[1] With vastly more capability! The distro ships everything from firmware blobs and kernel drivers up through browser glitz and desktop customization. Talk about "attack surface"!
Fiscal responsibility: required
> Not merely a couple dudes in their bedroom doing this in their spare time?
Fiscal responsibility: optional
I would also point out, the malware-infested extension we are talking about presents more as the “two guys in a bedroom” model (though possibly a state-sponsored actor).
Disclosure: I work at Google.
Soon, I'm going to need an extension that removes the AI stuff I don't want and didn't ask for.
Using youtube in 2025 is exhausting.
Also note that while it takes away the ads, it does nothing about the stalking (which bothers me much more than the adverts themselves) the results from which will be used to serve ads if you cancel in future (and in any case may be made available, directly or otherwise, to third parties, unless that part of the terms has changed).
Netflix 1080p: $18/mo. Netflix 4k: $25/mo. No annual plan.
Youtube Premium, which offers 4k, is $14/mo, or $120/yr for the annual plan (which averages to $12/mo).
UK prices:
Netflix 1080p: £13/mo. Netflix 4k: £19/mo. No annual plan.
Youtube Premium: £12/mo. No annual plan.
It's interesting how in the Youtube Premiums discount over Netflix is smaller in the UK than the US, and how Youtube Premium lacks an annual plan in the UK.
>Also note that while it takes away the ads, it does nothing about the stalking
Does an ad blocker change that?
When Microsoft gets bored of VSCode or forces you to only do AI "vibe coding", Emacs will still be there.
New version just came out. The release notes were full of good things.
I still use it for some things, but what we really need is a new, different edition of Emacs that has the same basic architecture but a more modern take on all the stuff that dates from the 1980s.
In contrast, with Emacs I can change any behavior of any function and command - built-in or third-party with amazing granularity. I can change specific parts of a function without rewriting it, and I don't even need to save that - I can just write a piece of Elisp in a scratch buffer, evaluate it, and test it out immediately.
Also, you are completely wrong with your notion that Emacs is outdated. Modern Emacs tools allow you to do things in a way no other editors let you - you can control video playback, read and annotate PDFs, search through your browser history, and automate things with LLMs.
Not to mention that the problem similar to the one being discussed in the thread would never happen in the Emacs world - nobody would ever get to publish a package with obfuscated Elisp code in it. You always will have full control over the code you download to use.
GTK+ and webkit has been integrated into emacs and it has a package manager now and configuration is still a problem.
For the most popular package:
Debian: ~253K installs per month [1]
NPM: ~236M installs per month [2]
VSCode: ~158M installs total [3]
Obviously VSCode is hard to compare, but the most popular Debian package would need 52 years to achieve the total VSCode numbers so I'm sure it's safe to say VSCode beats Debian significantly on installs and NPM wins even more convincingly.
Ok, but let's take a look at how much code is shipping which was your metric:
Debian: 242k submissions per month for amd64 [4]
NPM: ~50k new non-spam packages per month, ~800k new version submissions per month [5]
VSCode: No data available
I don't know how VSCode compares, but clearly NPM beats Debian which makes sense because of how open it is and more importantly how many orders of magnitude there are JS developers vs Linux developers and how much more frequently they update their packages because the overhead is lower for creating a submission.
It's really easy to forget that the number of JS developers or people using IDEs is much larger than the number of Linux users. So NPM still beats Debian on this front. As for the security assumption and how good a job maintainers are doing, I'm not so sure on that either. The xz utils backdoor into SSH was found by a Microsoft employee (i.e. the community) not by Debian maintainers. It's not hard to imagine that the lack of notable security issues (particularly attempts recorded) actually indicates very little review, not that there's a higher bar because the maintainers are more talented or have better incentives for "reasons" - there's a reason Chrome was perceived as having better security than IE (it did - architecture was better) and STILL they see regular successful attacks bypassing all the mitigations.
Again, to reiterate in case the above got you triggered again - NPM & VScode have significantly more users than Debian and that creates economic incentives for attackers. The capabilities of a vulnerability matter less unless you're a state actor because capabilities do not track economic results as strongly. This has so much evidence it shouldn't even need this kind of explanation. Remember when people said that Mac had better security? Well turns out Apple is dealing with all the same vulnerability and spam issues on a closed down system when their popularity went up; again, economic incentives.
[1] https://popcon.debian.org/main/by_inst
[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash
[3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-pytho...
[4] https://popcon.debian.org/
[5] https://blog.sandworm.dev/state-of-npm-2023-the-overview
But I'm not following how you get from popularity numbers to "attack surface". The latter is a term of art that reflects the amount of complexity on the "outside" of a software system that can be interacted with by an attacker. It correlates well with "amount of code". I don't see that it has any relation at all to number of installs.
But sure, let's use "amount of code" as a proxy. Debian has ~123GiB of source code [1] across ~65k packages [2] while NPM has 74 GiB [3] if I'm reading it correctly (other sources say 128 GiB) across 3.3 M packages [4]. Given that JS requires less code than C for equivalent functionality (due to a richer runtime & no memory management), any way you slice it, NPM is a much larger attack surface both in terms of number of opportunities and how valuable the attack is.
[1] https://www.debian.org/mirror/size
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/basic-defs.en....
Skipping sponsored sections: https://sponsor.ajay.app/
Remove shorts: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtub...
Return dislike: https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com/
Forgot to mention returning the dislike in my original comment.
At least I can use these extensions and get something resembling the service I want to pay for.
> Does an ad blocker change that?
In many places, yes. Youtube? Less so, but it depends on which blocker(s) are in play.
A DNS based blocker won't help completely as some of the ad/track related requests are coming from their main domain or sub-domains that are used for other things so can't be blocked wholescale. It will block JS and other resources pulling from *.doubleclick.net though.
A browser/add-on based blocker may do much better by being able to more selectively block resource that are tracking related. It will also be able to block data passed via embedded videos in other sites. They can, and probably do, still track based on what you are actually watching via requests to the main domain, no ad blocker can do much about that without blocking the whole site.
>The Privacy Enhanced Mode of the YouTube embedded player prevents the use of views of embedded YouTube content from influencing the viewer’s browsing experience on YouTube. This means that the view of a video shown in the Privacy Enhanced Mode of the embedded player will not be used to personalize the YouTube browsing experience, either within your Privacy Enhanced Mode embedded player or in the viewer’s subsequent YouTube viewing experience.
>If ads are served on a video shown in the Privacy Enhanced Mode of the embedded player, those ads will likewise be non-personalized. In addition, the view of a video shown in the Privacy Enhanced Mode of the embedded player will not be used to personalize advertising shown to the viewer outside of your site or app.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en#zippy...
Or to make things more succinct:
* VSCode is a extendable code editor (like vim, neovim, Zed and Sublime)
* Jetbrains Rider is a fully equipped Integrated Development Environment (like Microsoft Visual Studio or its direct sibling Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA)
And while extensions are optional within a IDE (and often solely used for increased productivity), more often than not they are a necessity in a code editor to even become productive.
"Integrated" isn't meant to contrast with a plugin-based system (otherwise JetBrains wouldn't count!), it's meant to contrast with a dev environment built out of a bunch of individual tools and terminal commands run separately.
How you know that?
As for the rest, been there and done that, but then you have to invest in your knowledge of Elisp, which has zero other benefits.
git uses "plumbing" and "porcelain" commands, referring to victorian-era plumbing systems. Adobe and other publishing tools use terms like "slug", "gutter", "folio", "pica". Debugging tools use terms like "trap", "dump", "patch". You're annoyed with what Emacs calls "window" and "frame"? And what about Tmux's "pane" and "window"; or "session" - "an ancient" term from the time of timesharing systems? Oh boy, if you afraid of words don't ever try to get into Haskell - those FP-crazies do use some real fancy words for their stuff.
> knowledge of Elisp, which has zero other benefits
The same way the knowledge of sql, or awk, or bash, or vim motions, or ssh, or tmux has zero benefits outside of their respective domains? What are you even talking about? I, for one, get daily gains, benefiting from knowing elisp - anything that has to do with text, just about anything can be automated with ease.
Just the other day - watching my colleague over Zoom, I decided to fix that for my note-taking. It took me fifteen minutes to write a piece of Elisp that OCRs any piece of text from a screenshot. Instead of disrupting my teammates all the time, I would now take a screenshot of a screen area with Flameshot, run my custom command and voilà - the text appears in my editor, and I can quickly grab it and use it in my notes.
I don't know where exactly "you've been" and what "you've done", but it really sounds like you haven't seen modern Emacs in practice. When one sees what people can do these days in it, it's hard not to get impressed.