Recently I've been coming back to my chrome browsers to find a tab open with the following URL:
(link disabled to prevent giving them any more clicks)

https ://theaisecrets.beehiiv.com/p/chatgpt-can-now-work-docs-apps-websites-emails

This is happening across all my computers, both linux, windows, and linux VM, so I don't think it's OS-specific malware, but I suspect a rogue chrome extension is opening the tab, because I have chrome synced across all affected devices via my google account.

I've searched for this particular problem and URL to no avail, so I wondered if there's a way to track back which extension opened the tab, other than by doing a binary search disabling half my extensions at a time (which would be annoying as hell - the tabs only seem to get opened once a day or so).

In a discussion on Hacker News, Jonathan Mayer pointed out that the differential privacy code was removed from Chromium. It looks like they finished doing this in February.

I haven't seen any announcement, discussion, or explanation of this based on a brief web search, so I figured I'd note it here.

At about the time this process finished, there was a Google blog post about how they're still using it in other products.

We first deployed our world-class differential privacy anonymization technology in Chrome nearly seven years ago and are continually expanding its use across our products including Google Maps and the Assistant.

(If you read this quickly, you might think it's still used in Chrome.)

Reading between the lines, I suspect that some folks at Google are still advocating for more usage of differential privacy, but they lost an important customer. Why that happened is a mystery.

What are some of your must have browser extensions?

I recently made an effort to switch to Firefox, and now I'm looking for some good browser extensions to make my web browsing experience better. Here are the ones I currently use:

• HTTPS Everywhere
• Privacy Badger
• uBlock Origin
• Vimium