What's wrong with that? Why do you fear getting left behind? This is just fearmongering.
Mind you these are legitimate interests of people and in most of cases probably not related to professional work.
And lol @ "It's 2026, the AI will write a compiler in 5 minutes, no headache required.", no it will not, have you seen Anthropic's post about Claude writing the "C compiler"?
A while back I noticed a visual bug on a specific webpage. I mean a real insect bug, crawling across the bottom of the screen on a corporate webpage[1]. It genuinely scared the shit out of me. I thought there was a bug inside my laptop. I had a few reputable extensions in that browser profile, but it contained bpwc. Downloaded, of course from the official repo.
I restarted my browser and removed bpwc from that profile. I never saw it again. Now i use it only in a specific browser profile called paywalls. I don't know what extension or ad injection caused it, but that experience, along with the countless articles about the malware in extensions has caused me to be a lot more careful.
I am not accusing bpwc of course, it is open source and well regarded, but if anyone has any insight into what happened I would be curious to hear.
On Firefox, this extension doesn't ask to run on all domains that you visit, only the news sites it bypasses paywalls. For example I visited deepl.com now and it doesn't have permission to run.
That's the default, but Firefox does offer toggle to give it permission to run on all pages you visit, I never clicked it (never seen the need to).
Also for Firefox, Mozilla banned it from their extension store (like Chrome did) after a legal threat from news publishers, but they still have to sign the extension and approve every new release even though it is distributed outside the Mozilla extension store now.
https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/16361/jewish/Ch...
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