The plugin that is inspected in this article is now delisted in the Eclipse Marketplace. You can't download it from there anymore (Checked with STS 3.9.0.RELEASE). A new fork without the ad related code as been publish and you can inspect the code on <a href="https://github.com/ecd-plugin/ecd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ecd-plugin/ecd</a> .<p>It's nice to see the community stepping in to "fix" the situation.
Original author doing a pretty bad job of explaining himself [0]. Mainly:<p>Anyone who does not like it, please uninstall this plugin.<p>I will not explain it anymore.<p>I'm not interested in stealing your privacy.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/cnfree/Eclipse-Class-Decompiler/issues/30" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cnfree/Eclipse-Class-Decompiler/issues/30</a>
Alternative version:<p><a href="http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/enhanced-class-decompiler?mpc=true&mpc_state=" rel="nofollow">http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/enhanced-class-decomp...</a>
Good writeup on the reverse engineering.<p>I'm still a little confused as to what the code was doing, though. It gathers statistics about your user machine (none of which seemed too personal - basically IP, OS, country, etc).<p>But then what is it doing? Opening a virtual browser or simulating clicks to some ad network?
Guess author of the plugin is pretty smart but not smart enough to encrypt the traffic back home or obscure his/her nasty secrets.<p>I guess it might be keeping the black stuff for some cool down time just after installation. Many malware seem to do there days. We might have got true clicks targeted.
While this was a popular plugin for Eclipse - I'm sure there are plugins for other editors, IDEs and browsers which do the same (or worse).
Yet, we often try a multitude of plugins without a single thought about any unwanted features bundled with the main features.