Malicious Code in Kodi Addons!
C/P By TV ADDONS Staff
It was recently brought to our attention that in the last few weeks, one or more developers have pushed certain code updates to their addons, which effectively deleted an addon created by another developer and/or made other unauthorized changes to users’ systems.
We want to make our position clear on the matter: we are strongly opposed to any modification made by addons outside their own installation path, their own profile path, or Kodi database path without the end user’s explicit permission to do so prior to any instance of such a modification occuring. We will not under any circumstances permit an addon developer to take it upon him or herself to remove another developer’s addon.
It is imperative that any addon containing any code that falls outside the rules outlined above remove such code immediately. Failure to comply with these community standards within 24 hours will result in complete excommunication from our community, and removal from comunity distribution tools such as the Fusion Installer and Addon Installer. It should be noted that such leeway will not be afforded to addons in the future, any addon that is found to contain such malicious code will be instantly banned.
It is important to us that it be made clear that banning addons from our community is not something we take lightly and would truly prefer to never have to do so, but we cannot in good conscience allow the discussion nor distribution of addons which could negatively impact an end user’s system. As the community grows, we need to ensure that a certain level of integrity is maintained in order to protect the security and privacy of our users.
If you’re an end user and have reason to be concerned about a specific addon, please feel free to send a private message to any of our staff members at our discussion forums so that they can check it out. Please refrain from posting publicly about this type of concern, as we prefer to prevent the spread of misinformation, unfounded witchhunts and the publicity of potentially malicious addons.
As for addon developers who are concerned with other developers using content from your addon without proper attribution, you are encouraged to do your best to attempt to amicably resolve the situation. We really try to keep our community positive and drama free, and a little bit of polite discussion sometimes goes a long way. If you can’t work it out amicably, in the most extreme cases the most we can accept is to prevent your own addon from running while the addon you are concerned with remains installed on the user’s system.
It is our belief that each user has the right to decide for themselves what is installed on their system, and destructive actions taken by any addon, even with the best intentions, subverts that right. In the future, we hope to explore potential options for preventing the use of malicious code on devices owned by visitors of this site.
