No - it was the language that I said was transphobic, not the author. Given that there were two different word choices (“transsexual” and “perceived gender”) that reinforced each other, it seems more likely than not that they reflected the mindset of the author, but not having looked further for their other writings I was not sure. That’s why I said " transphobic language" and not “transphobic author”.

More, but there’s an even simpler solution. In the context, the author is distinguishing between “sex assigned at birth” and “perceived gender.” The equivocating word " perceived" could simply be dropped with no loss of clarity.

There’s nothing wrong with the example in and of itself, but the word “transsexual” in place of “transgender” is not generally random. It is explicitly chosen by Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) as well as by right-wing transphobes as a dog whistle to conflate gender dysphoria with drag queens and cross-dess fetishists so as to delegitimise transpeople and suggest some sort of sexual deviance. Coupled with the equivocation of “perceived” gender, motive doesn’t even have to come into it. The words themselves and the concepts they reinforce are transphobic and harmful.

A witch hunt would have been for me to say that the author is a transphobic asshole whose writings need to be wiped from the internet - which is very far from what I actually posted, which was regret for the way the language they chose distracted from the flow of their argument by reinforcing the social stigmatization of trans people. (Edit: That was a deliberate choice on my part. Not knowing enough about the author to be sure of motives and having no desire to deep dive into their history, I decided that it was only appropriate to point out the hurtful nature of the language and not imply motive.)

A well argued point. Could have done without the random transphobic comments about “transsexuals” and “perceived gender”.

Good point. That was in the “static IP” category and not counted in the 200+ million install “malicious code” category, though. It could be a warning sign of false positives, but the example was such a small snippet it could also be opening after a VPN is established. That example was supposedly part of code that opens a connection for shell access from the other end, but without more details it’s not really possible to say.

The researchers are releasing the scanning tool they created for people to be able to run against their own installs.

Except their summary is wrong. The researchers went on to search other extensions for known malicious code, and found it in thousands of extensions with tens of millions of total installs.