Greasy Fork

OK, what's this "play button" and "jfk-button" thingy doing on my Google news page?

Only appears on one page, upper right, below, it shows a standard > wedge-thingy for playing, and || for stop/pause? button when clicked on. Did Google itself install it? It shows in Mac Safari, FF, and Chrome for that specific page.

Thus:
   —>  <

>

(Extra "<" added for display)

I tracked down the code to this place, and I needs answers. Google isn't giving me any.

*need answers...

What userscript are you talking about?

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/6853-shaderoot-google/code

I never installed this thing, never even heard of it, never heard of this site. I'm not a coder. It appears on that specific Google page in all three browsers.

The ">" play button toggles with " || " stop button. See attachment, upper left region, but this should be enough information anyway. This site has a reasonable WOT rating, so I assume you guys aren't mucking around with something dirty. But maybe someone is grabbing your codes and misusing them. I want to assume that Google itself is using it. Which is slightly less obnoxious.

More details:
It appears for most any Google News "Explore in depth" pages, not elsewhere. It disappeared when I signed out of Google, as does the "Personalize" button. Thus, it's somehow associated with my account, not with the general browser code proper. There is virtually no information about author "Glenn Wiking" anywhere on Google. Who is the guy? What's going on here?

What you wrote makes no sense at all. There's no magic so if the button is there then something is doing it. Maybe it is added by Google or maybe you've installed something or ticked some setting in google account options. BTW "Personalise" is a British spelling, looks unusual unless your locale is UK.

I tracked down the code to this place

Wrong! The userscript you linked only adds styling (like different colors) to the google "code" that IS ALREADY on the page and nothing more. That is not our code, and like I said it doesn't add any buttons to the page.

The standard solution is to create a new user/profile and see if the issue is gone, then switch back and disable the extensions one by one and refresh the page until you know which one is to blame. Or you can start with Greasemonkey and if it's the culprit then proceed with finding the offending userscript.

I didn't say there was 'magic'. That has nothing to do with anything. There may be something deeply nasty, like rootkits and keyloggers, but you don't seem to be the types. I haven't installed anything, except standard AdBlock and WOT; and it appears in Safari, Chrome, and FF, the latter two I have very little to do with anyway. There are no 'extensions' attached to my Google account.

I may do as you suggest and see if I can do a 2-factor signin and change passwords, whatever.

I think it would be easier if somebody simply said that that button doesn't appear anywhere on their Google news page anywhere, signed in or not. It is very disturbing: I find it hard to believe Google would be picking up code from obscure corners of the intertubes and putting into their products.

If somebody else is doing that to anyone's browers/accounts with code that appears on your site, it would be of concern to anyone here, I would think.

I don't have these buttons on any of the google pages. I'm signed in. The page doesn't contain any jfk elements, however the CSS style references them so evidently it's google's thingy.

Maybe Google is testing something and your account was randomly selected. There's also a possibility your ISP is injecting things, it happens not that rarely throughout the world even on https pages. And I still wonder why the British spelling.

Apparently this a Canadian G-News edition. I'm not seeing any play button when I switch to U.S. edition. Instead of "Personalise", it says "Personalize this edition". The code I found here in association with other search elements, but those might have been a happenstance that narrowed it down further than is meaningful. Unfortunately, Google (or Safari) has decided not to include search-box items themselves in History any more, so I can't retrace how I landed here in the first place. Yes, the jfk-thing predates its appearance in Wiking's code here.

I believe I tracked the code down to this place—or more specifically—Glenn Wiking's contributions here because Google search finds only Wiking's play-button/jfk-button in this specific combination that would generate that button. As far as I can tell, it only appeared on Canadian-English Google pages. I cleared out a lot of site-permissions and apps etc. from my Google account, and currently the phenomenon has vanished.

Or perhaps it was indeed one of those temporary Google test-things worked out by Canadian Google developers. If that's the case, Google is going to suffer some mass-revolt by users some day, where users with accounts are simply going to jettison everything but what they need for using Android phones and gmail accounts. That will not sit well with their advertisers.