Highly Suspect Agency
I became aware of the mod "Create: Protection Pixel" uploaded by JEDIGD today through a /r/feedthememes post, although the mod has been exposed 10 days before on /r/feedthebeast. Version 1.1.3 of the mod is notable for displaying a very strange GUI when you first logged into a world.
In this post, I'll summarize the code found inside Create: Protection Pixel, discuss Bright Data (the company who appears to be behind the code) and their behaviors in the modded Minecraft community, and I'll conclude with a more detailed analysis of the code inside Protection Pixel for those interested.
Create: Protection Pixel is a popular Create addon with over half a million downloads. It is available on CurseForge and was formerly available on Modrinth; its page has now been taken down. It was made with MCreator.
Ever since version 1.1.2, the mod .jar bundles the Amplitude Java SDK under com.amplitude, and the org.json:json library (a dependency of Amplitude SDK) under org.json. Amplitude is a software analytics company. This is, obviously, unusual code to find in a Minecraft mod.
