raesene5
We're starting to see that idea come about with platforms like https://www.seedrs.com/ where if it goes swimingly the backers do well out of it, which kind of offsets the risk.
I think the problem with standard crowd-funding is the people doing the project obviously have an interest in downplaying the risks, and the platform does too, so with no regulation that's exactly what'll happen, and then we get a lot of very late, underdelivering projects which will sour people on the whole concept.
And the bit where a very dubious interpretation of the CFAA which is opposed by the EFF was used as the legal basis to sue 3Taps...
Probably one of the most obvious is that access to the repos is over unencrypted HTTP connections which opens the process up to tampering (depending on the attacker) for example injecting an older version of a package with a known security issue.
Of course what's extra worrying is it's not just the libs you directly install, but all their dependencies which get to carry out these actions. So for example when you install rails, it will install quite a large number of subsidiary gems.
Then when you add in the fact that the credentials that control dev access to push to places like rubygems and npm are just static username/password combos (which sometimes get stored in plain text in a dot file in the developers home dir) and that there's no common use of digital signing for issued libs (in some cases the installers don't even support it).
AFAIK google have applied for a large number of TLDs, this is one of them