this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024

694 points (97.4% liked)

Technology

57472 readers

3757 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

694

Microsoft is once again injecting pop-up ads into Google Chrome on Windows in a bid to get people to switch to Bing (www.theverge.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

123 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The software giant first introduced malware-like pop-up ads last year with a prompt that appeared over the top of other apps and windows. After pausing that notification to address “unintended behavior,” the pop-ups have returned again on Windows 10 and 11.

Windows users have reported seeing the new pop-up in recent days, advertising Bing AI and Microsoft’s Bing search engine inside Google Chrome. If you click yes to this prompt, then Microsoft will set Bing as the default search engine for Chrome. These latest prompts look like malware, and once again have Windows users asking if they are legit or nefarious. Microsoft has confirmed to The Verge that the pop-ups are genuine and should only appear once.

Every trick Microsoft pulled to make you browse Edge instead of Chrome

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Easy Solution: Linux, Firefox/LibreWolf, DuckDuckGo

Fuck Microsoft!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Ddg has content bubbles and tracking that you can stop.

Turn off location and you will still get results relevant to your area filling the page.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Duckduckgo once allowed trackers from Microsoft

Source: www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N3792HE

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (3 children)

This only applies to the mobile app
They stopped doing this in 2022
LibreWolf comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, which blocks all sorts of ads, trackers and other malicious JavaScript

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Ublock Origin does not block "malicious Javascript" reliably. You need NoScript for that, and a opt-in approach. Block everything, unblock what you need, hope its not malicious.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

uBO can be set up to block all JS by default, allowing you to manually whitelist each script. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-mode

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I also run disabling addons for java script and flash as well as an overlay remover in Firefox

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Flash should be possible to disable about:config as its legacy technology.

Could you explain the overlay remover?

Noscript is the only good addon for blocking javascript and allowing only some parts for specific origins.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Those pop up pages that prevent you from seeing the underlying page. It doesn't happen as often anymore but it's nice to have a way to remove them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

That probably is a Ublock origin filterlist. Did you ever open UBOs settings? Try to not use too many, too many lists increase RAM and CPU usage and are all using badness enumeration so they will be 80% duplicates.

I dont know if UBO deduplicates them (removes duplicates), that would make sense.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

While I actually do that, you cannot seriously recommend it to anyone. Hardly any site works without Javascript nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes thats why you have the button to click on. I also need to allowlist basically every site I visit.

There should be some way to share such a list, to reduce the manual work.

I highly recommend manually enabling Javascript.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sometimes it's great. If people complain about paywalls, for example, and you didn't even see the pop-up.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago

And sometimes it prevents sites from working, because paywalls that are avoidable by blocking the cover are deprecated and nowadays real solutions are used. This means such size will just break.

Ublock can also remove overlays, and I am sure it you add more lists they will be blocked by default.

Having less code run in your browser is always recommended.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I have nothing to do with Librewolf at all. Don't confuse the two. I just said what Duckduckgo did with trackers based on a search agreement with Microsoft. BTW, this issue was initially exposed by others, not Duckduckgo itself.

[+] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Suggest a better alternative then. Startpage, Mullvad Leta and Whoogle are just Google proxies (and Whoogle is pretty unreliable), SearX, SearXNG and 4get are also just proxies for multiple search engines. There are no good independent search engiens, Brave Search sucks because it's made by Brave, a company notorious for pushing weird NFT and Blockchain shit, Mojeek has pretty bad search results and Kagi requires an account, and only allows 100 searches.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

sorry to hear that; if you are using us any point in the future and want to flag this, we have a "submit feedback" button on pages, this is a really useful thing to do for us, as it helps us to identify results which are not so good :D

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I would love to switch away from DuckDuckGo, and I would be very happy if Mojeek was a viable alternative. I'll try using it for some time and I will report any issues I encounter with the search. Btw it's great that you're on the Fediverse!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

thanks a lot in advance, and fedi is where it's at ! 💯

[+] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

And DDG is just a proxy for Bing following that logic. I’d choose those three over DDG.

Yeah, but if the alternatives aren't better, why not just use DDG?

Making a new account every 100 searches should be an option (albeit a somewhat tedious one), no?

That ain't a great solution either

[+] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Tell me which of the options I listed you would use.

Startpage is owned by an advertising company
Mullvad Leta is only available to Mullvad VPN customers
Brave does a whole bunch of shady stuff, e.g. installing VPN services on people's computers, although they never asked for it

The other options aren't good either

[+] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Never heard of it.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/6/20/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-search-engine-used-in-the-mullvad-browser

It's pretty neat and Mullvad is a very privacy-focused company with a great track record. They released their search engine (which is a Google proxy) together with their own browser, which is based on the Tor Browser and developed together with the Tor Project.

SearXNG and 4get is what I recommend for privacy. They get their results from other search engines but those won’t be able to trace the query back to you. Also, it’s open source and everyone can set up their own instance so there is no incentive to generate profit from your data.

I tried to use 4get as a DDG proxy, all the instances I tried kept getting blocked by DuckDuckGo. It wasn't a great experience. I also tried SearX and SearXNG many times, I always keep coming back to DuckDuckGo, because it just works and it gives me decent results. With SearX, I often had trouble finding relevant results. I tried various options and different search engine backends in SearXNG, but I never really liked it. DDG is definitely far from perfect, but so are the other options, and I think DDG is the best and easiest to use for less technical users.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

>Brave, a company notorious for pushing weird NFT and Blockchain shit,

what nft shit?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

https://brave.com/category/web3-crypto-nfts/