SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the when-the-new-shiny-is-not-always-better dept.
Google's plans to limit ad blockers in Chrome have already led many users to consider switching browsers. People's anger was made worse by the confirmation that the only people who will avoid the changes to the way ad blockers work in Chrome will be Google's enterprise users. Advertising is at the heart of Google's business model and so unsurprisingly, users have been questioning the software giant's motives.
And now, another prominent voice has entered the debate. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the move will not help security and in fact, will probably hinder it.
The plans, dubbed Manifest V3, represent a major transformation to Chrome extensions including a revamp of the permissions system. As a result, modern ad blockers such as uBlock Origin—which uses Chrome's webRequest API to block ads before they're downloaded–won't work. This is because Manifest V3 sees Google halt the webRequest API's ability to block a particular request before it's loaded. The plans are earmarked for release into the Google Canary channel around now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:47PM (4 children)
And now it is impossible to stop firefox from auto updating too. Disgusting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @01:27PM (1 child)
I assume you're on windows since you'd probably update via package management otherwise. It is still possible to prevent it from updating, just not from within the browser. You need to toggle a group policy [ghacks.net] for that now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @01:53PM
Thanks for that link, I've been using autoconfig for years and wasn't aware of the GPO efforts. There's also some useful lockPref settings discussed in the comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:23PM (1 child)
Automatic updates are putting a tremendous amount of faith into the software maker to not do horrible things to your system since they already have a foothold there. While it is arguable that they can do that anyway, in this case they arguably already have your trust and have embedded their software into your work environment, making it much less likely that you will be willing (or able) to dispose of them, giving them an increasingly free reign to do as they will with no oversight but themselves.
Forced automatic updates are basically handing the software makers outright ownership of your computer, seeing as how they now have what amounts to a back door.
I would suggest considering solutions such as virtual machines or other environments that are easier to control, although if you're running Windows 10 there isn't a whole lot of a point; even Google's spyware isn't nearly as bad as modern Windows spyware.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @05:09PM
The problem isn't so much the software vendor (not that I disagree with you on that point), but more that anybody who gains control over the update pipeline will gain control over everybody hooked into the
botnetforced automatic updates.