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Microsoft's sneaky plan to switch Chrome searches from Google to Bing:
Microsoft announced today that, beginning in February 2020, Office365 Pro Plus installs and updates will include a Chrome extension that forcibly changes the default search engine to Microsoft's own search engine, Bing.
[...] This new policy only takes places in specific geographic areas, as determined by a user's IP address. If you aren't in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, the UK, or the United States, you should be safe—for now
[...] Predictably, the unruly denizens of Reddit's r/sysadmin—arguably, the closest thing the modern Internet has to the scary devil monastery—are unhappy.
[...] Microsoft's actual stated reasoning for the change is to automatically enable Microsoft Search within the user's browser.
[...] Aside from the potential to enrage sysadmins and users alike, we question the wisdom of conditioning users to search for internal, likely confidential data in their Web browser's general-purpose search bar.
LibreOffice + Firefox anyone?
Additional coverage at: searchengineland
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @10:03PM (3 children)
bing.com 127.0.0.1
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @11:12PM
lol
Or perhaps you can reroute bing to Google (or whatever search engine you want) instead? I wonder if you can do it with the hosts.txt file (IIRC and if that's still used)?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 24 2020, @11:24PM (1 child)
You're assuming that they don't avoid IP lookup. IIRC, they have in the past avoided it, so they probably will this time.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:37AM
Uhm ... Maybe a restriction/redirect can be done on the router instead.