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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: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @08:09PM (1 child)
So what? [chromium.org]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 24 2020, @08:47PM
That's the way to do it
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday January 24 2020, @08:18PM (5 children)
Libreoffice + Waterfox.
Well, actually mostly LaTeX + Waterfox. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 24 2020, @08:51PM (4 children)
Emacs + Netscape [seamonkey-project.org]
vi + lynx?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Friday January 24 2020, @09:23PM (3 children)
ex + elinks?
ed + curl?
echo + wget?
Maybe talk the old way, words and sounds?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 24 2020, @10:01PM (2 children)
To hell with the sound
quill + parchment
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @10:56PM (1 child)
Oh, but the poor lusers will be confused with no sound.
Caveman cubicles are the pointy-haired boss solution.
Therefore, I propose: hammers and chisels on stone tablets.
Lusers will hear the *tink* *tink* of typing(even better than the old beloved IBM 'clacker' keyboards), and HR can hear/feel the *crash* n *smash* of doc's being 'shredded' to compliance. ;-)
rts008
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 24 2020, @11:04PM
edlin + usenet
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 3, Funny) by NateMich on Friday January 24 2020, @08:43PM (6 children)
Irritating your customers is always great for market share.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Friday January 24 2020, @08:45PM (3 children)
If you or I did this, we'd be in the lockup for "hacking."
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Funny) by hemocyanin on Friday January 24 2020, @09:09PM (2 children)
Who -- google or MS?
(Score: 5, Touché) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Friday January 24 2020, @09:26PM (1 child)
Yes.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 4, Funny) by hemocyanin on Saturday January 25 2020, @01:50AM
Dang it -you're already +5. If I had a sockpuppet account, I'd mod you down so I could mod you up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @05:52AM (1 child)
I don't think they're customers anymore. I don't quite know what they are now... they're not exactly prisoners, and they're not quite hostages, but they're definitely not customers.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:41PM
If they are running Windows then they, or someone on their behalf, gave Microsoft money.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @09:06PM (2 children)
Remember back in the good old days that they would get in trouble for doing this kind of thing?
Pepperidge Farm remembers [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday January 24 2020, @09:48PM
Yeah, I remember: While that was being prosecuted and decided, they increased their lobbying spending considerably, and all of a sudden the prospect of a breakup and any real punishment went away. They learned their lesson well: Bribing the government is good for business.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @10:26PM
I 'member
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Friday January 24 2020, @09:40PM (2 children)
I am trying out "Brave" in Win10, initially as a PDF reader, but also to verify its functionality.
I have noticed that unwanted extensions, such as "Avast" magically show up in both browsers, but can be disabled.
Is it possible to disable this new extension in Brave?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 24 2020, @10:50PM (1 child)
If you get sick of Brave's shit, go WaterFox instead. I never understood why Brave was higher-rated, it's got all kinds of little privacy-autist-triggering shit that's not straightforward (if not impossible) to disable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @05:18PM
(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.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 24 2020, @11:01PM (5 children)
Can somebody give me a quick rundown of how this behavior works any differently from Chrome or Firefox? And anyway, if it's proprietary enough to warrant keeping a secret, than searching it in that manner isn't going to help much anyway. Everytime I see people needing help with proprietary shit and not having the internal help they need to solve the problems, they will go to the product forum of their choice (Stackexchange, LabVIEW Forums, etc.) and sanitize their example with generic variable names and other altered shit (LabVIEW is pretty cool for this because you can censor bits of a complicated algorithm quickly with MS Paint rather than have to search and replace text or rewrite a whole algo).
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 24 2020, @11:26PM (4 children)
I don't know about Chrome, but in FireFox you can choose which search engine you want as your default. Sometimes I choose Google, and sometimes I choose Duck-duck-go. Somehow I never choose Bing...but I could.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 24 2020, @11:41PM
The point I was trying to make was that searching externally to corporate doesn't make a difference whether or not it was Bing, Google, Yahoo, or even DuckDuckGo.
Those are all essentially the same searches, just with different skins, anyway. DuckDuckGo just pretends to suck more than the others so it can fool you into believing that it's less deep-state.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:46AM (2 children)
Chrome->Settings->Search Engine->Search engine used in the address bar
You can also add custom search engines under Manage search engines
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:02AM (1 child)
From my understanding, if you do this the extension will just change it back to Bing (hence the reason they install an extension rather than just changing your default). You need to remove the extension first before you change reset your default.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @12:53AM
Which is why they should burn for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @11:16PM
Unless it comes up 'do you want to do this' they should be sued into oblivion. Burnt to the ground, and we all get to have a party stamping on their ashes.
(Score: 4, Touché) by sonamchauhan on Saturday January 25 2020, @02:50AM
The postman does not like your newspaper.
So, next month he'll put a note on your porch telling the newsboy you've decided to read the 'The Daily Bing' instead.
Postman's been planning this a long time. But if you don't want this, login to his website and ask nicely. You got a few days.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @09:15AM
All fine and well as a suggestion (though I have little love for vanilla Firefox)
Unfortunately, for most of humanity, they'd still be running these fine products on a Microsoft platform, one where they control the horizontal, they control the vertical etc. etc....they, if the notion takes them, can still interfere in the operations of other code running on their platform in any way they like at an untouchable low level.
So, Libreoffice and Firefox, yes, but running on any other OS than a Microsoft one..