So, I had to "fix" my fathers browser again this morning. I swear sometimes letting the elderly loose on the internet feels like letting them rawdog a crackhead sex party under an overpass full of used syringes. They're guaranteed to catch something.

Anyway, he had half a dozen of scam extensions installed that all added "Yahoo by " (also, he uninstalled uBO ffs).

Why?

Has yahoo become so desperate and/or scammy that they rely on malicious extensions to drive traffic to their shitty search engine? Are they so insecure that any scammer can hijack them to inject their own ads?

How the fuck can my father catch such extensions despite me locking down pretty much everything (he's on Bluefin) and not even knowing what an extension is?

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[–] 2 points 1 day ago

the affiliate theory sounds right to me, the hijack only pays if every search goes through their tagged link. for locking it down, regular Firefox supports enterprise policies. on Bluefin it's the system Flatpak, so put a policies.json in /var/lib/flatpak/extension/org.mozilla.firefox.systemconfig/x86_64/stable/policies/ with ExtensionSettings set to "*": {"installation_mode": "blocked"} and "uBlock0@raymondhill.net": {"installation_mode": "force_installed"}. that removes the junk, blocks new installs and he can't uninstall uBO again. restart Firefox and check about:policies to see it applied.

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