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Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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I have said this in other threads about this issue in response to all the "use Firefox" comments.
Thousands upon thousands of school children are currently using Chromebooks they get from their schools. Now they will be forced to look at ads.
I'm pretty sure they would've been seeing ads anyways. I doubt that school IT administrators had uBlock Origins as an extension that was being installed and I really doubt they didn't have the chromebooks locked down so students could install whatever extensions they wanted.
Good, smart IT would have installed ublock and locked that shit down. Saves bandwidth and protects the kids.
But you're probably right, most IT departments are useless.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's not a good practice, but I just don't see them doing it.
Don't think it saves bandwidth unless it's a DNS level block, which IT should also do but separately from uBO
I was able to install it on my daughter's Chromebook.
They're forced to look at ads anyway, as the IT dept blocks installing extensions
The IT department at my daughter's school allowed me to install the uBlock Origin extension last year. Granted, some extensions (and websites for that matter, no PornHub) were blocked, but not that one.
I'm willing to bet you're the exception and not the rule. I can confirm from my own experience that we couldn't even alter the system settings of the individual device.
I would personally push adblockers in a professional environment. They eliminate a lot of unwanted threat vectors.
There is a very rare occasion where it breaks things just one ticket later and a little education and it's good.
Definitely! It's just unfortunate that many times the people in charge of doing that don't know that.
Around the time the FBI quietly updated their security recommendations to include recommending adblocking a couple of large local colleges in the very conservative area I live started pushing uBlock Origin to all of their computers. And if I were higher on the foodchain at my place of work I'd be pushing to enact a similar policy update
Altering system settings wasn't possible when I was in school, but browser settings weren't so locked down. Extensions were freely available to install on the school computers.
That wasn't the case for us, we couldn't download anything that didn't come pre-installed. If the teachers wanted to use a website that was blocked by the cartoonishly restrictive web filter they had to wait upwards of a week because all of the IT was done by one guy who was also a teacher.
Our IT team was pretty cool I think.
I had a technology class when I was there that only had 6 students in this little computer lab in the back of the cafeteria. There were way more computers than than students though, so the few of us that were there started unplugging monitors from the unused computers next to us and giving our computers multiple monitors. We couldn't rearrange the monitors since they were physically attached to the tables, and they couldn't be reordered in Windows since system settings were locked, so we just had to remember that to get to the left monitor we'd actually have to move the mouse to the right for example.
Not even a week later, someone from IT showed up to check on things. We thought that would be it for our multi-monitor setups and they'd make us put them back, but not a beat was missed between them noticing what we had done, realizing that the monitors were in the wrong order, and offering to fix it for us in the settings.
Yeah our IT guy was cool and always tried to be helpful, it's just that he was given the job of a whole team on top of being a full time teacher, while also constantly facing criticism from the school board for being unable to keep up. You could tell he was only there for the students, because his bosses treated him like shit.
Except he was also a big time trump supporter and ended up losing his job after (from what I heard) bringing a gun on a school trip.
So nobody's perfect I guess.
Gotta get 'em hooked while they're young...
Joe Camel
Tbh I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t a goal of the chromebook project
I don't want to be "that guy", but the ads school-aged kids are viewing come from the apps they are using, not their web browsing on Chrome.
And they are even more heavily impacted when their favourite content creator hucks sponsored products, which can't be blocked with an adblocker.
I feel like I've dodged a bullet by not being exposed to 99.9% of the ads out there, but that's only because I don't use toxic social media apps or YouTube in its designed form.
Except no they don't because they have to do things like research for their essays, which requires using the web in general.
Maybe it depends on the school system, but my kid's Chromebook was locked down, so they couldn't really explore the full internet. Many sites are either white or blacklisted, so they were researching from a website designed to be used by students - not many ads, but yeah, going off script would get them into ad territory.
Still, they aren't seeing the majority of ads from the few minutes they need to look up a research topic.
I was done with school before giving out computers to students was the norm, but my brother's school district seems to be issuing Surface Laptops instead of Chromebooks. With Firefox preinstalled.
It must be a wealthier school district because Chromebooks are far cheaper, even in bulk, than Surface notebooks.
https://discountcomputerdepot.com/shop?product_listings=Chromebooks+For+Students
Wow those things can really get down in price. I think the district is issuing the original Surface Laptop Go, which went for about $500 when they were new and bought individually. No idea what kind of discount they could get for buying in bulk though, educational institution pricing is hidden behind having to "contact sales".
given the typical IT inertia, that will be a problem when they update chrome in 5 years.