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?

My guess would be that Yahoo is one of the few search engines with some sort of affiliate program, so if the scammers can get a browser to redirect all searches - with their affiliate code attached - they can make extra money after the initial infection. Maybe Yahoo's has some of the loosest requirements for signups, which would explain why it shows up most often?

It's possible their intention is to represent themselves as the search engine, and the demographic they target lines up well with people that use Yahoo for search?

I wouldn't be surprised to see some represent themselves as AOL either, for example.

Anything anyone old enough to not know what they're doing will look at and think, "That's the internet."

Install diff . browser try.

https://librewolf.net/

Maybe experiment with making the extensions directory read-only so they can't be uninstalled, but that might not prevent merely disabling them.

Your situation might actually be a use-case for Firefox Enterprise as and when that comes out. It's likely to cost money though. Assuming they don't make the feature set available for regular Firefox sysadmins for free anyway.

That would indeed be a very plausible explanation... most of the links are ads it's incredibly horrible.

despite me locking down pretty much everything (he’s on Bluefin)

Maybe Bluefin... isn't good? I know nothing about it, except that it's pretty far down the list of search results even when the search term is "bluefin software" specifically, and that the homepage sets off my bullshit detector talking about it being made by "cloud-native enthusiasts." Maybe it's "new and up-and-coming" or something, but from my perspective it just looks unpopular.

I haven't actually used any immutable distros and don't know whether any of their designs would actually keep a browser extension set 'immutable,' but maybe try a more popular one, like NixOS...?

I get frustrated with my parents for being computer-illiterate too, but it's posts like these that remind me it could be worse: they're so computer-illiterate that they're almost scared to use it at all and don't go messing with stuff like that. FWIW, they're just on normal Debian and Firefox and so far, it's been fine.

I disagree - I wish people weren't scared so they could build up that skill. There's so many skills that start with some fear and getting over it, with or without a few mistakes, is the best thing to do.

This happened recently to me, it was kinda crazy because I always thought I was better than this. No idea what extension it was but I have Google as the default search engine but CloudFlare gave some notice that whatever-search.com was down and I was like wtf!

They used windows group policy to lock down the search engine so I couldn't change it from Yahoo too. But it still would up taking me to Google. It was only on one of my mini PCs I rarely touch so I never paid attention. Going to install debian on that guy today and make it headless!

Nah. Bluefin is great. It's made by the same people as Bazzite, just much more vanilla and not gaming focused. The issue is 100% between the chair and the keyboard and confined to the browser. I know the system itself is safe, but no amount of immutability can prevent userspace fuckups.