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Comment by watertom | Hacker News Reader

I blocked Grammarly at my last company, nothing like giving a company tracking access to everything you type or read, and their EULA gives them the rights to everything they track.

Using Grammarly is stupid, paying them is downright insane.

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We block extensions, period, on Google Chrome, as it prevents most malware outright. But then we've also discovered Grammarly's Microsoft Office plugin installs to the user folder (without requiring admin rights) as well. I've made a request to our antivirus vendor to add detection and blocking of Grammarly specifically, for the moment we're detecting it a different way.

May I ask how you're detecting it? If you can't say [or don't want to] for whatever reason that's fine, I'm merely curious is all.

We have a couple different layers we can work with here, both on the computers and the network.

He asked for a specific thing, and you answered with nothing at all.

What if GP was working for Grammarly and wanted to avoid detection?

I do not, but that's not an invalid concern.

He also indicated he understood that one might not want to detail their network security measures in detail. ;)

That's OK, I figured he or she may not want to publicly reveal details, that is understandable in this case imho. As I said I was just curious if it was maybe a simple solution that could be implemented elsewhere.

Is it possible to force uBlock and HTTPS Everywhere, but stop all other extensions?

Yes. Google offers ADMX templates for controlling Chrome which can be deployed through group policy. It includes an extension blacklist, which accepts wildcards. In my case, I put a * in there. It also has an extension whitelist, and a list of "force-installed apps and extensions".

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/187202?hl=en

This is one place where Google actually did really do their homework, IMHO.

Is something comparable available for Firefox?

They are working on it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/EnterprisePolicies

I found a Firefox ADMX template project on GitHub, though it's third party and entails running a VBS file on system startup, so I wouldn't recommend it.

Most software patching solutions have a way to push files though, and you can use something like this: https://www.itsupportguides.com/knowledge-base/tech-tips-tri...

One of the reasons I started writing my own editor.

Interesting, how is the progress going so far? I think there is a lot of demand out there for a certain type of editor.

A certain type you say?

Oh well, you know. https://eddtor.com

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