develwoutacause’s avatardevelwoutacause’s Twitter Archive—№ 887

  1. I was using #Chrome today when I happened to notice a tag line that it was "managed", meaning some company owns the browser as a corp device. This was confusing to me because it was my *personal* computer, never associated with any company. WTF? Was this a hack or something?
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    On twitter.com Twitter logo develwoutacause’s avatar ❤️ 1 Favorite Mood -6 🙁
    1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
      What "organization" is managing my browser? Looking around, there is malware that manages your browser, but usually to manipulate it into using their search engine / trick you into other things. I hadn't noticed any sketchy behavior recently, was someone spying on me?
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      1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
        I found that you can "unmanage" the device on #Windows by deleting some registry keys, I started digging around to look for any identifying information, a company name, C&C URL, ... support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9844476?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwindows
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        1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
          All the registry keys were empty except for one: DisablePrintPreview. This sounded really familiar, had I edited this before? Digging through my browser history, I found this page about disabling print preview: pupuweb.com/solved-fix-print-preview-chrome/
          /img/NRqKWLpYNo.jpeg
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          1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
            Then it hit me, a long time ago I encountered a Chrome bug where printing a web page would just hang on the preview screen. My workaround was to regedit the key to disable that preview screen so I could print the page. Worked at the time, and I forgot all about it.
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            1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
              Apparently a side effect I hadn't noticed is that setting this policy meant that Chrome assumed this device was managed by organization, even though there was no other information to that effect on the device. Deleting this key removes the "Your device is managed" message.
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              1. …in reply to @develwoutacause
                Not sure what the point of this was, but I guess this is a fun fact about Chrome? If you enable any policy registry key, it just assumes you're on a managed device with no additional configuration required. That was a fun 30 minutes.
                Permalink On twitter.com Twitter logo develwoutacause’s avatar ❤️ 2 Favorites Mood +7 🙂