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Tell HN: Microsoft Defender webfilter now blocking entire brave.com domain

24 points by soupfordummies ↗ HN
Noticed this morning that my searches were getting blocked in Brave. Did some digging and see that they are now blocking everything from brave.com in their default web filter under the "Downloads" category.

Blocking a rival browser/search engine... hmm...

8 comments

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RadixDLT
time for ubuntu
deprecative
Do you have anything to add or are you just going with low effort basement nerd?
RadixDLT
Microsoft will literally record everything you do on your computer and then go back in time and watch you happily click on stuff.
RadixDLT
I have windows 11 and its not blocked
soupfordummies
Ah yeah, to clarify this is the enterprise endpoint Defender, not regular consumer. If yours is an org machine, your org's filtering setup may be looser
logicalmonster
Are other search engines/browsers/advertising networks similarly blocked, or is this exclusive to Brave?

Not to defend Microsoft here, but these kinds of large-scale blacklists are almost always riddled with errors and fuckups from the rushed staff who are assigned to quickly review domains to meet their quotas.

soupfordummies
Yeah, to be fair their web filter is really inconsistent (it even blocks some Microsoft sites).

Haven't seen any other search/browser and Brave/search has been working fine for as long as we've used this web filter... until this morning

logicalmonster
Just a small thought, but if there is any automation involved in determining these blacklists, I bet some of the keywords on Brave's site might be automatically classified as risky such as Tor Onion, Wallet, Crypto, malware. That might be enough to merit a default negative classification.

Not trying to excuse Microsoft, but there's other conceivable explanations (incompetence) here other than the obvious "Microsoft is trying to throw friction onto a competitor's business" (which remains a possibility, of course)

But it's pretty gross either way that these kinds of filtering lists would have such errors. Brave is probably ok either way, but what about a random small business that wrongly gets put on such a list? People are harmed by this level of carelessness from companies like Microsoft.