How can perplexity.com persist on the browser without extension

2 points by roscas 16 days ago | 2 comments

I talked about this before on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142325

Facts: - restarted archlinux yesterday after updates, so browser will start clean - did not open perplexity.com since that restart - on the morning chromium tried to open perplexity.com - again after more or less 8 hours, another call to that site - I don't have any extension other than ublock origin on Chromium: Version 147.0.7727.116 (Official Build, ungoogled-chromium) Arch Linux (64-bit)

So why is chromium trying to open perplexity.com?

I have opensnitch installed and every connection prompts to allow or deny, that is why I can find this requests. I did use perplexity a few days ago, but sure it was before update, so pc was restarted.

This was made from /usr/lib/chromium/chromium.

Even /usr/lib/firefox/browser/omni.ja is full of perplexity.ai crap, and some other sites, but that is shocking. I found perplexity mentions on Firefox, Librewolf and Thunderbird libs. But none for Chromium.

I know there is a aur/perplexity 1.5.1-2 client but I don't have it installed, as I don't have any account with them.

This is worst than a virus. I don't even know where to start to find evidence? Chromium code?

roscas 16 days ago |

Hum, I will use perplexity to find what is the mistery in here. Remember that chromium is trying to open perplexity.ai and I don't know what triggered it, even if it was something outside of chromium. So far, I cannot blame anyone... yet. update: I also cannot exclude Firefox that I use at the same time and opensnitch caught the request but shows chromium instead of firefox.

bitpush 16 days ago |

Do you have browser history? I wonder whether handshake is happening of the last N entries in the history.