My gf told me they blocked all addons at work, including adblock. Told her to recommend to the IT department that adblock be mandatory on all computers. Ad networks make too much money not to look the other way on malvertising.
Even large companies have adopted this crap and you don't know whether there's any digital signing going on or whether they're downright stealing anything you have of value.
It's not difficult to generate a rpm, deb, tgz and relevant detatched .asc PGP signature or if you hate PGP use openssh signatures or something.
Trusting distro maintainers to curate software in their repos can help, if you only ever install from the curated repos. If there's some software not in the repo which you need, then you can't rely on that trust. "Stable" distros like Debian are less likely to have all the necessary software in their repos, and the difficulty of getting software into a curated repo itself creates legitimate software that doesn't get into repos. That means "is this software in my distro's repository" can give a good signal that some software is safe, but can't give much signal that the software is unsafe.
> Alphabet (Google) reported historic financial results for fiscal year 2025 (ending Dec 31, 2025), with annual revenue surpassing $400 billion for the first time. The company showed strong profit growth, with Q4 2025 net income at $34.5 billion, a 30% increase year-over-year. Key growth drivers were AI integration, YouTube ads, and a surging Cloud segment.
You can literally find this exact same blog post from approximately 20 years ago. Absolutely nothing has changed since then!
Well, I lied. A lot has changed. Drive-by attacks are gone, largely thanks to Google. 15 years ago you would’ve been hacked immediately after you clicked the ad.