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How to disabel users from changing your homepage and downloading programs

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 7 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Hello:

 I would like to request your guidance. Lately, our community computers, we are having the unpleasant problem of getting Trojans and hijacks from users downloading programs and changing our homepage. We would like to know if there is a way to disable users from making changes. 

We hope you can kindly instruct us in how can we prevent and secure our computers. Your help is very much appreciated.

Hello: I would like to request your guidance. Lately, our community computers, we are having the unpleasant problem of getting Trojans and hijacks from users downloading programs and changing our homepage. We would like to know if there is a way to disable users from making changes. We hope you can kindly instruct us in how can we prevent and secure our computers. Your help is very much appreciated.

All Replies (3)

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Take a look at the Kiosk extensions available at AMO for Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=Kiosk&appver=20.0&platform=windows

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There is a feature to "lock" preferences such as the home page. This article has more information: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Lock_Prefs. However, extensions can override that once they fire up, so I'm not sure how effective it will be.

Ideally every user would come to a fresh, clean, trustworthy install of Firefox. Could you use virtual machine/sandboxing technology to launch an isolated instance of Firefox that is destroyed when you exit the browser? Windows 7 Professional may include something along these lines, or perhaps a third party product could help.

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You can use a mozilla.cfg file in the Firefox program folder to lock prefs or specify new (default) values.

Place a file local-settings.js in the defaults\pref folder where you also find the file channel-prefs.js to specify using mozilla.cfg.

pref("general.config.filename", "mozilla.cfg");
pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0); // use this to disable the byte-shift

See:

These functions can be used in the mozilla.cfg file:

defaultPref();  // set new default value
pref();         // set pref, but allow changes in current session
lockPref();     // lock pref, disallow changes

You can also look at this extension:

You can hide the extension in the Add-ons manager with code in userContent.css to make it more difficult to remove or disable the extension.

Open the extension's XPI (ZIP) archive and look in the install.rdf file to see the ID (<em:id>xxx</em:id>) of that extension, GUID between curly brackets {} or an email address if that is used as ID.

@-moz-document url(about:addons){
#addons-page richlistitem[value="GUID"] { display:none!important; }
}

See also: