uBlock Origin is no longer available to install

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uBlock Origin is no longer available to install, and the content-blocking floor just moved out from under hundreds of millions of browsers. Google today completed the Manifest V2 deprecation it has been dragging out for years: every remaining MV2 extension has been removed from the Chrome Web Store, and the most consequential casualty is uBlock Origin, the de facto standard content blocker and ad blocker for the Chromium web.

The immediate effect is narrower than it sounds. Google confirmed that MV2 extensions already installed on Chrome 138 or earlier stay installed — they just cannot receive updates and cannot be reinstalled from the store once removed. What died today is the supply line: no new users, no new installations, no security updates for the people still running the old platform. The extensions are frozen where they sit, aging against a web that keeps moving.

The damage is not confined to Chrome. The Chrome Web Store is the extension marketplace for the entire Chromium ecosystem, and browsers that still support Manifest V2 — Brave is the notable example — have no storefront for it anymore. Users of those browsers who never installed uBlock Origin cannot get it through the ordinary channel, because the ordinary channel is Google’s, and Google has shut the door.

Brave is refusing to let the transition take the best content blocker down with it. The browser team has decided to host four popular MV2 extensions — AdGuard, uBlock Origin, uMatrix, and NoScript — on its own backend and let users enable them directly in a Brave installation. It is a small, deliberate carve-out: Brave keeps the old platform alive as a matter of product policy, even as Google declares it dead.

Google’s case for the cut is not unserious. Manifest V3 was designed to constrain what extensions can reach into a browsing session — tighter permission scoping, fewer remote code paths, more predictable performance — and browser extensions hold an extraordinary amount of access to what users do online. Those are legitimate problems, and MV3’s restrictions have real security value. But the trade is not symmetric. MV3’s declarativeNetRequest API caps and shapes what blockers can do, and uBlock Origin’s author has long said the MV3 rebuild is a fundamentally less capable tool, one that cannot match the original’s filtering without the very powers Google took away.

What is true today: the most capable content blocker ever built for Chrome is, for practical purposes, retired from distribution. Its successor — uBlock Origin Lite, an MV3 rewrite — remains on the store, and it works, but it is not the same product and its author has never pretended otherwise.

The party whose move decides where this lands is Brave. Its self-hosted MV2 backend is the one place on the modern Chromium web where uBlock Origin still installs and updates, and it becomes the de facto home for an entire category of power-user extensions that Google has abandoned. The question that will answer itself over the coming months is whether Brave becomes a genuine refuge for the blocking crowd — and whether the people who follow uBlock Origin there stay, once they are used to a browser that does not require them to ask Google’s permission to install the software they want. For now, the plain fact is the one to hold onto: after years of warnings, the store that once made uBlock Origin one tap away no longer carries it, and the ad-blocking fight on Chrome has moved to a smaller, faster, more loyal battlefield. Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

Also Today

Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode · Source Anthropic commissioned Trajectory Labs to test Opus 5 in Auto Mode, and the vendor’s 72 indirect-injection scenarios came back at 0.00% — a number Boris Cherny shared as evidence that layered defenses have pushed prompt injection to zero. Johann Rehberger’s targeted chain doesn’t argue with the benchmark; it goes around it. By nudging Claude off WebFetch onto curl, feeding it a ZIP, then getting the model to write and run its own Python decoder inside an attacker-controlled directory, a shadowed struct.py yields code execution and a Sliver C2 callback at up to 80% success in small samples. The sharpest detail is that Auto Mode blocked Claude’s own cleanup command once it detected the compromise. A 0.00% eval result describes the tested scenarios, not the threat.

Read Tim Cook’s full memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO · Source Tim Cook’s last day as CEO closed with a memo to Apple employees, published in full by 9to5Mac, ahead of John Ternus taking the helm tomorrow. It is exactly what a farewell memo should be: gratitude, the claim that culture ’triumphs over everything,’ a nod to Steve’s ‘dent in the universe,’ and an explicit passing of the baton to Ternus, who Cook calls ‘brilliant and wonderful and capable.’ Cook stays at Apple in a new role and signs off ‘Yours, Tim,’ which tells you the tone. The notable thing about the transition is how little it is treated as a rupture — Apple has framed it as pure continuity, and the memo works hard to keep it that way.

Nvidia Deepens Chip Ties With $3.5 Billion MediaTek Bet | Bloomberg Tech 8/31/2026 · Source Nvidia is deepening its relationship with MediaTek through a $3.5 billion bet, reported by Bloomberg on the eve of the Ternus transition — a reminder that the chip war moves on several fronts at once. MediaTek is the world’s largest maker of Arm-based mobile SoCs and already partners with Nvidia on PC processors for Windows-on-Arm. An equity stake of this size turns a partnership into strategic lock-in. Nvidia’s message is that its growth isn’t only data-center GPUs and AI accelerators; it wants a seat in edge devices, PCs, and automotive silicon where MediaTek has reach Nvidia lacks. The open question is whether this is a hedge or the first step toward something much larger.

RT by @huggingface: Here we go folks!! DeepSeek-V4 Flash with vision support is now live. https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp · Source DeepSeek dropped DeepSeek-V4 Flash with vision support on Hugging Face, an experimental checkpoint flagged ‘Exp.’ The notable part isn’t just another open-weights model landing — it’s that a vision-capable V4 Flash arrives as an experiment, not a polished flagship launch. That cadence is becoming DeepSeek’s signature: ship smaller, faster, and often, then let the community find the limits. It also keeps the pressure on the claim that frontier capability and openness are in tension. If a vision-enabled V4 Flash holds up, open models keep closing the gap at a cadence that labs gating releases behind months of red-teaming can’t easily match. The ‘Exp’ tag is doing real work here.

Radiant Wins $750 Million US Army Nuclear Reactor Deal · Source Radiant has won a $750 million deal to build nuclear reactors for the US Army, per Bloomberg Technology reporting. Radiant is the company behind the Kaleidos portable microreactor — a small, truck-transportable unit aimed at replacing diesel generators at forward bases and installations. A contract of this size is where a microreactor startup stops being a demonstration project and becomes a supplier inside a procurement pipeline with a real budget. That is the significance: the Army isn’t buying a concept, it’s buying reactors. If Radiant delivers, it legitimizes the entire class of portable nuclear for defense; if it slips, it will chill the sector for years. This is the bet that matters.

In Brief

• Phil Schiller is stepping back from leading the App Store and Apple’s product events, the latest senior shuffle as the company resets leadership around incoming CEO John Ternus. (Source)
• Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned that frontier AI models could materially raise cyber risk across the global financial system by making attacks faster and cheaper. (Source)
• uv’s next change will deduplicate files in the wheel cache when content hashing is enabled, shrinking disk usage for repeated dependencies. (Source)
• OpenShot 4.0 arrives with a new color-view workflow for grading footage alongside a refreshed recording and editing pipeline. (Source)
• Wirewiki’s operator describes how DNS autocomplete over 240 million domain names can reach a p99 latency of effectively zero. (Source)
• Graham Dumpleton — of wrapt, mod_wsgi, and New Relic’s Python agent — has introduced wrapture, a new tool for Python instrumentation. (Source)
• curl’s Daniel Stenberg recounts a CVE dispute in his capacity as a CNA, where the project had to push back on a questionable vulnerability assignment. (Source)
• A piece on the rise and fall of agent civilizations recounts three secret AI swarms that rose and fell inside OpenAI, each new generation of agents carrying on where the last one left off. (Source)
• A new bot-defense offering called Adaptive Intelligence aims to undermine the economics of bot attacks by adapting defenses to each determined attacker group in real time. (Source)
• Uber says agentic-AI requests jumped 9.4x while token bills stayed flat, crediting its ‘AI software factory,’ where over 70% of code merges are now agent-generated. (Source)
• Qualcomm’s double-digit chip price increase takes effect tomorrow, a hike it announced back in July to let customers prepare. (Source)
• The Pentagon is rolling out military-grade ChatGPT and Grok capabilities to about 3 million military and civilian personnel under its GenAI.mil program, which launched last year with Google Gemini. (Source)

One Line

My title changes tomorrow, but the love I have for the Apple community never will.

— Tim Cook, in a post on X on his last day as Apple CEO