So increase your "privacy" at the risk of your security? Personally, I trust a fully-patched chrome more than a browser that lags behind the latest security updates by 6 weeks.
(Iridium is currently branched off chromium 54, chrome is on version 55)
Google violated my privacy dozens of times today, and there is nothing I can do to stop them from trying again tomorrow. My machine has been pwned due to browser vulnerabilities exactly zero times (as far as I know).
I get that protecting against hypothetical exploits is good, but it's probably best to stop the ongoing security breaches first.
Given current ransomware trends, that seems like setting up a bunker but crossing a highway on foot daily. Sure, the nukes won't get you, but those cars will.
It's not that you're not allowed to worry about google holding your data (of course it is!), but it's pretty unsafe to be on the 'net without being properly patched.
If I had to set about this, I would have an upstream fork of Chromium that would patch the various networking functions to blacklist known google domains, and then offer a flag to ignore the blacklist in the "obvious" spots (like when you go to google.com). Probably not perfect, but a bit safer.
If you're super serious, you could just 404 all access to google.
Users should absolutely use the latest version of a browser, and it is dangerous on the web, but I'd agree with wfunction that your analogy veers slightly into the hyperbolic.
I'm currently doing work in an office of ~30 people where the IT support company (supposedly accidentally) set up this lovely policy https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rC4FQwYXIok/maxresdefault.jpg which was in place for about a year before I noticed it on a colleague's computer. Pretty terrible security-wise, but no-one's been hit by a car to my knowledge.
This exists and is called Ungoogled Chromium[1]. As you'd expect from the name, it blocks all background communication with Google servers. I use it as my main browser and find it faster and more stable than both standard Chrome and Firefox, YMMV.
> Given current ransomware trends, that seems like setting up a bunker but crossing a highway on foot daily. Sure, the nukes won't get you, but those cars will.
I haven't updated Chrome in quite a while. My computer's been running just fine. I'm pretty sure I would've died if I'd tried to cross highways as you mentioned all this time. So I think something about the comparison doesn't smell right.
The relative odds aren't quite right, but consider how many people you might know who lost their PCs to virii, compared to people compromised by their Google searches.... Maybe it's a wash ;)
I think your likelyhood of getting your PC messed up is pretty dependant on habits too. You're much more likely to get hit by drive-by adware if you're (on Windows and) going to those random illegal streaming sites to watch some show than if you're reading HN.
An example: I was on a less than stellar video hosting site, and a bunch of pop-ups got me to accidentally download "FlashPlayer.dmg"
I'm pretty well versed in this stuff! And they got me to download this right as I was going to watch this video. If I didn't know better, it would have been like all those other plugin updaters (of course you need root to install flash right?)
Of course, updated Chrome didn't prevent this case for me...
I'm a lottery winner too, I guess - I often keep Chrome running weeks at a time on a Windows machine, because I tend to suspend the system instead of shutting the computer off...
Anyway, I came here for a tangent about those "less than stellar video hosting" sites: I have an idea how to kill two birds with one stone - getting rid of them, and fixing the Internet. Can we convince MAFIAA to go after ads on the web? After all, that's what keeps illicit streaming alive.
(Torrents will obviously survive, but at least right now, most people don't know how to use them.)
I think you're oversimplifying the concern people have about google hoarding their data. It's an entirely separate concern from your computer being infected.
> I think your likelyhood of getting your PC messed up is pretty dependant on habits too.
Indeed...
> You're much more likely to get hit by drive-by adware if you're (on Windows
Indeed I am on Windows... without security software, etc.
> and) going to those random illegal streaming sites to watch some show
Indeed I am not...
> than if you're reading HN
Indeed I am...
> An example: I was on a less than stellar video hosting site, and a bunch of pop-ups got me to accidentally download "FlashPlayer.dmg" I'm pretty well versed in this stuff! And they got me to download this right as I was going to watch this video.
Even if you downloaded that, you have to do some extra clicks to make it run. It's not something that I can see happening by accident to the average HN reader.
> If I didn't know better, it would have been like all those other plugin updaters (of course you need root to install flash right?)
But you did know better.
> Of course, updated Chrome didn't prevent this case for me...
Well there you go, I'm out of arguments.
I think you quite beautifully narrowed down where the real problems lie and proved my point, so I'm just going to leave it at that. ;)
On the other hand, looking over CVEs for chrome[0], I'd be a bit worried. Chromes before 47 included remote code execution via the MIDI subsystem! If someone could play a MIDI, they could compromise your system!
What did I say that was FUD? I'm legitimately curious if he's checked and seen any data being sent to google
*edit: I'd genuinely be surprised if google made it that easy to not send anything back to them. Additionally, I'd be genuinely surprised if FF made it that simple to avoid sending things back to Mozilla.
For example, I noticed a while back that the Chrome/Chromium browsers send the dns lookup of every website you visit to Google's own dns servers - even though i have NOT configured them in my OS.
(You can easily check this with an app like Little Snitch, look for the browser connecting to IPs 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4)
Are you certain that Chromium does this too? Because their documentation explicitly contradicts your statement: "This is done using the computer's normal DNS resolution mechanism; no connection to Google is used." Source - https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/dns-pre...
Interesting. I just ran a check on my own host, and chromium did not do that. Obviously there are a bunch of potential reasons why: Chromium may act differently than chrome, they may only send some dns queries instead of all of them, etc
i just checked with Chromium 57.0.2983.0 (64-bit) and it's still doing it.
I also just noticed that Little Snitch actually does NOT log the dns requests. Maybe this is caused by Chromium using ipv6 to access google-public-dns-a.google.com ?
Anyway, I then installed Vallum (1) and with this app, in the log i see many of these requests: https://i.imgur.com/lUR3Fd7.png
Which is why I can't use chrome at work at all. Google's services and DNS are blocked by admins, so when you try to open any site you get DNS_LOOKUP_FAILED error.
i don't think that's correct, because if you block 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 with the OSX pf firewall, then Chromium will use your OS configured DNS servers and everything still works (i do this.)
it is if your mistrust for google outweighs your time to check these things... maybe in that case you shouldn't say "for sure google is doing bad things" but you can mistrust and not use a product for fear of the company that produces it without current evidence
No. But I use Chromium so the source code is open.
I mean if we're going to go to this level of paranoid; then we might as well look at attacks on Firefox (which have been suspected to be used by the NSA against Tor Browser).
I'm curious as to why you think checking network connections is paranoia. As a sysadmin, I routinely log and check many of my network connections, though I have not done that for my browser.
I would disagree. I'd genuinely be surprised if google made it that easy to not send anything back to them. Additionally, I'd be genuinely surprised if FF made it that simple to avoid sending things back to Mozilla.
It's less about being covert, and more about having multiple settings to send different types of data back.
Please don't spread misinformation. Here are the facts:
1. While the Hotword module was downloaded at startup, the feature was not activated without the user explicitly enabling it via the settings menu. <https://crbug.com/500922#c6>
2. Downloading the module in Chromium was a bug, and it was fixed after being reported. <https://crbug.com/50922#30>
3. The Hotword feature was dropped from Chrome not too long after, because it was an experiment that never really panned out (and was enabled by very few people).
Was the last commit back in Oct 2016 (https://git.iridiumbrowser.de/cgit.cgi/iridium-browser/)? That looks like a long time gap. I am pretty sure there have been multiple security/critical bug fixes to Chromium between then and now.
Thing is, at least on MacOS Firefox is quite slow compared to Safari or Chrome.
Firefox also keeps eating more and more memory the more time it's open (Chrome also uses a lot memory, but at least it's stable). Firefox devs usually blame extensions for this (and I can believe them), but I really don't care who's fault it is, I just want my browser to work nicely.
Also, these are present complains. Since at work I'm back on Linux full time, I tried to stop using Safari at home and use Firefox in order to use the same browser everywhere. But Firefox just didn't cut it.
I'm now deciding between Opera and Chromium. They have their quirks, but at least they are considerably faster (on my MacBook Pro) and don't keep leaking memory like Firefox does.
Which brothers me, because the best browser on paper when it comes to multi OS support and privacy is Firefox and would be my default go to browser in this case it weren't for these big (for me personally) problems it still has after all these years of the same exact complains from a lot of users.
Never use forks of popular browsers (exception: when browser libraries are dynamically included from official sources). Forks never get security updates as timely as the originals. This is pretty significant if you are important enough for someone to use their zero-days on.
In general I agree. My only current exception is that I use Brave[1] instead of Chrome on Android, because Chrome is missing adblocking. It appears that the company behind Brave is large enough to keep the fork somewhat up to date (compared with several other forks that are only updated very infrequently).
Also not only security updates are an issue. Some of the previous forks have been maintained by people who hardly had any idea of what they were doing. Interesting blog post about the Iron fork: http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
That's what I did before I knew about Brave. If I don't have a choice I'd use whatever browser provides adblocking, but with a choice I'd prefer a Chromium-based browser.
After a very quick check, I think the chrome.webRequest API can be used without the browser giving any warnings. That means an extension can intercept and modify every incoming and outgoing request the browser makes, including sending a copy to a third party or redirecting xhr traffic in the background. Chrome (and consequently Iridium) makes it hard to hide an extension, and a malicious attacker would need to have access to the browser, but if you install this browser in the belief that it will "automatically" protect your privacy I don't think it's doing enough. There should be an indicator that an extension is manipulating requests that the browser is making.
Why? Because of all the reasons most people switched away from Firefox to Chrome to begin with...
Firefox is slow, klunky and the UI is deplorable. Mozilla and also hates native platforms and therefore Firefox doesn't respect my OS. For instance - since the beginning of time, every Windows program let me close the window by double-clicking in the upper left corner. People have been asking Mozilla to change this for years and got ignored. Meanwhile, the Chrome team changed it immediately upon request when one of their builds lost the ability.
IMO, Mozilla is a second-rate has-been that turns out nothing but useless crap like Rust and Servo that nobody needs or uses since there are much higher quality alternatives already in existence - http://www.mozillalabs.com/en-US/projects/
It looks like some of these changes could be implemented as a Chromium extension that toggles these settings in Chrome.
Mozilla and Tor are working to upstream many of Tor's privacy changes into the Firefox code base. Even if the features are disabled in Firefox for now, having the code already in Firefox will make Tor's work easier because they don't need to reapply bitrotted patches. They just need to toggle an about:config pref. This Tor blog post has more information about the upstreaming collaboration:
I think the point here is to offer a browser that does NOT report to Google or offer any Google services in order to give a more privacy oriented experience while keeping the same expectation a user has from Chrome.
Tor Browser on the other hand tries to be a very private oriented browser (blocks several features by default) and gives access to the Tor network.
I know we used to rubbish them, but in a world of auto playing video ads, flash animations and unnecessary javascript scrolling marquees seem like the least of our problems.
Used sparingly, the <blink/> tag was at times practical. Unforunately those that used <blink/> used it zealously.
I feel like there's should be a word that described the things that get ruined by a small number of abusers. I'd probably already know it, if such a word were coined, but maybe not.
I think s/he meant "scrolling marquees seem like the least of our problems in a world of auto playing video ads, flash animations and unnecessary javascript"
(Iridium is currently branched off chromium 54, chrome is on version 55)