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Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

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Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#241

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

coldtea wrote: post #47
blagie wrote: post #10

Google's increasingly cavalier attitude towards security is concerning: 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it 2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk 3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exp…

> 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it Doesn't sound concerning, especially the latter.

As a software engineer with kids, let me tell you: not only do they already bypass parental controls on both Android and iOS (I've yet to figure out how on this one) devices, but they discover these tactics from other kids in school that were saavy enough to find tutorials online. It's not like when I was a kid and had to dive into the registry to find the key associated with the program, understand what a swap file was and why it might contain credentials, write my own code to circumvent the controls, etc. They're not really learning anything about the system when they bypass the controls.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#242

Post by scrum-treats »

freedomben wrote: post #195
blagie wrote: post #10

Google's increasingly cavalier attitude towards security is concerning: 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it 2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk 3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exp…

> I don't think engineers at Google quite have a perspective on what it means when their decisions (not just security) ruin thousands of lives. Doesn't that seem a little hyperbolic? "Ruin somebody's life" seems pretty dramatic.

Are you familiar with identity theft? How about browser-based attacks leveraged via Google vulnerabilities that allow malicious (corporate) actors access to your keystrokes (e.g., user sign-on information across all accounts)?

Google's response since mid-2022 has consistently been "deny deny deny" and downplay, much like you are doing here. Meanwhile individuals and small businesses are targeted and crushed. It's hard to know when your identity is compromised, and by the time you know it, it's usually too late to easily triage. To the extent Google introduces products and services that contain large-scale vulnerabilities, it is very much their fault. Yet, nothing happens. Individuals pay the price of using Google products, and Google continues to make billions of dollars, unscathed. Microsoft and Amazon are also guilty of this.

Where are actual consumer protections? Nowhere to be found, in the US.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#244

Post by dmead »

thunderbong wrote: post #51

This is a bit like accessing the internet from chm (help) files when the browser was blocked. Damn. I revealed my age!

at my high school we used to open windows explorer by the file open dialog in notepad to escape the weird bookshelf shell.. i think it was an ibm product.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#245

Post by Dwedit »

seeknotfind wrote: post #165

Ah! The good old days. The Windows XP Calculator app had a browser I used to bypass the browser blocks in elementary school. :D

Okay, I'll bite... How did you bring up a web browser from XP Calculator? I know there's HTML Help, but I don't see a way to get on to the internet from there.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#246

Post by scrum-treats »

stewx wrote: post #72

This guy's experience reporting a bug to Google reminds me of mine: Me: Here's a bug in Google Sheets that exposes deleted content to third parties. Google: Not a bug. Working as expected, closing issue. Me: Really? I was personally harmed by this bug while using the application. Google: Actually, it is a bug but it's a longtime known issue, therefore you are not eligible for bug bounty. Closing issue.

Same experience. Receive hot air and fluff from Google, then a few months later the head of TAO announces a "fix" to the vulnerability originally raised.

Additionally, the first articles announcing the vulnerability tried to link it to Chinese/Russia hacking. Shove that propaganda directly back at yourself (i.e., Google; a US-based company). Google left the backdoor wide open for anyone to exploit, foreign and domestic. And, it was definitely exploited by both.

Google has real issues. Not sure what happened after 2019, but it's not great.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#247

Post by toast0 »

Steuard wrote: post #204
thunderbong wrote: post #51

This is a bit like accessing the internet from chm (help) files when the browser was blocked. Damn. I revealed my age!

Are we revealing our age through exploits now? How about "using gopher on a university library terminal to access a site that launched a telnet session so you can check your out-of-state college email over the summer"?

I definitely didn't use the open dialog in Notepad to run other executables at the library.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#248

Post by hsnewman »

rstat1 wrote: post #220
surgical_fire wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I am absolutely sure of that. I didn't mean my silly recollections there to be a way to handwave the concerns of people with parental controls nowadays. Those are important. I just miss those simpler times. The most risque thing we got our hands on back then were low resolution porn clips. Perhaps some odd hentai AVI with mangled translation. People used to be up in arms about something silly as Carmageddon being…

For 90's kids it was video games that were gonna rot your brain and make you a bad person. That turned out to be false. For 00's kids the new boogeyman is "social media". Likely will turn out false too. Just sounds like a cop-out way to blame anything other than poor parenting.

Social media may not be "bad" but has serious consequences including it's use to try to overthrow an election.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#249

Post by [deleted] »

lima wrote: post #113
blagie wrote: post #10

Google's increasingly cavalier attitude towards security is concerning: 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it 2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk 3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exp…

As a security researcher, I have to disagree - there's many things to criticize Google for, but "cavalier attitude to security" isn't one of them. Their security teams are industry-leading and they have done a lot of important work over the past decade (Project Zero, a very well-done bug bounty program, Advanced Protection, FIDO/hardware security keys, large-scale fuzzing and AFL, tons of behind the scenes sandboxing…

[deleted]

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#250

Post by seeknotfind »

Dwedit wrote: post #245
seeknotfind wrote: post #165

Ah! The good old days. The Windows XP Calculator app had a browser I used to bypass the browser blocks in elementary school. :D

Okay, I'll bite... How did you bring up a web browser from XP Calculator? I know there's HTML Help, but I don't see a way to get on to the internet from there.

I found an article on it: https://techieinspire.com/how-to-access-the-internet-via-ms-...
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