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UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

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Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#171

Post by donw »

Frondo wrote: post #128
gnarbarian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They fired a founder for retroactive wrongthink (post ex facto). That's pretty disturbing. Hard to trust someone like that. Meanwhile, Google doesn't return results for guns in the shopping section. So I get to search a bunch of sites and call people like i'm on astalavista in 1998. Sad Truth: both companies inject a brand of exclusionary (read: discriminatory) politics into their products. I don't trust either.

Eich resigned because his political views made it difficult for him to continue doing his job. He wasn't imprisoned, nothing was done to him with the force of law. He just had/has unpopular views and accepted the consequences of holding those views. I struggle to see how the world could be arranged such that we could all hold forth with controversial views, but such that there was never a consequence to holding those…

> I struggle to see how the world could be arranged such that we could all hold forth with controversial views, but such that there was never a consequence to holding those views. What would that world look like?

It would be a much less divided and angry place.

One of my most important life lessons was to learn how to argue in support of positions that I strongly oppose or dislike.

If I only seek to deeply understand things that I support or agree with, then I will struggle to communicate with people from different cultures, or from people that have backgrounds that differ to my own.

This does not require that I agree with things that I oppose or dislike, but it does require that I understand why people disagree with me. Never have I found the answer to be "they are ignorant idiots and/or outright horrible people"

Making it a point to do this has helped me to develop a more nuanced view of the world, and has been essential as a manager, as I can not effectively communicate with the people that work with me unless I am willing to try and deeply understand them.

Effective management requires dealing with all manner of politics, and it helps build bridges and find mutually acceptable solutions when you can speak to both sides in their own language.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#172

Post by rasz_pl »

Zarel wrote: post #158
hgf888 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if it's open source - it's an issue of trust. Firefox has never secretly downloaded binary blobs in the background which listen to my microphone without my permission or knowledge.[1] Chromium lost all my trust that day, even if none of my private conversations/data made it to Google that particular time. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922

The source you link to explicitly says that it does not listen to your microphone without your permission or knowledge: > First and foremost, while we do download the hotword module on startup, we do not activate it unless you opt in to hotwording. If you go into "chrome://settings", you will see a checkbox "Enable "Ok Google" to start a voice search". This should be unchecked by default, and if you do not check it,…

Except it does bind into the microphone and consumes audio stream using standard OS APIs, it just doesnt propagate it further .. as far as we know.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#173

Post by stephenr »

mrb wrote: post #129
fowlerpower wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how corporate marketing works. For a long time I used to really love their products and their processes. Maybe it was when they got rid of "don't be evil" but at some point they started turning into just another corporation. A corporation with a ton of resources and a ton of people's information. Anyway I don't want to go into a rant but lately everything they do even the open source stuff is just to furth…

"Don't be evil" was and still is in the Google code of conduct. Source: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

Their actions don't really follow that concept and haven't for a while

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#174

Post by stephenr »

gnicholas wrote: post #170
bobajeff wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox on my phone. I am more comfortable with it for privacy reasons. It's a pretty nice browser outside of that. However I'm using a pretty beefy phone whereas when I used my Moto G it wasn't quite the best browser in terms of resources however a lot has changed since then. (Like Chrome no longer having tabs integrated into the task manager. That feature was great for devices with not too much RAM and horrib…

Yep, support for older computers is a huge plus. My 2008 iMac is nearly half a dozen Mac OS versions behind, but I can still get the latest version of Firefox. Safari and Chrome stopped updating years ago. From a security perspective, it's Firefox all the way. I also happen to use Firefox as my daily driver on my main laptop, largely due to the Tree Style Tabs addon, which I have not seen a decent substitute for on C…

From a security perspective wouldn't you be better served by having an up to date OS?

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#175

Post by byuu »

lohankin wrote: post #104
byuu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was not fired. Straight from Mozilla themselves: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... "On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla." He could have stayed if he wanted to. Yes, it would have hurt their brand if he did, and yes it should have. Because yes, I and many others care very much if the CEO of a product donates to strip a minority of equal rights. Than…

Consider hypothetical situation: suddenly "Brave" browser (referred to below) becomes popular. Will you renew your personal vendetta against Brendan Eich? Because the reasons you cited still apply.

I will never use Brave, no matter how popular it becomes.

But yes, I have considered the opposite situation. And indeed, it's happened. It has only been 2-3 years since a majority of Americans have supported gay rights. It used to be that people would boycott over anything remotely supporting them. Most sponsors pulled out after Ellen Degeneres announced she was gay.

The thing with free speech is that it always works both ways. If you truly care about it, you always have to defend those that are indefensible. Yet in this case, supporters of Eich seem to think what he said was okay, but what his protestors said was not.

The people who protested had every bit as much of a right to their speech as Eich did to his. I believe Proposition 8 was a failure of government: that the rights of the minority should never be subjected to popular vote (tyranny of the majority.) But Eich was perfectly within his right to spend his money to say something truly abhorrent. And since freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, so too did the people using Mozilla have a right to voice their displeasure.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#176

Post by rasz_pl »

sergiotapia wrote: post #163
NeutronBoy wrote: post #4

While I applaud the effort that's gone into this, I urge people to consider (and use and contribute to!) Firefox. It's one of the last truly open-source browsers - both in terms of source code visibility (which Chrome(ium) has), and in terms of being able to contribute (which Chrome(ium) has not).

Firefox is unacceptably slugging and jittery on a brand new 27 inch iMac. Laughably slow and jittery. I would switch but it's just too slow and unresponsive. Opera, I would use but I don't trust the chinese parent company.

try Vivaldi, its run by ex Opera CEO. Pretty much like new Opera minus chinese/ad company.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#177

Post by groby_b »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #4

While I applaud the effort that's gone into this, I urge people to consider (and use and contribute to!) Firefox. It's one of the last truly open-source browsers - both in terms of source code visibility (which Chrome(ium) has), and in terms of being able to contribute (which Chrome(ium) has not).

Since I work on Chromium, I kind of care about this... We're still an open source project. We still take a lot of external contributions, as far as I know.

Can you point to concrete cases where Chromium has not taken contributions (without giving a good reason, that is)?

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#178

Post by byuu »

smsm42 wrote: post #155
byuu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was not fired. Straight from Mozilla themselves: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... "On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla." He could have stayed if he wanted to. Yes, it would have hurt their brand if he did, and yes it should have. Because yes, I and many others care very much if the CEO of a product donates to strip a minority of equal rights. Than…

> "On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla." Yeah as voluntarily as those politicians resigning to spend more time with their families really resign to spend more time with their families. It's not fooling anybody else, and I have very hard time believing it's fooling you. He resigned because he was asked to resign. That's how top management firing is done. > He could have stayed if h…

> He resigned because he was asked to resign.

Sorry to post a link, but I responded to the same argument already here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579498

> So if somebody who thinks firing people because they have different political opinion than you is wrong, would arrange to get you fired from your job - you'd be completely ok with that, according to your beliefs?

If they were truly my convictions, I would stand by them and tell the world that I was fired for my beliefs. I wouldn't suddenly become a liar. Especially not to protect the company that just fired me.

If what you say is true, and there is zero evidence that it is, then I would lose the very last tiny bit of respect I have for Eich. It would also mean the Mozilla board was truly and utterly incompetent; because this was an extremely predictable result. They already knew of Eich's donation. And anyone with a functioning brain would have realized that this would become a much bigger issue when he was promoted to CEO.

We do, however, share common ground that nobody should be fired for their personal beliefs (nor for that matter, for what they do in their personal time.) Yet at the same time, I refuse to accept a world where I would be denied the right to protest an abhorrent individual. Say there were a company run by a neo-nazi grandmaster wizard of the KKK that wanted to commit genocide. But hey, those were just his personal beliefs! Would you still be against anyone refusing to use that company's products? Against anyone saying the company shouldn't have hired such a man to lead them?

The critics who called for his job were wrong to do so. Saying a man should be fired for his beliefs was almost as bad as saying that gay people should not be treated as equal citizens with the same rights as straight people.

> Mozilla absolutely, totally and completely caved to the protests.

Prove it. Or if that's no longer required, then NASA absolutely, totally and completely faked the moon landings.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#179

Post by icelancer »

Frondo wrote: post #162
smsm42 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eich resigned because his political views made it difficult for him to continue doing his job. This is a very disingenuous way of describing it. More proper way to describe it would be that a group of political activists put pressure on Mozilla to fire Eich because of his political views, for political reasons, and Mozilla as organization caved. There was no instance of Eich's views ever influencing anything on his…

"There was no instance of Eich's views ever influencing anything on his job, and no single instance or evidence of any problem with his job." I don't know if that's true. I don't know how many gay folks work for Mozilla, but I'm 100% it's a non-zero number. They might have had a real problem with his donating to Prop 8. I couldn't say whether they did, being neither gay nor a mozilla employee, but I could imagine it…

"He resigned of his own volition..."

Yeah, I'm sure he just up and decided to resign with zero pressure from political insiders and the flash mob causing outrage. That's probably what happened.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#180

Post by [deleted] »

sergiotapia wrote: post #163
NeutronBoy wrote: post #4

While I applaud the effort that's gone into this, I urge people to consider (and use and contribute to!) Firefox. It's one of the last truly open-source browsers - both in terms of source code visibility (which Chrome(ium) has), and in terms of being able to contribute (which Chrome(ium) has not).

Firefox is unacceptably slugging and jittery on a brand new 27 inch iMac. Laughably slow and jittery. I would switch but it's just too slow and unresponsive. Opera, I would use but I don't trust the chinese parent company.

[deleted]
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