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Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

blog.pushbullet.com

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Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#451

Post by StavrosK »

freehunter wrote: post #134
wlesieutre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is a trivially easy product to switch off of compared to other Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Have you tried Firefox recently?

I've found the exact opposite to be true in my very specific experience. Five years ago I used every Google product under the sun, today the only Google product I use at all (even search) is Chrome because it's the only one I haven't been able to replace. I try Firefox with a fresh install on nearly every major release and I keep it installed as a secondary browser, but I can never manage to use it as my daily browse…

Wouldn't the fact that your company's site doesn't work on Firefox need to be filed as a bug on your site's bug tracker?

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#452

Post by spydum »

winter_blue wrote: post #448
jtxx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProtonMail has come a long way as a replacement for Gmail as well. Suuuper happy with them, they're really responsive to feature requests and support inquiries. I requested for an iOS feature to choose browsers so I could open all links from PM in Firefox. They had it implemented in a month or something... it a quick fix but that impressed me. hence me shilling here They recently added ProtonCalendar too.

I'm a paying customer (paid for 2 years upfront), and I only found out after paying that ProtonMail has an incredibly poor implementation of 2FA . All it supports is app-based authentication[1]. No support for U2F (FIDO) keys[2]. No support for sending SMS to phones. In comparison, my Google account is protected with: (a) three distinct U2F FIDO keys that are stored safely in different countries, (b) three separate p…

Not sure about the other stuff, but SMS 2FA is generally frowned upon for auth.. though obviously they've decided it's fine for the one time setup just as a verification on signup (not used as 2fa in that case, more like crude proof of identity). U2F has been a challenge for everyone from what I've seen.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#453

Post by smnthermes »

bromonkey wrote: post #127
msla wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/7/17326184/firefox-ads-spons...

Yep, the three clicks it takes to disable that really drives me nuts.

They should not do it in the first place. Don't be so dismissive.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#454

Post by yellowapple »

ashtonkem wrote: post #204
freehunter wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security through obscurity is no security at all. Edit - this is a basic principle of security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

Anti-cheat through obscurity on the other hand is absolutely a thing. As a metaphor, there’s a damn good reason you can’t just pay an Olympic anti-doping facility to test your urine; it would be trivial to develop protocols that evade the tests if you could do that.

> it would be trivial to develop protocols that evade the tests if you could do that.

If it's trivial to evade the tests, then the tests are inadequate in the first place, and should not be trusted to be accurate.

Likewise, if an anti-cheat system relies on obscurity in order to not be bypassed, then it's a crappy anti-cheat system (and, mind you, would be far less necessary if multiplayer games didn't have a fetish for trusting the client to do potentially-exploitable things instead of insisting upon server-side validation, but I digress).

And likewise, if making your policy publicly-known will result in people skirting around the spirit of that policy, then the policy is poorly-written and should be rewritten to better reflect the intent.

Security through obscurity is not security. Full stop.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#455

Post by core-questions »

dilandau wrote: post #319
seanwilson wrote: post #84

For people focusing their comments on this particular extension + the permissions it asks for, please take a quick look at the numerous recent posts in the official forum for Chrome extension developers to see it's not an isolated issue: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chrom... It's a systematic issue that isn't specific to anything Pushbullet is doing and it's been like this before the pandemi…

>We hear you and are eagerly looking to improve things. Joking aside, isn't this just what people should come to expect from the company that has always tried to normalize the "no support and no service" model? If these antics start causing GOOG to lose share in the browser market then they may review these policies, but I highly doubt it. At the end of the day GOOG is an ad company and publicly-traded at that. They…

> Stop using their browser, stop using their search.

The more people that do this in general, the better. We've given Google entirely too much power to control what people see and read (and it follows, control over what they say and think).

They don't have our best interests at heart, they have financial interests at heart, and everything else flows from there. I'm not saying this is evil, but it's certainly not _good_.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#456

Post by yellowapple »

extesy wrote: post #259

I'm in the same boat. My open source chrome extension[1] has just been taken down[2] after several years of no complaints because it apparently violated content policies related to nudity and pornography. Say what? Well, I guess you could view _any_ image using my extension, including nudes. Isn't that the problem with most other extensions which could be used on porn sites, like editing cookies, etc? I've submitted…

I mentioned this in the GitHub issue thread (howdy!), but I strongly suspect it has to do with specific references to pornographic sites in the extension's manifest.

If only Google would mind its own business instead of playing mommy-knows-best and dictating its morality on grown adults.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#457

Post by FpUser »

FpUser wrote: post #218
minikites wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Fastmail for more than a decade and I don't know why someone would trust something as important as email to a company like Google.

I am not sure why would one trust something as important as email to any company. Register and use your own domain. Then you are totally free in your choice and switching is no problem

Downvote for expressing reasonable opinion? Google is that you?

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#458

Post by brigandish »

lostcolony wrote: post #367
skykooler wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Reading the source of every program you used was certainly possible back in the 80's when the FOSS movement started; but nowadays, with every program being millions of lines of code, it's implausible to get through all that and still have time to actually use the software.

Not to mention background updating. I don't even know when Chrome has updated half the time, unless something stops working.

If you're on OSX/macOS (what a silly rebrand) then if you look in ~/Library/LaunchAgents (and possibly /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons) for any .plist from Google (or Keystone) in there and add

    Disabled
under the first and then unload each file, e.g.

    launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.*
The auto-updating stops and stop them reloading after a reboot/logon.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#459

Post by bzb3 »

jschwartzi wrote: post #189
dylz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, the intent is that no one should be doing this and anyone doing it should be at least technical enough to figure out what they're doing and be reminded that it's a bad idea.

On the other hand these stupid dialog tricks are why I stopped using Chrome. I'm not an idiot and I know what I'm doing. It's pretty arrogant to assume that I shouldn't be visiting my router's configuration page just because it uses a self-signed certificate. I don't care to set up an X.509 infrastructure at my house, thank you. Please stop mollycoddling me. Firefox continues to do a good job of just letting me visit…

At least Chrome lets you use that trick to bypass an hsts error message. Firefox won't let you.

Re: Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension

#460

Post by ernsheong »

Arcsech wrote: post #294

This kind of thing just keeps. Coming. Up. from Google and between ML black boxes making arbitrary judgements and random product shutdowns, a hard requirement for any personal projects of mine is "no Google dependency", because it might vanish at any time, with zero notice or recourse.

Far from arbitrary, Pushbullet is just wielding far too many permissions.
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