Web 2.0 Expo reveals more Chrome Goodness
September 22, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
Highlights include:
- Google to support add-ons like Firefox and Greasemonkey scripts (the founder of GreaseMonkey now works on the Chrome team).
- A discussion of developer discontent on the lack of standards for browsers.
- Whether or not browsers have become more important than the OS when writing applications.
- Plenty of helpings of “do no evil” from Google when asked about their goals for Chrome.
See Darryl K. Taft’s full article here.
Chrome Browser Team Did Not Disassemble Microsoft Vista
“Seriously…we didn’t disassemble Vista….”
In his special report for ZDNet, Stephen Shankland, writes that even though comments in Chromium (open source code for Chrome) indicate otherwise, Google denies disassembling Window’s Vista to get the “Data Execution Prevention” security code to work in Chrome.
That’s good news for Google, because had they indeed followed their own suggestion to disassemble Vista’s kernal32.dll file to understand how the security code works, they would have been in violation of Vista’s EULA.
Google says “We did not disassemble this code” in one statement, but then shows their support for using the technique saying “Disassembling is a common and accepted practice in software development, frequently used to make sure software features are compatible with other software programs or operating systems”.
To me it sounds like someone did disassemble the code and put the comment in Chromium before the Google legal and PR team knew it.
The net result is “who cares”. I doubt there was evil intent behind it and besides, I’m guessing Microsoft has probably done the same once or twice in it’s 30 year history. I bet the same goes for Mozilla developers too.
To see Stephen Shankland’s full report, go here.
CDD Privacy Concerns, Says Chrome Browser a “state-art surveillance program”
September 20, 2008 by admin · 2 Comments
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Jeffrey Chester, the executive director for “The Center for Digital Democracy ” described Chrome as a “state-of-the-art surveillance program” because of the unique ID Chrome creates for you when installed.
Think of this unique id as a “digital finger print” which can reportedly be used by Google to uniquely identify you by correlating it with other information Google collects about you such as you IP addresses, cookies, and your use of YouTube or Gmail.
Chrome’s project manager, Brian Rakowski, says that users can opt out of this when they first install Chrome by not checking the box that says “help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google.”
True, they can opt out of sending the information, but the unique tracking id is always created and even recreated by Chrome if you delete it.
Clearly, some people consider this unique id a major breach of their privacy, and thus Ablesoft from Germany offers a simple app “unchrome” to zero out this unique identifier.
More info about “unchrome” is available here.
Read the full article by in the San Jose Mercury News here.
