
Chromium will no longer download/install the Hotword Shared Module - kekebo
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922#c30
======
Aqua_Geek
> An extension that is enabled is not the same as an extension that is
> actually running. To see the list of Chrome processes that are actually
> running, use Chrome's task manager. Hotword Triggering, as well as many
> other extensions will run briefly at startup. Those that are not actually
> being used will quit in about 10-15 seconds.

I'm sorry, what?! So I still have to trust that it's not doing anything
malicious for 10-15 seconds?

~~~
JonnieCache
No, you can just use the open source build which doesn't include any of the
google components, like the ticket says. I don't see how they can do any more
for you than that.

~~~
astazangasta
Release only open source products? Not sell our information to advertisers?
Not collaborate with the government to spy on us? Not use their monopoly money
to buy all of the smart people in the world? The list of how they could
improve is endless.

~~~
exelius
> Release only open source products?

Google open sources far more than most companies. They've also contributed
greatly to building new open source projects, and they actually keep them open
and are a generally benevolent maintainer. They're probably one of the best
corporate citizens of the open source community.

> Not sell our information to advertisers?

It's their entire business model; if you don't like it, don't use their
products.

> Not collaborate with the government to spy on us?

Google never willingly collaborated with the government. They were either
hacked by the NSA (this isn't a mark of shame -- just read up on the Equation
Group virus that went undetected for the better part of a decade) or they
cooperated under a sealed court order. Corporations don't have the agency that
individuals do in refusing to cooperate with a court order -- it's literally
not possible for a company to refuse to comply with a court order because the
feds can just keep arresting people until someone complies. Most companies
refuse to put their employees in this position, so they comply under protest
(which is exactly what Google did).

> Not use their monopoly money to buy all of the smart people in the world?

So they shouldn't hire under capitalist principles? Also note that this is
beneficial for the smart people of the world, because it forces other
companies to pay more as well.

~~~
astazangasta
>So they shouldn't hire under capitalist principles? Also note that this is
beneficial for the smart people of the world, because it forces other
companies to pay more as well.

Yes, basically I'm asking for non-capitalism (sorry, I'm a relentless anti-
capitalist). It's too much for a HN thread. But I'm sick of this world -
Google is a company _BUILT_ on free software. They only exist because of
public largesse. Without Linus Torvalds and Stallman (and a million others),
Google would not exist, period. Without the Internet, Google would not exist.

This sort of thing is rampant - github has a billion-dollar valuation based on
the fact that Linus Torvalds wrote and open-sourced git, and pretty much for
no other reason.

I want a word that acknowledges that we exist together, dammit, that the
wealth we've made - all of it - is produced in common, and that we don't use
every single scrap of advantage we get to arrogate more power to ourselves.

Google is a company that is built on taking a public good, perhaps the
greatest public good we have ever made, and turning it into an engine for
generating wealth and power for a few individuals.

It's the 21st century, dammit. Let's do better. We have the fucking model for
how to do this. Let's build on it. Let's share what we produce instead of
taking the collective bounty and using it for our own personal gain.

~~~
mynameisvlad
> github has a billion-dollar valuation based on the fact that Linus Torvalds
> wrote and open-sourced git, and pretty much for no other reason.

No, github has a billion-dollar valuation based on the fact that they took a
pretty empty market (source code hosting) and created a developer ecosystem
around it. Whether they used git, or mercurial, or svn, or any other version
control system really doesn't make a big difference. They happened to pick up
on the fact that git was picking up steam and went all-in on that bet, but you
can replace git with practically any other VCS and it still could have worked.
In fact, I'd say it brought more younger developers and enterprise companies
_to_ git than git bringing the developers to them.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
>hedged on that bet I do not think that first word means what you think it
means:

[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/hedge_one's_bets](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/hedge_one's_bets)

~~~
mynameisvlad
Huh, TIL. What's the expression I'm thinking of for putting your bet solely on
one thing? I could've sworn it was that but clearly it's not.

~~~
DougBTX
You could say they "went all-in on that bet"

~~~
mynameisvlad
It's not _exactly_ what I was thinking, but it works; thanks! Edited the post
above with it. :)

------
fweespeech
Yaya, the march of progress.

Seriously, the idea of open source projects downloading close sourced code "on
your behalf" is bad in and of itself, regardless of the purpose.

~~~
kekebo
the hotword flag existed for ages, it got changed from opt-in to opt-out about
a week ago[1] and just has been reverted.

Less evolution than things back to normal.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409)

~~~
morganvachon
It should never have been flipped to opt-out in the first place. Google cares
about open source only as long as it benefits them, and I wasn't surprised to
see one of their flagship projects take a trip to the dark side for a few
days.

To paraphrase a Jurassic Park character, they are testing the waters, checking
for weaknesses. They remember...

------
BuildTheRobots
"Chromium silently stops installing binary blob" is probably just as good a
headline...

~~~
zfp
Thanks William Shatner for popularizing the split infinitive... to boldly go!

~~~
nazgul1
An infinitive verb is a to verb. There's no to above, thus no split
infinitive.

~~~
jfb
Too, pedantry about splitting infinitives is agrammatical and dumb.

------
imslavko
My mother uses her Dell laptop with an Ubuntu installed on it. It is usually
great to maintain from my part, as all she uses is Chromium and the files
explorer. I just update the software sometimes.

But something that started happening in the latest versions of Chromium is
driving me nuts. Every time I talk to my mother in my native language in front
of the laptop, the "Ok, Google" functionality activates and starts the search
of the "parsed" English sentence in Google.

I tried to disable it but failed to find how.

~~~
andor
At least in Google Chrome, "Enable Ok Google" is one of the few options in the
settings that are not buried under "show advanced". It's very easy to find.

------
snaky
There is a nice patchset for Chromium that turns off or strips (almost?) all
of the controversial features.

[https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=198763](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=198763)

------
victor9000
apt-get purge google-chrome-stable

apt-get install chromium-browser

well, that was easy.

~~~
magicalist
> _google-chrome-stable_

uh, you were worried about your binary blob running a binary blob?

~~~
ISL
The difference is the provenance of the binary-blob supplier.

Would you be more likely to run a checksummed binary blob from your trusted
Debian mirror, or one I send you via email?

~~~
DannyBee
"Trusted debian mirror".

Remind me the accountability on that one? vs a company you can sue for
billions?

~~~
pyre
By this logic, no large company should ever end up on the wrong side of the
law, ethics or morality...

~~~
DannyBee
???? This is a really extreme takeaway.

My point was more "i don't think trusted debian mirror buys you much either"
if your goal is to not ship binary blobs not "billion dollar company is
great".

------
ryanlol
Clicking this link will make your browser silently download and execute a
binary blob

[http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/pooka/rump.js/](http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/pooka/rump.js/)

~~~
morganvachon
Yes, exactly, clicking a link. An action taken by the user. Before the bit of
code in question was reverted back to its normal behavior, just the act of
launching the Chromium browser for the first time would silently download and
activate the binary blob, the user was completely out of the picture and had
no control over it. There's a huge difference.

~~~
ryanlol
I don't know if that's a huge difference, considering the binary blob provably
doesn't do anything (you should be complaining about).

~~~
morganvachon
I'm not complaining about what it does, I'm complaining about how it was
delivered. If someone breaks into my house to put a new TV on the table, I'm
still going to feel violated.

Google broke the trust the open source community had in them, by silently
flipping a switch that surreptitiously downloads a binary blob. They have now
gone on record saying that was wrong and have reversed the change going
forward. Good on them for that, but as far as I'm concerned that trust is
irrevocably broken.

