@Tlacaelel Oh I do run Chromium on Linux (BunsenLabs) personally, but this isn’t really an option on locked down corporate environments. I don’t see that situation changing any time soon, unfortunately

@RussSharek So far, it seems limited to Windows. I haven’t seen anyone mentioning the same on Linux or macOS. Also Chromium doesn’t seem to have that functionality so any version should be fine

@RussSharek So far, this is the most detail I’ve been able to find that’s verifiable. Straight from the horse’s mouth:

https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/cleaner-safer-web-chrome-cleanup

Apparently, they’ve partnered with AV company ESET and incorporated scanning for malware into Chrome

There’s an awful lot of speculation floating about this already so I’d avoid any other sources until a trusted security researcher can shed more light on this

@cypnk @RussSharek by "scanning for malware" I think they mean "malware that scans for competitor malware"

I mean what wouldn't Alphabet want with the contents of billions of users' drives?

I wonder when they'll start detecting other browsers as "malware" for not including this "feature"

#saltasaservice

@io @cypnk

You know things are scary when you read the date and hope for a hoax.

@cypnk @RussSharek From another angle, there's https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2765944 as well:

« Chrome helps you find suspicious or unwanted programs on your Windows computer.

When Chrome offers to remove unwanted programs, click Remove. Chrome will remove the software, set some settings to default, and turn off extensions. »

@scoon Well, I can’t imagine it helping performance at all, that’s for sure

@Shamar @cypnk @angristan everything built on Electron and thus Chromium would disagree?

@Shamar @cypnk @angristan Well, that's the difference between "open source" (or even plain openwashing: e.g. using the word "open" or "opensource" to promote proprietary stuff) and #FreeSoftware

@angristan Windows only so far. I believe Chromium is also unaffected since it has different priorities and it’s open source. If you run Chromium, you should be fine

@szbalint @cypnk but dated Mar. 29...

@szbalint If only! Speaking if April fools... I stayed mostly offline today and it was relatively peaceful

I think I’ll be talking April 1st off every year

@valerauko I don’t think Chromium will have this. There are too many non-Google people involved and Chrome is seen more as “Value Added” anyway

If Chromium gets something similar, I’d expect a fork shortly after

@tastytentacles @cypnk Firefox is fully open source, and the nonprofit behind it is very committed to user privacy and freedom.

@brainblasted
I know Firefox is one of the better ones for transparency, but I just don't really trust anything anymore.

Used to think I was being paranoid about Facebook and the like and now I find out I was exactly right.
It's kinda reinforced all my worst paranoias.
@cypnk

@tastytentacles @cypnk Facebook was a proprietary software and web service vendor that was known to try to gather as much data as possible for monetization purposes. The abuses of Facebook were likely, and you happened to be justified in your paranoia in one area. You should not let that paranoia commandeer your critical thinking and judgment ability.

@brainblasted
Definitely, my problem is more that I stored my paranoia about Facebook in the same place as some less useful paranoias.
@cypnk

@maloki @cypnk real

@maloki Sadly real. Just bad timing 😓

@Faveing It may use too many resources for Android right now, but that hardware gap is dropping for new phones every year

But they may incorporate something into Android base and not the browser

@cypnk
True but they could sneak it into Google play services and only have it run when your not using the phone like 3am

@Faveing Oh definitely. And make it so that Play is unusable if the update isn’t applied. That will force vendors to make changes quickly even if they’re slow to release updates to Android itself

@cypnk
Yep they would do that but they can't if you never installed gapps lol

@cypnk https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/basic-usage/

@mastor Chromium may not need that kind of isolation (yet), but I guess some people would want to be prepared, just in case

@cypnk I'll try to find Firejail's tweaks for Chromium
based Brave * these days.

* Sometimes you need a ›shit‹ browser; yes, indeed