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Seasoned...
Joined: Sat Oct 21st, 2017
Location: Near The Pointy End , USA
Posts: 1299
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Google Chrome is like everything you wanted to be when in high school. It's cool, it's trendy and it's fast, just like all the wrong popular girls. But I also found like many it drains your computer's battery life and not to mention when I was shown that Google actually really does monitor the Internet and goes above and beyond to forbid anyone from offering old versions of Chrome to download to mitigate your portion of control.. well
- File aggregation sites like OldVersion.com and FileHippo don't archive Chrome. FileHippo has a notice that states Google's policies disallow the site from offering downloads.
- Google had made changes to its own update process. It was no longer sufficient to set the “Auto-Update Check Period Override†to 0, as it had been. Now, the company's help pages contain the following: “Warning: To prevent abuse of this policy, if a device is not joined to an Active Directory domain, and if this policy has been set to 0 or to a value greater than 77 hours, this setting will not be honored and replaced by 77 hours after August 2014. If you are affected by this, and still want to disable Chrome updates (NOT RECOMMENDED), you may do so by using 'Update policy override' as described.â€
In other words, Google was still able to reach into my machine and forcibly update my software.
- You see pop-ups, at least once a day, telling you that you need to update Google Chrome manually. Google services like Gmail or Google Drive would embed a yellow banner when you attempted to use them. The banner would pop up every single time I used a Google service, and apparently can't be dismissed or blocked.
- Then, I stopped getting the errors. I checked my Google version and discovered I'm now running [at the time] 44.0.2403.89. My policy settings haven't changed. The only way to set them is by manually editing gpedit.msc, and that's not a command you enter accidentally. My Downloads folder indicates that I haven't downloaded Chrome's installer for more than a year. Somehow, and entirely not by choice, I'm running a new browser version.I am aware of course, that the trend in software is to force users to install security updates by default, and if Google had only made security patches mandatory, I'd have little issue with the company.
- my problem is that Google has made it virtually impossible to actually choose not to update your browser. You can't opt out. You can't install an older version. You can't shut Auto Update off unless you own the professional version of the Windows OS (though there are hacks to allow gpedit.msc to run on other versions of Windows).
Even once you've jumped through the hoops required to shut off Auto Update, Google retains the ability to turn it right back on. Windows 10 at least allows users to uninstall updates if they cause a problem. In Google's world, every version is better than the last for everyone, period, without exception.
Despite some possibly already deeply rooted opinions of me, I don't have an authority problem, authority has a ME problem.
I do have an issue with person's or in this case some corporation dictating to me what I CAN use on MY PROPERTY and I think that the whole aspect that this same genre of self-proclaimed authority by private corporations as a whole to use everything from compulsory action to coercion or even threats of violence in response to a demand of compliance sends me off the edge in true anger.
And as I stated, I get it, there's a corruptible source of NON-do good people sprinkled through society as a whole who have nothing better to do than complicate things from simplicity and wreak havoc and mayhem out of fun or spite thus creating breaches of security, trust, contracts, laws, and or otherwise things. Which should just show you what humans are like as we sweep from one degree to another.
Too deep.., that is; it can only be ankle deep when you dive in head first anymore in the world.
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"Be never first, never last and never noticed." - Unknown
"The slave is held most securely when he is held by the chains of his own will and of his own fears, and when he is locked down by his own slavish desires for a comfortable life." - Michael Bunker
"Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur" - ~ attributed to Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter (ca. 27–66 AD))
Roman courtier during the reign of Nero.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." - Thomas Paine
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~ Undrstm8ed Trailermentry Write Up Pg.
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