[conspire] (forw) Re: Firefox Addons Being Disabled Due to an Expired Certificate

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mignon Belongie (mignon.belongie at gmail.com):

> I will look into ungoogled-chromium , which I had not heard of.

I haven't done more than look at the GitHub site, so cannot in any way
vouch for the state of the project.  I note that they do have some
binary packages:
https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/

I inferthat it's the work of just a single coder -- as often is the case
for projects without big corporate money behind them.  On the bright
side, the scope of that developer's work is limited to removing
Chromium's integration with Google infrastructure, rather than
maintaining the entire browser.  On the third hand, you might be slow to
get needed security updates (or not get them):  As many critics note,
Ungoogled-Chromium doesn't _automatically_ update itself.  (That doesn't
mean updates aren't available.)


Reviews:
https://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Browsers/UnGoogled-Chromium.shtml
https://lifehacker.com/ungoogled-chromium-strips-away-the-privacy-invading-fea-1787139870
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/5j2auv/why_ungoogled_chromium_if_we_have_iridium/
https://askbobrankin.com/google_chrome_ungoogled.html


And, by the way, applications deciding to update themselves is yet
another thing I consider not-OK.  Applications should concentrate on
doing their jobs, and I & my distribution's package-management system in
conjunction with distro package maintainers, will take care of updating
when and if we wish, thankyouverymuch.  This self-updating thing is
apparently now accepted practice on proprietary OSes, but isn't with me.
I don't want my applications changing themselves, nor phoning home for
any reason, either.

Let alone would I be happy about _this_:

   [Mozilla's] Studies [is] a system through which the company tries 
   out new features and ideas before they are released to all
   Firefox users....

Pardon me?  You expect to remotely push experimental code out to my 
Linux machine and run it for corporate purposes?  I don't know why
people say 'Sure, whatevs' to that sort of idea.

'Studies' may well be Mozilla, Inc's answer to Google, Inc.'s 'field
trials' in Chrome and Chromium.  See mailing list posting reproduced
below for more on the latter.


Another Chromium variant, mentioned in my list: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRWare_Iron

I have it listed in my roster as proprietary, though as mentioned in the
Wikpedia page's 'Controversies' section, that's a bit murky.


Typo correction:

  FWIW, Chromium itself turns out to have a number of disturbing things
  built into it, where Google arrogates to itself the right to launch
  stranger processes from the browser to conduct experiments and collect
  ^^^^^^^^
  information,

That was supposed to be 'strange', not 'stranger'.



About 'field trials' in Chromium/Chrome, herewith part of a discussion
that first called to my attention ungoogled-chromium:


 Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:25:53 -0800
 From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
 To: dng at lists.dyne.org
 Subject: Re: [DNG] Multiple chromium mystery processes

 Quoting golinux at dyne.org (golinux at dyne.org):

 > I just noticed that chromium has started spawning multiple PIDs that
 > start with this string:
 >
 > PID XXXX chromium --type=renderer --field-trial-handle=1
 > --primordial-pipe-token= and on and on including lots of number
 > sequences.
 [...]
 > I searched a bit, and gather that this is phoning home with who
 > knows what information about my habits.  That can't be a good thing.
 > Does anyone know how to kill it?  Is there something comparable to
 > about:config in chromium?

 Possibly you've already seen http://raeknowler.com/wtf-chromium .
 That doesn't have a solution, exactly, but does provide more detail.

 Also,
 https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromium-dev/6V-OhvCMxJE/EZR_jpPFCAAJ
 says:

  While I believe you cannot disable field trials altogether, you can at
  least identify them by going to chrome://net-internals/#capture and
  clicking on "Stop". The "Active Field Trial Groups" shows their names.
  Then, I believe you can disable them one by one (or create a script that
  takes the names and creates a command line disabling all of them) using
  some command flag.

  (Of course, in case it does not list all of the available (not
  necessarily enabled) field trials, then some field trial may be added
  the next time you launch Chrome. Wash, rinse, repeat)

 'T'would be nice if the De??an package maintainer performed an
 experimentecetomy.

 Seems like there's an 'ungoogled-chromium' fork that has this covered:
 https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/patches/bromite/disable-fetching-field-trials.patch
 https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

 They claim to have functional builds for Stretch and Buster.