Google Updates Chrome's Terms of Service
centuren writes "In response to the reaction to Chrome's terms of service, Google has truncated the offending Section 11, apologizing for the oversight. The new Section 11 contains only the first sentence included in their Universal Terms of Service, now stating: 'You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.'"
Its icon looks like an anal bead.
So far we've gotten an apology and a quick amendment that eliminates the offending clause. Now we just need for the group responsible for the oversight to be fired and one or two sacrificial killings and we'll call it even.
I'm a big tall mofo.
relinquish rights to the stuff that may have been created before the update?
No, the OP had it right, its just an "outbreak"... saying a sudden outbreak is redundant.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outbreak
Main Entry:
outbreak
Function:
noun
Date:
1602
1 a: a sudden or violent increase in activity or currency
b: a sudden rise in the incidence of a disease
c: a sudden increase in numbers of a harmful organism and especially an insect within a particular area
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+outbreak
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/outbreak
etc, etc...
See.... nobody, not even Google themselves ever reads the freakin' legal boilerplate crap you have to click on to install software.
It's open source. Just remove the terms of service and recompile.
They took the standard EULA that they use for everything, and slapped it on - it was the easiest thing for the programmers to do at the time, no thought required, just use the standard legal mumbo-jumbo. An understandable mistake, and they've corrected it.
Can't we have a legal system that would just dismiss something so rediculous and unreasonable??? You know, something to protect the people?? They could have put "by agreeing, we will assume the deed to your house", and I'm sure the number of downloads wouldn't have changed.
Umm, nice try troll. It was a genuine concern. The clause had the potential to be a huge land grab. It's hard to say whether it was an accident or they really got the message but it's been fixed. It's not the only time it's happened. I seem to remember both Apple and MS trying that sort of thing in the past, it's a bit easier to believe that Google just made a mistake though.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
On the resource side of things, they're going to have to make a significant amount of improvement to be competitive with Firefox on performance. Sure web surfing is apparently faster, but that's against the 3.0 release and neglects the impact of memory hogging and the tweaks coming down the pipe in 3.1.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
Umm, that's what a boilerplate is for. For pretty much any other service they have it would have been fine. Or at least in keeping with the competition.
The only reason why it's a problem is because this is one of like two things they're providing where it's not appropriate. Google has a much larger number of projects for which a clause like that is pretty much mandatory to provide the service.
All this is scaremongering. Your confidential business data, bank account details, personal preferences in pornography, medical records and DNA sequence are strictly a matter between you and Google's marketing department, and no-one else. Remember, they're not evil!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The thing is, the language itself was not the most offensive part of this.
What is most offensive is the way these bastards write these absurdly one-sided "agreements", assuming the benefit that if anything is unenforceable it will only selectively be struck, and just pass off their standard shit with every single product assuming nobody will ever read it.
Good thing we have the internets to call them on it this time, but shame on them for doing it in the first place. And not just google, but damn near every tech company. The only reason they fixed it was because the high profile of the product. It's still evil.
Hmmm, let's see...
1. Loudly complain about annoying features in the beta stage
2. Watch as company removes said features because they're in vulnerable position
3. Rinse and repeat on other products
4. Realize why so many corporations fight for control of the media
5. Start your own local newspaper
6. ?
7. Go out of business because nobody reads newspapers anymore, you moron
That's not the only thing that prevents Firefox users from using chrome. The other two big things are the lack of add-ons and Windows exclusivity, both subject to change. As soon as Chrome has a decent enough equivalent to Adblock and Noscript, and maybe better keyboard-only navigation, I'll be all over it.
Corporations just don't copy and past legal stuff -- EVER.
As a past member of three corporate legal departments, I'm ROFL at this quote. Most contracts start as boilerplate and only get changed through negotiation between the parties.
I'm running xp-64 and run Chrome just fine.
Math is like sex. People who get it are popular in class, people who don't are not.
Chrome works just fine for me on Vista64 and integrates very slickly with Aero Glass. If you look at the build requirements it lists the Vista SDK, so frankly I'd be pretty amused if it didn't work on on Vista.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
The vast majority of Firefox users are running Windows. I don't see the lack of other platforms making much difference here.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
The factor you seem to be ignoring is that Firefox users are more likely to be early adopters. So I think they are more likely to at least try Chrome.
If you use Privoxy you can have Chrome with ad blocking as well. Works like a charm for me. Credit to this blog for pointing me in the right direction.
Denny
Erecting the wall of separation between church and state is absolutely essential in a free society. - Thomas Jefferson
The Chrome browser binary you can download is *based* on the Chromium source code, which is free (see http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-windows on instructions how to compile). The Chrome browser itself is NOT under the BSD license. I was quite disappointed when I realized that. - Just because they say "open source" somewhere doesn't make the Chrome browser itself open source.
;)
And what's this "installer" program to download the browser for you, why not just give us a download link to the browser itself? Furthermore, the browser will also *update* anytime it feels like it. Afaik there's no way to deactivate this *feature*.
I'd love to see a site dedicated to compiling daily builds of the Chromium source code, maybe through in some forks by private fiddlers, because right now following the instructions from the link requires you to use a non open source tool "gclient" to download about 500MB of source and then compile it using M$ Visual Studio - and then hope it produces a working binary (oh, and have the time for this). So far I couldn't find anyone doing this and putting the binaries online yet - not even using google
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.