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Google Chrome Spinoff 'Iron' For Privacy Fanatics
Sonnet_XVIII writes "According to DownloadSquad,
A German company SRWare has developed a Google Chrome Spin off called Iron aimed at people who are concerned or have questions about Google's policies for collecting usage data."
we started to call forks a "spin off"?
Red Leader Standing By!
I only speak a little German. So here is a bery bad translation via babelfish:
America, Home of the Brave.
That alone makes it far superior to Chrome.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They should have called it "Tinfoil" instead...
I promise not to make "dupe" comments.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Not really, unless you call clearing cookies between browsing sessions fanatical.
The SRWare site and the installer are in German, but the browser itself (menu's, etc.) is in English, just for anyone thinking you're going to have to hunt out an EnUs addon or something
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense
Tin Hat?
Titanium?
--
Oh Well, Bad Karma and all . . .
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
I'm increasingly starting to think that Slashdot editors are being underhandedly paid by Google to subtly ridicule anti-Google articles or sentiments. The wording of this summary makes it pretty blatantly obvious that the editor wants to make people who are suspicious of Google appear "fanatical", implying all the baggage that that word carries with it these days.
How is it fanatical to not want to send your data to a private corporation? Would it be fanatical if that corporation was Microsoft, Sony or Universal Studios?
I clear my cookies regularly. What Slashdot calls fanatical I call routine. So I guess that makes me a fanatic.
I hate printers.
Fanatical people don't think of themselves as fanatical. Only the people that label them fanatical do..
I don't see where "privacy fanatics" == suspicious of Google. I fall into the former, and I am suspicious of most online companies.
"Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...' and then do it." - Duane Michals
Uhm, because there is a box you have to check to OPT-IN to the program to send them that information.
aimed at people who are concerned or have questions about Google's policies for collecting usage data.
So if I have questions, it answers them? Cool. I can never decode those EULAs.
So, um, thanks for giving no actual information about this new revision, with the only real reference a German website with a download link. I guess this could be an incentive to learn Deutsch, but for the average /. reader, this is just an advertisement.
Anyway, here's a Babelfish translated link:
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.srware.net%2Fsoftware_srware_iron.php&lp=de_en&btnTrUrl=Translate
Bullshit. In the modern surveillance society, you'd have to be stupid to not take every precaution you reasonably can.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
The problem is determining what a reasonable person would call a fanatic. We all think we're reasonable, when honestly I find most of us (myself included) to be essentially unreasonable most of the time.
Calling someone fanatical these days is less about about extremism (for good or ill), and more about casting disrespect.
But you are expected to trust some obscure German software company. Right.
The sad thing is, some of you will (but then, you already use Windows...)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So they take the open source code, and redistribute it as an executable only. Of course completely legal under the BSD license, but wouldn't a privacy nut wonder why they give away the application for free but not the source code?
"I Just Want You To Hurt Like I Do" - Randy Newman
What is Iron?
Iron is an Internet Browser, like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera. It is based off of the free online source code of "Chromium".
I read that there are tools which attempt to make Chrome anonymous. Why shouldn't I simply use these?
There are worthwhile Freeware tools which offer similar functionality. However, these do not work from source and offer only limited control. Functions like the URL tracker cannot be switched off. This only offers variable security.
Iron is free -- how do you finance it?
In order to keep Iron financed, we place an advertisement on the front page. We also ask for donations if you like the product -- it would make us happy.
How can one be sure that Iron doesn't inadvertantly send data?
This is a concern. We log all incoming and outgoing packets and did not detect any precarious activity. You can also test this yourself.
PS: The harmless (DNS Vorabruf?) has been disabled based on standard, since it can possibly be abused by Spammern.
Do you offer uncompiled source code for Chromium?
This would be useless, because Chromium Builds likewise contain the offending source code. We only offer the modified Iron.
Since when was it "fanatical" to not want your activities tracked? You wouldn't call it fanatical if I didn't want you to follow me around the streets all day, so nor do I want Google to follow me around the net all day.
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense
You clear your cookies???!?!?!? I could never do that. I like all my cookies very much, and I get very sad when I lose them. All 12 of them. That said, until chrome/iron/whatever gets CS Lite, NoScript and AdBlock+ extensions, they will continue to be useless when compared to Firefox.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
So don't check the box.
I know there's a checkbox to agree to Chrome tracking your activity. My point was that it isn't fanatical to not want to be tracked, whether you have the choice or not.
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense
I configured Opera to clear all cookies at the end of every session. Occasionally, I also clear them during a session.
In Epiphany, I regularly clean out all cookies manually. I do this before and after visiting any e-commerce or financial site, even if I don't conduct any transactions.
It's no more fanatical than using a condom.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
This is a wonderful translation, because now I have a new exclamation: Achtung! Spammern!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
* unlike the current Chrome beta it uses the newest Webkit version of the current Chromium build
* it does not generate a unique ID of every client for use by Google
* no installation timestamp ill be generated for google
* no "suggest feature" that phones home to google (for help) what you type into the address bar
* will not phone home to google in case you mistyped a URL
* no phoning home for error reporting
* does not send RLZ tracking info to google, e.g. about when and where Chrome was downloaded
* NO frickin updater that installs itself as a startup app to run in the background
* does not load google homepage in background when the browser is loaded
Of course they provide the source code for your own tinkering as well, just don't hammer the poor fellas (more than they already get hammered right now ;)) as according to their page their current revenue only comes from the ads on the page and hopefully some donations by people showing their appreciation of their work.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Not at all. If you RTFCB you'll know that a major goal of Chrome is to get its technologies and ideas incorporated into other Open Source projects. Actually, that seems to be pretty much the idea, at least at this stage in the product's lifecycle. The product itself is too limited and glitchy for any other purpose. It's not like a lot of people are going to adopt it as their day-to-day browser, not with its minimal feature set and rendering issues.
I suspect the Chrome team is actually quite pleased to see their software adopted by a "competing" project.
I'm no Google fanboy (though I guess I used to be). I'm often quite impatient with their endless betas, their crappy documentation, their buggy products, and their total indifference to the actual software marketplace. But for once I have to admit that they've created something really useful. It's just that the usefulness is not to the end user, it's to the OS developer community.
Only fanatics label other fanatics as being fanatical !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The article uses the word fanatical. The editor is just summarizing what the original author wrote.
You're right. Here's an idea for safe browsing. Call it the "one time coffee shop" method.
1. Go to coffee shop & browse away
2. after surfing, torch the coffee house.
You can only do this once per coffee shop. Sadly, Starbucks doesn't supply computers since there's an abundance of said shops.
I see more anti-Google articles on Slashdot these days, that I seriously doubt on the whole the editors have a secret agenda to make Goolge look good. Individuals have individual opinions. I wouldn't be shocked to learn one editor is extremely pro-Google, and another anti-Google, but I haven't seen a consistent trend, though you might see a consistent trend if you were only looking for the good or bad.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Only fanatics debate if other fanatics are fanatical to qualify as fanatics.
And for the record, all the rest of you are fanatics. I'll well adjusted.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Because we all have so much to hide and fear?
I've been posting using the same name since the pre-internet BBS days. A quick Google will show you on the front page what my real name is, and what city I live in. A halfway thorough search will show you considerably more.
Frankly, I ain't got nothing to hide (besides my live chicken fetishes, but no one knows about that except he who controls my browsing data...oh shit)
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's unfortunate that this guy decided to fork rather than submit bug fixes (or even file bugs). Several of the issues he identified are bugs, not intentional behavior in Chromium. It's supposed to be the case that anything that talks to a third-party server is controllable via preferences and options. He ran into a few that slipped through and decided to do a fork for self-publicity and $$ rather than trying to help the project. I see no problem with having forks in general, but this one seems unnecessary at this point.
Here's an excerpt from an IRC log on chromium-dev from a week ago when people asked him why he wasn't filing bugs or patches:
Iron: because a fork will bring a lot of publicity to my person and my homepage ;) ;) ;) ;)
Iron: that means: a lot of money too
Iron: i dont take money for my fork
Iron: but i have adsense on my page
Iron: a lot of visitor -> a lot of clicka > a lot of money
Iron: we are here in germany
Iron: the press will love my fork
Iron: i talked to much journalists already
Iron: to remove all things in source talking to google
Iron: nobody here trusts google
Iron: the german people say: google is very evil
So, questions, #1 "source code available" - what license? #2: Does it need a friking installer or can I just unzip it and run (aka it doesn't mess with the registry) If it is still FLOSS and doesn't touch the registry, it would be a great choice.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
A reasonable person, or the average person? I don't think that the average person is reasonable.
The average person cares about having the newest car, the newest TV, a house they can't afford, etc. They want to keep up with the Joneses. They measure their own worth as relative to other people's possessions. Their own happiness depends upon being "better" than other people. That's not reasonable. That's why the American economy is in the mess that it's in. We're a society where the goal is to attain money any way you can. If you don't, you're a failure.
Reasonable? My ass.
Hey, were you on Disagree Mail the other day?
Yeah, it couldn't possibly be because you seem ridiculous to most people. It's gotta be a conspiracy!
You're not really doing your cause any favours with that post, you know.
Delete cookies?!
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Why not just set them to clear when you close your browser?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I won't pick points, but I don't think it's fair to roll 50% of the population into one bucket and assume things about them, right or wrong.
I'm sure you've never, in your entire life, done anything unreasonable, like wanting something because it looked cool, or sounded cool, or because you wanted to be the first kid on the block to have it, or because all of your friends had one.
All general statements are false.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Seems kind of pointless considering;
If you don't want tracking, don't check the box during install;
Even if you *did* check the box, you can go into "incognito" mode to avoid sending usage statistics.
looks like Google already had that covered and it looks like this edition covered here is solely for those who refuse to use anything with a "Google" tag on it.
Does it come with a personal wool-trimmer?
All general statements are false.
Kinda reminds me of a certain quote
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
So my reading of the original post was that the only thing the editors of Slashdot had added to the submission of Sonnet_XVIII was "Sonnet_XVIII writes." How do you think the editors are responsible for the wording of a submission? Do you assert that a "better" submission was made? It appears to me that you should be annoyed with Sonnet_XVIII not the slashdot editors.
I don't get much spam. When I do, I want something rough-sounding to bark.
Don't listen to U2, so yes, those would qualify.
*must buy pickelhaube helmet for web surfing*
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I clear my cookies regularly. What Slashdot calls fanatical I call routine. So I guess that makes me a fanatic.
That's not fanatical. Fanatical is forking a browser because simply deleting your cookies is not enough. I think you took it too personally.
um, yes, it is. You'll NEVER get the HIV or Herpes from some online website. You can reinstall your computer, there's no do-over button on your life.
Actually, many would argue that the economy is in the state it is in due to fractional banking. Wanting more than you had yesterday isn't exclusive to America. Being able to GET it w/o earning it is, and massive fractional banking allows leveraging to make it possible.
What worries me more is companies like Apple and Google gaming sites like Slashdot, reddit, etc. I seriously doubt it is only the fan boys who counter and mod down even the best of arguments, just because they dares to criticize their infallible darlings. The worst part is that they all call themselves liberal in the good sense of the word. I'm not sure who are more dangerous. Both are entities that dilute our privacy and rights step by step, because, you have nothing to hide, right?
Because we all have so much to hide and fear?
Because we all have so many good reasons to believe that those in authority respect our rights and have our best interests in mind. If you trust the authorities, you are part of the problem.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
That would be a wonderful idea if I wanted to get busted for arson and not "sedition".
I write sci-fi for metalheads
And people that considered clearing your browser cookies a sign of fanatacism have seriously low standards of effort or caring. It takes seconds. Good grief - what would they think of someone brushing their teeth each night? "He spends minutes everyday doing this activity? FANATIC!"
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Hey, it's the joke variant of the ad hominem argument. Good job laughing it all away without providing actual arguments (and no, "I got nothing to hide" is not one of them). If it weren't for people like you, how would they be able to dilute our privacy and rights? And your work is for a good cause. They must be defeated, these fanatics, in the finest of contemporary American anti-intellectual of styles. Knowledge, path! Intelligent debate, pah! Sir, you must be proud, I congratulate you for your accomplishments.
I think the main agenda
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Interesting that people raising privacy concerns on Google products are called "Fanatics", whilest the same people would be called heros if they'd identify similar problems in for instance Microsoft products.
Raises the questions who are the real fanatics?
Fanatical people don't think of themselves as fanatical. Only the people that label them fanatical do..
That's true, and it seems that extremism is becoming the norm. This can not be tolerated! I say intolerance and extremism must be wiped out on every level...
Oh, wait...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Maybe one of these days an Iron users door will get kicked down for fanatic browsing practices.
What surprises me most about the pro or anti Google opinions, is how quiet the open source supporters have been. This year we have a company developing both an open source web browser and an open source operating system for mobile computing, and people seem to be up in arms about it.
Considering NONE of us are required to use the official versions of either if we don't like something about it, what's there to complain about?
Then yours is as well. PARADOX.
I don't get the same interpretation as you from the summary. I think you're reading into it. In fact, CmdrTaco added the department of the story as "the why-open-source-is-awesome dept." Which very much compliments the creators of this fork.
If you run some of the text on Iron's website through a translator, you get:
The summary, therefore, is a really great representation of what the project is trying to do.
Your cache and browsing history can be detected by websites too. Firefox has extensions to deal with these.
In Opera, the easiest way to deal with cache privacy and "web bugs" may be to switch its image-loading mode to only load images from the originating website (the site in the address bar).
I don't know exactly what to do about keeping the browsing history private in Opera; turn off javascript I suppose.
This guy is gettin' paid by simply highlighting and deleting a few things from the source... genius
1. Light coffee house on fire ...
2. Search on their Internet
3.
4. Profit
>You can reinstall your computer
reinstall your computer? Not to sound overly pedantic but geez, I would not expect that kind of language on slashdot, less so from a poster with a low uid.
fantastic!
Oh yeah? Well, only the Sith deal in absolutes!
Not so funny now, is it?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You're right. Here's an idea for safe browsing. Call it the "one time coffee shop" method.
1. Go to coffee shop & browse away
2. after surfing, torch the coffee house.
You can only do this once per coffee shop. Sadly, Starbucks doesn't supply computers since there's an abundance of said shops.
I solved that problem by taking my laptop to each of the coffee shops.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Identity theft can, in the worst case scenarios, have costs that are comparable to the initial outlay in childbirth and treatment for the diseases mentioned in the parent post (given insurance).
It's not fanatical. It's just crazy and paranoid. I bet you shred all your credit card offers to.
My life is to busy for all that paranoia - to much time spent trying to fix my credit as it keeps getting hijacked somehow.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Isn't saying "Only the Sith deal in absolutes" an absolute statement?
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4414439 Iron 0.2.152.0
So pedantic. You know exactly what I meant... :-)
All of which are fixable. Even the worst case of identity theft ruining your life and leaving you broke still leaves you alive (unless part of the identity theft is killing you for your eyes or something).
There are things out there far worse. A little perspective. Some judicious caution applied in all cases will keep you healthy, happy, comfortable and safe your entire life.
Alright, I'm gonna shut up now... I think I've trolled enough. lol.
I wonder if George Lucas, or whoever wrote that line, realised how funny it was.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.