Slashdot Mirror
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!
They should have called it "Tinfoil" instead...
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.
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.
* 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.
Only fanatics label other fanatics as being fanatical !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
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