Or, you could have just partitioned the drive in two, one for OS, the other for data. And then "lock / freeze" the OS partition against any changes using something like Deep Freeze.
The fact that Google is one of the most popular brands among consumers, and the fact that millions upon millions (perhaps billion(?)) people are on Facebook shows you how little people care to know, and care about privacy!
Despite all the noise about Facebook freely sharing user data with third-parties, and despite all the noise about Google providing a backdoors to three-letter agencies.
I was basically going to say something similar but add that iOS only allows an app access to location service "while using the app", otherwise, permission is refused by default.
Apple are pathological about battery usage, and quite rightly also take privacy far more seriously than most other companies, thus the reason iOS allowed you control over apps well before Android starting implementing similar controls - minus Google services that is, because, you know, Google is All Knowing.
I despise Google and try to avoid them as much as possible, but unfortunately there's a few domains of theirs that there's no getting away from... namely, GoogleApi, Google Captcha, their cdn, as well as arguably the products: Maps and YouTube.
Without some of those domains, a large portion of websites would be broken, including many of those that require authentication using Captcha.
DuckDuckGo have their own crawler, and like any other search engine or AI personal assistant, sometimes they use third-parties for instant answers, such as Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Stack Overflow, MetroLyrics, etc, etc - basically "over 400 sources".
I don't think I've used Google in over 10 years now - I first switched to Bing, then about 6 years ago, to DuckDuckGo. And except on a handful of occasions (for image search), I've never used Bing, and certainly not Google!
In my opinion, DuckDuckGo has surpassed Google by far, as they don't mess with your query, they don't bubble you in your own little world, and you can use advanced queries to target what you really need.
Nothing is stored, no ip, no user-agent, no identifying cookies, and obviously no js fingerprinting.
And since they don't store anything useful, they don't get government requests for data, as there's nothing to give law enforcement.
When you search at DuckDuckGo, we don't know who you are and there is no way to tie your searches together.
When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.
Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all. This is a very unusual practice, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy.
On the scale of things, they make a tiny amount of profit from affiliate links, but again, nothing is passed to third-parties, except just the product you searched for.
Oh, and much of their profit is given to good causes such as open source projects and privacy organisations such as EFF, etc.
In short, every query is unique, so there's no way to tie one user doing multiple queries, no cookies, no user-agent capture, no ip, and obviously no js fingerprinting.
They keep advertising to a minimum and instead try to use affiliate services; but in either case, since they don't know who's doing a query, there's no personal info which is sent.
Another thing: since they don't store anything useful, they don't get any government requests for data, since there's nothing to give them.
If they didn't go down the route of compiling JS code, most people wouldn't be using Firefox as their browser in this day and age!
Don't blame Mozilla/Firefox for the problems caused by hipster web devs creating a new damned JS framework every month which manages to consume twice the processing power and cause massive browser bloat!
Erm, as others pointed out, mozilla is a non-profit organisation which does more than just create the Firefox browser.
And yes, Firefox does absolutely obey the hosts file, that's how I'm blocking countless google spyware. Perhaps you're mistaking Firefox with Windows 10?
With regards to privacy, they do what they can to the extent possible without getting under the skin of their funders, thus the reason for including 'tracking blocker' by default. i.e. you can't cut the hand that feeds you!
Who else will donate money - you?! Firefox is the only browser of hope left!
Israel is the Jewish homeland and has been for 3,200 years.
Prove it.
You hate Jewish people. Why the smirking and dishonest veil? Just own it.
Why are some Jews so insecure? No I don't hate any religious group, whether Muslim, Jews, or Christians, even if they be orthodox (in fact I admire some orthodox Jews/Christians), as long as they're not extremists/terrorists (like zionists).
Very true; and when they have no defence, they pull the anti-semitic card.
I find it pretty crazy that criticising Israel or even Zionism is anti-Semitic - imagine criticising Nazi's was anti-German, or criticising Saudi's was Islamophobic or criticising America was anti-Christian!
I love peace-loving Jews such as Noam Chomsky, and the people behind Jewish Voice for Peace. Anti-Semitism has it's place, just like Islamophobia, but using it as a trump card in every debate (particularly concerning the terrorist/apartheid state of Israel and their terrorising politics (zionism)) is just crazy wrong.
Again, imagine being critical of Saudi's, particularly concerning Jamal Khashoggi, and the Saudi's silencing any argument with "Islamophobia"!
The "secret sauce" to Google's products is their engineers, algorithms, and more recently, AI - and of course, their vast and unparalleled collection of user data put-together helps. Not to mention collective user analysis to better predict users, their buying habits, and to ultimately influence them (e.g. filter bubble).
It wouldn't be strange if they sold portions of user data to any entity, as long as it doesn't give the complete picture about that person. e.g. they can sell all they know about your health issues to insurance companies, without exposing your risky behaviour or things you get up to in your time, such as your drinking/drug use, and looking for prostitutes every 2 days after midnight in x-radius area, etc.
This used to happen with previous versions of Firefox = 56, specifically due to XUL.
I'm not sure if it happens now; but I also encountered it with some machines which have Kaspersky antivirus installed, because most anti-virus products inject their addon into Firefox (which would cause strange cpu-usage). And sadly, there doesn't appear to be an easy way to disable it except perhaps through some obscure setting in the AV.
Curious... why did you "upgrade" to Win10 in the first place? Why not stick with Win7 or possibly even Win8.1?
Based on my tests, it appears each iteration of Windows since XP is slower in various benchmarks, and Win10 (with April update) appears slowest out of all.
But at least a little praise to Microsoft for some-what improving energy efficiency since Win8.1 - although that's been set back by Win10 due to so many anomalous processes constantly consuming cpu/disk.
No, they were copied products. Like pretty much everything google has ever done - either it's bought off competition (i.e. extinguish), or copied the competition (extend).
There were a multitude on mapping products before google, including ajaxed ones, such as streetmaps and multimaps (bought by Microsoft and turned into bing). Although perhaps none were draggable.
Android was brought from a competitor when they realised from their spy (Eric Schmidt who was on the board of Apple) what Apple were creating. So they had early prototypes and virtually copied every aspect of the iPhone. The purpose was for tracking users on-the-go and so that one player couldn't lock them out of the mobile search and ad market.
No one is disputing the search giant's monopoly on the web. What they are disputing is that Google has moved all of the previous functionality of their OS into a closed off and highly regulated set of libraries. And they did that to tighten control over their OS. Now if Google made the OS and made the hardware and they were the only ones in town selling Android, who cares? But Google is literally fucking with third parties here. That's the deal here. Apple sells their phones direct to the public, so if they make a change and people hate it, their voting dollars moving away directly affect them, Apple. Now if Google makes a change and people hate it, the public voting dollars indirectly affect Google, but directly messes with the profits of other companies. That's where the anti-competitive nature comes into play. Google knows that if a vendor doesn't agree with them, they can literally twist the API enough to screw the vendor over. It's not like the vendor can sit there and redo an entire access API between releases. Now had Google done that from start, then we'd be in a different story and I'd just say, well they got what they deserve. But no, Google has slowly killed off "open" and "free" Android and did so when vendors were too deep to escape.
Whether they call it Android / ChromeOS / Fuchsia or how it works generally doesn't matter.
But if their product is the most widely used (they have a monopoly), they can't force and stipulate anti-trust / anti-competent behaviour over OEMs (handset manufacturers) - just like Microsoft used to do.
Namely, 1. if the OEM wants access to app store, they can't force them to also bundle other Google apps exclusively; 2. they shouldn't bribe network operators and OEMs to install Google apps exclusively; 3. if a handset manufacturer wants to ship a custom Android build, Google shouldn't threaten them from denying access to the app store market, or to any other Google apps.
I would have thoughts nerds would be pretty happy about this, as it means more competition and a more open and free market place, such that others have a chance to create competing apps and services.
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heh, nice reply!
Wish I had mod points!
Let me guess, you use Android as your phone, Chrome as your browser, gmail for emails, and have your profile on facebook / linkedin ?
Or, you could have just partitioned the drive in two, one for OS, the other for data.
And then "lock / freeze" the OS partition against any changes using something like Deep Freeze.
No offence, but maybe you're just rubbish with Windows as your familiar home is unix?
Just as Win admins are rubbish and lost in unix terminals.
Japanese politics is all about money.
What a strange thing to say - and American (or any democratic / capitalist) politics isn't about money?!
There's probably no other country in the World who is as well funded by large corporate interests as USA - look up lobbying (bribing).
The fact that Google is one of the most popular brands among consumers,
and the fact that millions upon millions (perhaps billion(?)) people are on Facebook shows you how little people care to know, and care about privacy!
Despite all the noise about Facebook freely sharing user data with third-parties,
and despite all the noise about Google providing a backdoors to three-letter agencies.
It's a sad state of affairs!
I was basically going to say something similar but add that iOS only allows an app access to location service "while using the app", otherwise, permission is refused by default.
Apple are pathological about battery usage, and quite rightly also take privacy far more seriously than most other companies, thus the reason iOS allowed you control over apps well before Android starting implementing similar controls - minus Google services that is, because, you know, Google is All Knowing.
I despise Google and try to avoid them as much as possible, but unfortunately there's a few domains of theirs that there's no getting away from...
namely, GoogleApi, Google Captcha, their cdn, as well as arguably the products: Maps and YouTube.
Without some of those domains, a large portion of websites would be broken, including many of those that require authentication using Captcha.
How do you possibly get around that?!
Try Firefox, tab management and scrolling has been a "feature" for quite a long time now;
and Firefox Quantum (v57+) is generally faster than Chrome if not the same, and uses less memory on Windows.
Proof?
DuckDuckGo have their own crawler, and like any other search engine or AI personal assistant, sometimes they use third-parties for instant answers, such as Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Stack Overflow, MetroLyrics, etc, etc - basically "over 400 sources".
I don't think I've used Google in over 10 years now - I first switched to Bing, then about 6 years ago, to DuckDuckGo. And except on a handful of occasions (for image search), I've never used Bing, and certainly not Google!
In my opinion, DuckDuckGo has surpassed Google by far, as they don't mess with your query, they don't bubble you in your own little world, and you can use advanced queries to target what you really need.
Proof?
Their policy is crystal clear.
Nothing is stored, no ip, no user-agent, no identifying cookies, and obviously no js fingerprinting.
And since they don't store anything useful, they don't get government requests for data, as there's nothing to give law enforcement.
When you search at DuckDuckGo, we don't know who you are and there is no way to tie your searches together.
When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.
Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all. This is a very unusual practice, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy.
On the scale of things, they make a tiny amount of profit from affiliate links, but again, nothing is passed to third-parties, except just the product you searched for.
Oh, and much of their profit is given to good causes such as open source projects and privacy organisations such as EFF, etc.
Proof?
Their policy is crystal clear on what data they capture / store / pass forward.
In short, every query is unique, so there's no way to tie one user doing multiple queries, no cookies, no user-agent capture, no ip, and obviously no js fingerprinting.
They keep advertising to a minimum and instead try to use affiliate services;
but in either case, since they don't know who's doing a query, there's no personal info which is sent.
Another thing: since they don't store anything useful, they don't get any government requests for data, since there's nothing to give them.
I think that quote was from Microsoft (particularly Gates), including the one about copying their competitors - before Apple, and now Google ;)
Humms, sadly, you're right... Firefox isn't blocking domains based on hosts file :/
I'm using OpenDNS for blocking various domains too, so didn't notice.
Just checked and it appears both IE11 as well as latest Google's Chrome browser are honouring the hosts file.
Shocking.
If they didn't go down the route of compiling JS code, most people wouldn't be using Firefox as their browser in this day and age!
Don't blame Mozilla/Firefox for the problems caused by hipster web devs creating a new damned JS framework every month which manages to consume twice the processing power and cause massive browser bloat!
Erm, as others pointed out, mozilla is a non-profit organisation which does more than just create the Firefox browser.
And yes, Firefox does absolutely obey the hosts file, that's how I'm blocking countless google spyware.
Perhaps you're mistaking Firefox with Windows 10?
With regards to privacy, they do what they can to the extent possible without getting under the skin of their funders, thus the reason for including 'tracking blocker' by default. i.e. you can't cut the hand that feeds you!
Who else will donate money - you?!
Firefox is the only browser of hope left!
Israel is the Jewish homeland and has been for 3,200 years.
Prove it.
You hate Jewish people. Why the smirking and dishonest veil? Just own it.
Why are some Jews so insecure?
No I don't hate any religious group, whether Muslim, Jews, or Christians, even if they be orthodox (in fact I admire some orthodox Jews/Christians), as long as they're not extremists/terrorists (like zionists).
Precisely!!
Very true;
and when they have no defence, they pull the anti-semitic card.
I find it pretty crazy that criticising Israel or even Zionism is anti-Semitic - imagine criticising Nazi's was anti-German, or criticising Saudi's was Islamophobic or criticising America was anti-Christian!
I love peace-loving Jews such as Noam Chomsky, and the people behind Jewish Voice for Peace. Anti-Semitism has it's place, just like Islamophobia, but using it as a trump card in every debate (particularly concerning the terrorist/apartheid state of Israel and their terrorising politics (zionism)) is just crazy wrong.
Again, imagine being critical of Saudi's, particularly concerning Jamal Khashoggi, and the Saudi's silencing any argument with "Islamophobia"!
The "secret sauce" to Google's products is their engineers, algorithms, and more recently, AI - and of course, their vast and unparalleled collection of user data put-together helps. Not to mention collective user analysis to better predict users, their buying habits, and to ultimately influence them (e.g. filter bubble).
It wouldn't be strange if they sold portions of user data to any entity, as long as it doesn't give the complete picture about that person. e.g. they can sell all they know about your health issues to insurance companies, without exposing your risky behaviour or things you get up to in your time, such as your drinking/drug use, and looking for prostitutes every 2 days after midnight in x-radius area, etc.
Just as we know they likely sell a small subset of our data related to products we might be interested in, in the recent past, and other related data which shows your wealth and how affluent you are, to big buyers such as retailers so they can charge a different price to each individual.
We also know from Snowdon's revelations that Google is basically an arm of NSA, they work closely together, and in part, Google gives away vast sums and even user data to the government in exchange for relaxed laws that benefit themselves - i.e. Google is one of the biggest US Gov lobbyist (briber).
This used to happen with previous versions of Firefox = 56, specifically due to XUL.
I'm not sure if it happens now; but I also encountered it with some machines which have Kaspersky antivirus installed, because most anti-virus products inject their addon into Firefox (which would cause strange cpu-usage). And sadly, there doesn't appear to be an easy way to disable it except perhaps through some obscure setting in the AV.
Curious... why did you "upgrade" to Win10 in the first place?
Why not stick with Win7 or possibly even Win8.1?
Based on my tests, it appears each iteration of Windows since XP is slower in various benchmarks, and Win10 (with April update) appears slowest out of all.
But at least a little praise to Microsoft for some-what improving energy efficiency since Win8.1 - although that's been set back by Win10 due to so many anomalous processes constantly consuming cpu/disk.
No, they were copied products.
Like pretty much everything google has ever done - either it's bought off competition (i.e. extinguish), or copied the competition (extend).
There were a multitude on mapping products before google, including ajaxed ones, such as streetmaps and multimaps (bought by Microsoft and turned into bing). Although perhaps none were draggable.
And like most clueless google supporters, you should read a little history - ajax was created by Microsoft (in 1998) for the very purpose of their office webmail!
Android was brought from a competitor when they realised from their spy (Eric Schmidt who was on the board of Apple) what Apple were creating. So they had early prototypes and virtually copied every aspect of the iPhone. The purpose was for tracking users on-the-go and so that one player couldn't lock them out of the mobile search and ad market.
Very insightful reply, thank you!
Particularly this paragraph...
No one is disputing the search giant's monopoly on the web. What they are disputing is that Google has moved all of the previous functionality of their OS into a closed off and highly regulated set of libraries. And they did that to tighten control over their OS. Now if Google made the OS and made the hardware and they were the only ones in town selling Android, who cares? But Google is literally fucking with third parties here. That's the deal here. Apple sells their phones direct to the public, so if they make a change and people hate it, their voting dollars moving away directly affect them, Apple. Now if Google makes a change and people hate it, the public voting dollars indirectly affect Google, but directly messes with the profits of other companies. That's where the anti-competitive nature comes into play. Google knows that if a vendor doesn't agree with them, they can literally twist the API enough to screw the vendor over. It's not like the vendor can sit there and redo an entire access API between releases. Now had Google done that from start, then we'd be in a different story and I'd just say, well they got what they deserve. But no, Google has slowly killed off "open" and "free" Android and did so when vendors were too deep to escape.
Whether they call it Android / ChromeOS / Fuchsia or how it works generally doesn't matter.
But if their product is the most widely used (they have a monopoly), they can't force and stipulate anti-trust / anti-competent behaviour over OEMs (handset manufacturers) - just like Microsoft used to do.
Namely,
1. if the OEM wants access to app store, they can't force them to also bundle other Google apps exclusively;
2. they shouldn't bribe network operators and OEMs to install Google apps exclusively;
3. if a handset manufacturer wants to ship a custom Android build, Google shouldn't threaten them from denying access to the app store market, or to any other Google apps.
I would have thoughts nerds would be pretty happy about this, as it means more competition and a more open and free market place, such that others have a chance to create competing apps and services.