Google web services take advantage of an API that only Google knows about.
Completely unsurprising. Google should have been given the anti-trust treatment long ago. There’s not a saving us because the ones to save us are completely complicit. And people who write independent browsers will be smacked back down by having places like YouTube throttle them.
In the comments its not just chrome that is affected.
Its apparently all Chromium browsers.
Isn’t chromium open source? How are the APIs a secret?
Simply noone ever looked and it’s not documented. And the api is locked to work only on google domains so it wasn’t usable to anyone to accidentally notice what’s going on.
The code doesn’t do anything on non-Google domains.
Luca says this - I’m inclined to agree:
This is interesting because it is a clear violation of the idea that browser vendors should not give preference to their websites over anyone elses.
Follow up question: How many other parts of the chromium codebase limited to work on (maybe other) specific domains?
including Vanadium?
This comes from
hangout_services/thunk.jsI searched for
hangoutin the vanadium repo, no result, so it’s not patched there either: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium
Kind of. Vivaldi let’s you turn it off though. Privacy, disable meet extension.
Fuck Chromium. Don’t let Google single handedly control how the Internet works. Don’t support Chromium browsers.
This is why we need to all back firefox…
I dont care if the CEO sucks, or if they have some opt-out anti-features…
Chrome monopoly is a far greater threat
Google should have been given the anti-trust treatment long ago
Lina Khan on the horizon looming ominously.
Hopefully no one comes in here and tells me Firefox does shit like this as well… I just swapped back.
Remember this thumb rule -> if it’s not open-source, you are allowing the software to do whatever it wants to do.
No regulation, law, support group is going to help you. You are digging your own grave.
I agree, but… This was in open source software. Chromium. Not just Google Chrome. https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/422c736b82e7ee763c67109cde700db81ca7b443
hangout_services/thunk.js (via) It turns out Google Chrome (via Chromium) includes a default extension which makes extra services available to code running on the *.google.com domains - tweeted about today by Luca Casonato, but the code has been there in the public repo since October 2013 as far as I can tell.
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servicesthunkjs/
If it’s any software you didn’t write yourself or audit every line of…
For a typical Linux distro that’s tens of thousands of packages…
I am no expert on code-auditing. But I’m slightly at peace that there are 100s of experts looking at the code because it’s open-source. But i also understand mistakes can still happen. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best solution so far.
There’s some truth to that, but bad actors have managed to slip things through in the past. It happened recently with xz.
I guess my point is that we put a lot of trust in strangers when we run any code on our systems. Open or not.
This is not new news lol
