11 ms·

I've always hated that "service" (more like malware given this news) like everything else that installs itself into the autolaunch sequence without permission,

• sneak 7y ago
  Yeah, the Google autoupdater’s insistence on reinstalling itself to maintain RCE on my machine even after being explicitly removed is really irksome.
  • techslave 7y ago
    interesting that apple brought the hammer out for zoom but doesn’t do that for chrome
• toyg 7y ago
  Yeah, I removed Chrome precisely because it kept re-adding its crap to the login sequence. It really drove home the notion that Google will not respect any boundary or privacy - your machine is their machine, your data is their data, and screw you if you don't agree. Now I live in Firefox and it's just as good as Chrome, at least for my needs. I've dropped pretty much all Google stuff except for GMail, mostly out of laziness (I would have to update hundreds of accounts).
  • w0utert 7y ago
    >> I've dropped pretty much all Google stuff except for GMail, mostly out of laziness (I would have to update hundreds of accounts). I held off for two years moving away from GMail for this reason. A year ago I decided to pull the plug anyway, and it turned out to be much less annoying than expected. My strategy was as follows: first enable a forward from GMail to your new mail address, then directly migrate the ~10 vital/daily accounts, then just leave the rest pointing to the GMail account. After that, change each remaining account immediately (no exceptions) the moment I either log in to it, or receive an e-mail from it that refers to the GMail address. It took me about two months migrating away from GMail, and as a bonus I was able to identify quite a few old login I didn't really have a use for anymore, so I closed them. For regular mail I put an auto-reply in GMail that says I don't use it anymore and the address will be closed at some point in the future. But honestly, I don't think anyone ever saw it as nobody sends regular email anymore these days. All in all the process was pretty painless, and I feel very happy about ditching the last Google service I was still using (except the rare Google query of DDG fails to return useful results)
    • jeremija 7y ago
      I've been thinking about migrating away from GMail for a while now. Are you self hosting your email now, or are you using a provider like ProtonMail? Just curious
      • dewey 7y ago
        Not GP but I did my migration with the same steps from Google Apps to Fastmail. They even have a nice importer that works well.
      • osamagirl69 7y ago
        not GP either, but I did the same and migrated to Fastmail. The transition was extremely smooth, and at least for now gmail allows you to set up integration (either forwarding rule or remote retrieval through IMAP) to forward you old e-mail to fastmail. I have it set up to auto tag all incoming gmail mail and move it into a folder that I check occasionally to see if anything interesting came through. One amazing advantage to using fastmail (or really any real e-mail provider) is that it is trivial to set it up to use your own domain for e-mail, and to do catchall addresses for your domain. I use this feature heavily, using the general strategy of giving every service a different e-mail address. In this way I can sort by incoming to field, and block out anyone who sends spam using rules acting on the to field. This does an amazing job of sorting out things like mailing lists that keep re-adding you or that are worth monitoring but aren't worthy of showing up in my inbox.
• crushingcrash 7y ago
  Agreed with you 100% - I also hate the nonstandard window GUI interface elements (tabs in the title bar, fuck outta here!) and the really horrific preferences pane. Chrome is a dumpster fire.
  • human20190310 7y ago
    I like Chrome for Javascript development/debugging, but I don't use it for anything else.
    • fmajid 7y ago
      Use Vivaldi instead.
      • dewey 7y ago
        Why not Firefox?
      • PikachuEXE 7y ago
        or Brave (for debugging only)
    • minusf 7y ago
      I use iridium.
  • techslave 7y ago
    my #1 UI hate is single click in omnibar selects all. WTF
    • crushingcrash 7y ago
      I hate how they have this "Hold Command-Q to quit.' FUCK that.
• bluedino 7y ago
  Google's update service was the cause of my Mac not waking up from sleep. :(
  • fpgaminer 7y ago
    Any details? My Mac sometimes won't wake (eventually k-panics). Curious if I'm falling prey to the same thing...
    • bluedino 7y ago
      Do your logs mention it (open the Mac console app)?
• Shank 7y ago
  This is the one thing I wish Apple would solve in a new version of macOS. There are so many ways to automatically start software, and I would love a more built-in way to manage what can start with the system. They have login items, but that's an incomplete list. I recently _gave up_ trying to remove Dropbox because its auto-updater kept coming back after removing seemingly all possible places where it was stored. Apple is willing to inundate users with permission prompts for microphone, location, and disk access. Why not the ability to start with the system?
  • Scapeghost 7y ago
    Yes, it's one of the first things that befuddled/frustrated me on macOS after coming from Windows (not that that was much better). Dropbox apparently also used to show you a fake system password dialog which saved your administrator password, and more: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dropbox https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dropbox
    • Shank 7y ago
      > not that that was much better At least on Windows, I could with confidence say that Sysinternals Autoruns + Process Hacker would get you 99.9% of the way. I too went from Windows to macOS, and I tried countless tools (Lingon X, CleanMyMac, App Cleaner, App Cleaner & Uninstaller Pro, etc.) to no avail in my quest to kill Dropbox.
      • fortran77 7y ago
        Agreed! The Macs are still a crazy mess. Not that much different from the old days with chains of Inits.
    • api 7y ago
      A lot of these things are hacks to streamline user experience.
    • pilif 7y ago
      Back then it turned out the password dialog wasn't fake but was the standard OS dialog apps can request sudo access with. The text in the dialog is app-customizable.
• boardwaalk 7y ago
  I'm not even quite sure why Google does it. Can't they just check and fetch updates while Chrome is open? What's it matter if Chrome is out of date if it isn't running? Are they trying to push off updates to the middle of the night or something? That doesn't really make sense, since people probably mostly leave their browser open anyways. I had Chrome installed "just in case" (mainly for the dev tools for the rare occasion I do web dev) and I just uninstalled it and the updater. It's not worth the surface area... Now to get around to nuke all this junk that Citrix Receiver installs. Ugh.
  • cbsmith 7y ago
    It's a better way to mitigate against zero days in the browser, where you might get exploited even before you find out the browser is out of date.
    • apostacy 7y ago
      While that is true, I do not believe that is why they are doing it that way. There's nothing stopping them from giving some minimal feedback that an update happened. It would actually be better that they did. It is also suspicious how set they are so against users using an older version of their browser. Security is not a good enough justification. It is actually easier to use an older Operating System than an older version of Chrome. This is clearly just to protect the integrity of their platform.
    • kevingadd 7y ago
      What kind of zero-day does this protect against that wouldn't be blocked by an at-launch-time update check like most regular software uses? If anything, at-launch-time is better because Keystone's last update check might have been 2 hours before the 0day patch came out, but at-launch-time would check immediately and notice.
      • Already__Taken 7y ago
        at-launch check would obviously delay launch. Users do not want chrome to start slower I thought this would be obvious.
• apostacy 7y ago
  The trends that Google has spearheaded have had a real effect on me over the years. I feel alienated from my computer. Subtle things will just change. If I really dig I might be able to find out why, but I don't have the time, so I just accept it. Usually very small things that are barely noticeable. My Chromecast extension disappeared and was integrated into the browser. My brain could not help but notice this benign change, which caused a hard to place sense of unease. Or when Google decided to remove rotation from the home screen on Android 2.3 -- it wasn't a huge problem, but I could have sworn that something changed. Users were conflicted, many convincing themselves that the homescreen never rotated at all. It has made me not trust my computer. I second guess myself much more. If some option no longer exists, I wonder if it was just my imagination or if it was quietly deprecated while I wasn't looking. Does it even matter? I think that we are being trained to see devices as ephemeral, and not to get too attached to them.
  • cortesoft 7y ago
    You feel alienated from your computer because there has been a conscious decision to take away options and user control in modern software. And I get why that decision has been made, even if I hate it as much as you and every other computer enthusiast. For 90% of people, they have always "felt alienated" from their computers. They didn't understand what was happening or why things changed either, and it was easy to get yourself into trouble if you didn't know what you were doing and were trying to figure out how to fix something. So companies decided to make their software have fewer options, and do more things automatically, without asking the user to have to make a choice. They don't give the users an option to customize, so they don't have to worry about those customizations causing breakage. For advanced users this is crippling, but there are a lot more of them than there are of us, so they are going to be catered to.
    • yesco 7y ago
      Ironically despite there being less choices in an effort to make it easier for that "90%", the amount of tech support friends and family request from me has only increased in the past years. Personally I don't buy the whole "removing choices to stop users from hurting themselves" excuse. To me it seems like over zealous designers trimming far more than necessary to make things look nicer at the cost of usability. But what do I know?
• jasonvorhe 7y ago
  You hate software with a big more than malware?
• nothis 7y ago
  >but sadly Google Search and YouTube still don't have good enough alternatives yet. I thought that, too, but then I held my breath and just switched to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine and... there's no difference, really. Maybe some niche cases where google spits out more specific results and handles exact quotes better. But for 99% of "type a word, get results" kind of uses, it works great. I did not expect that, maybe still burnt from when Google was so far ahead of the competition in search it wasn't even a question. Youtube is a different story but I don't really miss anything not logging in, so there's that.
  • narrator 7y ago
    If duckduckgo doesn't do a good search you can always type "g! <search>" and it will search using google. I usually search duckduckgo first and then fall back to Google. The thing that made me quit google was the "controversial twiddler"[1] and their delisting of non corporate health sites[2]. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20723327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20723327 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755
  • jvzr 7y ago
    I've been using DDG for literal years now, and whenever (rarely) I use Google for a search, I'm completely befuddled by Google Search's user experience. There's stuff everywhere: vertical lists, horizontal lists, thumbnails, chevrons, cards, blocks, drop shadows. DDG is just no-nonsense: a list of web results, like Google was then. For that alone, it wins my heart. Though, privacy is the main reason I use DDG.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  In fairness, having a less-than-up-to-date web browser or OS is quite dangerous from a security perspective. I'm extremely glad that today's browsers patch themselves in the background.
• universenz 7y ago
  You should check out BlockBlock[1] by the cool dudes at Objective-See.. "Malware installs itself persistently, to ensure it's automatically re-executed at reboot. BlockBlock continually monitors common persistence locations and displays an alert whenever a persistent component is added to the OS." [1] https://www.objective-see.com/products/blockblock.html https://www.objective-see.com/products/blockblock.html