Chocolate Teapots come to mind ...
Cookie clutter: Chrome saves Google cookies from cookie jar purges
If you tell Google's latest version of Chrome to delete all of its cookies – surprise, you may still end up with Google cookies on your computer. Christoph Tavan, CTO of publishing biz Contentpass, pointed out this week that when netizens tell the browser to remove all cookies from their machines, Chrome 69 keeps users logged …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 25th September 2018 22:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
China Teapots come to mind too...
From here:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/24/google_chrome_auto_login/
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To here:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-ledger-video-data-privacy
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To here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-and-mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-to-track-retail-sales
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Final Destination:
https://neweconomics.org/2018/07/whats-your-score
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Tuesday 25th September 2018 21:58 GMT K
"Why do people still use Chrome?"
Because people would prefer to believe that Google is benevolent and a charity... rather than commercial business, also there was a time, when Google was the up-start underdog and could do no wrong. They've managed to continue playing this role quite well, but it's gradually wearing away!
The only thing that has kept me using Chrome was the convenience of Chrome Remote Desktop, but Google have now released a HTML5 interface for that, so now I'm tossing up between Firefox and Vivaldi - But i do wonder if they are secretly recording my sessions!
If I'm honest, with all the Cambridge Analytics fiasco and Android's Location tracking fiasco - Things are starting to creep the sh*t out of me! Won't be long before I do buy a tin-foil hat..
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 11:35 GMT DropBear
"Doesn't clearing cookies at end of session but setting up a cookie exception list on Firefox do that for you?"
Not sure what exactly that ended up doing, but when I last checked Firefox allowed you to do absolutely whatever you wanted with cookies except keeping a select few and deleting everything else. Exceptions was definitely not doing that. I'm still looking for an add-on that would do this, seeing as how the myriad cookie handling add-ons that seem to exist for FF sent my head spinning when I tried figuring out which one would let me nuke absolutely all cookies on each exit except the explicit per-site ones I want to keep, in the simplest one-click way possible.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 12:23 GMT Dan 55
In Options > Privacy, if 'keep until' is set to 'you close Firefox', all cookies apart from those set to allow in the exception list get deleted when you close Firefox. This is the only way to do it, I think.
If you additionally have 'Clear History when Firefox closes' ticked and have 'Cookies' ticked in the window which opens when you click the settings button on the right, all cookies get deleted in spite of the exception list.
And if you clear cookies in History > Clear Recent History it also won't take notice of your exception list.
At least that's the theory.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 09:25 GMT Spazturtle
Sounds like you want Firefox's 'first party isolate' feature that can be enabled in about:config. It gives each site it's own cookie jar and cache, preventing cookies from being used to track you across sites and restricting them to their original purpose (of storing logins and settings). And Firefox's new content blocker will blocks tracking scripts and cookies that's only purpose is to track you.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 11:03 GMT Dan 55
I didn't know 'first party isolate' was a thing in Firefox (it's not shown in the settings). Now I do, I'll enable it.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 11:00 GMT vtcodger
"Why do people still use Chrome?"
Because some websites won't work right with other browsers? I don't use chrome myself, and put up with a lot of websites not working very well although I do use a lot more profanity than I used to. My perception is that between security issues, javascript, vendor misbehavior, government misbehavior, and miscellaneous lunacy, the Internet is rather closer to total chaos than most folks realize. But maybe I'm wrong. I am sometime.
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Thursday 27th September 2018 19:09 GMT Dave 15
come now
By the time Microsoft has sent your data to the Americans, that porn virus has copied it to everyone else, what the browser does is a bit of a waste. If you think that your android or apple are any better I wouldnt put a penny on it. Heaven only knows what goes on in the code of linux either... yeah, we may know about the kernel but what about the other stuff wrapped up in that distribution or the apps you need
Governments dont want the plebs to get together and find out how much the rich are getting richer and more powerful while the plebs are shafted, after all its the rich that fund them
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 11:28 GMT DropBear
"Why do people still use Chrome?"
Why, what would you do when neither Palemoon nor Firefox ESR 52 can coax any sign of life out of Yet Another Website no matter where you click? Happens at least once a day, btw. Funnily enough not a single one of these rejects ever failed when trying again in Chromium. It's a must have I use for nothing else unless a site fails, but I very much need it nonetheless.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 11:46 GMT DropBear
"Switch to Waterfox. There's also Vivaldi and Opera."
Thanks for the Waterfox tipoff - I swear I saw it before but apparently I managed to forget about it somehow. As for Opera, I used to have that as another fallback as well, but ever since it has been bought by China I'm not all that keen on using it. As for Vivaldi, I definitely checked it out at some point but the UI was way too weird for someone like me who still refuses to use the title bar as a menu and thinks of flamethrowers and chainsaws at the sight of any "hamburger" button.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 16:36 GMT bombastic bob
Re: "what would you do when neither [...] sign of life out of Yet Another Website"
ack on the 'Ignore that site' - and I also 'ignore that site' for anything that uses nginx and returns 'Forbidden' because I'm running 'noscript'.
As far as I can tell, the 'nginx "Forbidden"' problem is due to one or more cloud services front-loading a 301 or 303 re-direct with script in the header, which then fails because you have 'noscript' running. Not only is it *INCREDIBLY LAME* it's *INCREDIBLY IRRITATING*. Web authors that write such [expletive deleted] DESERVE the cat-5-o-nine tails, the cluebat, AND a nice long tongue lashing from an El Reg commenter with a really good vocabulary.
[and because it's always nginx involved, I will *NEVER* use their application, nor recommend it, because as far as I'm concerned, it's "noscript" hostile]
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Tuesday 25th September 2018 20:15 GMT Shadow Systems
Just wondering...
If you fire up a ChromeBox but don't connect it to a network, can you then go into the file system & alter the properties of the cookies folder to be Read Only? Would that stop the thing from writing cookies at all, or would it just find somewhere else to store them? Or would it pull a Microsoft & just ignore your settings in favor for its own the next time it went online, downloaded updates, & "accidentally" negated the RO setting?
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Tuesday 25th September 2018 20:38 GMT Nolveys
The Fonz Vs The Sharknado
Back in the early zeros Google could do no wrong. Their services were excellent, sometimes even revolutionary. They generally seemed to act with some measure of morality, or at least not in the despicable way that typified most of the rest of the computing industry.
Then they jumped the shark.
Now we have deteriorating services, increasingly shady practices and slime-ball antics. Just a few short years ago an article like this would come out only once or twice a month. Now it's every day, and the "creepy asshole" factor is through the roof. The rate of decay is accelerating.
If you work in anything web-related then Google is almost completely unavoidable. Many platforms have hard dependencies on Google Maps and Google tracking services. This doesn't seem to be getting better as it becomes more and more blatantly obvious what Google is really about.
Google has already turned into a creepy nightmare from hell. I really don't want to think where we will find ourselves in ten years time.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 07:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The Fonz Vs The Sharknado
Brin e Page had an excellent search engine, but not a way to make money from it Schmidt was brought in from investors because he is the heartless executive you need to make the company a money machine - he's the "adult" in such sense.
He's been also very effective is building a Google Propaganda Machine to paint the company as the "good one" against the evilness of Microsoft & C, brainwashing many people while throwing some free bones at them.
It looks it was exactly only paint, and it's crumbling apart. Let's see how long before an antitrust and privacy investigations start...
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Tuesday 25th September 2018 20:49 GMT nematoad
Yep.
Having read the above article I checked my cookies, which is something I do regularly especially with anything from Google, and lo and behold there was a Google nasty sitting there. Now I don't use Chrome or anything else from Google so it has me puzzled as the where it came from. Maybe a drive-by from a site associated in some way with these characters?
As I use Palemoon I was able to deep-six it immediately.
Turds of the first water.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 06:29 GMT bazza
Re: Cry "Margrethe Vestager!"...
Quite. This is yet another reason for the European Commission to get its teeth into Google, who really don't seem to be learning that the damage being done by all these negative findings will accrue.
Also how long before Samsung et al decide that shipping Android infected with Google's stuff is damaging to their business? Google free Android sounds better and better.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 01:25 GMT Tim99
Its Google (again)
This is what they do. Why are people surprised? (Yesterday's post)
Hopefully this still works - About 3 years ago when I looked after some Windows PCs for a seniors computer club, I found that the only way to clear out Chrome was to delete the:-
[X:\Users\*User*\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data] folder
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 07:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Just checked....
OS: Fedora28, kernel 4.18.9
Chrome: Version 69.0.3497.100 (Official Build) (64-bit)
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google-chrome/Default folder: SQLITE3 database called Cookies -->> Empty
google-chrome folder: SQLITE3 database called Safe Browsing Cookies -->> Empty
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....but then -- I have NEVER logged into either Chrome itself, or into one of the Google services.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 07:31 GMT pavel.petrman
Case for a new Marx
This time it won't be labour, it will be personality (or, euphemistically, personal data). New movements, new fights for data-welfare state, new iteration of communists insisting on all your
basepersonal data, photos, location info etc. are belong to us - and the iron curtain after the war. The whole package. With a bit of luck, our generation (I'm 30) will still be able to have a bit of fun before the storm comes.I've had this though for the past four or five years and Google et al. are doing their best to prove me right, which is very sad indeed.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 16:46 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Case for a new Marx
considering that Marx and Engels were complete morons, but their B.S. "manifesto" was believed by enough clueless people to get MILLIONS KILLED (and BILLIONS oppressed) because of it, makes the idea for a 'new Marx' sound pretty bad.
How about some reasonable anti-trust laws applied directly to Google instead? You know, don't allow the source of an operating system to strong-arm you into using ONLY its services from end to end...
This was tried with Micro-shaft a while ago, like during the 'browser wars', but for some reason it wore off. maybe it's time to resume the countdown... for a 'duopoly' between MS and Google is as bad as a monopoly when both of them do THE! SAME! DAMN! THING!
Google+Chrome+Android
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Bing+Edge+Win-10-nic
choice. wheee.
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Thursday 27th September 2018 13:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Did you not have a normal YouTube account?
Whilst they did basically create a new YouTube account using my Google account a few years back, and tried to get me to use that rather than my YouTube account, I simply ignored it and continued to use my pre-existing YouTube account, which is still working quite happily today.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 09:25 GMT Test Man
Google are going to reverse this in Chrome 70 - https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-based-your-feedback/
I find this behaviour weird - if I want to clear all cookies, I'm explicitly asking it to clear ALL cookies including Google ones, so I expect to be logged out of everything. What issue did they think they were solving by keeping Google cookies persistent?
If they want to give the option of the user keeping Google cookies persistent while deleting everything else, they simply need to produce a better cookie deletion interface that lets people delete individual groups of cookies instead of users having to rely on the Inspector to do it.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 10:28 GMT David Nash
Not defending them but wondering, this happens so often that I wonder if they are evil or just blind to what users really want.
Do they think, "heh heh, we will keep them logged in so we continue to track the unsuspecting users" or do they think, "poor users would be logged out of Google, nobody wants that, we had better keep those cookies"?
Could it be that they think they are being helpful rather than creepy?
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 12:15 GMT vtcodger
"Do they think...?"
Most likely thing is that they don't think at all. I would guess that every personal computing device at Google is permanently logged into a wide variety of Google services. It'd be aggravating if they had to log back in constantly, so they don't clear their own cookies. The notion that folks outside of Google might not want to be logged into all that stuff permanently probably never crosses their minds. That's the way large organizations tend to work.
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 09:43 GMT Harry Stottle
Sandboxie is your friend
First line of defence for me and most of my clients.
This particular issue is trivial for SB users. If you've set the relevant sandbox to delete on exit, whatever google et al have dumped onto your machine (cookie caches, profiles, unwanted updates, plugins etc etc) all evaporate on exit.
More important than that, in the ten years or so since I started bullying my clients into using it, it has caught and prevented at least a dozen ransomware attacks and several dozens other malicious attempts to infect users. Typically, the ransomware will exhibit its normal behaviour (eg lock screen with warning that your hard drive has been encrypted and you need to pay bitcoins to this address to recover blah blah) and my client calls me in a panic. The usual fix is "right click on the Sandboxie icon and choose terminate all programs". Threat and sweat eliminated instantly.
It's also particularly good for testing out software that you're not sure you can trust. Install it into its own sandboxie (which you set NOT to delete on exit) then run as normal. If it does anything suspicious, it can't cause harm outside the box.
Unscrupulous users have suggested that it's also a good way to run "30 day trial" software forever (delete on expiry, rinse and repeat) but you didn't hear that from me.
The only downside is that it is so good at preventing change that you have to remember to disable the Sandbox to permit those changes you actually want (like browser updates, adding plugins etc)
I would say it has prevented far more damage than all my other routine defences put together (firewalls, av, anti-keyloggers, etc)
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Wednesday 26th September 2018 11:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Chrome v Firefox
I don't use Chrome if I can avoid it, but the latest release of Firefox has borked it to such an extent that pages can take 10x or 20x times longer to load than in IE - I can set both browsers pointing to the same site and Firefox just hangs there long after IE has finished.
Oh, and I note that Google has started aggressively hobbling their response to IE 11, making the Google homepage look like some homage to Netscape 1, at least on some machines.
Basically, a pox on all their houses.
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Thursday 27th September 2018 13:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Chrome v Firefox
Why are you still using IE 11 for anything on the Internet?
It's a dead product, with no new updates other than critical bug fixes, was replaced by Edge back in 2015, and was only included on Windows 10 for compatibility with 'old' intranet sites.
No one should be using IE as a daily browser for anything on the Internet at all. I doubt the likes of Google bother testing their web sites against IE, due to it being a dead product!
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