patrick.net

even viewing a youtube video at work i noticed that they have me logged in to youtube

Use Firefox as your browser. Create two user profiles: work and home. Use home for browsing YouTube and anything other than work-related stuff where you have to be logged into your work Google account.

To create a Firefox user profile, run the command "firefox.exe -p" when Firefox is not running. The profiles will be kept in separate directories, which you can choose.

To run two instances of the Firefox browser with separate user profiles, and thus separate website sessions, cookies, add-ons, bookmarks, and everything else, run the command "C:\Apps\Firefox\firefox.exe -p [firstProfileName]" and the command "C:\Apps\Firefox\firefox.exe -p [secondProfileName] -no-remote". Works like a charm.

I create shortcuts for these commands on the toolbar in the Windows taskbar and give them different icons. I can then launch a window with the profile I want with a click of a button. You can even theme Firefox to look different for each profile.

There is some pushback from employees who are asking for a work-only cellphone if their employers want them to be pingable wirelessly. I know quite a few people who carry a work phone and a personal phone.

Everyone should just use Ashley Madison and Grindr as well e-mailing several S&M escorts on these gmail first_name.last_name accounts. Eventually, the legal department will explain to the IT manager that there is a profound downside to handing everyone's names to google.

I know, Patrick, that we're not supposed to get mad about stuff we read on a message board, but this really pisses me off.

I have toyed with Firefox extensions CookieSwap and Multifox, that let you have different "cookie profiles" inside the same firefox profile.

Can be used to run youtube with a separate login from your work "gmail" login, for example. Or to access multiple gmail accounts from the same browser at the same time.

Seems to work, although I must admit I have not tested these extensions very carefully.

Patrick,
The problem is the shallow minded Americans,in particular the voters that don't demand a stop to intrusion without permission,that permission to be written on paper.
Until there is an uproar & a punishment for this BS nothing will change. Don't expect much from the brain washed.

As the greeks say: "OXI"

Just opt out:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lMChO0qNbkY

Does anyone else notice AF's tendency to the pejorative?

So what you're saying is that the pointy headed computer geeks are ruining your life? 😄

to view my work calendar on my phone i have to add that account, so google knows my phone now too.

even viewing a youtube video at work i noticed that they have me logged in to youtube (which google owns). if i log out, i can't read my email...

google is the worst thing ever to happen to privacy.

It's a testiment to the real assbags working in technology today for companies.
I don't know what stupid son of a bitch would go to the owner/president of a company and say. I recommend we put all of our AD list on Google and use it as our communication platform.

Last year I worked for a company that was proud to be a Google company. YET Them or Google's best and brightest engineers couldn't figure out how to get Google's API to give me a user list to populate a User dropdown list for admin forms I was creating for them. This was after three months of back and forth meetings which K*pl*n University fucked me over on, I ended up querying the AD which was I originally told their inept IT department I would have to do. Useless sorry sons of bitches. The sorriest most useless IT department in the US bar none hands down!

again, very impressed with how evil google is. worse than microsoft now.

if you have an android phone, look for the "log out" option for your google account.

it does not exist.

Patrick says

if i log out, i can't read my email...

Google does provide you with incognito mode in chrome to handle this.

Last night I was Googling for a timeline for the Dallas Shooter.

If you type "Dallas Shooter" in the searchbar, it doesn't even give an autosugestion. Not a single one.

This guy, the story, the premise the whole story is starting to stink worse than Obama's rank politcal breath.
I still haven't heard a good explaination on how this guy, this "ONE" guy if you believe that. Got the drop on 10 cops.
Body armour my ass, don't they train to shoot people like this in the head?

How dare anyone criticize a great,Unregulated ,Free Enterprise,Corporations are People,Intrusive company.
Tech is GOD!
Burn in hell for blasphemy!

Who is worse ? Google or Obama ?

Maybe someone could do a survey to see how the dimbulbs rank all of these from best to worst.
Inquiring minds wanna know.

Google, Obama, BLM, the Fed, Hillary, Muslims

YesYNot says

Google does provide you with incognito mode in chrome to handle this.

but that does not provide you any protection against google itself.

if you're not paranoid, you haven't been paying attention.

Self destructing cookies and noscript are two firefox extensions everybody should have. Use startpage for your search engine. Don't use social media. Don't use chrome or any Apple OS. Run some variation of Linux or if you have to have Windows, use 7. Use a dumbphone.

Anything I'm forgetting?

Have you considered a linux/ubuntu phone? I may be making that my next choice. Already switched to the Tor browser, protonmail and duckduckgo for most things. To start....

just_passing_through says

Have you considered a linux/ubuntu phone?

sounds interesting, but ubuntu has blown any claim to protecting your privacy:

Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical's servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do

Rats... I didn't know that. Well this looks interesting but it's still android: http://www.cnet.com/products/blackphone-2/

rando says

sounds interesting, but ubuntu has blown any claim to protecting your privacy:

Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical's servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)

select SearchString from LocalFileSearch where Username = 'CallItCrazy';

Results
======
SearchString
varchar(1024)
-------------------
goat ass
man goat rape
penis stretcher
cheap anal lube
farm animal sex
sheep porn

www.youtube.com/embed/b6uXmp9AWng
I swear, CIC must be from Pakistan.

Well people are getting Alexa for their home so they can order coffee on Amazon via voice. Great idea! You can substitute chrome with Iron from Germany if you can live without flash. Solid, non-invasive browser based on chromium.

DieBankOfAmericaPhukkingDie says

What everyone needs is a browser that constantly feeds disinformation to Google about everything, all the time, even when you're not using it.

lol, yes!

Ironman says

Posting a list of your Saturday activities again?

Obviously not. Fucking your daughter wasn't on the list.

"The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left and helped Google shape those debates.
***
New America...employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.”
***
[After New America's Open Markets initiative scholar Barry Lynn] posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
***
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn.
***
Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”
***
After initially eschewing Washington public policy debates, which were seen in Silicon Valley as pay-to-play politics, Google has developed an influence operation that is arguably more muscular and sophisticated than that of any other American company."

I read about NewAmerica.org after seeing a terribly misleading comment on PatNet, and the user who posted it said it came from NewAmerica.org.

The disinformation turned out to be part of the "New America Muslim Diaspora Initiative." Among other things, the Initiative documents "Anti-Muslim Activities in the United States," for example which "local government officials denounce Islam." Accused online of such blasphemy, these local officials can then be added to Islamic State kill lists, because the Islamic penalty for blasphemy is death.

The question becomes, why have "New America" and apparently Google become so intent on spreading Islam and silencing blasphemy? PatNet readers may already know about Pakistan and KSA's "Muslim world plan against blasphemous content," including online, and that KSA leads a war on "terrorism" which it defines to include questioning the fundamentals of Islam, while KSA and Pakistan fund and participate in terror attacks against other countries.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-google-antitrust-aptoide/aptoide-wins-court-battle-against-google-in-landmark-case-idUKKCN1MW2CL

LISBON (Reuters) - Portuguese app store Aptoide said on Monday that a local court had ruled against Alphabet Inc’s Google (GOOGL.O) in a landmark case, ordering the U.S. giant to stop removing its app from users’ mobile phones without their knowledge. ...

“We believe this may apply to other situations where Google has competition,” Nestal said. Aptoide said in a statement that the court decision is applicable in 82 countries, including the UK and India.

Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The European Commission hit Google with a record 4.34 billion euro ($5 billion) fine in July for using its popular Android mobile operating system to block rivals.

Google Play caught hosting an app that steals users’ cryptocurrency. "Clipper" app replaced user's wallet address with addresses controlled by developers.

Google Play has been caught hosting yet another malicious app, this time one that was designed to steal cryptocurrency from unwitting end users, researchers said Friday.

The malware, which masqueraded as a legitimate cryptocurrency app, worked by replacing wallet addresses copied into the Android clipboard with one belonging to attackers, a researcher with Eset said in a blog post. As a result, people who intended to use the app to transfer digital coins into a wallet of their choosing would instead deposit the funds into a wallet belonging to the attackers.

So-called clipper malware has targeted Windows users since at least 2017. Last year, a botnet known as Satori was updated to infect coin-mining computers with malware that similarly changed wallet addresses. Last August came word of Android-based clipper malware that was distributed in third-party marketplaces.

The clipper malware available in Google Play impersonated a service called MetaMask, which is designed to allow browsers to run apps that work with the digital coin Ethereum. The primary purpose of Android/Clipper.C, as Eset has dubbed the malware, was to steal credentials needed to gain control of Ethereum funds. It also replaced both bitcoin and Ethereum wallet addresses copied to the clipboard with ones belonging to the attackers.

The discovery is yet more evidence that Google can’t be trusted to proactively keep malware out of Play. That leaves the onus on end users. People should limit the number of apps they install and then only after doing a fair amount of research. One way to check the legitimacy of an app is to independently visit the site of the outfit that purportedly developed the app. The official MetaMask website makes no mention of an Android app. That should have been a red flag that the Google Play offering was an imposter.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/google-play-caught-hosting-an-app-that-steals-users-cryptocurrency/

Google says the built-in microphone it never told Nest users about was 'never supposed to be a secret'

In early February, Google announced that Assistant would now work with its home security and alarm system Nest Secure.

The problem — users didn't know a microphone even existed on their Nest security devices to begin with.

On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider it had made an "error."

"The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part," the spokesperson said.

In early February, Google announced that its home security and alarm system Nest Secure would be getting an update — users could now enable its virtual assistant technology, Google Assistant.

The problem: Nest users didn't know a microphone even existed on their security device to begin with.

The existence of a microphone on the Nest Guard (which is the alarm, keypad, and motion sensor component in the Nest Secure offering) was never disclosed in any of the product material for the device.

On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider the company had made an "error."

"The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part," the spokesperson said.

Google says that "the microphone has never been on and is only activated when users specifically enable the option."

It also said the microphone was originally included in the Nest Guard for the possibility of adding new security features down the line, like the ability to detect broken glass.

Still, even if Google included the microphone in its Nest Guard device for future updates — like its Assistant integration — the news comes as consumers have grown increasingly wary of major tech companies and their commitment to consumer privacy.

For Google, the revelation is particularly problematic and brings to mind previous privacy controversies, such as the 2010 incident in which the company admitted that its fleet of Street View cars "accidentally" collected personal data transmitted over consumers' unsecured WiFi networks, including emails.

Tom Zeller Jr.‏Verified account @tomzellerjr

Follow Follow @tomzellerjr

If @Google's @Nest Secure devices really had secret microphones that they hid from consumers, those consumers should probably be forgiven if they don't trust the company's after-the-fact promises that it never spied on them. #DontBeEvil

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3336227/security/nest-secure-had-a-secret-microphone-can-now-be-a-google-assistant.html … via @csoonline

Google bought Nest — which was initially known for its smart thermostat device — back in 2014 for $3.2 billion. It became a standalone company in 2015 when Google reorganized as Alphabet, but in February 2018, it was brought back into Google under the leadership of head hardware exec Rick Osterloh.

Today, Nest offers a variety of IoT products including smoke detectors, video doorbells, and security cameras.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-microphone-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-secret-2019-2

I have a friend that asks Google "N" word searches. What's fucked up is Google will give him Black historic answers.
He does it as a Joke, saying "I'm not racist, Google is, watch... Hey Google who was the first..."

LOL at all of the dislikes in the comments.

EBGuy says

I think they just made a movie about that: In what sounds like a parody, maybe intentional, of the way every intrusive, privacy-annihilating technology is heralded as a convenience, the movie has several people gushing about how, with Genisys, all their devices can be linked!

My wife and I have our email with different entities in an attempt at information silo diversification... probably just spittin' in the wind, though.

And about a two weeks ago, I think Google broke the internet (this may have been part of their "mobile ready" websites initiative). I run NoScript (edit: Firefox addon) and couldn't get "normal" functionality" out of several websites. Sigh.... most are back up now (I think some of them dropped scripting from googleappservices.com or something like that) .

On caller ID, my phone for whatever reason, comes up with the name "Victor" and a polish last name I will not publish. I assume it's the guy who owned my phone previously. Basically, as a joke 8 years ago, I made a gmail account with the name and have since registered all social media under that official name. I think I've confused them quite a bit. I remember in 1998, when that online browsing advertisement service "All Advantage" came out, they would pay you 50 cents an hour to surf the net. I wrote a bot to search random things every 4 minutes to fool the service into thinking I was browsing. I was thinking it would be useful to write a similar program to do so just to spam google with nonsensical searches. The goal would be to basically dilute your true searches in a sea of crap.

I was thinking it would be useful to write a similar program to do so just to spam google with nonsensical searches.

Just be sure those nonsensical searchers do not link you to pedo. Or racism or whatever the next cause de jour turns out to be.

Is it just me or has Google's search algorithm gone to shit? Whenever I searching something technical it used to pull up relevant stuff quick even on obscure (to the layman) topics... Lately it seems to wants to push Google scholar type links to the forefront (technical papers, etc.) Most of which are only available in full via a paid subscription.

Anyone else run into a similar problem... or is it just me?

https://storyfire.com/video-details/5f469f725029ac56680ab8c4

Apparently Alexandre Dumas identified as a non white.
(Screenshot from yesterday's doodle)


Keep in mind he was French.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/19/google_cookie_wipe/

Google exempts its own websites from Chrome's automatic data-scrubbing feature, allowing the ads giant to potentially track you even when you've told it not to.

Programmer Jeff Johnson noticed the unusual behavior, and this month documented the issue with screenshots. In his assessment of the situation, he noted that if you set up Chrome, on desktop at least, to automatically delete all cookies and so-called site data when you quit the browser, it deletes it all as expected – except your site data for Google.com and YouTube.com.

While cookies are typically used to identify you and store some of your online preferences when visiting websites, site data is on another level: it includes, among other things, a storage database in which a site can store personal information about you, on your computer, that can be accessed again by the site the next time you visit. Thus, while your Google and YouTube cookies may be wiped by Chrome, their site data remains on your computer...

Patrick says

Google exempts its own websites from Chrome's automatic data-scrubbing feature

I don't even have this shit installed on any of my systems.

I'm going to throw in my 2 cents.

First, your phone is 100% insecure. You cannot secure it. Give up on that. It's absolutely impossible.

If you want to use a phone anyhow, use Brave - you can use TOR on it, TOR is a method to both obscure who you are, and where you are however nothing prevents the Android OS from directly identifying what you are doing and what you are looking at.

Second, get a burner phone. You almost are always near wifi anyhow, or at least I am. The only time I actually make use of an SD card is when I'm going between work and home. I don't use if it I'm out, I'm not asshole with the people I hang out.

If you have a computer assigned you from work, use it exclusively for work.

If you use a your own computer to connect to work, use Virtual Box or VMWare - this allows you to install a complete operating system on top of a software simulation of a complete computer. When I connect to work, I'm doing it through Virtual Box. From the point of view of my company, my computer has 4 GB of memory, 100 GB of disk storage, and 4 processors. What I actually have is an 32 GB of memory, an 8TB HDD and 8 processors. There is no way for my company to access my main machine.

Finally, don't use Chrome at all. I'd advise against I.E. Yandex is a Russian company that makes a decent browser and search engine, I'm sure there is no security there, but it's just Russians that are watching - who cares?

Do not do banking on your phone. Do not use your phone for financial transactions at all. I know how insecure phones are, and they are HOPELESSLY insecure. This is intentional. Do not store compromising or sensitive information on a phone, period, even on a burner phone.