Google Chrome

[nobile]

I saw a few of you guys getting all hyped up about Chrome yesterday, and today saw a guy linking to this site: http://tapthehive.s483.sureserver.com/discuss/This_Post_Not_Made_In_Chrome_Google_s_EULA_Sucks. Could anyone confirm it? Sounds like srs bizniz

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EDIT:

UPDATE: As of 4:02PM EST, I've received the following note:
Here's an official response from Rebecca Ward, Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome:

"In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don't apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."

One thing that's different in the software engineering world from the legal world is that in software engineering, we deal in discretes -- anyone can test algorithms and instantly get absolute answers (I was a software engineer before I got into IP law). But in the legal realm, a lot of what goes on is interpretation, argument, and lots of grey areas. So you can call this conspiracy theories or a mistake if you want, but I'd rather think of it as misunderstanding between what we were reading and what Google was trying to say. I wasn't trying to induce some conspiracy theory or promote any ill will towards Google (I'm a faithful google search, gmail, analytics, and adsense user), but I wanted the record straight. When we hear back from Rebecca Ward, I have full faith in the Google legal team that this will be a non-issue.

Google has updated the ToS and it now states

11. Content license from you 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. 12. Software updates

The questionable language has been removed entirely. I didn't think it was necessary for Google to step that far back, but it's definitely more in line with the mantra of "Do No Evil."

[Enok]

Well I hope this isn't a surprise to anyone, that anything you send to the internets isn't under your control anymore whatever any law, EULA, ToS or internet daddy says. Information wants to be free.

[Dorden]

I tried out this new browser yesterday and it had same funtionality as Firefox and Opera... Nothing new at all. Though it made my computer lag while it was open so I have no idea what was going on, maybe just a beta bug.

[Mortis]

Well I hope this isn't a surprise to anyone, that anything you send to the internets isn't under your control anymore whatever any law, EULA, ToS or internet daddy says. Information wants to be free.

That's a fantastic way of putting it

I think people still get surprised by such occurrences not because they don't fully realize the situation, but because they still believe in what could be loosely termed "authorship", and by this I mean designated "creatorship" of a piece of work that somewhat disagrees with the way "intellectual property" or "ownership" is defined today. I know the difference is relatively small, but we've also seen an upsurge of user-made content with the advent of the www... while people are happy to have their content "shared", they don't necessarily want to see it "taken use of". When an alpha-scale megacorporation like Google takes such "liberties", even if it's in the manner of a botched EULA, people react because they think a powerful entity is taking advantage of something, abusing privileges, whatever they are... and in this case, what they would have been doing wouldn't have exactly been the same thing as "piracy", anyhow.

I do think the backlash over the mistaken EULA was quite an overstatement, though, and I would have been very surprised had Google not amended the policies shortly as soon as the matter became evident. There's one thing the whole debacle proves, though, which is that nobody (including Google's lawyers!) ever reads any EULAs

Anyway, to move away from the EULA issue, I saw an interesting post where someone painted Chrome not as a browser, but as a desktop replacement. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: Google has a full-featured set of various online applications, and by using Chrome you can effectively turn those into actual 'programs'. This is expounding the same concept behind Mozilla's Prism.

The poster then added, "I for one welcome our new Google overlords"

[Mortis]

Sorry for the double post, but I thought this was rather pertinent:

...the popular "carpet bomb" vulnerability ... still exists within Chrome .... this vulnerability allows malicious websites to drive by download and execute programs on your machine. ... Apple patched the carpet-bombing issue with Safari v3.1.2. Chrome is vulnerable to this exploit because it is based on the same engine, WebKit 525.13, and Google did not patch or update the engine before releasing the software.

[nobile]

Sorry for the double post, but I thought this was rather pertinent:

...the popular "carpet bomb" vulnerability ... still exists within Chrome .... this vulnerability allows malicious websites to drive by download and execute programs on your machine. ... Apple patched the carpet-bombing issue with Safari v3.1.2. Chrome is vulnerable to this exploit because it is based on the same engine, WebKit 525.13, and Google did not patch or update the engine before releasing the software.

Yeah, I do remember someone on some IRC channel arguing that Chrome kept downloading files on his computer..

[eci]

Codeweavers has released mac/linux version, calling it a port but it uses wine so imo it's not a port.
Anyway it can be downloaded here http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/
Works fine on ubuntu hardy but flash doesn't work atleast with everything default.