Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Remember how pissed off everyone was when Sony added software to people's computers?
Do you mean that time they installed a rootkit on people's PCs when they went to play (what was supposed to be) a music CD, or the time they retroactively and remotely sabotaged Linux on people's Playstations?
Just wondering which massive felony that should've landed the entire C-suite in prison you're referring to, since there was more than one.
Hey come on now, there's no need to lie. We all know that when the C-suite does it it's not a crime in America. It's illegal to hold them accountable!
/wrist :(
The sad thing is that Sony is multinational, and they weren't prosecuted in Japan or anywhere else, either.
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My mom never used iTunes on her phone, meaning she never once put any music on her phone, and so she was completely confused/angry when she'd get in her car and suddenly it would pair and start playing this U2 album. She didn't know how to stop it, so it would play over and over (she'd just drop the volume). It also didn't help that the cover art is among the gayest things to ever appear on her phone screen. I'd come home to visit and get in her car and she'd just start hollering "this stupid thing, where did this come from?!?"
I remember when Sony installed rootkits on our home computers when we played CDs with music we bought.
I have not bought a single Sony device or product since.
Never forget.
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The AI Mode pill in the Chrome 147 omnibox is a cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface - every query the user types into it is sent over the network to Google's servers for processing by Google's hosted models. The on-device Nano model is not invoked by the AI Mode UI flow at all. They are entirely separate code paths - the most visible AI affordance in the browser does not use the local model the user has been silently given, and the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in , tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus that the average user will discover, on average, never.
What a double kick to the dick. First, they silently download 4gb to your disk, and they still fucking send your shit to their cloud AI.
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Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:
- Start
- regedit
- Backup registry by exporting it
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
- right-click Policies, New, Key
- right-click Google, New, Key
- Chrome
- right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
- GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings
- right-click newly created key, Modify
- set value to 1
- OK
- Restart computer. https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/
Or, you know don't install software from companies owned and operated by psychopaths, like Google and Microsoft.
"Linux is hard" but godawful reg key hacks are fiiiiine, eh.
I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, "it's easy to work around that. You just have to..." and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.
But even if it's easy to do that, it's not easy.
- You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there's a different one for every problem.
- You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
- You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don't want you to be able to remove their trash.
- You have to vet the tools, make sure they're not malware. And continuously make sure it's not replaced by malware in the future. There's no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.
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Naw, Linux is easy, until OBS won't start virtual camera because V4L has dependency on the previous kernel which is pretty old.
if you did't run it right after the update, you might not even put together it was a kernel issue.
No easy errors, start obs from cli see v4l errors out, start digging into v4l, it's not hard, but you have to know about it, then you have to know grub well enough to select an old kernel.
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I think the overlap between people who think using Linux is hard and the people who would open regedit in the first place is basically zero.
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- Uninstall Chrome
- Uninstall Windows
- Uninstall boot loader
- Uninstall cmos
- Uninstall ac unit
- Wait at least 30 sex
- Begin new life with linux
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So we now have a four-way evidence chain - macOS kernel filesystem events, Chrome's own per-profile state, Chrome's runtime feature flags, and Google's component-updater logs - all four agreeing on the same conduct, and the conduct is: a 4 GB AI model arrived on this user's disk without consent, without notice, on a profile that received zero human input, in a window of 14 minutes and 28 seconds, on a Tuesday afternoon.
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The increasing enshittification of every service pushed me to GrapheneOS long before Google could force this shit on me
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This is very alarming. My eyes have never been opened so widely as they are in the last two months since I started ungoogling and FOSSing. This post has veritably split my eyelids.
Edit: Since reading this thread I have installed Shizuku + Canta and removed Chr9me and about 50 other pieces of bloatware from my phone.
Props to @zerozaku for the suggestion.
It's funny because they're trying to find ways to cut cloud costs by offloading to users, but when that's not a concern, they shove everything into the cloud and then ensure no local running option is available or viable.
They want all of your data in the cloud so they own it.
They want all their crap on your device, so you pay for it.
Bingo
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How unsurprising anymore in this hellish world where corporates hate your desire for anonymity... but try to hide theirs, such as dark expense accounts, tax evasion, secret offshore banking accounts, connections with crime and hate groups, etc.
Alarming, but not surprising.
The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn't work.
I don't do web development or anything, but I haven't run into anything that hasn't worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn't like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I'll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it's over to normal firefox.
Man I sure do wish Linux mobile was a thing. I really want a full on Linux phone.
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My Google chrome took 10GB space on system disc so I needed to unistal it. Now I use only Firefox.
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