Hacker News: negutron

New comment by negutron in "Tell HN: Google requiring phone number to log into Chromebook"

negutron — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 07:41:43 +0000

> Am I crazy or does this seem like an extremely cynical attempt to get more phone numbers?

Nope you are not crazy at all, that's exactly what they are doing. It's the same pattern in practice of online banks that are demanding you give them an SMS capable phone, it's so that they can in the backchannel identify you through AT&T, which is really teh corporate face of the NSA (don't argue with me, 33 thomas st. nyc), and the implications there is that they have many things tied together in fusion centers so they can use something like palantir to instantly profile you when you put in that number and it draws in via their backchannel apis your bank accounts into a single view along with your other information, like medical, civic, etc that's literally what fusion centers do. It's all hooked up for THEIR convenience, and its all keyed off now on google's gaia_id. They tether your phone number(s) to gaia_id and voila all these data sources get drawn in....it's all about the convenience to the five eyes/nato people to force you to use their free sandwich stuff and get everyone tied into the central hub of services that is google

So I agree with others: don't use a chromebook. I have an older friend who needed a laptop for work and I made the mistake of getting a chromebook. The f*cking thing didn't do TKIP correctly in WPA2 so it didn't work with my wifi without making major changes to security in a tactical frustration that made ME look like I didn't know what I was doing

It was a G d nightmare, but needless to say I will NEVER use a chromebook again, esp after hearing your issue with the phone

Just get a refurb lenovo from tigertits or newegg and put linux mint debian edition with xfce on it. The end

New comment by negutron in "Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome"

negutron — Sat, 08 Sep 2018 20:50:53 +0000

https://panopticlick.eff.org/ eff has a tool that can show you what weird things your browser is doing to identify you

New comment by negutron in "Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome"

negutron — Sat, 08 Sep 2018 20:49:27 +0000

Everything you do in chrome is called back to google servers. Even if you block cookies you can look at the network tab in dev tools and see it calling back; also it sends the links you click on to a malware check service (you know, safe browsing) that server tracks everything you click on: no cookies needed; there are also endpoints for transmitting your urls for 'quality of service' (to optimize bandwidth), that tracks, and then all the performance data called bakc to the google servers could potentially have your data steganographically included in that data

There are many things that chrome is doing that are dubious, quasi legal

one thing they could be doing is a kind of reverse beacon or barium meal beacon where they generate a unique code and steganographically insert that as an overlay into images...you won't see the difference when your webpage loads the image, but then some javascript will send that image back to a server, and there you ahve a cross site tracking mechanism. This concept has been used in browser fingerprinting, but now that has evolved with html5 with the canvas tag which generates unique ids and sends that back in order to track your browser everywhere around the internet without needing cookies or websocket sessions or any other newer session mgmt mechanism