- cross-posted to:
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- technology@lemmy.zip
- privacy@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.zip
- privacy@lemmy.world
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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.
And, most of all, you need to be allowed to do such things in the first place.
I, for one, am certainly not allowed to play in the registry of computers I don’t own at my office job.
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.
If there is one thing AI is useful for, it’s to make sense of and learn Linux.
It can be good at sifting through the top search results, but if people stop posting those questions because of AI where will the answers come from?
Hopefully nowhere so I no longer have to read comments like “its good for making sense of Linux”.
These people don’t care how LLMs function, nor that information is true, false or complete nonsense. It strokes their false ego.
It’s spectacular at working with nixos. I can tell it to do whatever to the declarative configs, if it f’s it up, i have git backups.
Yeah, that’s a relatively easy issue to debug. It goes to show that it’s really about where your familiarity level is.
Personally, my familiarity level is maybe 2 out of 10. Don’t really know what I’m doing with Linux, only made the jump a few weeks ago. I’ve had to google some stuff but it’s still much less hassle than windows. I just got bored of seeing all those ‘switch to linux durr’ comments so I gave it a try, turns out they were right.
Those comments really do get tedious. But there’s no billion-dollar company pushing desktop Linux and buying podcast ads and whatnot, so … there’s really no other way to get the word out.
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.
Yup. I don’t think it’s hard. I used to have a dual boot setup. I’m just lazy.
And by that I mean, lazy enough that messing with regedits is something I’m already familiar/comfortable with and can do relatively quickly.
Too lazy to (re)learn an entirely new OS and file system (it’s also why I’m still on Win10 because fuck Win11), learn what programs of mine are compatible and not compatible, dealing with grub/kernals anytime I need to diagnose an issue, etc.
That being said, Windows will eventually piss me off to the final breaking point/straw where my anger/spite will outweigh my laziness. And THEN they’ll be sorry!
But until then… Opens up regedit with a sigh
I’m in the overlap where I can easily follow reg edit direction and similar tutorials but can’t actually diagnose it myself. I wouldn’t have a clue. These known regedit edit workaround posts exist and are spread because there’s a ton of people in this overlap. We just aren’t vocal because it’s not one of our hills to die on.
But I can deal with cars, fix older models, and avoid buying an internet-connected model. Shit, I even learned how to fix drum brakes to maintain my options. I also disconnected my smart TV and grabbed a retired pc with win 10 pro or whatever to get some control back over that.
I do what I can, but at the end of the day, I still need to relax at some point.
Honest question, not necessarily for you but for maybe one of those people that actually understands the registry - how do those people figure that stuff out? Like, do software authors actually publish their registry config, or do people have to decompile/reverse engineer things to figure out what registry settings a given program might use?
keys tend to be organized (that’s a horrible word for whatt he registry is lol) in a handful of locations depending on context. so those chrome keys are next to the other chrome keys. in enterprise we mod that area pretty often.
the 2 was to discover a new key are:
- reg watcher that takes a baseline, then you install soemething, and you see the diff.
- in the case of no new key has been added (like for this new setting), most softwares have support articles aimed at Enterprise Admins who need to control deployments granularly. So the regkeys tend to be available.
Sometimes some dev figures it out, sometimes word spreads from the devs themselves on Discord/etc. Sometimes if you contact Support they have that workaround (after escalating to engineer). Not that you can easily get to Google Engineers, but you have a much better track with say a paid Workspace account.
It’s a FT job though to maintain a set of controlled software in an enterprise environment. Constant fiddling/tweaking. SOmetimes it’s a RegKey, sometimes a GPO setting, sometimes you’re modding a config file in AppData, or adding some lines to a Logon Script. And a lot of the info spreads by word of mouth still and to really answer your question - sometimes, no one knows where the hell it came from but after days of searching, you’re happy some random forum post finally worked and you hope to never have to touch it again. Then you close your ticket and move on to the next one.
I don’t miss it lol
There are tools that let you hook the registry and see what keys programs are trying to read from.
Ah ok cool, that was the sort of middle ground option I was missing
Tell that to my Windows desktop support coworkers, hah.
It’s really all about what you’re familiar with.
Hell, even borking my linux install was a relatively painless experience. I was updating from Fedora 43 to 44 and noticed at one point that my keyboard had power but nothing was displaying on my monitor. Capslock still responded so I wondered if the update had messed up the video display or something and restarted after seeing someone say that they saw the same and restarting seemed to actually kick off the update.
Well, for me, it fucked the dnf5 install, which I tried fixing from the command line for a bit before deciding to just grab the 44 iso and install it fresh. I kept my home and game partitions and just reinstalled the root dir, then created two new accounts, renamed one of them to my old username and took over the old home dir, logged in and it was like the update had just worked. Only thing I need to do to get back to where I was is reinstall some packages or software. All the settings are stored in my home dir, so even the ones I don’t have yet will get their old settings back when I do get around to installing them. All I had to do was install steam and it launched like it normally does, all my installed games still there.
And I’m pretty sure I could have even done this with a different distro and whatever was the same would have preserved settings, too.
No cloud involved or even saving any files specifically. I did ask an LLM what I should preserve to make sure I wasn’t missing anything but everything it suggested waa already in home. It could have gone even quicker if I wasn’t overthinking it so much, but it was just like an hour or so before I was back up and running once I started the install process.
Im laughing at the image of linux users trying to sell someone on linux by talking about how painless of an experience borking their computer was.
It really goes to show that giving people the tools to solve their problems is the better route. Windows has the same thing, if they bork the root partition you can hit repair and it tries to attempt to do what you describe but if it fails to automatically detect and resolve then thats it your fucked. But it might be a simple problem that the user could correct and fix if they were given the option or included in the process.
I’m considering switching to Linux and at this point I’m trying to ignore the “recommendations” of this sort.
didnt make the switch, but it feels like theres more and more shit to disable on fresh installs
Omg!!! You’re absolutely right! Running through YouTube tutorials from India or Linux terminal videos from India is exactly the same!
Honestly you only need like a handful of commands to install, update and remove applications. It’s not like your compiling each package by hand (unless you’re into that sort of thing). Also those commands can be located in the documentation.
I’ve spent countless hours in the registry. Linux filesystem is cakewalk compared to the bloated abomination that is system32.
- Uninstall Chrome
- Uninstall Windows
- Uninstall boot loader
- Uninstall cmos
- Uninstall ac unit
- Wait at least 30 sex
- Begin new life with linux
Begin new life with linux
- Find a package you need.
- It’s only distributed as a docker container.
- Install docker.
- Docker installs it’s AI assistant.
- Install podman.
“zsh: regedit: command not found…” I use arch btw. 😂
And of course you made sure we know you use zsh because of course you do
I use fish btw
I use women btw to fill a gap in my life i cant see
That’s the joke!
no no no; since you are using zsh you will need to use ragedit not regedit.
zsh
Good.
And Apple, don’t forget Apple.
Macintosh.
after setting up a windows machine started taking days instead of a few minutes, I quit using it. so many bloated spywares you’d never get them all
This sounds like something a flag can solve…
I was about to type something something about just switching to Linux and at least Firefox but you already got there in the end
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.
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.
Huh? What’s the name of it then? My Chrome is but an .exe with 4mb to it and I don’t see any 4GB…
Edit: From Article, “Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed [1]”
So, morons who installed shitty AI are getting AI shafted - makes ALL the sense to me.
The article, as usual, makes no comparison to the environmental impact of companies like McDonalds (who use PER DAY what every AI data centre combined in the world uses PER YEAR, not companies like Shell or BP who are orders of magnitude worse than that. This is the usual anti-ai fear-mongering bollocks.
Should Google have installed it unasked? No, that’s bullshit, possibly illegal bullshit but honestly considering how disingenuous the environmental impact is I can’t trust the legal stuff that I don’t know about either. But it is not an environmental catastrophe as whoever wrote this article would like you to believe for some reason.
Honest question: why are the haters pushing their nonsense? What do they have to gain?
edit: As usually the haters and useful idiots provide nonsense counterpoints and downvote because they don’t have laugh reacts to demonstrate their groupthink and wilful ignorance. I really wish they’d all shut the hell up, they’re annoying!
look im far from a monger but this argument makes no sense. mdconalds makes food. which is a necessity. In addition its actually pretty well known for its efficiency. So its a question of output vs input. Now granted. super unhealthy but they don’t sneak mcdonalds into your home cooked meal while your not looking. This article is far from nonsense.
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Grocery stores are unnecessary too, you can just go kill/harvest/forage your own food. Shut up.
thanks.
What for? Coming out with a fucking stupid counterpoint? Weird thing to thank someone for
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No, that’s a really fucking dumb argument. Stop being an idiot
Take your own advice
No, I’m angrily calling out bullshit that is bullshit, but you thought Terminator was a documentary and so will immediately believe anything that says AI is bad no matter now outlandish rather than actually learn anything
None of that refutes my point, or supports your non sequiturs, and is just making up bullshit about what you think I believe.
I see what you’re saying and, parts of it, I’m on your side!
Those final two words there, I must say, do a disservice to the comment. One thought experiment: what makes Lemmy a pleasant place to debate?
Pointing out the huge environmental cost and relative uselessness of shiny word predictors is not pushing nonsense.
Claiming a tiny environmental impact is huge in order to push an agenda is bullshit and you know it
Sticking your head in the sand and pretending everyone has an agenda is bullshit and you know it.
Right back at ya! Calling out bullshit agendas is not bullshit and you, know it
Ok dude. Enjoy
I think we found the google engineer.
Why? Because I’m not keen on lies and bullshit? I don’t work for google
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Classy. Did you learn your conversation skills via the internet?
I’m gonna need some references to back up those energy claims. I do not see McDonalds (or any other restaurant) operating methane gas turbine generators because the energy grid can’t keep up with their power demands.
I would assume the enormous environmental impact of McDonald’s comes from the amount of meat, specifically cow, they are responsible for
Can you convert those cow meats into watts? I was asking about energy usage in the context of that specific claim
Sure. 1 kcal ≈ 1.162 watt-hours.
Oh, some whataboutism. Great.
Also great to know you don’t have to pay to get storage in your devices, otherwise you’d be quite unhappy to see it taken out of your control for no feature (Chrome still relies on cloud services for most AI features).
I don’t even know what you’re getting at here. You claim my comment, which points out how disingenuous the article is, is whataboutism, then provide some whataboutism.
Article talk about pushing a large model on people’s computer. You minimize this by going about McDonalds, Shell, BP. Do you even know what “whataboutism” mean? Your first sentence is “what about McDonald, Shell, BP”.
I’m calling out how stupidly and obviously disingenuous the article is. That’s not whataboutism. Do you know what disingenuous means? The article claims it has a huge environmental impact. It doesn’t.
Are they hating, or are they pointing out that companies that claim to be honestly working towards a “greener” end are adding unwanted and unnecessary code to users computers against their will. Code, BTW, that can not be removed permanently and adds not only the cost of the bandwidth of the download used, but also the general cost of the cloud-backed nature of it’s functioning to the mix. As someone that doesn’t use Chrome or the cloud, I’d be furious… The Keystone Agent (a perniciously rotten bit of code that eats clock cycles in one’s system and runs constantly in the background) that chrome updates with - it’s exactly why I quit the browser years ago.
Nuts to that.
Chrome sucks, sure. Did you have a coherent point beyond that? No, didn’t think so.
You asked… I answered.
Dunno why you’re so butthurt over the fact that beyond the environmental claims, the issue of code being deployed into someone’s system without their permission or any ability to halt or prevent it means less to you than the former point.
Do you work for google? 'Cos damn dude, you’re coming down on this like you do.
The environmental impact of AI is massively overblown all the fucking time and I don’t like lies. And I do like AI
Can I send you this month’s electric bill to split the difference off of?
I have maintained a rigorous control on our home power useage for years and in spite of this, the bill has increased roughly 52% in the last year - and it’s aparently down to the increased demand that needs to be supplemented by purchasing power from outside of our region because of data centers.
If you love it so much… How about YOU pay the extra cost for those of us who did not ask for, and do not need, it.
It’s all part of the same thing… offloading burdens from the provider - be it a data center or google, onto the user, without permission.
No. It’s risen because corporate execs think they can gouge you for money to increase the high scores in their bank accounts. Increased demand means they’d be selling more which would mean more profits or even your bills decreasing if they were being fair. As usual it’s corps and billionaires that are the problem
Hmmm. I wonder which corpo executive runs my local community power collective.
Data center operators can and will negotiate yearly rates for bulk electricity up. That’s how they can guarantee supply, by paying more than the competition. Small local distributors will never have that kind of leverage, that’s why consumers end up paying more.
So yes, you are correct in saying that corporations and billionaires are the problem, but in this particular case, it’s because of a particular subset of those.
What do you think this nano model actually achieves?
Because I know why someone would want to eat a burger, or fill up a tank, but why would anyone want this running in their computers?
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Jeez, calm your tits, I think I asked politely enough so I wouldn’t deserve this kind of response.
My question was what do you think this particular model does, not what is achievable with AI in general. And I’m asking because a model that weights 4GB is not some trivial thing that every Chrome user wants or needs loaded in memory.
That’s nothing to do with my point that the article’s claim about the environmental impact is bullshit. I don’t know or care what that model is, I’ve not looked, and it’s not relevant to my point. And yeah, you haters do deserve anger as a response because you are actively making the world worse via wilful ignorance, and we know what that does because of arseholes like trump and farrage.
I don’t hate AI. I work for an AI company. But I hate the uselessness of a lot of the AI derived products. So, for me, burning a single drop of oil to write an email in business speech, post a video of a kitten in a superman outfit, or make a Trump Jesus pic, is a waste.
And in many ways, AI is actively making the world worse too, from big tech stealing content from everyone to train their models, to deepfake content flooding social media, there’s no good coming out of that. So maybe you should chill a bit before going off rails like you did.
You work for an AI company and can see no good coming from AI? What?
Is AI your field of work or research? Genuinely curious.
Maybe you should tell your model of choice to re-read my comment, because clearly you didn’t get the nuance in it.
But in plain words, yes, one can work in a field and be critical of the misuses.
Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?
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.
I remember when microslop was sued for monopoly antitrust for packaging a browser with it’s OS, pretty sure now in win 11 it resets default to Edge on every reboot.
Two decades. We’re old
I believe they did it a second time more recently.
As I said, few years ago.
It was last year. /s
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.
I may be a forgetful curmudgeon, but I sure remember those!
*shakes cane at things*
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.
I think the rootkit was only on CD’s sold in North America. I could be wrong though.
Nope Europe too
major L
…did you mean to say Korea?
What do you mean? I don’t follow.
Remember when people used to go insane in newsgroups screaming bloat if a program update was 80 KB bigger than the previous version and now people do not notice an extra 4 GB.
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?!?”
To be fair, I’d probably prefer the 4gb model.
If it was actually good people may not have cared so much.
Even if it was good - and it’s not - it’s still an incredibly unethical thing to do.
Agreed
Free music was awesome.
No they took payment
The big deal about that was that it was added to people’s libraries and couldn’t be removed.
This isn’t pushed in your face, and you can easily uninstall Chrome.
Well, and it was U2.
Idk about that, you can’t uninstall any of the ai bs they put on phones and computers, from microsoft to android. You can’t uninstall edge on a newer computer either, not without being an IT specialist or whatever.
The U2 album could be easily removed. The issue is that the average iTunes user doesn’t remove songs from their libraries, and thus had no idea the option to do so even existed and just assumed they were stuck with the album.
In a comment on another post about this the other day, I saw someone claim that they had to resort to CCleaner to remove Chrome off of their system after this update. Chrome wouldn’t let them uninstall the browser manually.
Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, I haven’t used Chrome in a while and I’m not gonna install it just to try (or ever again - I like my ad blockers, thank you very much). But, with the current state of the software landscape, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true.
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 <textarea>, 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.
>cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface
😡🤢🤮
4GB is now a Nano model?
It’s probably a typo and supposed to be Nanu. In German, nanu is an expression of surprise. This model’s slogan is “Nanu, wo kommt das denn her?” meaning “Huh, where did this come from?”.
That’s interesting. It’s an “old man” way of saying “nani?!” in Japanese.
Was Mork attempting a surprised German, an elderly Japanese man, or some strange third thing?
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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.
How do we uninstall or block the download?
Uninstall chrome
Can you even uninstall chrome on an android phone? I only get the option to disable.
You can use adb on a computer to remove chrome.
this is very helpful info, thank you, didn’t realize this was possible.
Use Shizuku and Canta to uninstall any uninstallable app. Or if you don’t want to bother, just disabling works fine too as long as you are not worried about the storage.
Thank you for the excellent suggestion. Worked perfectly. Managed to uninstall about 50 pieces of bloatware from my phone, starting with Chrome.
Props to you @zerozaku
Happy to help! Real props to the devs of these amazing apps.
Hear hear. 📢
Learned about this the other day and gave it a whirl, worked great, felt reminiscent of old school iPod jailbreaking shenanigans, but I had no issues. Easier (in a way) than adb!
That depends on the ROM you are using.
The one i am using (https://iode.tech/) is using a firefox based browser that you can actually uninstall.
Probably not stock Android. I’m on GrapheneOS and it doesn’t come with Chrome at all. But I don’t think the article is claiming it happens on Android.
Vanadium is Chrome derived; but I’m sure Graphene de-enshittifies it to the maximum possible extent.
Technically speaking, it is chromium derived which does make the difference in this instance.
Is this happening on android, too?
I don’t think so… yet… So not as disconcerting tbf, but curious to if it will come out of nowhere at some point, just like this.
And install Firefox or one of its many forks.
So it just to the Chrome app?
The article actually gives 3 options:
The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome’s AI features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy tooling that home users do not generally have, or to uninstall Chrome entirely
- It can probably be reverted at their whim at any time
- You probably don’t have access to it
- It is the most realistic option, just use another non chromium browser
Even Chromium should be fine. I doubt it has the branded Google AI features.
More difficult to remove than install. Adding the file took zero clicks. Removing it requires (a) discovering the file exists, (b) understanding what it is, © navigating into a hidden user profile path, (d) deleting it (and on Windows, also clearing the read-only attribute first), and (e) accepting that Chrome will silently re-download it on next eligible window unless the user also navigates chrome://flags, enterprise policy, or platform-specific configuration tooling to disable the underlying Chrome AI feature [5]. None of those steps is documented in the place a normal user looks - none of them is even hinted at in default Chrome.
This is 5: https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/
Obviously only windows focused, so how other platforms stop would require more searching.
I don’t have Windows 11. Still on 10 until October then switching to Linux.
Don’t even bother with 11. At all.
I bought a win11 laptop, didn’t create any accounts just installed the os… Then microsoft locked me out of the laptop with thier new bitlocker bs. It won’t even let me factory reset the effing thing.Switched to linux and im happy. It’s just a steam deck, but it’s still a better pc than the bit brick.
Were you able to get your bitlocker key from your Microsoft account or save it when bitlocker activated? IIRC you can use that key to access the drive from a live Linux USB, get all your files off, then just install said Linux over the encrypted Windows install (which you should be able to do even if you don’t have the key).
There is no key. There’s no bitlocker account and theres no Microsoft account.
The key is created when bitlocker activates, if bitlocker is on then there is a key. It’s the same as the password you create when you encrypt your Linux disk, it just creates a stupid long one for you so you will be inclined to make an account to save it rather than just remembering it like a password.
The average new PC is equipped with a $115 1TB SSD, so 4GB is 0.4% of that storage space, all four put together comprise 1.6% of available SSD space - 1.6% of $115 is $1.84. So, across a billion users, how likely is this to make a dent in anything other than the bandwidth consumed in delivery? And updates…
my entire /usr directory is just a bit above 4 gigabytes. you can put a fully featured modern operating system into that size, or you can have google’s slop machine that no one asked for
I agree, it’s heinous, but how else are they going to sell MOAR RAM, MOAR SSD, MOAR MOAR?
Used to be. Have you seen SSD prices recently? 1TB is now ~$250 CAD.
https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Vi550-Internal-Interface-Technology/dp/B082QXYC7S
It’s not like OEMs pay more than they have to…
The increasing enshittification of every service pushed me to GrapheneOS long before Google could force this shit on me
The article doesn’t really say but this is just for desktop chrome right now right? I’ve long had chrome disabled since graphene isn’t an option unless I build it myself but I do worry about that pesky web view that snuck it’s way into everything.
uninstalled Chrome a looooong time ago on my Win 10 machine
Uninstalled Chrome and Windows a looooooong time ago on my computer
You had Chrome installed?
You guys have computers?
I am a meat popsicle.
Hey, when I was a kid I had a slide rule.
Back in my day, computer was a job, and all you had was an abacus. We liked it that way. None of this newfangled al-gebra nonsense.
I’ve used Firefox since 2004 and never once thought about using Chrome.
Well I’ve used Firefox before it was even publicly released. Checkmate.
It’s like the new Bitcoin miner.
It’s worse even, at least a Bitcoin miner would get you Bitcoin, this gets you slop for the same amount of GPU cycles
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
When something is free, you are the product.
You’re forgetting FLOSS. That wisdom only applies when the product is made for financial incentive and is free, and not always then either.
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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.
Maybe that why Google sent me this bullshit
What is a Google One plan?
Edit. Oh i see. Is that 15gb the original storage for gmail and stuff? Are we that old that we’re filing that up? Oh man
Google One is the combined storage of every service you use, even accidentally. Google Photos Gmail, Drive, it’s all in there.
Emails take up some space, especially if they have embedded images or attachments.
I remember when Gmail was advertised as unlimited email storage. Then they limited it. Then they sold more storage for it.
I remember when the Google Pixel offered free unlimited high quality photo backup to excuse the fact it had no SD card.
Then it offered free medium quality photo backup to excuse the fact it had no SD card.
Then it offered nothing because it had squeezed serious competitors with SD cards out of the market.
High quality uploads were free for all Google Photos users and tben they changed it to medium quality and now we get nothing.
I used high quality uploads for a long time deleted the original files. Turns out those *high quality" uploads were not very high quality and realised that I have ruined years of my photos believing in this gimmick. Fxck Google.
It still does, for models that were sold that way. My Pixel 4 still gets free uploads to Google Photos. Which I should really move to immich one of these days.
I’m told it’s finally time to make the move
I don’t remember Gmail ever offering unlimited storage, and I can’t find any record of that offer ever being made, either. When they first launched, they gave 1GB, which was the highest of any free email service at the time by an order of magnitude, but never unlimited.
I have had Gmail since it was in beta and needed an invite to use.
Yes, it was originally touted as unlimited email. “Never have to delete another email!!” This was in 2003 (or was early 2004? It all runs together these days. I got married in 03, and got the invite not too long after) when my cousin sent me the invite.
The big webmail provider back then was yahoo.com, and I still have that email address as well. AOL even started offering a free webmail for people who had broadband Internet, but wanted to use or keep their old dial up AOL account.
Hotmail was also a thing, and this was before MS bought them and merged it with msn.com
They kept incrementally adding more storage capacity to your account every day. It slowly ticked up and their marketing claim was that it would just keep growing forever. As we can see, that… did not happen.
No my Gmail isn’t even full, my wife got same email. Fucking scam to make us sign up for their extra storage.
My Gmail had 17 or 19GB last time I checked… Gotta love when they would give you extra storage just for doing a ‘security check’.
I think they lowered the threshold
How was the van repair?
What? I don’t own a van.
Top row of your screenshot
Busssssted
Oh that yeah that Trent the Traveler. And that was a Patreon exclusive video. And it got it fixed.
Suuuure, “buddy”…
Yessss.
I literally don’t have any clue what I even responded to or why, I’m drunk most of the time, all the best to ya.
Cool!
Congrats! You’ve just beaten the final boss and finished the main quest of Gmail. Sounds like a great time to switch to Tutanota.
A joyous day!
Will need look into that, would love to self host my email.
That’s totally doable! Get a domain, find a server you like, pay for hosting, and you can install whatever you want on it. If you want to have your own cloud service, just install nextcloud. Install pihole and start blocking ads everywhere. Do you want to run an LLM in your own cloud? Totally doable as well. Maybe even host a Fediverse instance, while you’re at it.
I know I don’t have the time and energy to play admin in my free time, but I can definitely see the value in a hobby like that. I don’t mind paying for a cloud service or email, because that way I can be sure amateurs like me aren’t running the show. Obviously, I’m not paying Apple or Google to defile me. Those scammers don’t deserve my money or my data. Privacy respecting companies deserve to be paid for their efforts though.
How is a local model being downloading on your computer counting against your Google cloud storage?
Man I sure do wish Linux mobile was a thing. I really want a full on Linux phone.
