The discovery was made by Kelly Shortridge, a cybersecurity expert at New York based startup SecurityScorecard.
Ms Shortridge noticed that the tool was scanning files in a documents folder on her Windows PC and was concerned that it may be collecting data.
She shared her findings on Twitter, where she said: 'I was wondering why my Canarytoken (a file folder) was triggering and discovered the culprit was Chrome.
'Turns out Google Chrome quietly began performing AV scans on Windows devices last fall.'
Other than failing to notify Chrome users that this AV SW was made an integral part of Chrome, how is this different in operation from pretty much any other AV SW?
I've reduced my Mozilla use to zero and my Google use to Gmail, but how is something an entire industry does sinister when Google does it?
PeteS in CA
Power Supplies should be boring: No loud noises, no bright flashes, and no bad smells.
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To kill personal responsibility, initiative or success, punish it by taxing it. To encourage irresponsibility, improvidence, dependence and failure, reward it by subsidizing it.
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Firefox is the only way to go these days. I don't care if it's slower or if some bugs pop up once in a while (that long slow load a while back, which I think I traced to Add-On updates being turned On) - it still a better choice and at the very least more transparent than Chrome. Not to mention the amount of customization available for FF.
Chrome is like a damn virus - once you install it onto your PC, there is no removing it completely afterwards. I have one or two PCs on which I tried Chrome before, and CCleaner still picks up junk to remove from those, despite Chrome being uninstalled long time go now.
Firefox is the only way to go these days. I don't care if it's slower or if some bugs pop up once in a while (that long slow load a while back, which I think I traced to Add-On updates being turned On) - it still a better choice and at the very least more transparent than Chrome. Not to mention the amount of customization available for FF.
Not any more! Now Firefox looks just like Chrome too, and the extensions are all useless.
"Tantalum for the brave, Solid Aluminium for the wise, Wet Electrolytic for the adventurous"
-David VanHorn
^ Yeah, I heard newer versions of FF to be like that. I'm still running pre- FF-57 versions. Heck, I even found a few tweaks to get my FF 24 going for a bit longer (set TLS max version to 3 if you get pages complaining about SSL/TLS security incompatibility or refusing to load).
Firefox is the only way to go these days. I don't care if it's slower or if some bugs pop up once in a while (that long slow load a while back, which I think I traced to Add-On updates being turned On) - it still a better choice and at the very least more transparent than Chrome. Not to mention the amount of customization available for FF.
Chrome is like a damn virus - once you install it onto your PC, there is no removing it completely afterwards. I have one or two PCs on which I tried Chrome before, and CCleaner still picks up junk to remove from those, despite Chrome being uninstalled long time go now.
I use Waterfox, which is Firefox that's been denutted, been using it for years. Telemetry has been removed as well as other annoying things. They're basically turning 56 into a 'LTS' it seems, since 57 sucked so bad. It supports all the addons that FF does.
I personally hate Chrome and Opera, and love Firefox.
Seriously now though, I can't believe how Firefox (which is been said to eat loads and loads of RAM, and that is still true to an extent) runs fast for me but Chrome and Opera are slower than a sloth. Oh wait, Opera is nowadays just rebranded Chrome.
Firefox was and will always be my choice, despite their RAM usage issues.
I use Waterfox, which is Firefox that's been denutted, been using it for years. Telemetry has been removed as well as other annoying things. They're basically turning 56 into a 'LTS' it seems, since 57 sucked so bad. It supports all the addons that FF does.
Sounds good.
I'll have to check how their portable version fares, though. While I say I use FF, I actually use FF Portable on most of my PCs. Reason being is backwards compatibility with both hardware and software (but really mostly hardware, as older versions of FF use less RAM - a necessity for some of my old computer fleet).
Actually, I have a somewhat amusing story regarding that above. The other day, a neighbor friend's kid was doing homework and couldn't get a certain website to run on his PC to generate a graphic he wanted to use in a project. The website needed Java NPAPI plugin, which of course wasn't supported by any of the browsers on their OS (Windows 10 with latest Chrome and updated Edge, as any person would have it these days). So his mother asked me if I could help him. I suggested installing Firefox, but the latest version didn't work, as FF57 and newer don't really support plugins and addon like the old versions. Then I tried FF 52 ESR, but that still didn't work due to being 64-bit - at least according to Java error message (really Java?). Then I started looking for an older 32-bit version of FF, but Google search seemed to really have a mind of its own and not want me to find it. After looking for 10 minutes, I gave up on that, went home, grabbed a flash drive with FF 24 Portable 32-bit, and had the website running for the kid in less than 5 minutes.
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