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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.
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?
Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:
- Backup registry
- Start
- regedit
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
- right-click Policies, New, Key
- confirm Google, Enter
- right-click Google, New, Key
- confirm Chrome, Enter
- right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
- confirm GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings, Enter
- 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.
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.
Yeah, that’s a relatively easy issue to debug. It goes to show that it’s really about where your familiarity level is.
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.
Tell that to my Windows desktop support coworkers, hah.
It’s really all about what you’re familiar with.
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?
And Apple, don’t forget Apple.
I was about to type something something about just switching to Linux and at least Firefox but you already got there in the end
“zsh: regedit: command not found…” I use arch btw. 😂
no no no; since you are using zsh you will need to use ragedit not regedit.
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!
That’s your fault for using Chrome.
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
A less harmful Chrome derivative:
Is most consumer hardware even capable of running this model?
The article says it has hardware requirements to even download it. But yeah, you can run lots of stuff on the CPU, just at a fraction of the speed.
Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?
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?!?”
Two decades. We’re old
As I said, few years ago.
It was last year. /s
I believe they did it a second time more recently.
Remember how pissed off everyone was when Sony added software to people’s computers?
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.
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.
I think the rootkit was only on CD’s sold in North America. I could be wrong though.
…did you mean to say Korea?
What do you mean? I don’t follow.
Free music was awesome.
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.
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.
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.
Well, and it was U2.
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.
4GB is now a Nano model?
Is it sleazy? Absolutely. Is it exploitation of a massive power imbalance? Undoubtedly. Is it illegal? Probably about as illegal as a game pre-loading 4gb of DLC I’m not going to buy as part of an automatic update. The terms of your agreement with Google for Chrome allow them to update their software as they see fit. Their gamble is that you won’t switch.
https://news.aibase.com/news/25955 https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started#model_download
It was bound to happen, since they started testing it more than a year ago. While I really hate this decision, I hate the linked blog more. It’s populist SEO slop that exists to advertise “that privacy guy”'s consultancy services. Measuring environment impact of the downloads, that’s your chosen angle here? Bleh.
Who still uses Chrome?
Most middle and high schoolers use chromebooks nowadays.
Got a notice just yesterday that my browser wasn’t supported on a site and I needed the latest version of chrome. Luckily chromium fooled it. So… Chrome is still the IE of the modern web.
Companies.
And you, if you work for a company.The corporate images for our company come with Firefox ESR, and you can file an automated request for Chrome if you want it added 🤷♂️
That’s dope. And rare. Good on them.
Same here. Our IT guys have good taste in browsers, but they also know that some people in the company may still need one of the messy sites that are incompatible with web standards. Chrome is for those edge cases.
I got the short end when i was in the office. Edge and chrome were it. And there was a white list. They even monitored when the TV was turned on.
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
And install Firefox or one of its many forks.
Can you even uninstall chrome on an android phone? I only get the option to disable.
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.
You can use adb on a computer to remove chrome.
this is very helpful info, thank you, didn’t realize this was possible.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Are grapheneos and apple the best ways to avoid anything to do with google?
Yes. But Apple is pushing so many things as opt-out (especially their AI detection crap for photos and stuff) that I now consider GrapheneOS to be the only OS left for a phone.
A fully de-goggled Android won’t be able to run some apps. For example banking apps tend to be really picky about these things. Either the app runs on a vanilla Android or it won’t run at all. Sure, you can get rid of Google, but you’ll be making some sacrifices. Another option is to use iOS, but it comes with some messed up sacrifices too.
A third option is to use a Linux phone, but I haven’t got any personal experience with that. Looks promising, but apparently many basic necessities aren’t available yet.
If you don’t really need anything more than email, SMS and phone calls, a de-googled android and Linux phones should be fine. If you want to be more compatible with the rest of the modern world, iOS is the least bad option here. Still, pretty awful but at least you can guarantee that all the modern mobile things work. Sure, you’ll be living without Google, but you’ll be living with Apple now so… Is that a win? Probably not.
Either way, Linux phones look very promising. Remember to check back in 5 about years to see if the situation has improved. Some EU countries are currently severing their ties with American spyware companies, and this move could result in developing the mobile Linux ecosystem to a more usable state. If that happens, I’m probably going to recommend ditching your iPhone and Switching to a mobile Linux phone.
I use Ubuntu touch as a personal device, which has zero support for banking apps, meaning I have to have a backup Android device. My work phone is a pixel 6 running graphene OS, which manages to run all of my banking apps just fine. (Though admittedly I ‘got lucky’ in the sense that my banks are supported by graphene OS)
Graphene, or any other alternative to the big 2, aren’t perfect and don’t cover all banks, but graphene is by far the frontrunner for a viable alternative. If you haven’t toyed around with it and get the opportunity, id definitely recommend it.
I really hope we do see further Linux phone development, but without buy-in from the banks themselves, they will not be supported for the same reason Graphene isn’t. The only difference is Graphene allows sandboxing play integrity to navigate the “Google has to say it’s okay” nonsense. It’s a rock and a hard place problem; the banks won’t support without mass adoption, and mass adoption won’t happen due to lack of banking support.
I think sailfish OS has a similar integrity sandboxing concept, though I haven’t tried that personally, so can’t comment on how well it works.
Maybe that why Google sent me this bullshit
Congrats! You’ve just beaten the final boss and finished the main quest of Gmail. Sounds like a great time to switch to Tutanota.
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 was the van repair?
What? I don’t own a van.
Top row of your screenshot
Oh that yeah that Trent the Traveler. And that was a Patreon exclusive video. And it got it fixed.
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
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.
No my Gmail isn’t even full, my wife got same email. Fucking scam to make us sign up for their extra storage.
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 think they lowered the threshold
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’.
