Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
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.
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:
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