back to article Crank up the volume on that Pixies album: Time to exercise your Raspberry Pi with an... alternative browser

While browser-makers squabble over standards, privacy and exactly what their User-Agent string should say, Ekioh's clean-room browser, Flow, has continued to quietly advance. The Register last looked at Flow over Christmas 2020 and we came away impressed with the work in progress, not least its speed and the lack of data …

  1. PhilipN Silver badge

    Pixies

    You don’t need to ask twice! Back in a week or two….

    1. AdamT

      Re: Pixies

      OK, I just can't work it out. Can someone explain the Pixies reference in the headline?

      1. Dev_Fit

        Re: Pixies

        They are a quite representative band in a genre of music in the 1990s that was known as "Alternative" music (as in the alternative to the mainstream).

        They sound very punk rockish, and many of the songs are led by bassist Kim Deal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPgf_btTFlc).

        1. Ian 55

          Re: Pixies

          It'd have been better with MC5: ""And right now... right now... right now it's time to... kick out the Chome, motherfuckers!"

          1. picturethis
            Childcatcher

            Re: Pixies

            "right now it's time to... kick out the Chome"

            Chrome on Pi is the new IE on Pi.. Except for using Chrome to download Firefox ESR, I have been (happily) using Firefox ESR on Pi for quite a few years now.

            This includes installing/running my favorite plugins: Ghostery, Ublox, Adbloc, NoScript.

            Yes, yes I do change the agent string to x86, otherwise there are just too many web sites (i.e. all of them), that when they detect ARM, they almost universally serve up mobile websites - web-designers are friggin' idiots...(I'm lookin at you, Amazon).

        2. AdamT

          Re: Pixies

          Sorry, I should have said that I am familiar with the Pixies and have several of their albums (actual CDs!). I just couldn't work out if the title was a reference to a specific track or lyrics...

  2. Greybearded old scrote Silver badge
    Go

    Oh, please!

    HTML4 and less javascript sounds like a good result to me.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmmm,

    I read this article to the end reading his name as "womble" and now I have got a "remember you're a womble" earworm. About right for a hungover Monday I suppose

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Hmmm,

      I always sing it to myself in a Noddy Holder voice - had to check that it wasn't sung by Wizard.

      Now I have 70s Brummie ear worms

      1. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: Hmmm,

        It was sung by Mike Batt, a non-Westmidlander.

        I always used to sing "Remember you're a member", which rhymes better.

        Remember-member-member what a member, member, member you are. Sound advice.

        -A.

      2. JDPower666

        Re: Hmmm,

        You're just trolling us oldies with the error in your post, but I'm not biting lol

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Hmmm,

          Yeah, he should be slayed for that!

    2. Intractable Potsherd

      Re: Hmmm,

      If it is like the village of the same name in South Yorkshire, it is "Woomwell".

  4. Little Mouse
    Alert

    "I imagine it'll be pretty simple to fix"

    Experience has taught me to Never - EVER - voice this opinion out loud to anyone on the outside of my immediate professional circle.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: "I imagine it'll be pretty simple to fix"

      The real skill is not telling yourself this....

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: "I imagine it'll be pretty simple to fix"

      Voicing an opinion like this is like signing a binding written contract in blood. One which has penalties for being unable to fulfil contractual obligations.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "I imagine it'll be pretty simple to fix"

      And the fix depends on Googles deliberately obfuscated interface, which could (and will) change without a moments notice.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "I imagine it'll be pretty simple to fix"

        @"And the fix depends on Googles deliberately obfuscated interface, which could (and will) change without a moments notice."

        Agreed so why bother, if you are looking to make a browser without slurp then not supporting google's honey pots is a must or your users will think any interoperability problems are down to your browser rather than Google's anticompetitive practices.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I've spent some time in clean rooms, so I wondered how it applies to browsers. I found this [what-is-a-data-clean-room measured dot com] :

    > What is a Data Clean Room?

    > A Data Clean Room is a secure, protected environment where PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data is anonymized, processed and stored to be made available for measurement, or data transformations in a privacy-compliant way. The raw PII, is made available to the brand and is only viewable by the brand.

    How does a Data Clean Room work?

    > All user-level first-party data loaded from CRM systems (including historical data) like Salesforce, or ecommerce platforms (such as Shopify, Magento, Epsilon). are loaded into this secure environment. Any other data sources including historical and current transaction data can also made available in the clean room environment for a variety of use cases.

    > The PII data sent to the clean room is hashed for transmission and once it enters the clean room it is secured and encrypted, protecting it from unauthorized access. Brands have full control over the clean room, while partners can get a feed with hashed PII data as an output. This anonymized data can then be shared in a compliant way with measurement partners like Measured or media/publisher platforms like Facebook and Google.

    > What’s the benefit of a Data Clean Room?

    > It is set up by a partner like Measured, but is handed over to the brand to use as a turnkey feature giving complete control of the environment to the brand.

    After a winding detour of obfuscating verbiage : ".... giving complete control of the environment to the brand." Parasite capitalism (as opposed to making useful things).

    Hopefully this is nothing to do with Flow. I wish there were a bit more explanation from Flow.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      In this case, "clean room" refers to writing code where you never look at the code someone else wrote to do the task. That means that you don't run the risk of accidentally copying someone else's algorithm or less accidentally copying their source chunks. This helps both with licensing and with preventing a monoculture. For licensing, it means that you don't run the risk of having to adhere to someone else's license terms because you used something that requires it; for proprietary licenses, this is a virtual requirement to avoid copyright or reverse-engineering EULA violation charges. For monoculture, it avoids having a certain implementation become an effective standard merely because everybody did it that way, and therefore strengthens the limited public standard over the arbitrary whatever the Chromium dev thought of.

  6. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

    "We're working from home and no one has a Windows computer at home."

    Yaaay!!! LOL

  7. Merpug

    I know that name

    Piers Wombwell rings an old bell from my days as an Acorn reseller. Good to see he's still independent...

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like