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