Chrome vs data hoarding
We have a NAS now, and I've been doing some data hoarding on it, for fun, with the full knowledge that this is a bit stupid. Or maybe not so stupid...? At any rate, I went onto my Humble account and downloaded a lot of the DRM-free games that I own there.
A lot of the games I downloaded were extremely old, from the earliest years of the Humble Bundle (before it really became a store, I guess?) and had been uploaded as .exe and .msi installers. Most of these were blocked by Chrome. Regrettably, I still use Chrome on my desktop, but stuff like this always makes me start looking at different browsers. Every single old installer was marked as suspicious, and then I had to go through the process of turning off Chrome's browsing safety protections, downloading these installers, then overriding the download-blocking system that STILL triggered on each one, even in unprotected mode.
I genuinely didn't understand how a system like this could be well-tuned enough to protect many users from dangerous software in disguise, but be completely unaware of products like Slime Rancher, Sword and Sworcery, and even Undertale, all of which triggered the browser protections. Undertale really got me suspicious, because I guarantee that installer has been downloaded truly zillions of times by zillions of children (who probably don't understand filesystems or browsers).
Well, it seems like Chrome may simply block EVERY installer, or perhaps every installer that is not digitally signed... but I also found people posting online about how even signed installers can get blocked, even when downloaded from extremely well-known and reputable sources like HP. This blocking occurs in all browser safety modes and must still be manually overridden even at the lowest safety level.
I'm far from the first person to say this, but even though it takes about 2 minutes to activate the lowest safety mode and then override a failed download, it is definitely fucked that this happens at all. As we enter a world where most kids don't know how filesystems work, and where many adults have replaced the desktop's role in their life with a phone and are losing familiarity with desktops as a platform... and where where most people are as dumb as I am and probably use shit like Chrome... I can so easily imagine a popular browser that does not allow you to disable download protections. Browsers with the kind of market penetration Chrome has achieved can create a walled garden as easily as a platform like Apple can.
So the final beat in this story is that the US courts are not going to order Google to sell off Chrome after all. I'm nowhere near smart and informed enough to tell whether the remedies they're actually imposing will improve anything in a way that effects the issues I'm thinking about today. Forcing Google to share its data seems kind of weird to me, because the structural issue of Google owning Chrome is still at play, and knowing someone's industry secrets or whatever doesn't seem like it would always be a good leveler.
In the meantime, my NAS is finally full of all the DRM-free Humble installers I care about. (If I ever, ever, ever touch any of these to actually install them from my NAS rather than through Steam, I'll let you know.)