🚀 go-pugleaf

Mark Anderson <mea@nospambradnylion.com> wrote:
> Since no one posts here I thought I'd try and add something interesting.  
> I put my PC on a quiet subnet to check on something and noticed google 
> updates was phoning home every single minute using http with a rather 
> lengthy session.  This chatter was filling up my logs so I investigated 
> and found an installation of google chrome had 3 processes running.  
> After uninstalling google chrome all went away and my laptop is as quiet 
> as a church mouse on the network.  Since I use firefox exclusively I 
> completely forgot I installed Chrome a bunch of months ago  to try it 
> out.  I didn't know that having it installed meant that they could set 
> up shop on my PC!  And this much activity is rather obnoxious IMHO.



Obnoxious maybe, evil, probably not.

From what I understand (which is little), Chrome is unique because it's a
sandboxed browser. Other words, you shouldn't be able to hit a malicious
website which can grab your contacts/address book, plant viruses and so
forth.

It's completely self-contained meaning it doesn't communicate or need calls
from the operating system and stays where it belongs.

To get that to work, it needs to launch a bunch of background processes,
everything from the extentions you have loaded to the printer and updater.
These have to be in the sandbox with the application since they can't be
called if not there.

I guess the main question is if they should continue to run after the main
application quits. I dunno. I've seen a lot people notice the
googleupdater.exe still running but seems to be related to it being able to
download any updates in the background so they are there next time you
launch, rather than waiting around when launched to download.

Same with the printer executable, if you hit print accidently and offline,
guess it keeps running thinking it has a job to do, sometimes for weeks.

So it's more the nature of the beast than anything else.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com