I assume the malicious part is that it phones home without permission, likely tracking users without their consent or informing them.

Have they? I couldn’t find any information about that online. As for the rest, yeah, likely poached (or, like Mistral, not very pro-open source (◡︵◡) )

Nah, I’ve heard they stopped development. People use LocalCDN as a drop in replacement. However, by itself, it doesn’t change much when it comes to ads and tracking.

Username does NOT check out. You give too many.

You can block the main mastodon instances if you find it THAT horrible. No more hashtags in your feed then.

I’m not sure. The courts intends for Google to sell Chrome, not Chromium. Even if they gave guarentees that Chromium will become independant, the coourt’s likely to tell them to sell Chrome anyway (as they could still apply monopolistic practices like service bundling without control over Chromium, not to mention they could ‘fork’ LF’s Chromium later to make their own).

The way I see it, this is more Google being scared shitless about Chrome’s new owner being shitty, promote their own services instead of Google’s, and disrespect web standards (or depecreates the ‘standards’ Google implemented in Chromium without the approval of other browers, or standard bodies). That could cause MASSIVE issues for them, and the loss of business that could cause would be tremendous, in a way that’s far worse than giving up control on Chromium.

To me, his seems more like the nuclear option of Google saying that if they can’t own Chromiulm, then nobody can as a way to cut their losses.

Stephen Shankland’s report from 2020 notes a number of people suggesting that Chromium as a whole could be moved out of Google entirely and into an independent foundation, such as the Linux Foundation. That’s not what is happening now, but it’s another step toward larger organization outside of the web’s dominant browser and advertising provider (though Google is still one of the supporters).

One can only hope this is the first step toward a larger trend. LF stewardship of the Chromium project wouldn’t be perfect, but it’s still much better than the current situation of it being controlled by one company, be it Google or whoever they’ll forced to sell Chrome to.

Heavy recommendation for Portal: Revolutions. It’s one of those super fun storied Portal 2 mods like Stories: Mel, if you like this kind of thing!

You’d be suprised. A few years back in France, there were trials on hate speech involving death threats, and the 13 people who were brought in court were aged between 18 and 31.

And I remember and article (though was unable to find it again), that spoke about the many groups of 60+ y.o. people that spewed a lot of hate speech and death threats on Facebook.