Kingdom Code UK

Kingdom Code is a new initiative to gather together Christians who program, to direct their efforts towards hastening the eventual total triumph of God’s kingdom on earth. There’s a preparatory meet-up on Monday 15th September (tickets) and then a full get-together on Monday 13th October. Check out the website and sign up if you are interested.

(There’s also Code for the Kingdom in various cities in the US and India, if you live nearer those places than here.)

Google Safe Browsing Now Blocks “Deceptive Software”

From the Google Online Security blog:

Starting next week, we’ll be expanding Safe Browsing protection against additional kinds of deceptive software: programs disguised as a helpful download that actually make unexpected changes to your computer—for instance, switching your homepage or other browser settings to ones you don’t want.

I posted a comment asking:

How is it determined, and who determines, what software falls into this category and is therefore blocked?

However, this question has not been approved for publication, let alone answered :-( At Mozilla, we recognise exactly the behaviour this initiative is trying to stop, but without written criteria, transparency and accountability, this could easily devolve into “Chrome now blocks software Google doesn’t like.” Which would be concerning.

Firefox uses the Google Safe Browsing service but enhancements to it are not necessarily automatically reflected in the APIs we use, so I’m not certain whether or not Firefox would also be blocking software Google doesn’t like, and if it did, whether we would get some input into the list.

Someone else asked:

So this will block flash player downloads from https://get.adobe.com/de/flashplayer/ because it unexpectedly changed my default browser to Google Chrome?!

Kudos to Google for at least publishing that comment, but it also hasn’t been answered. Perhaps this change might signal a move by Google away from deals which sideload Chrome? That would be most welcome.