Yandex.Browser for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Yandex.Browser for Linux

browser.yandex.ru

54 pointsrev36 comments

Now your private information can go directly to the russian government using this amazing fork of google chrome.

Sounds like you were ok with sharing with western governments (regular chrome).

In the US and most Western countries, that data can only be accessed with a warrant or other court order.

In Russia, the prosecutor can demand the data himself. Bloggers with at least 3000 followers automatically get put under surveillance (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russian-blogger-law-puts...), and the surveillance infrastructure is modern (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM).

You might have missed all the Snowden / NSA posts if you think the first paragraph is really true.

I didn't miss those disclosures. None of them contradict my first paragraph.

You inaccurately equate the "blogger law" requirements (i.e. having to "register, disclose [blogger's] personal information and submit to the same regulations as mass media") with mass surveillance.

You're right.

Since when does a law stop criminals in positions of power from doing what they want to?

I dont see a point in using yet another proprietary branded chromium, that sends info to yandex instead of google.

Makes sense to those who'd rather phone Moscow than Mountain View.

Something tells me this browser isn't really aimed at us.

At least wrt searches you can easily send info to, say, AOL, every browser, Y.B included, allows that. (It is interesting for the Russian-speaking auditory to note that Y.Browser doesn't include search engines of other Yandex's competitors on the Russian market - Mail.ru and Rambler, while it has Ask, Bing and whatnot).

Seems like a natural progression. Yandex gets a significant chunk of Russian search traffic and also offer email and cloud storage. Presumably the default search engine will be Yandex...

The sad thing is that it doesn't run on GNU/Linux natively, but runs via Wine.

I think thats incorrect. It was made from chromium which has native linux support. In fact, I unpacked archive and I couldnt see any wine parts

Whoa, It automatically imports everything from Chrome. Which includes cookies (and as extension login sessions), bookmarks, extensions etc.

Is it just me or - I find that somewhat scary.I daresay, I would expect Chrome to encrypt sensitive information it saves on disk. Yandex does not seem to have imported the plaintext passwords thankfully, but I don't think I trust a new service with this much of private information.

In other words - Chrome, please stop random applications from copying my login sessions and cookies.

That isn't necessarily very easy thing to implement. If the data is accessible by one application, how could it not be available by some other application running with the same credentials? Maybe some "vault" daemon running as a different user could do, but then it would only take reverse engineering the client part from Chrome (if it wouldn't be open source via Chromium already). And all this to protect the application data from other application user is willingly running? TL;DR: don't run applications you don't trust.

If you have configured Chrome with a Google account, on Linux - for me, it does ask me for password on restart. I am assuming the password is for decrypting the passwords it stores in browser's "manage passwords".

Overall, I think either:

a. Chrome can use that account password for decrypting the other senstive information too. b. or it can integrate with keychain of operation system. If I am not wrong, each time a new application accesses keychain of OS, OS prompts for user's password.

Where would it store that encryption key? How would it store it in such a way that a Chromium fork wouldn't have good access to it to easily decrypt and copy the cookies anyways?

Are you sure it's even an import? I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is just naively using the same cookie stores and bookmarks and whatnot live.

Chrome and Firefox both store cookies, bookmarks, etc. in unencrypted, unprotected sqlite databases in a user profile directory. Internet Explorer stores them in regular text files on the filesystem. Any application run by the same user has trivial access to all of that information.

In many cases that information can't be sent out to an external server and then used to impersonate you, however. Google, for example, has a lot of safeguards to identify abnormal traffic like that and block it out. An application could, however, use the cookies/session info locally on your machine to do things without your knowledge.

This is why security minded apps will log you off all the time. It's not to annoy you, it's because the session security model is just not safe in a computer that may be running untrusted applications. You're responsible of the applications you install not stealing your stuff or hijacking your sessions.

Where's the source?

Just after Chrome's source.

Just like I switched off Opera when it became a webkit fork, I do not see any reason in installing another one.

From my experience, Yandex is only good for one thing: Russian maps. Their accuracy and features are still unparalleled on Russian territory.

When it comes to browser though, I would still use Chrome if I wanted WebKit, FireFox if I wanted features and Opera 12 if I wanted great user experience.

>Their accuracy and features are still unparalleled on Russian territory.

2GIS blows Yandex out of the water as long as you're in one of the many cities it supports.

I think last time I tried it, it was behind on the nav part. Did they improve it? Does it allow setting marks for other drivers? Does it show traffic jams?

Is Google Chrome not using Blink yet?

I am not sure about the actual name, the point is that those engines come from the same root, be it WebKit, Blink or something else.

As far as my experience goes, they include common things like dev tools, rendering nuances and other such stuff.

How does Yandex compare against Google? Is their search experience and their algorithms similarly advanced?

We built a site for a Russian supermarket and tried using Yandex maps as that's what they wanted. Was accurate for Russian addresses, as you would expect, but ended up switching for Mapbox so we could heavily customise it.

Yandex maps is way more accurate and way more pervasive in Russian than Google Maps in my experience.

Download page is in Russian, but the interface is in English when installed. International site (http://browser.yandex.com) still has "We're working on it".

Looks like they did work on it. Working now, including a download for Mac and Windows.

So much anti-Russian sentiment - why is Hacker News so full of politics!? Are NSA or GCHQ any better? The thing is that other countries don't trust stuff built in the US anymore and you will see more and more of these.

Some useful extensions like LastPass, Adguard, Pocket and Evernote are packaged (but not enabled) by default. Functionally it's Yandexified Chromium (vs Googlized Chromium aka Chrome—and modulo UI chrome of course).

Nice try, KGB!

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