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Comment by Aqua_Geek | Hacker News Reader

Re-reading the ticket:

> Chromium builds from r335874 (version 45) onwards will have hotwording disabled by default and will not download the module. There is no way to enable this feature at runtime.

So as long as you compile from source or trust your package maintainer to not enable the compile-time flag you should be good.

Sorry to raise undue alarm.

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You don't have to trust your maintainer, just go to chrome://voicesearch and check the status (but read up on it, it's badly labeled) or search for "hotword-x86-64.nexe" inside your chromium extensions folder and delete the extension containing it.

using chrome://voicesearch, I get:

Microphone No

Audio Capture Allowed Yes

Does audio capture has admin privileges over the microphone, or the speakers for that matter?

Flags are explained in comment #22:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922#c...

>Microphone: Is a microphone detected? (Does not mean it is being used.)

>Audio Capture Allowed: Can Chromium use the mic? (This is there for historical reasons, it's always "Yes".)

Those are some poorly labelled flags.

Do you also trust your package maintainer to not mismerge patches and leave you open to security bugs? Your argument is no bueno.

You have to extend trust out at some point. Your only other alternative is to manually type the machine code required for a C compiler and start from that.

Additionally, it's fairly ironic this is about a browser. If you don't trust packages maintainers, yet you want to use a browser, which the whole point of is to download and interpret text, code and binaries which you have little in the way of actually controlling after pointing it at a site, then I think you've made some interesting security trade-offs in your mind.

And even then, who knows?

http://wccftech.com/intel-possibly-amd-chips-permanent-backd...

Okay, so the only other alternative is to create your own processor[1], manually type the machine code required for a C compiler, and then start from that. Sheesh.

Really, this is what everything in life is like. Every time you cross a bridge, you are implicitly trusting the builders who built it, the engineers who designed it, the mechanical engineering processes they used, and the mathematical disciplines that they rely on, all the way down to their fundamental axioms. You have to extend trust at some point there as well, otherwise you can start by proving there exists a class of numbers we will call integers...

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755742

I agree with you, my point was to illustrate that at some point, everyone needs to place some trust (even if implicitly). I'm as paranoid as the next person, but this is just the reality.

Yeah, that "sheesh" wasn't directed at you, but at the even more ludicrous amount of work required to not have to trust a third party. The response wasn't a rebuttal, I just felt I had more to say. :)

got you covered http://www.idc.ac.il/tecs/

It's easier to trust that the maintainer compiled upstream properly instead of backported/mismerged because of a stupid OS policy preventing you from incrementing version numbers

Ergo: use a distribution like Arch Linux or Gentoo. Arch Linux has the advantage that you don't have to build everything from source yourself. Both have the advantage that the build scripts are easy to understand (Arch PKGBUILDs more so, IMHO).

In the end you will always arrive at a chicken and egg situation, you will ultimately need to trust the engineers who designed your CPU and chipset, the VLSI design software which they used, the developers who wrote the compiler and toolchain, the tools used to bootstrap it, external libraries, etc.

The world ultimately runs on trust, no matter how you slice it.

This whole issue got raised by the package maintainers from debian[1], so yeah, there are sources and people you could consider to trust.

But of course nothing beats compiling from source.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409

If you don't have the time, skillset or inclination to review the source you're compiling yourself, trusting a third party who you have reason to put faith in beats compiling from source yourself.

> But of course nothing beats compiling from source.

Did you assemble a bootstrap compiler yourself? Your binary compiler could be backdoored! [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)#Compiler_...

I've no idea why you've been downvoted. While it's not amazingly pertinent, it's worthy to note that security from source assumes your compiler is being honest.

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