Chrome and its implications, particularly for Microsoft, has received wall-to-wall coverage this week. Most of it has been excitement about how the browser as operating system will change the face of life, the universe and everything as we know it.
That first wave of hysteria over, here comes the detail, which is where the devil always lies and it looks like Google has been pretty sloppy too.
The end of the week has brought widespread reports of the unacceptable terms of the end-user licence agreement (EULA) issued by Google concerning the use of Chrome (in part 11.1).
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence etc etc and as a belt and braces precaution:
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licence.
Google has hastily withdrawn this and come up with some hard to believe excuse about universal legal conditions being applied for the sake of simplicity, but accepts they weren't applicable here.
Next, according to Computerworld (US) , it turns out that troublemakers can combine the months-old 'carpet bomb' bug with another flaw disclosed last month to trick people running Google's brand-new Chrome browser into downloading and launching malicious code.
Israeli researcher and security expert Aviv Raff was quoted in the report explaining that the attacks are possible because Google used an older version of WebKit, the open-source rendering engine that also powers Apple's Safari, as the foundation of Chrome.
Raff has apparently posted a proof-of-concept exploit to demonstrate how hackers could create a new 'blended threat' to attack Chrome.
As the Computerworld reporter observed, that didn't take long, did it‾