1.0.118.19 is still a surveillance tool
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Just had a look at 1.0.118.19. It comes with a variety of Google tools [b]switched on by default[/b]. I turned them off. I tried to change default search engine and it keeps [b]ignoring my choice[/b] and reverting to Google. With obvious surveillance links off, it makes calls to a number of Google end points. Also some calls to nonsense domains. A domain called Pingdom. net too. [b]In short you appear not to be able to prevent surveillance in Vivaldi.[/b] At the end of the day they haven't yet stopped the surveillance. Time to uninstall again.
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The nonsense domains appear to alter each time the browser starts. Anybody know what they do?
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Ouch. The uninstaller is a fake.
In windows 8.1, custom install location, it removes the uninstall item from "Programs and Features" but leaves the browser installed and operational.
Now need to explore and spend time to find out how to get rid of it.
Not impressed.
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Ouch. The uninstaller is a fake.
In windows 8.1, custom install location, it removes the uninstall item from "Programs and Features" but leaves the browser installed and operational.
Now need to explore and spend time to find out how to get rid of it.
Not impressed.
I believe that finding a folder and deleting it is not that time consuming.
Anyway I don't have the problem the uninstaller works properly for me.
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Once I disabled all the options in preferences, these are the only 2 connections Vivaldi does at run:
Request 1:
GET https://translate.googleapis.com/translate_a/l?client=chrome&cb=sl&hl=pt&key=s0M3k3y&alpha=1 HTTP/1.1 Host: translate.googleapis.com Connection: keep-alive User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.115 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.0.118.19 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
The response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2015 17:59:53 GMT Expires: Sat, 07 Mar 2015 17:59:53 GMT Cache-Control: private, max-age=86400 Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=UTF-8 Content-Language: pt X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="f.txt" Server: HTTP server (unknown) X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic,p=0.08 Content-Length: 2914 /* API response */ sl({"sl":{"auto":"Detectar idioma","af":"africâner","sq":"albanês","de":"alemão","ar":"árabe","hy":"armênio","az":"azerbaijano","eu":"basco","bn":"bengali","be":"bielo-russo","my":"Birmanês","bs":"bósnio","bg":"búlgaro","ca":"catalão","kk":"cazaque","ceb":"Cebuano","ny":"Chichewa","zh-CN":"chinês","si":"Cingalês","ko":"coreano","ht":"crioulo haitiano","hr":"croata","da":"dinamarquês","sk":"eslovaco","sl":"esloveno","es":"espanhol","eo":"esperanto","et":"estoniano","fi":"finlandês","fr":"francês","gl":"galego","cy":"galês","ka":"georgiano","el":"grego","gu":"gujarati","ha":"hauçá","iw":"hebraico","hi":"hindi","hmn":"Hmong","nl":"holandês","hu":"húngaro","ig":"Igbo","id":"indonésio","en":"inglês","yo":"ioruba","ga":"irlandês","is":"islandês","it":"italiano","ja":"japonês","jw":"javanês","kn":"kannada","km":"Khmer","lo":"laosiano","la":"latim","lv":"letão","lt":"lituano","mk":"macedônico","ml":"malaiala","ms":"malaio","mg":"malgaxe","mt":"maltês","mi":"maori","mr":"marathi","mn":"mongol","ne":"nepalês","no":"norueguês","fa":"persa","pl":"polonês","pt":"português","pa":"punjabi","ro":"romeno","ru":"russo","sr":"sérvio","st":"sesotho","so":"somália","sw":"suaíle","su":"sudanês","sv":"sueco","tg":"tadjique","tl":"tagalo","th":"tailandês","ta":"tâmil","cs":"tcheco","te":"telugo","tr":"turco","uk":"ucraniano","ur":"urdu","uz":"usbeque","vi":"vietnamita","yi":"yiddish","zu":"zulu"},"tl":{"af":"africâner","sq":"albanês","de":"alemão","ar":"árabe","hy":"armênio","az":"azerbaijano","eu":"basco","bn":"bengali","be":"bielo-russo","my":"Birmanês","bs":"bósnio","bg":"búlgaro","ca":"catalão","kk":"cazaque","ceb":"Cebuano","ny":"Chichewa","zh-CN":"chinês (simplificado)","zh-TW":"chinês (tradicional)","si":"Cingalês","ko":"coreano","ht":"crioulo haitiano","hr":"croata","da":"dinamarquês","sk":"eslovaco","sl":"esloveno","es":"espanhol","eo":"esperanto","et":"estoniano","fi":"finlandês","fr":"francês","gl":"galego","cy":"galês","ka":"georgiano","el":"grego","gu":"gujarati","ha":"hauçá","iw":"hebraico","hi":"hindi","hmn":"Hmong","nl":"holandês","hu":"húngaro","ig":"Igbo","id":"indonésio","en":"inglês","yo":"ioruba","ga":"irlandês","is":"islandês","it":"italiano","ja":"japonês","jw":"javanês","kn":"kannada","km":"Khmer","lo":"laosiano","la":"latim","lv":"letão","lt":"lituano","mk":"macedônico","ml":"malaiala","ms":"malaio","mg":"malgaxe","mt":"maltês","mi":"maori","mr":"marathi","mn":"mongol","ne":"nepalês","no":"norueguês","fa":"persa","pl":"polonês","pt":"português","pa":"punjabi","ro":"romeno","ru":"russo","sr":"sérvio","st":"sesotho","so":"somália","sw":"suaíle","su":"sudanês","sv":"sueco","tg":"tadjique","tl":"tagalo","th":"tailandês","ta":"tâmil","cs":"tcheco","te":"telugo","tr":"turco","uk":"ucraniano","ur":"urdu","uz":"usbeque","vi":"vietnamita","yi":"yiddish","zu":"zulu"},"al":{}})
Request 2:
GET https://www.google.com/searchdomaincheck?format=url&type=chrome HTTP/1.1 Host: www.google.com Connection: keep-alive DNT: 1 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.115 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.0.118.19 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch Accept-Language: pt-BR,pt;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4 Cookie: OTZ=0000000_00_00_00000_00_000000; NID=67=xXxXXXxX_Xxxx0xxXxxx; PREF=ID=000xx000xxxx0000:U=00x000x0x0000000:FF=0:LD=pt-BR:TM=0000000000:LM=0000000000:SG=2:S=xX-x_xxxXXxxXXxx; SID=XXXXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXXXXXXXX_XXXXXXXXXXXXXX_xxxxxx_xxxx-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX_xxxx; HSID=XXXXXXXXXXXXX; SSID=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX; APISID=_XXXXXXXXX-xx/XXXXXXXXXXXXX; SAPISID=XXXXXXXXXXXXX/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx_XX
Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2015 18:00:21 GMT Expires: Sat, 07 Mar 2015 18:00:21 GMT Cache-Control: private, max-age=5184000 Vary: Cookie Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Encoding: gzip Server: gws X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic,p=0.08 Transfer-Encoding: chunked 00000001 Truncated, this is repeated a lot of more times, plus it has many non-recognisable chars
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The nonsense domains appear to alter each time the browser starts. Anybody know what they do?
I answered this the last time we discussed the issue here:
Funny are the requests 3508-3510. Trying to connect three random strings? What's that?
By my understanding, this is a Chromium feature used to test whether the user's ISP (or otherwise their chosen DNS) hijacks failed DNS lookups. e.g. An old ISP I used to have would serve you an error page with some ads and some search results for the relevant failed lookup instead of the browser itself just giving you a normal error. Bit of revenue raising for the ISP and theoretically useful to some users if they mistyped or something. Personally, I'd say it's a bad deal for the end-user. It also becomes problematic if you want to ping an address; you'll always get a response because as far as your system knows, every possible page is working.
Anyway, Chromium looks up some random addresses to see if your DNS is engaging in this behavior to determine whether it should try to resolve the errors or back off. I don't really know what benefit this provides to the user, but it shouldn't really hurt anything either.
EDIT: This article offers a better explanation than I could ever hope to: "Chrome connects to three random domains at startup."
The salient point is as follows:
The goal of the requests is to determine if you’re currently on a network that intercepts and redirects requests for nonexistent hostnames. For example, it’s not at all uncommon for ISP to transparently redirect failed DNS lookups in order to convert requests like http://text/ into requests for http://your.helpful.isp/search?q=text. Leaving aside a discussion of the rightness or wrongness of these “helpful” activities, this behavior causes problems for Chrome. Specifically, it breaks some heuristics the Omnibox uses to determine whether a user means to search for a specific term, or to visit a non-standard domain name.
That is, it's beneficial to the user for their browser to know what behavior their DNS engages in so that it knows whether it should try to resolve something typed into the URL bar or search for it.
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Thanks vaguerant. That makes sense.
An unintended consequence of that "omnibox" control.
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I believe that finding a folder and deleting it is not that time consuming.Hi Solutor.
I'm not sure how many uninstallers you've written, but they tend to involve more than just deleting directories.
(The exception is many installs that are deliberately XCopy. Not that common.)
If you can guarantee that Vivaldi doesn't install other assemblies and puts nothing in Registry, path… let me know.
If not anyone else got an uninstall script for Vivaldi_TP2.1.0.118.19.
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I went the hard route for uninstall, in the absence of any feedback.
For anybody else doing it on Windows.
In registry look for Vivaldi in entries. Make a note of ProgID's etc, as you go. Backup first. Delete entries, pretty obvious provided you read each entry and figure out what it does, there's quite a lot of them. (There's one or two that clearly should stay.) It's not that hard. I got it right without any side effects.
Renamed install directories and when I was happy nuked them.
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Hi Solutor.
I'm not sure how many uninstallers you've written, but they tend to involve more than just deleting directories.
Written=Zero, I'm not a coder. But I know way better than the casual user how the [un]installation process works.
Vivaldi is not MS Office nor an Antivirus, it doesn't fill the system directory with dlls, nor the registry with hundreds of items.
That's true, more or less, for any multiplatform program, as would be really impractical to rely on a directory on Linux and Macos, while using the registry on Windows, to store the settings.
Surely there are some registry entries related to Vivaldi, but are mostly used to manage the file associations and the uninstall process trough the control panel.
Basically, to "install" Vivaldi, extracting its folder somewhere is enough.
To uninstall it, deleting that folder is sufficient as well.Obviously there is also the profile folder, where the user data are stored, that the user may wan't to delete too. It's an optional action in the official uninstaller too. It's a single parent folder containing many files and subfolders.
So if you want to manually uninstall Vivaldi, you have to delete ONE folder. To get rid of user data and settings you have to delete TWO folders.
Then just set another program as default browser.
That's all
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Ouch. The uninstaller is a fake.
In windows 8.1, custom install location, it removes the uninstall item from "Programs and Features" but leaves the browser installed and operational.
Now need to explore and spend time to find out how to get rid of it.
Not impressed.
There is a huge difference between Buggy and Fake.
What you are saying is that the Vivaldi devs are willingly trying to deceive users, and are trying to do bad things.At what point did you forget that Vivaldi has not yet even made it to a Beta release ?
Betas will still have bugs, and Alphas are way more buggy, and very prone to random acts of weirdness.
The public did not used to get access this early, because they often freak out when it does not do what you expected, and claim foul-play.
Welcome to the world of Beta testing. You have a long wait until you are happy.
What you found was a bug, please report it via https://vivaldi.com/bugreport/ -