Google Chrome, in a recent update, silently installed a four gigabyte local large language model on every machine running the browser. The model ships as part of a feature called Gemini Nano. There was no prompt at install time, no notification afterward, and an opt-out that exists if you know where to look and what to uncheck. The Register covered it.

The Legacy Sysadmin places the move in a thirty-year arc of installer-bundled software, from late-90s browser toolbars through to today — same pattern, larger payload. The Paranoid CISO declines to reach for nation-state attribution and instead names the actual issue: Google has built a new high-bandwidth software-delivery channel into a billion endpoints, and the public conversation about how that channel is secured should have happened before the model shipped, not after a journalist notice ...