So, I'm a privacy advocate (or paranoiac, depending on your perspective). I run both uMatrix and NoScript plug-ins (among others) in my Firefox browser, so I can see when and where websites send calls out to other locations, and block the ones I want ... google analytics, google fonts, google-apis, google tag manager, and gstatic are all ubiquitous out there, probably 99% of websites use at least one of them (PS: Tildes is in the 1%; yeay, Deimos).

And note ... there may well be nothing at all wrong with any of those sites/services ... but Google has a global all-encompassing Terms and Conditions policy that says, you use anything of Theirs, and They are allowed to harvest your personal data and make money off of it.

And I do not accept those terms.

Okay, that's the prologue. The deal is, I have a small piece of documentation, just basic "how to use this" info, for a WordPress plug-in. It is in .html format, with bundled bootstrap and jquery and a few other assets.

Nothing, anywhere in the entire folder, references gstatic. And yet when I open this local, on-my-computer-only html file ... my browser tells me that it is trying to connect to gstatic.com.

Anyone happen to know why/how that is happening?

Edit:

This was resolved by @tomf (cf. this comment).

Google’s account authentication appears to broken for me for some reason.

I have several devices and several Google accounts accumulated over the years.

Accounts:

1. Work Google account (this was set up by IT staff at the company where I work as they are a paying enterprise Google services customer)
2. Undergraduate University account (this was set up when I attended undergrad, where the University is a paying Google services customer)
3. Graduate University account (this was set up when I attended for grad school, where the University is a paying Google services customer)
4. Personal Google account (this was set up a long time ago, it’s just a non-paid, consumer Google account)

Under iOS and iPad OS, Google apparently asks you to download the official Google app in order to sign in and “trust” devices, so that they can send you prompts to acknowledge when you sign in on other devices. There is also the Google Authenticator app that lets you do traditional 2FA.

Further background, I got an iPhone 12 Pro circa October 2020. I gave my old iPhone handset to my dad (after signing out of everything and resetting it according to Apple’s instructions). Ever since, I’ve been having issues with logging into my Google accounts from the new iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac (provided by work). I’m actually afraid to log out of my work Google account on my work Mac, because I’m afraid I won’t be able to log in again, and that would prevent me from being able to get work done.

For example, let me walk through the steps I would normally take to log in to my Undergraduate University Google account on my iPad:

1. Open the Google app
2. Tap user icon in top right corner
3. From the modal menu, tap the downward chevron (circled in red)
4. Tap “Add another account” (circled in red)
5. Tap “Continue” on the confirmation widget when prompted
6. Enter the Gmail address for the account in the provided “Email or phone” input box and tap “Next”
7. At this point, I wait for the progress indicator (the blue bar with the red arrow pointing to it) to indefinitely traverse from left to right over and over again and I cannot progress further.

Virtually the same steps can be reproduced from my iPhone by going to accounts.google.com from any browser (I’ve tried Safari and Chrome).

The same sort of authentication redirect from accounts.google.com happens when trying to add my associated Gmail accounts to my iOS devices from the Settings > Mail > Accounts > Add Account, and similarly stalls at the same point.

I’ve tried logging out of my accounts from my personal Mac where I can still log in from google.com, and also tried going into the security settings for the accounts and disabling, then re-enabling 2FA (I can receive the text message with the code to associate my iPhone as a second factor authenticator, so Google knows my phone number).

Google’s support documents don’t provide any guidance on this situation where the accounts.google.com authentication hangs, and there seems to be no way to contact a human being at Google to provide technical support. I’ve searched their help portal/forums, and found nothing similar to my issue. They point me down a tree that ends here, which is not useful to me.

If Google’s services don’t work for you, it seems to be your problem, not theirs. I get that I’m not paying for their services, so it is totally unreasonable for me to expect any sort of technical support from Google. But, at the same time, it seems very strange that I am alone in my use case of simply trying to log into my accounts that have worked for years in the past without issue.

Anyone have advice on next steps?

I've been thinking about this but based on the current rulings in the Oracle v. Google court case, it would seem that APIs are indeed copyrightable.

This would mean that Wine would be infringing on Microsoft's copyright of the Windows API and system calls. Of course it wouldn't matter until Microsoft actually does something about it. But as Wine gets better and better and its market share higher and higher, I worry that Microsoft might set their sights on Wine now that they have the law on their side.

I was a bit worried about the future of Google Voice with the demise of Hangouts, but I got an email from GSuite about classic Hangouts today, which linked to this support page. Coming to Hangouts Chat are:

• Enhanced video calling experience

• Google Voice integration

I included the video calling line because I thought it was a bit odd for Chat to have that - I thought that's what Hangouts Meet was for (though it certainly wouldn't be the first case of Google making a redundant product). In any case, if Chat is going to have video calling, it's not much of a stretch to assume it'll also have voice calling for Google Voice, in addition to SMS/MMS.

Self-post instead of a link post because I want to highlight just 2 bullet points in the support page that wouldn't be obvious if I just linked the page. I wasn't sure if this should go in ~tech or ~comp, but ~comp seems to have more non-link discussion than ~tech.

Edit: Somewhat related, I found a news article about the Google Voice 5.7 update. They've created some interesting Google Calendar integrations, which makes sense since Voice will be available in GSuite this March.

I have a personal website, and while I don't mind it showing up in SERPs for DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. I do not want it showing up on Google at all.

Google doesn't send traffic my way, I pay for my site out of my salary from my day job instead of running ads, and preventing Google from indexing my site seems like the best form of nonviolent direct action I can take to protest their continuing dominance and their "embrace, extend, and extinguish" campaign against the Web.

I figure the easiest way to do this is to add the following to my site's .htaccess file since I don't have access to the server config file:

X-Robots-Tag: googlebot: none, noarchive, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex

Are there any downsides that I should know about besides not showing up in Google results?