Re: is google earth safe to install?

[Mario Castelán Castro <marioxcc.MT@yandex.com>]

Indeed, using any software makes you used to it, and dependent on it up 
to whatever extent you use it. With free software, you know that you 
have control over the software. You can rely on the community to do most 
of the job, and do for yourself what they won't do or you would do 
better (and contribute that to upstream). With proprietary software, you 
are making yourself dependent and handing the control of a part of your 
life (computing) to a company that only cares for profit; that's not 
security.

Also, most proprietary software is distributed without source. That 
precludes a real security audit, incentives the developer to be sloppy 
about security and to intentionally build anti-features into the 
software that work for his own interests and against those of the user, 
since it's unlikely that users will figure about these anti-features. 
There are many cases. Just to name one, think of the recent cases of VW 
and Lenovo with Superfish.

> is google earth safe to install?

You want to hear "yes, I have been using it for years with no incident", 
but that doesn't means it's secure. With the internals of the system 
hidden from you, you will never be able to trust it.

El 10/10/15 a las 16:31, Timothy Hobbs escribió:
> You could try running google-earth in subuser.org . But I don't
> recommend it, because I don't recommend using any non-free software ;).
>
> Tim
>
> On 10/10/15 23:29, rlharris@oplink.net wrote:
> > On Sat, October 10, 2015 3:20 pm, Torsten Rahn wrote:
> > Thanks, Torsen.
> >
> > Over the past week I have been running Google Earth on an old machine in
> > an isolated, but it would be nice to have GE capability without the GE
> > liability.
> >
> > I still have Marble installed, so I shall read over the documentation and
> > give Marble another try.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Russell