[omh]

> I'm seriously baffled by the audacity of Google here

Join the club!

> It might be worth to investigate whether there is some kind of host name that could be nullified on the network, of the server that the trials are loaded from.

It looks like they're downloaded from https://clients4.google.com/chrome-variations/seed

Blocking the entire hostname would cause problems with other features of Chrome. But I think blocking the particular URL would need SSL interception which isn't very appealing.

[Slartie]

Digging in the code also brought up that URL, and it appears as if the entire feature was disabled if Chromium is built without the "Google Chrome branding" flag (and can then be reenabled by specifying a seed URL yourself via command line). Hence one might get by with building from unmodified Chromium source.

But the options to disable it on official prebuilt Chrome appear to be grim indeed. SSL interception might not even work at all, as I guess Google uses certificate pinning.

[technofiend]

Amusingly Chromium shows up in my list of things to disable in the Google security checks results.

[oarsinsync]

> But I think blocking the particular URL would need SSL interception which isn't very appealing.

SSL interception is very appealing in a corporate environment. Thanks for sharing this, I've raised it with the guys who run the proxies here to investigate if we can / should drop this.

[patrec]

Is just patching the url in the binary an option?