Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser
And since you won't be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is... interesting to say the least.
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
This isn't even close to being okay. It's 100% bullshit.
Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.
It's like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don't need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately
The enshittification of the internet shall continue.
We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.
But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌
I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.. That's how they've been brainwashing us till now.
You'll finish your enshittification and you'll like it!
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
I don't think it's coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they've really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don't understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they've already made a decision, they decide it's because we don't understand the squeeze they're under to make money.
It can be a combo of several objectives:
Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding "reddit" at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.
And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.
So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.
Nothing about this is recent, those who pay attention to the standards process have been screaming for ages about the Google problem. It's just that now between interest rates being what they are and them having a monopoly on the browser market that they're cashing in on their investment.
Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it's usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there's really very little that can be done.
The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.
Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?
Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.
and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).
They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.
Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.
Luckly we still have free platforms like lemmy, browsers like Firefox, networks like tor or i2p, torrents, monetary system like bitcoin.
We can step out of the world of and we are the ones who have the most intruments to do so.
Yes, which works for the few, but they know that the majority are completely oblivious and will just consume whatever they are given.
The tech sector just hit a major correction recently. Wall Street found companies like Google to be overvalued and as such their stocks suffered. This is Google trying to claw back some of that value. See step 3 in the enshittification process. This isn't just Google. It's the entire tech sector.
I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.
Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.
For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.
Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.
So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.
I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw
Sounds you might enjoy the Enshittification of TikTok article floating around. It explains quite well the mechanism why a site have to becoming worse and worse over time.
Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.
Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.
Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money
What do you mean, Google of all companies... It's a company that makes 90% of its money from ads and all of its products are made with the express purpose of enabling them to spy on you or creating technical dependencies so you can't quit their services.
Plus they've already tried to lock the web into proprietary formats (AMP, PWA etc.) and have maneuvered so they have 90% of the browser market and the smartphone market but can't be actioned for it.
Since when was PWA proprietary?
Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that's fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.
The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.
Check out "enshittification"
This happens when something, in this case the Internet, is a monopoly or oligopoly.
IDK, but we need to riot. Fuck google.
Their fake advert viewing numbers and YouTube's inability to monetise without ruining itself are forcing them to think of new ways to encrapsulate user's and drain their wallets.
Instead of, you know, providing a service people want and would pay for.
AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.
A race to the bottom with who can come up with the next dogshit idea on how to ruin the internet and make things actively worse for the people who use it
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.
One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.
I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.
Obligatory use Firefox
Let's hope there's already a law that the EU can find to apply (since they already don't like the non-EU dominance of big tech), or that they make one in time.
I was just thinking that I'm sure Google will lobby the US government to get this model enforced as law, making it illegal for anyone to create workarounds, or alternative browsers. And the US legislative government being what it is, will hand Google whatever legislation it wants to turn their nightmare into a reality.
It is imperative to make as many people as possible aware
Since this is something that can be used as a DRM solution, hacking it might be already illegal under the DMCA. IANAL though.
With how shittily Chrome has been running for me lately, I'm feeling like making the switch to Firefox sooner and sooner.
I guess now is one of those famous best times to do it. If you want even more privacy and security ootb, you can try Librewolf. Recently released Mullvad Browser seems to be pretty up there too, at least from what I've read so far.
And if you're on Android, Mull is pretty much for Smartphones what Librewolf is for Desktops.
The EU is rapidly becoming a neoliberal hellehole resembling the US. I no longer have any hope for existing institutions resisting corporate encroachment. Best that can be done is the support of initiatives like the fediverse and foss in general but if the current trend continues even that is in a precarious position.
The EU is so utterly out of whack right now.
You got the proposal of chat control on one hand, and stuff like replaceable batteries on the other.
Like, make up your mind already, do you want to help your citizens or not? It's almost like they do it on purpose to keep our expectations in check.
Obligatory use Firefox
No way. Why should I feel obligated to use something I feel has inferior UX and UI than the browser I'm using now? For Mozilla's CEO to rais her wage (again): https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html ?
You people are really delusional if you really think that Mozilla are the only good guys (or good guys at all, for that matters).
Inb4, unimaginative people downvoting just because they can't stand different opinions.
What's your alternative?
EDIT: Oh I just found in the profile. It's Brave. I used it for half a year before I got tired of the crypto ads sneaking into my home page's links no matter how many times I deleted them and of some other stuff. I prefer Firefox's UI. Also I don't expect any browser to be 100% ethical but Brave is below Firefox in that list for me
There is a huge difference between mozilla and google. That's quite obvious to most. The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you, and you prefer Google, where they have enormous salaries and incomes? It's one of the richest companies in the world.
Firefox doesn't have inferior UX at all. It has more functions and features than chrome. It also has very good default privacy and the plugin system is amazing.
And it just became faster than chrome as well.
Dude, look, I'm sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.
They're not saying you should feel obligated to use Firefox. It's a tongue-in-cheek joke about how everything FLOSS, Privacy or GDPR related always includes a comment thread about using Firefox. I use Brave too but you gotta read the room. Lemmy users in general are going to be much more pro-Firefox than anything else.
UX is not worse than Chrome, please shut up.
This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet
Given that Firefox is now faster than Chrome I see no reason to remain.
Momentum. And it's likely most people won't be about to tell, or regularly run comparisons to find out for themselves. Theres enough value added to Chrome that people kind of assume it's "the best" ... It took me years to convince my boss to switch, but the one thing that did it for him was just that the PDF viewer is better in Firefox.
People have weird preferences that don't always line up with what software developers expect.
Wait, is Google in the process of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on the free internet?
Always have been, and they're in it for the long game. They've already acquired a stupid amount of control on the web and web standards with everything from Chromium to Youtube, not to mention it doesn't help that they basically control the world's most popular mobile OS. Google wants it all if we let them.
Yes.
And we saw this was going to happen at least 5 years ago. But since the majority don't care, we get what we deserve I guess.
Let's just hope this doesn't go through.
A move like this sounds like a great way to end that monopoly.
i'm not really a tech-savvy guy here, so can someone explain if having DRMs like this would make ad-blocking near impossible for other chromium-based browsers too?
As I understand, if implemented, websites would basically be able to force you to see the page however it wants.
So if you view the page in Chrome, it might force you to not have any adblock.
If you view it in another chromium browser, like Arc, it could just force you to view it in Chrome.
It would also mean that you can’t use extension that modify the page, not only affects ad blocks but things like blocking Facebook “like” buttons or Google trackers. Right now we need more people to use non-chromium browsers, like Firefox, so hopefully Chrome looses market share and with it Google starts loosing control over the internet.
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this "Web DRM".
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
Reminds me of Microsoft with the ActivePlatform / Blackbird stuff in the 90s.
Awful to see Google turn into that.
Doesn't Firefox support DRM? I know on netacad.com it prompts me to enable it, or rather on a CCNA course. Or is it something else?
Please drink verification can
ERROR! Piracy detected!
I have exceeding low expectations, but I would hope that would be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit against Google as Chromium browsers account for roughly 70% of all users (based on numbers I pulled from Wikipedia)
Antitrust lawsuit? What's that?
When is the last time any of the big tech companies got hit with antitrust? Microsoft is brazenly doing shit on windows they wouldn't even dream of in early 2000s. Resetting user defaults to their products. Constantly advertising their products when user launches a competitors software.
They don't give a fuck and neither do the governments.
Sounds like EU will come for the rescue. In 2029...
Subscription-based, restricted to verified accounts Chromium, that shares your personally identifiable public key with each website you visit.
Shudders
It makes such complete sense for Google and Microsoft that it's a wonder we didn't see it coming sooner.
Not just Chromium, but the proprietary binary Chrome. Chromium can still be modified to block ads.
Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)
Congratulations, guys. You are now internet pariahs. Your unrepentantly mercenary lack of engineering ethics is now recorded for all eternity. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.
I see what you're attempting but you saying they're pariahs doesn't make it so. Most don't even recognize these names - hell, I certainly didn't.
It’s because the actual details weren’t linked. However if you click the link and then go to the main GitHub page, it lists these people as the engineers for this service.
For most it’s just work, but for those that take pride in software engineering it’s (imo) ethically wrong. I certainly don’t have the skills these engineers have but I would turn down such a project purely on principle.
That's a good way for me to never visit your website again. Honestly, this kinda sounds like the death of the internet if I'm being honest. This would transform it from a free medium into a full blown corporate dystopia. It's really scary to see the digital (corporate) development over the past couple decades. Would be really cool if we don't move further towards some cyberpunk like future where megacorps control everything.
Google taking some ideas from Cyberpunk 2077 and NetWatch.
It's already owned by corporations.
Bit late on that front. If you think governments are in control, then you are a tad naive
I think the level of government capture in the US is unique. The EU is kinda balanced, as many good things as bad in this regard, while the authoritarian part of the world is definitely not corporate controlled.
Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds
And they went ahead and blocked comments now - "An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past."
Fucking cowards
EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don't pay the big tech you can't access anything.
Oh do fuck off Google.
I couldn't have been more eloquent myself.
How can the smartest people be so dumb?
Please, please, PLEASE.. if you care about a healthy open internet, donate to Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF, at the minimum, if you're able to.
I liked to subscribe to Youtube Premium to support my favourite channels but this kinda stuff turns me off.
Easy to confuse stupidity with malice. They're chasing one thing and one thing only: the almighty dollar. Look at it through that lens and their actions make sense. For the rest of us though, that's just stupid.
Not just the almighty dollar.
Some people just pursue a perceived challenge with zero care for the terrible consequences of it.
either way, they need to be stopped
if they were chasing the dollar, they would be clever about it. This just looks like they are penny wise and pound foolish.
It's not like Google engineers are hard up for cash. I know I know... it's never enough for the rich..
Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF,
Do you know that donation to Mozilla don't (and can't legally) fund Firefox development, right? (opposite to what happens for Thunderbird, actually).
But, hey, you can guarantee Mozilla's CEO a better retirement:
Thus, your money are better spent donating to Thunderbird or EFF or whatever other foundation that does something actually useful.
Mozilla income went from $78m to $497m. It's a much bigger organisation to before. Also if you inflation rate the 500k pay, it's now worth $710k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliations
The web changed, and complexity increased and even staying in there against a larger adversary is hard. Unless you run a company that is competing with Google, I don't think you're really qualified to comment.
Edit: Just realise your description has "Fuck Mozilla!" and you've been bashing it since you started on Lemmy. Looks very shilly to me.
It's not doing something dumb. It's another power grab. We passed the stage where giving the benefit of the doubt is a reasonable thing to do well over a decade ago.
How can the smartest people be so dumb?
Who are you talking about exactly? Because I doubt that everyone working at google knows everything thats going on, even while working on it.
I think he is talking about the 70% of the world that uses Chrome/Chromium based browsers
I wonder how much of the money would go to the creators themselves rather than YouTube though. I'd rather use adblock and give money directly through patreon or something. Fuck Google.
So soon we’ll need uBlock Origin FitGirl Edition?
Hopefully we won't have to deal with a uBlock Origin Empress Edition
Just this week or was it last week, I made a comment on some post that putting privacy aside, we should still be encouraging people to use Firefox instead of any chromium browsers to break control. It is good to see that right now I am just given a very good example why Chromium being a monopoly allows Google to control the spec (even if other companies are on board)
This PR nails it
This may honestly be it for me.
I quit playing games because of all the greed and hype, I went back to piracy when streaming started to fracture and greed set in, I left non-federated social media because of the enshittifaction and invasiveness, and I go to fairly extensive lengths to block ads and protect my privacy as much as possible...
And instead of moving to any number of fair, non-exploitive business models, they're just going to force ads down my throat like that episode of black mirror.
If this goes through I'll be sorely tempted to wipe everything I can and start over as best I can. Only interact with the Internet when I need to.
You'll find me paying cash at the local used bookstore, at least until all the major publishers make that illegal.
EDIT: It's honestly depressing, I genuinely enjoy technology and the internet, but when companies like Google are able to force garbage like this it just sucks all the joy out of it for me.
It's like everying is becoming a shitty mobile game. Do the toolsheds that develop Candy Crush clones not think we can understand why in app currencies are sold in bundles of 100 but every thing we purchase with them requires amounts that end with a five? Does Google not think we know the real motivation behind a system that strives to prove ads were delivered to your browser either?
I know a lot of people may not see the real driver here, but I'm tired of being underestimated and infantalized by a bunch of dorks trapped in a corporate echo chamber. I think I'd prefer it if they just straight up said they're going to sacrifice our privacy and user experience for a quick bump in stock value.
Most people don't have an understanding as to why things are the way they are. I'm constantly shocked at how I need to explain things which I consider to be blatantly obvious. From what I can tell, the average person just goes about their lives without much evaluation of the world they're in. They buy the things they're told to buy, like the things they're told to like, and don't think much about why they do the things they do.
True, but I don't think it's due to a lack of faculties for most people, it's just not an area of interest or a primary concern. It should be, because this sort of consumer and media manipulation is being used to enable some very dangerous things at present, but it's really hard to make headway when you're telling people how fucked up and unhealthy the one thing that's providing them with a little escape and joy is.
It might be easier to lead an addiction intervention.
I try to reframe privacy concerns with the idea that if someone was stalking you and recording your every action in physical public spaces that you'd be pretty disturbed. Most people get it, they understand the idea and can view their internet activity through the lense of that metaphor.
But they don't really feel it, and that's where the disconnect comes in. How do you get people who don't feel the Internet is part of "real life" to understand how invasive this is on both and intellectual and emotional level? Because of digital privacy and user rights don't hold some sort of emotional significance for them, it's going to stay a back burner issue in their lives.
Careful, you don't want to veer into this line of thinking.
It's like the evolution of the $x.99 mental trickery. They realize that getting $1 1-2 times a day was much more palatable than $20 a month or once.
I refuse to play mobile trash because not only will I not give in to that shit, I refuse to play games that purposely are made worse because not enough people are paying (and there's never enough)
Yup, it's easier for a user to justify a small purchase and lose track of how much they're spending and that's exactly why they do it.
It's the same with in-app currency, they sell you 100 coins or gems or whatever for $2.99, then charge you 75 for the shortcut to the progression required upgrade. You don't want to let a quarter of your money go to waste, so you're more tempted to put another $2.99 down to utilize it and buy the next upgrade. Cue the leveling treadmill.
It's a sort of weaponization of the study of human behavior IMO.
This is the end game of everything when capitalism is involved, not surprising in the slightest
You quit playing games, but went to piracy for watching movies? Why not pirate games?
It was more due to the way a lot of the games I liked to play started to make changes to gameplay to try and push players to spend more money. Unnecessarily long grinds with subscription based paid shortcuts, freemium/premium BS, game modes that started to require you to be online for a certain amount of time each week to progress.
Gaming was always more of a social thing for me, and once it started to feel like an unpaid, part time job for me and my friends it stopped being fun.
EDIT: I may be projecting dark patterns onto something that's just driven by market forces these days, but I kind of doubt it.
There are some quality games on Steam tho. You don't need to play bloated AAA games.
All this enshittification lately really inspires me to de-google.
You don't have to look at reducing your Google use as a monumental effort. You can slowly transfer, minimise the number of services you use.
Simple - Switch your default search provider to Duck Duck Go.
Easy - Switch to Firefox
Mid - export your documents from Google Drive
Complex - Transfer your primary email to another provider.
Impossible: get a smartphone that is neither Google nor useless.
What's a good Gmail alternative that has a relatively professional name? I have a hotmail account from way back still, but the name "hotmail.com" has always sounded silly to me. I guess there's Outlook but idk if they're the best option.
Good suggestions. I just set Firefox to use DDG as my default search... something I've been slowly working my way through also, is replacing all the default-google apps on my phone with FOSS alternatives. It's involving a bit of trial and error, as of course free software that doesn't monetize the user often doesn't provide the polished experience you get from a google app. Many of them are perfectly fine though.
I'd recommend also that everyone installs DuckDuckGo browser app on their phone, as it blocks trackers in all your other apps even when you're not browsing. Pixel 7a has a truly disturbing amount of tracking requests, not sure if other phones are as bad.
I've always had an aversion to corporate anything so I'm already part way there. Use DDG half the time, Firefox user since it was called Firebird!. I really just need to drop Gmail and use DDG or others full time. I'm finding parting with gmail difficult and scary though as over a decade of history and old friends that may know that address as my only contact.
It doesn't seem to be targeting ad-blockers in particular (or other page customizing extensions), although that may result eventually. What it does do is let webpages restrict what web browsers and operating systems you are allowed to use, just like how SafetyNet on Android lets apps restrict you to using an OS signed by Google. That could end up with web pages forcing you to use a web browser and OS the big players like Google, Microsoft and Apple, blocking any less restrictive or less used competors like Firefox and Linux, thus creating a cryptographically enforced oligopoly. And even if they signed e.g. Firefox, it would only be certain builds of it. That would make it impossible to make a truly open-source browser that can access pages using this API. Quite concerning.
Google is hindrance to open web, like IE7 was with ActiveX.
Only difference is that IE7 wanted developers to develop for IE7, while Google also want to fully control the web and bend it according to its needs
And there’s zero chance of some other company dethroning Chrome like IE was. The only way that happens is with government intervention to protect the free market.
But of course antitrust enforcement is dead in this country, so that’s not happening. Just look at the obviously anticompetitive Activision acquisition that went through recently. Too many politicians slept through their economics classes, and they think that giant corporations are good for consumers.
I'm old enough to remember when the line was "IE has 90% marketshare and nothing's going to change that"
Yes the landscape is different now, but these are free apps and there are competitors out there. It takes only a few minutes to switch to Firefox. Google's hold on this market is not as ironclad as people may think.
Too many politicians slept through their economics classes, and they think that giant corporations are good for consumers.
They just think that giant corporations are good for politicians.
They've really strongly adopted their new "Do only evil" mantra
This is super fucked up. I use Stylus extensively to customize the UI on so many sites. Not even for adblocking or that kind of thing, but for accessibility. I actually learned to code many years ago specifically so I could write my own userstyles so that popular websites would be more accessible for me. This is not just predatory on an ads and money level but on an accessibility level too.
Having thought about it for a bit, it's possible for this proposal to be abused by authoritarian governments.
Suppose a government—say, Wadiya—mandated that all websites allowed on the Wadiyan Internet must ensure that visitors are using a list of verified browsers. This list is provided by the Wadiyan government, and includes: Wadiya On-Line, Wadiya Explorer, and WadiyaScape Navigator. All three of those browsers are developed in cooperation with the Wadiyan government.
Each of those browsers also happen to send a list of visited URLs to a Wadiyan government agency, and routinely scan the hard drive for material deemed "anti-social."
Because the attestations are cryptographically verified, citizens would not be able to fake the browser environment. They couldn't just download Firefox and install an extension to pretend to be Wadiya Explorer; they would actually have to install the spyware browser to be able to browse websites available on the Wadiyan Internet.
I literally swapped to Librewolf before the Rossman video was done. I was on Brave Browser before, but it's based on Chromium. Fuck Chromium and fuck Google. Fuck this shitty amoeba that tries to spread into and control everything.
I will post stupid shit on my federated forum and you will fucking live with it Google. Fuck you. Burn. It's time to break up the internet monopolies and do some trust busting. Someone pull FDR's rotten corpse out of the grave and put it back to work.
Google saw the enshitening of the web and went "hold my beer, I'll show you how it's done!".
I hope Louis Rossmann catches wind of this - the more people know about this, the better chance we have at stopping this unnecessary "WEI" spec.
If an company wants a trusted environment for their code to execute in, they should be asking themselves why they're not running that code in an app, or better yet - on their own servers
Can someone give me an easy to understand example of what they are proposing? Assume that I don’t allow them to install any software/tool that helps them track me/my device.
I saw this comment and found it helpful but its still not clear to me
At its core, it establishes software components called "attesters" that decide whether your device and/or browser is "trustworthy" enough - as defined by the website you are trying to visit. Websites can enforce which "attesters" users must accept, simply by denying everybody access who refuses to bow down to this regime; or who uses attesters that are deemed "inappropriate"; or who is on a platform that does not provide any attesters the website finds "acceptable".
In short: it is specifically designed to destroy the open web by denying you the right to use whatever browser you want to use, on whatever operating system. It is next-level "DRM", introduced by affiliates of a company that already has monopolized the browser market. And the creators of this "proposal" absolutely know what they are attempting here.
And they try to demonise Tor and I2P... At this rate, the dark web would soon be the only place to go.
Well I won't visit a site that is full of ads now without an ad blocker, so why would the fact that o can't block the ads change my mind. As soon as a site blocks content for having an ad blocker or immediately starts popping up tons of stuff that's nearly impossible to close, I leave.
Non-goals [...] Enforce or interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions. [...]
But guys they gave their pinky promise it's totally fine
let's just allow them to irreversibly make this change so that there is nothing preventing them from applying this totally Non-Goals in the future what could happen
Also
Challenges and threats to address
[...] Tracking users’ browser history User agents will not provide any browsing information to attesters when requesting a token. We are researching an issuer-attester split that prevents the attester from tracking users at scale, while allowing for a limited number of attestations to be inspected for debugging—with transparency reporting and auditability [...]
Cross-site tracking
While attestation tokens will not include information to identify unique users, the attestation tokens themselves could enable cross-site tracking if they are re-used between sites. For example, two colluding sites could work out that the same user visited their sites if a token contains any unique cryptographic keys and was shared between their sites.
Good to see where your priorities lie in terms of user protection when deciding to launch this into conversation. Dude idk we'll fix it later don't worry bro
Perhaps most tellingly:
undefined
<i>Todo</i>
## Privacy considerations ## {#privacy}
<i>Todo</i>
If that’s the level of seriousness they treat user privacy with, these engineers deserve to be lambasted.
This is a conscious abrogation of engineering ethics, and as a software engineer myself, it offends me immensely. It makes me and my entire profession look bad.
Edit: leaving less pressing design concerns as a TODO is fine. My issue is that user privacy is implicitly being declared as a secondary concern by the simple fact that it’s left as a TODO. The engineers should not have even considered releasing this, even in draft form, until they had something coherent and meaningful to address user privacy with. It should have been treated as a core design element.
Lol. Just like Google used to say "Don't be evil."
Wonder when this text will receive a similar strikethrough.
yet another reason to bash AMP
That also destroys the openess of the design. They already DRMed up the media, why the whole page? It will kill transparency completely
Before everyone starts complaining, remember:
This is for the ads. There are millions of starving ads on the internet right now. For just a click and load a day on every ad you see you too can help a billion dollar company survive.
"Please click on all the crosswalks before you can enter this site"
This is why people pirate things.
Google proving why it removed its old motto "Don't be evil."
Fuck Google
What a bunch of scumbags.
Here are the github repository, issues and comments immortalised for posterity in IPFS:
The issues and comments are in github json format -- if anyone wants to collate them into a human-readable text or html file, please do so.
Edit: Its immortality of course depends on you to access and pin the content.
Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it. This trust is the backbone of the open internet, critical for the safety of user data and for the sustainability of the website’s business.
Jesus christ just the introduction paragraph is a load of horseshit. Actually bold faced lies. Users depend on websites trusting the client? In what fucking world are websites trusting the client??? Literally the only case is the media DRM that should have never been part of the web in the first place.
Exactly. The websites only need to trust that the client can receive the content, which the protocols define and we have protocols to exchange what other protocols the client can use. Just use a http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com
Users depend on websites trusting the client? In what fucking world are websites trusting the client??? Literally the only case is the media DRM that should have never been part of the web in the first place.
Sometimes I see people with multiple toolbars in their browsers. These could sniff/leak data.
If you provide a service for your user, you may want to restrict access to your peticular customer.
I do not like it either. But the explainer to me does not appear like DRM in the first place.
And I am wondering if the client could just encrypt some fake data. How should the web server know? They get one ID and the content binding, which does not appear to be anything new (fragment/data from URL). But I am not developing websites.
Time to switch to the Gemini protocol.
In case anyone thinks this is a fiction reference or something, it's not. Kinda interesting project tbh, came across someone with a Gemini link in their profile on Mastodon the other day and it got me curious.
Thank you for linking it.
This sounds so sad
It is sad.
Bad too