Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

Life finds a way
Yarr
- I hope **chrome **fails terribly. Just like Internet Explorer(IE). Firefox all the way
  
  Anyone still using Google products is a fuckin idiot, IMO
  
  I just wish Firefox would improve their UI and add a few features without needing to rely on extensions (tab groups, vertical tabs, sharing tabs from mobile to desktop, etc.).
  
  Mozilla I think gets millions from google. At least they did at one point in a deal to set google as a default engine.
- Except when it doesn't. That saying never made sense (far more species have gone extinct than exist today) and it doesn't apply here.
  Piracy will continue, obviously, but what we're seeing here is the creation of an internet we can't even fathom yet. This is just where it starts.
  Also consider how much more difficult it will be for the average person to participate in piracy. Remember a few months back when Microsoft floated they were basically looking to lock down windows? No unsigned apps, no win32, etc. People will get around that, of course, but fewer people will. Especially if they continue with this trend towards stripping options and de-admin-ing all users unless they pay for an enterprise license.
  Then there's the dangerous trend toward encryption being broken by regulation and possibly even VPNs being rendered useless for anyone but businesses. There goes secure torrenting.
  The trends don't look good, across the board. We can't just sit here and hope it all works out and the loopholes are found, like it always has before.
  
  I am by no means saying we should passively hope that things will work out. What I am saying is that we have no reason to be defeatist. In the same time that we've seen aggressive pushes for a more locked down internet, we've seen dozens of open source projects to fight back.
- It's my right to have my personal computer display what I want it to display. It's my right set my device to reject internet traffic I don't want to receive. It's my right to instruct my machine to download the data I want, and refuse to download the data I don't want. If you make something publicly available online, then the public can consume that or refuse that, in part or in whole, as and when they wish. If a company or a browser wants to try and interfere with that, then they've chosen their fate.
- Monzo? Hmm

And then the plan to force everyone to abandon Firefox whether they like it or not.
Implement the misfeatures.
Movie and music websites will be the first to announce requiring DRM to be able to watch movies or listen to tunes.
The banks will be next. "For your safety, you must use an Official Approved Browser™ to be allowed access to your money!"
Then ecommerce sites. "You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything."
Then comes the social media sites. For your safety, of course...
At that point, the userbase of anything that's not Chrome or not DRM'd to death will be so eroded that virtually everyone else will abandon Firefox support, DRM will get enabled by default. Also, comes the lobbyists to Congress demanding changes to the DMCA to throw users in prison who dare to try to crack the DRM to block ads. "Ad-blocking is stealing!"
- Just means I'll have the shittiest Chromebook I can buy used, for access to the sites you just listed, and my Linux laptop for everything else. If their non-financial, non-commerce site won't let me in with my adblocking Linux machine, I just won't go there. There will be lots of site still, run by us, that don't do this shit, and they'll get my traffic.
  
  And I can bet that Google will spy on your home network from that shitty chromebook
  
  Just means I’ll have the shittiest Chromebook I can buy
  Google Exec: "But you did buy it, yes?"
- This right here is what has always scared me. The internet is getting more and more controlled and locked down as the years go on. The general population will not take up for, Linux, Firefox, etc. Neither will the services we now rely upon like banking etc. So we will be forced.
  
  I think it was always sketch from the beginning that governments and educational institutions used proprietary software. Too much money changing hands. Too many opaque business dealings. Too many cogs who don't care to understand, though they're not unreachable. Louis Rossman, the Mac repair guy from YouTube has done a lot of pro-consumer, pro-freedom videos lately and a few of my non-nerdy friends have really had light bulbs go off for them.
- Hi. I finally have the balls to ask, what is DRM? I am kind of a neophyte in all tech matters. But I managed to get out of Reddit because it was full of baits and ridden with apple ads. And so I like this new platform, reminds me of the good old gamefaqs forums days. Hope all this slicker simpler UI from and for users never die…
  
  Digital Rights Management. AKA the stuff that's supposed to prevent unauthorized copying and suchlike, but in practice just means the pirates have a better experience than legit customers.
- I don't think any of this would stop me from using FF for day to day browsing.
  2 - At this point I'd just pirate it. I don't care. If you're going to be hostile to paying customers, I'm going to be a non-paying customer again.
  3 - Separate banking app. Not bothered about desktop banking
  4 - Fine I'll support local businesses where possible, and use dedicated apps or if necessary Chrome (preferably sandboxed) specifically for shopping where not.
  5 - Social media was a mistake anyway, already deleted Twitter, I need very little excuse to get rid of Facebook as well.
  Honestly I think this is just the end phase of "Web 2.0" as I remember all this shit being labelled at the time. We managed fine with independent forums etc before and will manage again.
  Edit: I love the irony that people are killing off Reddit due to API access but the only way I've been able to post on lemmy.world is via the website. Connect app? Nope!
  
  Pretty much on board with this plan and already moving that direction step by step. Last year I started my deGoogling process again including switching to Firefox and working towards a gApps free phone. This year I mostly left Reddit. When the YouTube adblock stuff started coming up I've been waiting... show me one un-blockable ad, I fucking double dog dare you YouTube.
  We're ripe for a video revolution because content creators might be the only people more pissed at YouTube than the users. I kind of disengaged when everyone started having to imply controversial topics or use similar sounding words. That was too far for me and if I can't speak freely, or I have to listen to a bunch of people constantly self-censor, I will freely find my way to the door in search of greener pastures.
  Facebook popped this shit up on me the other day that said "Your AdBlocker will prevent you from seeing important updates from your Friends! Disable it now." Important updates from my friends you say? Like the ones where my naive friends like a random super-popular post and get inadvertently subscribed to a page and later that page takes out an ad and my friends name gets put under it like "Billy Bob likes this corporate swill" Never gonna happen. If I can't use it without an ad blocker I'm deleting what I can and moving on. If I'm paying for a product, I'll pay for one that puts the benefit to the user as their first priority.
  Thanks for letting me rant on your comment. Here's to hoping the internet somehow gets less shitty. :)
- Then ecommerce sites. “You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything.”
  I'm actually not sure about this one. Money is money. If I'm a vendor, and a bunch of bots want to give me money, I say bring it on. Why would any ecommerce vendor add that layer of friction, which could actually prevent a user from buying something from them? What's in it for the vendor?
  Seems to me the more likely anti-consumer hell is a points dystopia leveraged by monopolistic companies. Like apple, microsoft, or disney moving to some sort of loyalty points system where you can only buy their products using a currency and credit system that they control. Like, 'stream this movie using your disney points card'. We're not far off from that really.
- To all of mentioned above from the bottom of my heart

Google is such a bad company. People should discontinue use of all their software and at the very least stop using chrome or chromium. They’ve got the internet by the balls.
- I still remember old days, when most coders used to praise google. Their services were amazing and I think one of their old principle was >"Develop good products first, think about monetisation later"
  
  And now it's later.
  
  Their old principle was ‘don’t be evil’. The fact they no longer say that tells you everything
  
  When Gmail debuted and it was invited only 😊
  
  That's before they went public

The year is 2023, every single major tech companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No. 1. And the only Hero we have is the EU, will it be able to save the day?
- Don't have too much faith in the EU. Corporations are still heavily influencing politics. They will probably come with half assed laws that have loopholes or workarounds.
  
  Like GDPR?
  /s
- Forcing this might very well be something EU opposes. While there is a lot of corporate lobbying, Google would be forcing everyone to either use chromium or make compatibility changes into other browser. While not a total monopoly, it still limits the options radically. Therefore there might be hope that EU forbids this type of action. Let's see...
- Thinking about it, a lot of these companies created astounding products on a relatively unusual business model of delivering for free (not totally unheard of, tv for example but still not the most traditional way of doing business) and absorbed, cannibalized or destroyed a lot of other services and functions with their ubiquity and unbeatable price.
  The way they say it was funded was through advertising, but nonetheless much of the big banner services remained unprofitable for years or even decades. Sometimes the master plan is to get everyone hooked (users and advertisers) and then when they have little choice anymore, start making things cost, a lot more. The trouble with this though is that none of them are the only one's doing it and even with only a handful of big titans controlling it all, there's still the risk of one of your tech bros stealing your lunch when your start trying to cash-in and piss of your users and your customers alike so really I guess all of them doing it at once kind of makes sense. Kind of a "I'll jump when you jump" mentality and at least one has jumped. I somewhat wonder if they all planned to go this route at around the same time together or if they all just concluded that the short term gain in market share by taking advantage of one of them jumping wasn't worth the risks from the intense competition and just decided to instead cash in at the same time.
  Or I'm just rambling and have no business sense or idea what I'm talking about. It just seems that might explain why this all seems to be coming to some kind of a crescendo at about the same time.

We warned you about Chrome. We told you bro.

Google and Chrome really need to be broken up. Maybe people should start writing (physical) letters to the FTC asking to review Google's recent actions as monopolistic behavior.
It wouldn't be the first time. But showing the interest is the best way to get the ball rolling that we can do.
- Honest curiosity on your answer to this.
  Google is the developer of Chromium and the Chrome browser which uses Chromium. Chromium is free and open source (though owned by Google).
  I’m not sure how you break up Chrome and Google. That’s literally their product. Who are we giving this to? There are browsers that do not use Chromium (e.g., Firefox and Safari being the big ones).
  
  Companies have gotten broken up before, like AT&T once did many years ago. In this case, a Google breakup would probably separate some of their services into different companies. At the very least Google (the "advertising" company) should be separate from Chrome (the "browser" company), because it creates a conflict of interest and creates monopolistic behavior.
  In any case, trying to do something is better than doing nothing and hoping it turns out all right.
  
  Google isnt Google anymore. It's Alphabet. Alphabet includes Google domains, Android, Gmail, YouTube, chrome, Google search, search ads, play store, fuscia, Google maps, authenticator, chat, classroom, assistant, meet, nest, pixel, waze, Gboard, messages, google tv, Google photos and the rest
  Each one of these have their own presidents, their own boards, their own teams. They are all directed by Alphabet.
  
  Spin it off on their own and survive like Firefox. Browsers make money putting links in the homepage and adding search engines.
- How does one do that?
  
  I didn't include details because I still had to research after the comment, but this page details several methods of contact. The antitrust email looks like a good place to start if you don't want to mail anything. But physical mail is harder to ignore, it actually has to get into someone's hands and be dealt with. So I'll try to write up a letter and send that to maybe the regional office nearest Google's HQ.

The internet is unusable without adblockers.

"Google engineers want..."
No. Google executives want this to happen. Google's CEO wants this to happen.
They want to change the internet and remove any little bit of freedom for their own corporate profits.
Fuck "do no evil" Google.

We waste intelligent minds on this rubbish when we are facing an existential crisis in climate change.
- A few decades ago I gave a manager 2 options to solve a problem for the company.
  1st was to take a simple engineered approach with a dash of automation to keep our lives simple but I would have to push out previously set deadlines
  2nd was to just ignore it until it gets so bad that his managers finally give in to hire someone else to do it and hope that it gets done right after I leave the project
  He chose the 2nd. It never got solved. They ended up hiring a vendor who screwed it up and it took a volunteer using unpaid hours on threat of being fired to resolve it.
  It was only a few years later he became CIO for a major tech company and I lost all hope in humanity.
- Because our economic system is broken. It simply does not allow us to do what is best for humanity in the long run. It's completely absurd the more you think about it.
  
  Is it though? I mean yeah the incentives aren't perfectly aligned but to me it looks like we're heading to the right direction anyways. It's just the slow pace that's the issue. In Finland we're setting up so many wind turbines that the price of electricity drops to negative from time to time.
- Just when I thought the idea of DRM internet couldn't be any more depressing...
- Climate change is not an existential crisis. Not to the entire humanity atleast. This kind of extremist thinking and extraggerating just makes me want to check out completely because it feels like there's no one reasonable in the room.
  
  Climate change will kill billions, and there's a decent chance that each one of us might be in those billions. Even if it won't kill 100% of humanity, it will probably kill a number of governments, our current way of life, and there's no guarantee it won't kill me. It's an existential threat in the same way that Russian roulette is.
  
  "Don't worry guys your kids will only live in a dystopian hellhole, it's not that bad"
  
  If you're not at least mildly concerned by scientists (people who've spent years if not decades building up their reputation amongst many many peers) grabbing their hair and shouting about the incoming, slowly accelerating danger, then... Please. Checkout and get out of humanity's way.

I’ve tried internet without adblock and it’s almost unusable.
- On banking websites, yes.
  
  You know something is wrong if your bank's website needs adblocking. No wonder the internet has gone to shit... Is it that bad in other countries? ( i live in a country where bank sites dont have ads )

Alright, today is oficially the day I switch to Firefox
- Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Protonmail is my setup. I am slowy getting away from Google and all massive corps tbh, I'm spending more time on my Linux partition too.
- Yay!
- Come here, I left Firefox when Chrome first released, however after the Firefox Quantum release, I got back to using Firefox again. The container tabs feature is very useful to create a separate container for each project that I'm involved in. It's like having multiple browsers without needing to install multiple browsers.
  Although I still keep Vivaldi and Edge installed to visit some websites that doesn't work correctly with Firefox.

Why's everyone blaming the engineers lol, pretty sure they're just doing what they're told right?
- Exactly, headline should be more like "Google executives want Google engineers to make ad-blocking (near) impossible"
  
  Isn't Google famous for giving a large amount of creative freedom to their engineers (and having a lot of dead published products as a result)? Also, Google engineers are not exactly stuck at their job with little hope of finding anything else to survive.
- Just following orders is not the ironclad excuse some of you seem to think it is.
  
  Look dude, I hate advertising as much as anyone. I don't want any TV and most streaming services have wedged in some form of advertising nowadays and I avoid all that.
  But equating engineers trying to solve a problem like engineers figuring out how to block ads isn't really equivalent to murder.
  
  They're still bad people, but this kind of blame has to run uphill. The devs only have the option of quitting, not necessarily of not doing what they're told.
  That being said, I bet there are some Very Good Boys who enthusiastically and proactively suggest some evil shit to the execs.
  
  I mean shit, they aren't launching nukes here
- Doing what you're told does not relieve you of responsibility for the results of your actions
- The engineers are not blame free, and can do super shady shit too. For example, the issues with the WebHID "broswer" APIs.
- Ah yes, because "just following orders" has worked out so well in the past.
  That's right, I just godwin'd this removed.
- Because it is still unclear if this is an official project requested by Google or just some engineers working alone until Google adopts the project.
  
  The chances that a swashbuckling crew of rogue engineers organized a secret skunkworks project to implement their heartfelt, idealistic vision of an adblocker free web are… low.
- Software engineers have ethics classes, I'd imagine this would fall highly under unethical, just under building software for the military which google employees have protested in the past.
  
  Software engineers have ethics classes
  We do?
  
  Losing your ad blocker on chrome is "just under" software designed to kill people? Lol really? Oh the oppression

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. And it's a death knell of the internet as we know it. It won't be today or tomorrow, but slowly, over the next few years, expect surface level internet services to be extremely user unfriendly. I expect normies to just accept their fate and pay access fees to literally every website and service they use, while more tech savvy or explorative people might find their way to federated spaces or Usenet, etc.
- Then don't let Chrome be a super majority of users.
  https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
- The silver lining here might also be that the internet that we knew and loved 25 years ago might actually reappear. The 'other' stuff would just become background noise to the ones 'in the know'.
  
  Lol wouldn't that be epic. IRC becoming a big thing again because discord, whatsapp, and all thr other business social media go to shit.
  
  I sometimes wonder if this would be best outcome. Rather than spending so much effort trying to fight for the internet at large, those of us “in the know” just take our balls and go play in our own corner.
  The fediverse might be a test of this it continues to survive but never turns mainstream.

Use Firefox.
Support Firefox.
Using alternative Chromium based browsers is not it.

News headline, October 2078
Google finds users are covering their ears and closing their eyes; releases nanobots to force eyes open and lock hands behind back.
- Reminds of the 15 million merits episdoe in black mirror

Man I love using Firefox.
- This topic is a bit beyond me so I may have misunderstood but I think it's not going to matter that you use Firefox if this goes ahead and gets widely adopted because it sounds like websites will request these trust tokens and if your browser isn't forthcoming with one then they will assume you are a bot (or a user that blocks ads and is therefore one whose traffic does not benefit them). What happens then is unclear, do they not serve up the website? Do you get a degraded experience or different content? Do they just throw a lot of CAPTCHAs at you?
  Sounds like they're going to make life on the web a whole lot less convenient for folks that don't want to use their new token system. But it's totally voluntary though, no browser has to implement it.
  
  Yes it will affect you even if you use Firefox. If a lot of us still used Firefox, Google would not be able to do it as websites would not give up on a big chunk of their audience.
  
  I suspect the next step in the ongoing war between people who want to make websites unuseable and people who want to use websites is going to be some kind of spoofing method to keep browsing. Maybe your secure browser of choice runs a regular chrome instance as intended and then scrapes the non-add data from that process and presents it to you in an add free format.
- This might sound silly but assuming you are using firefox or even safari how will this proposal affect these browsers. Only thing I can currently think of is banking sites (on android) would force you to use chrome and check play integrity (safteynet) to block acess.
  At the end of the day won't this only affect people using Google chrome? (Forks of chrome, firefox, safari could by pass the issue)?
  Sorry if I seem a bit ignorant
  
  Firefox could always spoof the standard to maintain compatibility.
  
  Mozilla is working on their own v3, without a lot of the restrictions Google has added. I think you can already try out the relevant mode in Firefox.
  
  Yeah, as far as i understand, the browser needs to support the API. But firefox will implement it nonetheless after some protest, or no money from Google anymore.
- Pair it up with DDG + Protonmail and world will smile to you! 😄
  
  I prefer startpage or Qwant. Protonmail is great though!
- Would love to use Firefox if it wasn't so slow
  Hope more developers give special support to the gecko engine
  
  Firefox really isn't slow.
  
  I'm not sure how recently you've used it but I actually find chrome to be much more resource hungry. Maybe it's worth a try again if you haven't?
  
  lol Firefox + adblock beat Chrome any day.
  
  Have you seen the recent benchmarks where Firefox surpassed Chrome? Sure, they may not reflect actual use cases, but it shows that there isn't much of a speed difference.
  
  Firefox isn't slow, you just want an excuse.

I find it disturbing that there are people out there who spend much of their time thinking about new ways to get people to see adverts. Surely it falls under the "bullshit jobs" category that David Graeber once wrote about.
- It's not just that there are people thinking about it, it's that this is what our brightest minds in our society are incentivized to think about.
  There is a joke in tech circles - if you are smart enough you eventually end up in ad tech. It's really unhealthy for our society.
- A lot of ads should be banned for environmental reasons alone. From junk mail, lit up signs, eyesore billboards, and all the power wasted in digital ads.
- The big reasons I'm against this is all the side effects. Yes, there will be more ads, but there will also be:
  More autoplaying videos on article websites
  Increased risk of malware from ads
  Decreased competition in the browser space
  Decreased competition in the OS space
  More tracking and data harvesting
- I hate shitty ads as much as the next person, but you're ignoring how much of the internet runs on advertising money. Think of all the websites, services, apps, etc that you use that are "free" (read: ad-supported) — without ad revenue, a large percentage of them would be too expensive to run.
  I'm not saying ad-tech companies/people are always good, many of them clearly do unethical shit, but the idea that you're being forced to see ads is kind of crazy. You always have the option to not use ad-supported stuff, it's just a lot more limiting and expensive.

I don't know if it's the Google engineers that "want" to do this
- Not sure if troll or just an asshole.
  
  lmao imagine geniuenly thinking that if your company makes more money you'll also get more money 😭😭.
  If it ever makes 10% more, be lucky that they bump your salary by 2%
  Also, you do realize you are just as affected by this? I'm pretty sure, as a tech savvy person, you have ads removed, because you know how bad of an experience you have when they're on, enjoy that too if this ever comes into place, as of now, I'll keep using Firefox.
  
  We'll just won't look at your website then.
  
  Would you get more money doing this? How?

Ad pushing is only part of the problem… These tokens will kill the #InternetArchive Wayback machine. It’s anti-library tech.
Anti-bot tech is inherently anti-human.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=s7WDbnHlc1E
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

And another question: did someone already lay out a roadmap to google's collapse?
Right now we're going through a financial crisis, big tech needs to start making proper money so they try to squeeze the users. Google hopes to "drm the internet" to maximise ad revenue. Let's assume they succeed. 3 years from now the dystopia of dead adblockers is live, google and other leeches make bank off ads.
But there's no more adblockers and no more ad revenue left to squeeze out (because every internet user is already chained to a screen and force fed ads within ads). And shareholders demand increase in profits. What do they do then? Is there any hint of a long-term strategy? How long before the maximum theoretical ad revenue is reached and plateaus? Then COVID29 or something comes, fed raises rastes again and...?
- You’re describing the inherent limitations of capitalism. Our entire economy is predicated on infinite growth, which doesn’t exist and isn’t possible. What you describe is the eventual collapse of not just organizations, but of the US as a whole.
  
  No, not the US as a whole, but perhaps the end of the insane and without reasonable measures Capitalism that it has spawned. This is the theorized late-stage capitalism, but it was brought to this level by a broken and out of control system, whereas the academic model of capitalism would have had certain mechanisms of balance to prevent exactly where we are.
  The system of the present is too imbalanced to function with all these corporations, conglomerates, and billionaires holding a disproportionate amount of the wealth and keeping it from circulating. The economic system in the US just can't work this way, so some drastic shift to reduce or remove the wealth gap will need to change.
  
  Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth. This is some trite line that was invented on Twitter and became the common wisdom in online discussions about the failings of current national and global economic systems. It's not true. It appears to be true that the current model of capitalism favored the globe over requires infinite growth, but the current implementation of capitalism is not the same as it has always been implemented or will always be. There are more than enough legitimate criticisms of both capitalism writ large as well as current systems, we should be directing our ire through those arguments and not one that is factually false.
  
  Good. Let's fucking get it over with.
  
  Our entire economy is predicated on infinite growth, which doesn’t exist and isn’t possible.
  You can sit in front of a computer using almost zero new resources while coding an application which you then sell to a megacorporation for 30 billion. The "inifite growth with limited resources" -argument doesn't hold.

- Have you seen any commercials recently? They are something else. Either the most generic basic standard commercial or wtf did I just watch. There's no in-between lol. I genuinely thought a couple were in the movie I was watching because it was about a bad advertising company lol
- This message is brought to you by Lightspeed Briefs! 🩲
- Reject internet, return to book. Mmm, words.
- The last time I remember watching television must've been the early 2000s, and I remember watching a movie on TBS. They used to have commercial blocks every 20 minutes or so, which was a little annoying still, but at this point watching a movie was a commercial break every 5-8 minutes. It wasn't enough to get through a single scene sometimes, which is like somebody snatching a book out of your hand to tell you about products for three minutes as you're mid-chapter.
  I started just buying DVDs instead and ended up with a great little library full of movies that I hand picked and all the special features that came with them. If the internet turns into what TV was like in those days, I'll simply start blocking sites that run heavy with ads and only white-list websites that respect an ad-free ecosystem.
- If I have to FF past the same damn ad for an ear wax pressure washer one more time I'm going to scream.

Use Firefox.
Even the Android version lets you install uBlock Origin.

Google controls way too much. People need to stop using their products. Many people complaining right now are still using Google stuff. If everyone concerned stop using Google stuff, that would cause them to reconsider very quickly.

There are no laws stating that we have to watch or see ads, so forcing us to watch them feels like a huge overstep. Companies shouldn't be able to have this much control over a public service.
- so forcing us to watch them feels like a huge overstep.
  We live in a fascist society so I wouldn't be suprised of their audacity..
  
  Where are you from?

- Maybe it'd be healthier for all of us in the long run to just unplug, go outside, and visit a library or join a social club. Or we can just unplug from the ~~internet~~ corpo-net and go full Fediverse and FOSS. I'm sure there's plenty of people already doing it here on Lemmy.
  
  Im here to vouch for camping, specifically burns.
  Its a great way to talk to folks in a generally left leaning environment, try new things, have wild experiences, and you all use your superhero names so nobody actually knows who you are.
  great way to disconnect from the internet in a made-up society that is a bit nicer, plus theres a cool fire
- It's just a paywall with extra steps.
  Anyone that implements it I won't use their content unless it's absolutely necessary. I think stack exchange may be the only site that has enough pull for me to visit them anyway.
  Any browser that gets around it I'll use instead. I'm already using Brave, Firefox and Edge instead of chrome.
  Really All this is going to do is create a opportunity for AI ad removal, Man in the middle rendering raster scraping the data removing anything that looks like an ad.
  
  Really All this is going to do is create a opportunity for AI ad removal,
  It’s worse than that. As it stands, I’m blocked from ~30+% of the web because of Cloudflare. Unjailing the content into archive.org’s #WaybackMachine is indispensable. From the article:
  “Websites funded by ads require proof that their users are human and not bots”
  I already lose copious access to content as a human being treated like a bot. #Google’s plan is to take the next #CAPTCHA extreme. It’s the wrong direction.
  Robots work for the user, not against. I created a bot to find me a house because the real estate sites lacked the search criteria I needed. I scraped the sites & found the ideal house. This would be nearly impossible today & Google brings it closer to impossible.
  
  That is a great idea for a browser extension. An AI module that hides ads and clicks x’s and generally fucks with their engagement numbers but don’t let any of it get to your eyeballs.
- #Google will make you want to unplug (as Cloudflare has done to me), but if you’re in Europe you will be unable to because European governments have already killed off offline infrastructure (#digitalTransformation). There are already a number of government transactions & public services that can no longer be done offline.
  
  Why cloudflare? Honest question

It isn't Google Engineers wanting to do it. It's Google engineers being told to do it.

I'm not even joking, shit like this is bringing back my depression.
- If it's affecting your mental health, I highly recommend avoiding this side of social media and focusing on your needs. Don't let the world drag you down with it.
  
  I mean Google becoming crappy is not something you can easily avoid. I have a medical procedure happening soon and I literally couldn't find any non-corporate listicle on Google or bing. I ended up having to use mojeek to read stuff written by actual people.
  
  I need to know
- I'm glad you don't live in turkey where news and half of people are more cancer than this 💀💀

This is why I recently switched back to Firefox.
- If google really does away with adblockers I expect many more will follow. I'm not even against unobtrusive ads but the few times I've been away from my own pihole / ublock browser setup and rawdogged the internet those ads were next level obnoxious. I can't live like that.
- While nice to do, it's not going to solve the problem when the likes of Cloudflare are already on board with this. Apple has already implemented a similar system in Safari as well. Feels like the horse has already left the barn.
  Philosophically I want to agree with you, but when sites like banks and employment finders are going to require this it's really going to create a horrible world of the haves and have-nots.

Will use firefox until it gets broken into pieces. I would rather stop using the internet other than for necessary situations.
- Yeah, 100%. I would pretty much rather just use whatever underground internet pops up to replace the advertising based one. Advertisements are one of those things that I absolutely cannot stand.
- For real. Google continues to seriously underestimate my infinite loathing for ads. I will uninternet myself
- The thing is, Google has been a major donor to Mozilla Foundation from the start. Google has been financially supporting Firefox to deflect the accusations of Chrome being a monopoly.
- That's what I'm feeling too. If all the end to end encryption is banned, and the new kid safety act passes here in the US those will just be more nails in the coffin. It's so sad to me never it's been a huge part of my life. If it comes to that I'll miss you all.
- I'm not even upset. Yeah, it's finally clear that it's not our late 90s and early 00s Web anymore.
  So what? What it's magic was based on wasn't so technologically or computationally complex, FFS. There's been plenty of hypertext systems, some distributed. There are some hobbyist ones now, like Gemini again.
  I'm looking forward to the niche being filled by better solutions, made after the experience of WWW as it was. It's amazingly cool.

When will they understand, if I'm introduced to your product through an advertisement, I do not want to buy it. I will make a point not to. Do not annoy me. If your product is good enough, it will be bought.
- I'm in the same boat as you. But considering there's this thing called the "ad industry", there's bound to be a considerable portion of people that are influenced enough by ads, even just at a subconcious level, that investing money into ads is a worthwhile thing to do for businesses selling products and businesses offering ad platforms.
- Ad companies figured out that sales are much better with whatever publicity they can get, even bad publicity. It doesn't work with some people, like you, but they haven statistically proven that just getting their name out in any capacity will increase sales.
- I think that, to this day, the only item I have ever bought because of an ad was my eargasm ear plugs. I may have seen them somewhere else first but an ad popped up and I happened to be in the market so I got them and don't regret it at all. Otherwise I buy things because I do the research, not because they push the ads out.

Google engineers want me to stop using anything from google

Smart people coming up with smart ideas to do dumb things. When will we start shaming such people?
- When companies stop paying them so much for making them more money.

I don't know that we're watching the internet collapse. I think we are witnessing tech companies respond to growing financial pressure by accelerating their monetization plans, and it's blowing up in their faces. The result will be the reinvention of the web. I don't necessarily know if decentralized apps are going to take off, but I do think the internet will shift towards smaller (possibly open source) sites in retaliation.

Sometimes it is unbelievable. They want to make the Internet their own, following their model... luckily there will always be people fighting to keep the Internet free, where anyone can decide, in this case, whether to swallow ads or not
- Destruction of the Commons is key to capitalism.
  The internet is a huge ripe field to exploit.
  The destruction of the free resource is a consequence of how we organize society.
- It is indeed another attack on #openData principles.
  luckily there will always be people fighting to keep the Internet free
  Google’s move makes the fight much more uphill for freedom fighters. The real problem is the masses of pawns who fail to vote with their feet. Some of them voted with their feet merely because CAPTCHA is inconvenient. Eliminating the CAPTCHA puts these #tyrannyOfConvenience users on the wrong side of the fight.
- keep the internet free
  Never see ads
  Gonna have to pick one
  
  Absolutely untrue. People run websites and pay for their servers themselves. People inherently want to post stuff on the internet and many websites don't have ads at all. Think of pretty much every old blog that used to exist, or every portfolio page for an artist. I will simply stop using Google's internet and that will be that. I pretty much already have to be honest, Google results are absolute dog shit.

The engineers to blame are
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser
https://github.com/yoavweiss
- Lmao yoavweiss seems to have recently broken the 4 year hiatus on his personal blog to make a new post about how the discussions around this removed proposal are not constructive enough.
  The most constructive that can ever be said about this is "fuck right off" dude.
- You think they acted alone?
  
  They acted.
- Please don’t blame the people who were forced to implement this. There are engineers to blame behind all shitty tech in the world. They’re just trying to work a job. There aren’t exactly a lot of jobs in the tech industry where you don’t work for some of the evilest motherfuckers alive building unimaginably evil stuff. I’m all for directing as much hate, vitriol, credible threats of violence, etc at the people on top, but let’s leave the poor sap who they forced to do their dirty work alone.
- I fail to see how the engineers building the technical side of this are relevant to this case. It's not their decision to put this into Chromium or not.
  
  True, it was not their decision, but they had the choice to show google the middle finger.
  
  You always have a decision. Especially when you’re a highly qualified engineer that could choose to work somewhere else easily.

Similar things are done with TV and streaming unfortunately. You ever notice how commercials/ads have louder volume than whatever content you're watching? It's intentional. If you're someone who doesn't skip them and doesn't mute them, they want you to be able to hear them from another room and then they hope you'll come back to see the ad. It's so dumb.
- Yeah and as it's illegal to bump up the volume (where I live) they bump up loudness instead, making the sound crappy but it's perceived as higher volume. God I hate that crap

Their examples are business issues where they want a tech solution.
These are working on a foundation that the internet today, with all it's venture capital money, "free" websites and services that run at a loss is how the internet should look. So they are building technical solutions to force some "trust" facilitate this internet. If a business or website cannot function or be profitable without this, that company does not deserve to survive. It's putting businesses ahead of users.
It works off the assumption that websites should know who the person visiting their website is (or that it's even a human.)
IMO, we need to return to the assumption that users are anonymous and remind people that you don't know who is on the other side so we should not trust at all.

It's fun to see capitalism doubling down on itself. 🫠

Google executives want this, NOT the engineers.
- Their engineers are super fucking shady too. For example, the issies with the WebHID "browser" APIs
  
  And you think it was the engineer’s idea to do that?
- They put their name on it. I hope it was monetary worth it because the public should not cut them any slack.

Am I the only one thinking these trust tokens are not going to prevent bots from scraping websites?
Eventually, somewhere, someone will just develop the infrastructure to work their way around this, right?
- It would stop beneficial bots like the ones I create¹ as a small-time hobbyist because the little guy does not have the resources for this arms race. You may be right when it comes to large-scale scraping ops that are done by a business (e.g. scraping RyanAir or Southwest airlines so an airfare consolidation site can show more fares).
  ① e.g. I wrote a bot that scraped the real estate market sites, scraped the public transport sites, and found me a house with the shortest public transport commute.
  
  Are you willing to share the source for said bot?
  
  How would this impact selenium based bots?

You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain

What a cursed timeline this is

Back when Threads got released someone told me on Lemmy that Meta will not pull an EEE on ActivotyPub because something something antitrust Microsoft long ago millions of dollars.
How is Manifestv3 different?

It was not hilarious when MS tried to control stuff like this with IE.
This is a boring fight, and it is why tech companies need a broken up and a kick in the profits/pants.

I really need to ween myself off the Internet so that, once it becomes an unusable hellhole in the next 20 years or so, I'll be able to give it up entirely and move on to better things.
- There will always be websites for us. Better websites who care about their users. Websites that still support firefox. So we only need to stay away from the hellhole websites and chromium based browsers
  
  The problem is search engines have proven not to keep up with our needs. Sites trashed up with cookie popups, subscription nags, and CAPTCHAs are making it into the highest ranks of search results. Cloudflare sites in particular.
- Yeah, I've never even thought about modern life without the use of internet for everything else other than professional work, just like I've never thought possible for me to stop using Reddit. But now thanks to spez I stopped using Reddit, and I can now really imagine a world where I don't surf the internet for fun. Part of me wants the internet to become an unusable hellhole.

Google engineers need to fuck off.
- Google ~~engineers~~ needs to fuck off.
  Fixed that for you
  
  👍

Per the article, this is already being integrated into Chromium as we speak, as in days ago: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/6f47a22906b2899412e79a2727355efa9cc8f5bd

Related: https://lemmy.world/post/2235459
So, we will be forced to see ads, while they can’t yet control who’s publishing those ads. I wonder why Google (and any other ad company) hasn’t been sued yet for showing and infecting malware into the people who click on their ads. Maybe is not that critical or easy for a domestic user, but corporations or governments?
And it’s not because it’s impossible to verify malware before accepting their ads, it’s because THEY DONT CARE. If they can detect music on videos for copyright claims, they can analyze everything, they can also verify publishers. And if they can’t with an algorithm, they should use humans to manually verify publishers.
- Yeah, but doing that won't get them bonuses for hitting KPIs. They let the malware through because it means the company buying the adspace is buying adspace. Everything else doesn't factor into their targets and quarterly goals.
- Facebook literally facilitated a genocide in Myanmar. These companies are not legally liable for anything they serve.

Maybe we should create another internet?
- With blackjack? And hookers?
- Something you can yell out during sex, like "Pied Piper!"
  
  R. Kelly has entered the bedroom......
- Kinda what we're doing here, right?
- This was my thought as well. I'm not against ads though, but there has to be some limits to it.

In recent news, Google has put forth a proposal known as the "Web Environment Integrity Explainer", authored by four of its engineers.
Imagine someone telling you this is your job and you do it.

I can’t imagine anyone who uses the internet thinking the current ad technology is effective, the web is broken because of ads

Even if they do that, some people will just create illegal website mirrors that remove ads.
On reddit, people already copy paste articles when there's a paywall. I can totally envision that thing to be more common.
I am not fucking kidding, I will stop using websites if I cannot block ads. This is non negotiable. I don't care about your business model, I have zero money to give you. I tried the official reddit app, and uninstalled within a week.

imagine working on shit like this. like wouldn't that make your life worse as well? how fucking malignant

Forced to implement is the wrong term - they were tasked with designing it. They can't just swap one person out for another - losing the lead dev or designer would be delay or kill the effort
They could've pushed back - software ethics is a required course for very good reason - but it's easy to never ask if you should do something and skip straight to how. It gets easier to skip that piece every time, and the company isn't going to respect it - we need outside pressure so they can point to us and say "this will have repercussions"
They don't deserve death threats, but trashing everything they push on GitHub is fair. Measured steady pressure - save the most extreme stuff for upper management and shareholders
For the engineers you have to make them understand they did bad and they should feel bad, they need to feel that their peers have lost respect for them, not that this is the public lashing out
- Your notion is just wrong. First of all engineers can't push back on something like this. They can try to push back on stuff that might be wrong for the product, that is not performant or potentially break stuff, but not on something that can make the company so much money. If this is the roadmap, they must align, they are being paid (tons of money) to implement the company's vision.
  Second of all, you are looking at this as a consumer perspective. They are part of the company and most likely heavily invested in it. And if such thing will increase the company's revenue, it will icrease theirs too. They won't feel bad trust me, they know where they are and what they're doing.
  
  That's where the ethics part comes into play. They're not being ethical.

News headline, October 2078