The much maligned “Trusted Computing” idea requires that the party you are supposed to trust deserves to be trusted, and Google is DEFINITELY NOT worthy of being trusted, this is a naked power grab to destroy the open web for Google’s ad profits no matter the consequences, this would put heavy surveillance in Google’s hands, this would eliminate ad-blocking, this would break any and all accessibility features, this would obliterate any competing platform, this is very much opposed to what the web is.
Yep, that sounds like a very Mega-Corp thing to do.
I just had to change my domain name because Google wouldn’t stop blocking my personal server webpage for being a “phishing” website, there was no way it could be interpreted in that way at all and it didn’t matter, my personal server apps were basically blocked on 80% of browsers.
If you hosted a compromised app once, or ever messed up the setup of your mail server… that’s what happens.
I was only flagged as phishing, with full SSL certs etc
Certs only prevent others from making it look like it was you, they don’t stop someone from exploiting a vulnerable webapp you might be hosting, or using a misconfigured mail server as a relay.
If you have anything open to the public, then you either have to keep it read only, or stay on it to make sure it’s updated, secured, sanitized, and so on.
Personally, I’ve switched to using client side certificates, so everything is effectively “not public”.
Does CloudFlares HTTPS resolve that issue?
This is nothing less than a brazen attempt at total control of the primary large-scale communication mechanism of humanity.
It’s time for Alphabet to be broken up into separate letters.
Or have some letters removed all together.
Pretty much the entire US needs a healthy dose of monopoly busting.
Hell, just look at the Ma Bell breakup and the path all of those companies took to where they are now. We’re basically back to step 1.
Ugh. DRM. I freaking hate DRM. I “buy” a book from Amazon and it’s all DRMed. I like the Kindle app so I keep buying there. But when I can I buy physical books at a LBS
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Years ago i would have agreed with you, but on this era of heavy capitalist surveillance you don’t want to give them the chance, they’ll get every bit of data they can get about you. That and ads are strong dissemination vectors for malware. If i want to support something i’d rather do it directly, ads have proven to be noxious.
I wish there was some kind of “ethical ad” standard, such that we can be served ads, maybe even “relevant” ads (with relevant topics picked by users), but without any tracking or malware, and in fact, with some kind of technology that prevents tracking instead of certifying to the advertisers that the user didn’t “tamper” with their pc so they can track as much as they want (I’m not aware of such a standard or technology. Genuine question: is there such a thing?).
Heck, I’d be even in favor of a standard to “pay to disable ads”, with reasonable fees, so that websites I like get their per-view dues, but without tracking or ads. If there was some kind of technology to send money to others without being tracked, kinda like back in the day when we used to buy newspapers at the newsstand with actual cash, but digital … who said “cryptocurrency”? Right, I heard they were actually invented to be used as currency, rather than high risk investing/speculation device … anyways, let me not digress (too much) …
duckduckgo shows basic ads when you search for anything
Can’t agree too much with you. Here, take this as a sign of my appreciation🎖
Give me Firefox or give me death.
Well good thing they have a company slogan of do no evil… Oh wait.
Ad blockers are my best disability accommodation. The things they do with ads to capture attention f with my brain. I’m really going to struggle if this happens. And I’m dependent on the internet for so many things, from groceries to prescriptions to people.
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The only thing I have left is YouTube. Apparently Piped allows registering and then storing subscriptions, maybe I’ll move mine there.
Gotta say, deleting my google account would be very awesome to do
I use FreeTube, which is opensource and allows you to subscribe to channels without an account. The awesome thing is that you can categorize channels under different “profiles”.
However, I think it won’t take too long for Google to paywall YouTube APIs and do what it can to prevent web scraping (through disabling login-less use or attempts such as the one linked in this thread.). So our best option would be to ask our favorite Youtubers to move (or duplicate) their videos to other platforms such a peertube, and start using those platforms ourselves.
Use invidious to watch YT videos “outside YT”. I think viewing from there doesn’t count towards their metrics, so you’re “freeloading” on their content. Some instances:
That is the only solution to all this!
To everyone: Please remove at least as much Google products/services as you can from your life. Start with the easiest ones. Have a plan and gradually find alternatives for all other products/services of them. Remove them from your life. It will help even if you do this partly. This is for the benefit of us all.
Also, let’s do the same to Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Reddit etc. Let’s not let our lives depend on them. They are corporations. They are programmed to maximize profit.
I know there’s currently not a lot of good alternatives out there, but if enough of us ditch these ass-companies, more and more open-source, decentralized, not-for-benefit services will pop up, and the existing ones will improve greatly. These are not for-profit projects that can be bought by corporations later and used to their benefit. They will only benefit their users.
Let’s do this!
Fuck megacorporations!
@ConfusedLlama @jherazob @kool_newt At this point I’m starting to wonder if an iPhone might be the lesser of two evils… sheesh
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gradually find alternatives for all other products/services of them
The difficult part is finding real alternatives that fundamentally improve the situation. Most of the alternatives out there are just shams, which have all the same problems, but are more expensive, less reliable or otherwise fundamentally flawed. Be it the Feddiverse (literally just a central server, all the federation is optional), Firefox (Google’s way to fend of monopoly lawsuits and stop real alternatives from arising, still telemetry, constantly tries to sell you something) or self hosting (pay more, get less).
Linux on a PC works well enough as Windows alternative, but as soon as it comes to anything networking/Web/cloud related things are a f’n wasteland. The part I don’t get is why we still don’t even have a reliable way to hole-punch through NAT and an alternative to DNS in the Free Software world. That has been the major pain point for at least the last 20 years and is the major stopping block for true P2P alternative software, but it’s still largely an unsolved problems (
libp2pis one way to deal with it, but not in widespread use and still has numerous problems from what I understand).I wish it were feasible to get off youtube…
Not a bad idea. Just also avoid Microsoft, Apple, and any non-open hardware or software… they all do the same stuff or worse.
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Is it progress, or just picking a different cage?
Good luck in your voyages though, my approach is to try keeping stuff in multiple cages, also far from perfect.
For me the most annoying part was switching off gmail (I went to fastmail) and the hardest habbit to break was Google search (I mostly use DDG).
I use fastmail, great service.
What motivated me to do that is finding these megacorp providers do not keep your email private.
I don’t remember what my breaking point was, but since I dropped gmail there have been 2 or 3 announcements about it that would have gotten me to that point again.
Spoiler for a later stage of your journey: Your phone gets wayv faster. That part is pretty nice.
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I’m not sure, honestly.
Charitably, we could assume it’s just from removing Google and various carriers background apps meant to improve my experience.
Uncharitably, I have my suspicions. For the last five or so versions of Android something always seemed to be using processor cycles and battery when I wasn’t actually doing much with my phone.
But I never saw evidence of usage data exfiltration via Google apps - at least after I turned off the related optional settings.
In any case, switching to GrapheneOs was a startling and pleasant speed boost for me, whatever the real root cause.
This is so silly. There is no technical solution to trust. What if Russia or China want to run a bit farm? Or the US goverbment? Are you not going to trust their signatures, and face legal action i their markets? This stuff is so stupid, just be honest that you want people to watch your ads. Than we can all refuse and move on with our lives.
There is no technical solution to trust.
Google knows this. Trust isn’t really the problem they’re trying to solve.
This is my biggest issue, it’s such a bare-faced lie!
It’s completely insane for the browser to need to trust the client. Instead, you implement zero-trust, and require authentication and authorization for anything sensitive.
The server absolutely shouldn’t trust the client isn’t malicious, instead it should assume it is malicious until proven otherwise
The number of people protesting against them in their “Issues” page is amazing. The devs have now blocked the creation of new issue tickets or of comments in existing ones.
It’s funny how in the “explainer” they present this as something done for the “user”, when it’s clearly not developed for the “user”. I wouldn’t accept something like this even if it was developed by some government – even less by Google.
I have just reported their repository to GitHub as malware, as an act of protest, since they closed the possibility of submitting issues or commenting.
Yeah, as if github aka Microsoft is going to do anything about it … but hey, anything to keep the pressure up and not letting this go through.
This is why we need Firefox.
And Firefox needs to be a market that can’t be ignored.
Or even if Microsoft edge disables this
Stop with this excuse and stop Insulting people. I’ve been on Firefox for nearly 20 years, but Mozilla has ruined it for me little by little. The last straw has been the horrible UI redesign. So I switched to a Chromium browser. Tell Mozilla to make a better browser and to listen to their community, instead of blaming people for using what serves them best.
What does your UI gripe have to do with this biased tabloid piece you shared?
Firefox is fine and works even better than it ever has. If you cared about the UI so much you’d have tried any of its forks that use different and older designs.
Firefox will most likely support this, if it doesn’t want to get cut off from most of the web.
However, it would be nice to have a Firefox or Chromium fork with a switch to disable the “feature”, an option to remove any links to websites requiring this stuff, and some search engine free of links to websites requiring it.
Firefox will most likely support this, if it doesn’t want to get cut off from most of the web.
well, if more people used Firefox websites couldn’t just throw them under the bus, which is why I said it’s so important.
We’ll have to see, but I’d hope Firefox puts up at least some resistance.However non technical folk will not be able to or really be interested in all that and will just download the regular browser and leave the option enabled. This only gets traction if the option it turned off by default.
I’ve never donated to Mozilla before, but will now.
Great idea, Mozilla does good things for the internet. Though, please keep in mind that donations to Mozilla never reach Firefox. That is, as donations go to the foundation, a non-profit, while Firefox is developed by a for-profit subsidiary.
Firefox depends on google for funding though. Google could probably deal a killing blow quite easily.
They do that because of Firefox goes, Google is open to being trust busted. Killing Firefox would be literal suicide for Google
i think they probably donate so much to make sure they have at least one competitor so they don’t get busted up like Standard Oil
They are not donating, if I remember correctly fairly recently Microsoft outbid them and bing was default for a bit.
But maybe I’m not remembering correctly tbh.
I’m skeptical if the government would even do that given how stacked it is with cronies
Don’t know what government you’re referring to, but if the EU anti-trust regulation kicks in it will affect everyone. EU agencies are slow but they do their job eventually.
Yeah I think they are still in court with the EU. If Mozilla fell, the EU would almost certainly come after chrome immediately.
Man, I hope the EU pulls the trigger on Google. They are way, way overdue for getting broken up. It’s insane how easily they can change the entire internet on a whim with zero oversight. The Biden admin will never do it.
Mozilla is trying to reduce its dependency on the Google search deal. The dependence is big, but Mozilla has some reserves and receives the money for channeling searches to Google. They could and already make such deals with other search providers.
Vote with your wallet. I recently increased my monthly donation to Mozilla.
I thought I read somewhere that donations to Mozilla legally can’t go to Firefox.
Indeed. Donations go to Mozilla Foundations for their activities (advocacy and whatever). Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp.,whom can’t legally receive donations.
OTOH, this will create a massive “in” group, and a much smaller “out” group. It almost formalizes the Indie Web, which would take us back to the early 90’s, but with better bandwidth. I’d be into that.
Until you’re required to use their software for, say, banking or legal procedures. You DO NOT want this to become the status quo
I was not advocating for it at all. Just looking on the bright side.
Indeed, IDK if you remember back in the bad old days but you used to need a specific browser, and if that browser was IE, good luck if you weren’t on Windows. Sites would just block you.
I really hope this doesn’t become a thing again - it’s already stupid with so many “best on chrome” stuff, but at least I think Apple and Safari put a dent in that because Apple users are a big enough group, and generally identified to have and spend more money than Android / Linux / Windows users so there’s that. And Firefox is… well… something. 10% now? IDK, it’s hard to be single browser now adays, but with these “for security” things? Who knows.
I guess if Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla all refuse to go this way, it’ll break it. The other option is something like Lets Encrypt being big enough they can’t delist the attester, but it just attest everything so turns into garbage. Or enough accepted attesters (if it’s like SSL PKI) “attest” that you paid them $50 that year and that’s about it, so again, everyone who cares gets a Comodo attestation or whatever and use a browser / extension / proxy / OS / whatever that just sends valid garbage or spoofed stuff to them, like many do for the various existing non-secure identity fields.
I’ve never in my life used IE, and did just fine without it. I’ve been using Firefox since it was called Netscape, and before that was Mosaic or something. I’m not supporting what Google is trying to do, I’m saying it will have consequences they don’t intend. They play whack-a-mole and the moles dig deeper.
Note of amusement: The GitHub issues tracker for that proposal got swamped with tickets either mocking this crap or denouncing it for what it is, this morning the person who seems to be the head of the project closed all those tickets and published this blog post, in essence saying “Shut up with your ethical considerations, give us a hand in putting up this electric fence around the web”. Of course that didn’t stop it.
Also somebody pointed out this gem in the proposal, quoted here:
6.2. Privacy considerations
Todo
Quick edit: This comment on one of the closed tickets points out the contact information of the Antitrust authorities of both US and EU, i think i’m gonna drop the EU folks a note
Edit: And they disabled commenting on the issues tracker
We developers should stop just looking at the technical side of our work only. There’s social, economic and values to be taken into account when we put our minds to solve a problem. We tend to go blindly into it, without thinking what it can cause when it is released into the world.
It’s like if we put a bunch of developers into a secret project to develop an Internet World Wide Nuclear Bomb a là Project Manhattan… the leaders shouldn’t really have to hide what they were about to do, just throw the developers and engineers troubles to solve and they wouldn’t mind what it will be used for. It’s just tech, right?
At least this guy seems to fit the type: I want to do this technology I’ve been tasked for, I’m trying to solve a technological problem. The rest of the world is telling him «Man, this is a bad idea to implement.» and he whines saying «I want solutions to this technology, not what is wrong with it!»
(And if you aren’t one of those developers, congratulations, we need more of you!)
Wow, that blog post is truly nauseating and infuriating to read, knowing the context.
Fuck Google. They’re the Nestlé of tech.
I don’t think Google has recently insisted that child slavery is just a thing we all have to be OK with if we want chocolate, or starved millions of babies by convincing their mothers that their breast milk is dangerous. But I also wouldn’t be shocked to learn that they had…
No, but they accepted to publish political fake news ads for one of the running parties (the fascistoid one, of course) in the last elections here in Brazil.
That party has lost, but it was too close. In the 4 last years, during their mandate, hunger, violence, discrimination rape, and other problems rose to the highest levels in the century.
Google and other big tech companies have been influencing elections in a lot of places, and the consequences are enormous.
Ha! Fair point. I guess the Internet is ultimately peanuts compared to the real world.
But as far as relative negative effect on its sphere of influence, I’d say they’re comparable.
My favorite part is when they ask you to give them the benefit of the doubt, but also anyone who disagrees with them in a way that doesn’t fit their expectations is “noise.”
What benefit of the doubt?
The absolute best possible case is repulsive.
Benefit of the doubt, as in “I doubt this is a good idea”
And if you have issues with the “use case” itself, you’re shit out of luck, shut it, shithead!
If you raise legal issues with the ‘use case’ of their ‘web platform’ thing, ppl will just not respond to you!
Meaning: we don’t care if the shot we plan might be illegal, and we won’t be stopped by you fucks telling us if it is or not "
My favorite part was “even if you notice we intend to break the law just be quiet about it”
[Don’t assume consensus nor finished state]
Often a proposal is just that - someone trying to solve a problem by proposing technical means to address it. Having a proposal sent out to public forums doesn’t necessarily imply that the sender’s employer is determined on pushing that proposal as is.
It also doesn’t mean that the proposal is “done” and the proposal authors won’t appreciate constructive suggestions for improvement.
[Be the signal, not the noise]
In cases where controversial browser proposals (or lack of adoption for features folks want, which is a related, but different, subject), it’s not uncommon to see issues with dozens or even hundreds of comments from presumably well-intentioned folks, trying to influence the team working on the feature to change their minds.
In the many years I’ve been working on the web platform, I’ve yet to see this work. Not even once.
…?
What is this, “Good vibes only?”“Good vibes only” seems to be embedded in the culture of web development today. Influential devs’ Twitter accounts have strong Instagram vibes: constantly promoting and congratulating each other, never sharing substantive criticisms. Hustle hustle.
People with deep, valid criticisms of popular frameworks like React seem to be ostracized as cranks.
It’s all very vapid and depressing.
Do you have an article about react? I’d love to read it. And yes tech is chock full of egos and fakers.
Alex Russell is a good read on React. His position gives him a broad view of its impacts and has kept him from being sidelined. This Changelog podcast is a decent distillation of his criticisms – it was recorded earlier this year, a few days after his Market For Lemons blog post.
(Sorry for the late reply! I’ve been a bit swamped lately and away from kbin.)
Never seen it work? These faang people are totally delusional. Google keeps putting off their third party cookie retirement exactly because of outcries like this.
The amount of noise IS the signal
