Fuck you Google.
Regulate Big Tech and be done with it.
Or make the internet a public resource. Let the USPS be the ISP
The constitution allows for a nationwide communications network that’s run at low cost for public good. USPS is absolutely legally allowed to run internet service and it’s shame that it hasn’t taken this over yet.
It would be a fitting legacy for Ben Franklin as well.
And I trust my privacy with the USPS a lot more than I do with AT&T
Any ideas what the behavior of webpages will be if somebody uses PiHole?
PiHole can be bypassed with DNS over HTTPS, although there’s ways to prevent that.
Since PiHole isn’t part of the browser but in the network I assume that still works.
It may be the last few years of the free web because of Google. Their goals are clear.
Please switch to Firefox, another search engine and another email provider…
I’ve long been trying to de-googlify myself, but it’s certainly ramped up this year.
Been trying out Kagi and just set up proton mail account. Not sure what I’ll land on in the end but it’s nice trying out newer services.
It is hard when you have a business. You really have to actively try to stay away from them. They control so much business infrastructure.
I know my business partner (god bless him, great friend but…) is super into big tech and every new product they offer. So it’s a bit of an uphill battle.
And I’m lucky. I own my own firm. Most people don’t have such a luxury.
Google server infrastructure products are almost universally worse than Amazon’s. The interfaces, APIs, and documentation look like they were designed by people who don’t understand humanity.
At least they’re not as bad as Microsoft. Azure is a goddamn dog with fleas.
I am fortunate enough to have never had MS servers forced upon me.
Good to know.
Most importantly, they are designed by people that don’t use them. Amazon uses AWS themselves, Google doesn’t use GCP.
I found out about Kagi from another Lemmy user and I’ve been really impressed. I feel like I’m getting better results than Google. I’m using their Personalized Results feature and it helps a ton!
It’s not too hard. The most important things are web search and email. I still use Google Maps. But I don’t want my private emails and searches at a company who is user hostile and preditory.
I quite disagree, it is very hard. Sure, switching search engine takes all of two seconds, and email can be had from many vendors free and commercial.
But calendaring! A calendar that is at least somewhat integrated with am email client, supports more than one actual calendar, and has real-world capability to share them with others - “if you succeed in this, two me how.”
CalDav? Integrated in nextcloud. Or Mailcow. Why does it needs to be integrated with e-mail? Thunderbird is able to add all invitations or reminders into my CalDav Account.
My calendaring needs might be less restrictive than yours, but Proton offers a nice calendar that from what I understand offers at least some integration with their e-mail client. Have you checked it out?
I use Nextcloud self-maintained on a VPS myself for all my calendaring needs, which is basically keeping track of appointments, syncing via CalDAV to my phone, as well as sharing some sub-calendars with other people. Setting up a Nextcloud-server is admittedly a bit more hassle than just signing up for a service, but also here there are options of making it a bit easier than hosting yourself.
I find Google Maps by far the hardest service to rid myself off, followed by Gmail (the time it takes!!! Been using Proton for two years, still not completely rid of my Gmail-account). I’m slowly getting used to using OSM-based map services more and more.
The Fastmail calendar is pretty good. Just a random page about them: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/shared-calendars/
Fastmail
Ohh, this does indeed look quite fantastic. I am certainly going to look more into this. Thank you!
_Edit: Ah, but $50/user/year. For the whole family that adds up real fast. Still, nice tip.
Any recommendations for free email providers?
Any recommendations for free email providers?
I’m using proton. I like it a lot.
Nothing is free. How would they make money as a company to pay employees and pay hosting bills?
All these big tech companies are free exactly because they are preditory on users.
Pay for good email like Fastmail or Proton.
I understand the sentiment, but email is a necessary part of modern life and not everyone has the luxury of paying for it.
A lot of things are necessary parts of modern live and you also have to pay for it, a mobile plan for your smartphone for example.
I had a smartphone but not a mobile plan for years. People can get very creative when times are tough.
Don’t get me wrong, I think everybody should have the guarantee for social participation, I’m just saying that Email is no exception. If you did not have a mobile plan for whatever reason, you were just not participating.
Not really; I could do everything everyone else was doing; just not make phone calls or send sms texts. I used wifi to connect to the net and I could still make emergency calls. Im actually considering going back to that to save money, lol.
Nah then gmail is good enough.
I mean, Proton, which you just mentioned, also has a free tier, which is just as usable as Gmail is for 90% of people, myself included.
Proton’s free tier is a step to right direction, and at least they don’t run a huge advertisement company that could benefit from the free tier users’ data. And if you pay for Proton Unlimited, you also get access to SimpleLogin’s Premium tier which is nice. I just found this out when I finally bit the bullet and changed away from Gmail over to Proton. Now I don’t have to expose my real email address to some random never-to-be-seen-again websites or campaigns if I don’t want to.
If one has enough motivation, time and interest in purchasing their own domain, you can get one step forward with changing away from Gmail. Then you can pay something like 5€/month for Proton Mail Plus, use your own domain as your email address and if one day you find a better email provider, you could just change the MX records for that service and wouldn’t have to go through all your accounts and update the new address to all the places.
I had pondered moving away from Gmail years and years ever since I found out Google doesn’t have any real customer support and HN had stories where people had suddenly been locked out of their Google accounts because of some silly reason and couldn’t get their accounts back without some inside connections. At one point most of my digital life was at the mercy of Google and losing access to my Gmail or Google Calendar or G Drive would have been a disaster. Reading all these web-DRM news reminded me that I should continue de-googlefying my life and finally made the change. Firefox has been my primary browser for years and I moved over to iPhone with my phone.
Register your own domain name with Gandi and they gift you free email with a choice of two webmail interfaces. It’s really good, and owning the domain name enables moving to a different provider later if you wish.
I do use the better options but lets be real, the battle was lost many years ago
I wonder how many people will be ok with this, considering that there’s a large portion of folks who does not know what’s AdBlock
Yup. The vast majority of internet users NEVER:
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Customizes their web experience
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Uses apps almost exclusively
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Navigates beyond the first page/screen
How will they react to this?
“Shut the hell up, fucking nerd and your fucking idiotic, stupid ass ‘privacy’ bullshit. God WHO THE FUCK CARES!? I was literally - LITERALLY - never inconvenienced by any of that stuff, so SHUT UP!”
That’s how.
We’re doomed. We were always doomed.
We’re doomed. We were always doomed.
I’m afraid that’s always been the case because the mass majority just don’t a give a shit. They’ll happily conform to whatever the monopolies tell them to.
Would be kinda cool to go back to irc or usenet, because the average internet user does not and will not give a shit about privacy, and definitely won’t get a complicated chat thing setup.
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As an aside, I know we’re not supposed to care about Reddit, but the lack of this news getting any attention over there is just depressing. Hell the Firefox sub hasn’t had any posts in days apparently.
People that care about this stuff are probably already jumped ship.
That’s because the firefox sub moved to Lemmy…
Chrome is a bag of shit anyway, easy jump
Chromium, not chrome. Which means also Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and a lot more. Basically only Firefox and Safari are left as the big non-chromium ones.
But that’s not the worst of it. Even if you tear out this code, more and more websites will be built that rely on it. Which means Firefox etc also need to include it to keep functioning.
Isn‘t Safari‘s WebKit the origin of Chromium‘s Blink 😉
If WebKit and Mozilla put up enough fight. It will not be the standard.
Well, you can’t say not chrome because it does include chrome, yes, it extends to other browsers using the same codebase, I understand I’m well versed. Either which way, fuck google
Not saying you don’t realize, but Safari already has this tech. They call it Personal Access Tokens.
Well, that’s the worst case scenario. I hope that Brave will fork Chromium and leave the WEI out. Brave prides itself on being the no nonsense browser …
Brave is a PoS. They are not looking out for you
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Sorry, what is PoS? I’m using Brave just shortly but it appears to be concerned with privacy and ad-blocking - more than what Firefox does.
oh, hai guys
Hello there browser which already implemented DRM similar to this a while ago!
Safari is ahead on this DRM game. It already deployed attestation silently a while ago: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
Feels so good to see Google getting called out for this in the GitHub comments
Does it? It’s making me depressed.
Because every last single thing said in those comments will be ignored. I sincerely doubt they’re even reading them.
They know what they’re doing. They know what people will say. They’re going to do it anyway.
Why is this bad? On first read, it seems like it could replace personally identifiable advertiser cookies with a trusted assertion that I am a human. Feels like a win
I quite disagree, it is very hard. Sure, switching search engine takes all of two seconds, and email can be had from many vendors free and commercial.
But calendaring! A calendar that is at least somewhat integrated with am email client, supports more than one actual calendar, and has real-world capability to share them with others - “if you succeed in this, two me how.”
(not sure this worked as intended. I meant to reply to https://lemmy.world/comment/1748023)
Tutanota is trying, but there’s still ways to go
I just don’t understand why they’re trying to solve this issue on the client side. It seems like a losing battle to me.
Instead, focus on the server side. If you want to push ads, then host on (or tunnel from) the content server. Get rid of all the <div\>s and tags and scripts and adserver links that the adblockers are using to identify ads. Just assemble the page on the host so that it looks indistinguisable from the content the user is looking for and push it out. EAT BACHELOR CHOW! NOW WITH FLAVOR! Google could even start an ad-friendly hosting service that does this - some sitebuilder tools, identify where you want Google Adsense, and host the damn thing.
Unless everybody fully customises the display and styling of the adverts for their own website, there’s going to be some sort of targetable, recognisable pattern in the way AdSense content looks. Most developers just want an easy drop-in solution.
Furthermore, Google don’t necessarily want to give you that level of control over the adverts, because that makes it easier to game the ads system with malicious, fake and misleading clicks or invisible adverts. They need their tracking tech attached to it.
So render to image? That sounds terribly inefficient. That means you’re drastically increasing the load on the server and sending way more data over the wire. And then on the client side, your page no longer changes to fit the huge variety of viewport sizes. And say goodbye to being able to copy-paste. Or any kind of user interaction. And anyone with visual disabilities can go fuck themselves, I guess.
No, they didn’t mean to render it all as an image, but that everything comes from the content server you’re getting the content you want from and thus the ads should be indistinguishable from content. I don’t understand how you could misunderstand it to such a degree as to think they meant to render it all as an image.
so… PDF then?
/sThanks, BTW. It never occurred to me that someone could interpret my comment as “render-as-an-image”.
You explicitly state “render to image”.
Because even if you host the ad content on the same server, it’s still possible to distinguish it, such as by URL or element xpath. To assemble the page to avoid this, you’d need to completely render the page.
i’ve been using a samsung chromebook plus since it launched until now… and it’s end-of-support next month. being a typical human with low funds for new gear, i WAS considering a new chromebook of some kind. The chrome drm bullshit doesn’t effect me too much as I use this mostly within the linux container, or firefox android version… however, I realize i need to take a stand and not financially support these tyrants.
so, what are my options? a pinebook running debian? are there any good netbooks out there? I don’t use this thing for games or streaming media at all - mostly ssh, some browsing, etc. it’s about time I take the final steps to de-goog my life.
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Used thinkpads (like the T480) are a great choice.
I use Manjaro Cinnamon on mine.
Get a used Thinkpad. They run Debian well!
Install Linux on your current chromebook. If the hardware is still good that’s a no-brainer in my book.
i’m in the middle of this process now, and just frustrating myself. i’ve forgotten too much of the inner workings of the kernel - that is, my old knowledge doesn’t apply anymore. I’ve got a dualboot working, but can’t for the life of me get the wifi module to load. not relevant to this thread, so i won’t dirty it up. but, thank you for getting my head in the right space!
i will, somehow, get some flavor working
Pardon my ignorance but Can someone explain what google is trying to do?
EME for the rest of the internet, not just video. Basically doing what hulu does to stop screen recording/as blocking but across every webpage
Pardon formatting, on mobile. Its a form of device authentication. Apple does this with safari already BTW, and it can reduce things like captcha because the authentication is done on the backend when a request hits a server. While still an issue in concept with Apple doing it, chromium browsers are a much larger market share. In layman’s terms this is basically the company saying, hey you are attempting to visit this site, we need to verify the device (or browser, or add on configuration, or no ad blocker, etc) is ‘authentic’. Which of course is nebulous. It can be whatever the entity in charge of attestation wants it to be.
This sets the precedent that whomever is controlling verification, can deny whomever they see fit. I’m running GrapheneOS on my phone currently, they could deny for that. Or, if you are blocking ads. Maybe you’re not sharing specific information about your device, and they want to harvest that. Too bad, comply or you’re ‘not allowed to do x or y’.
This is the gist. The web should be able to be accessed by anybody. It isn’t for companies to own nor should it be built that way. Web2 is a corporate hellscape.
Edit wrt Safari: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
I suspect “authentic” will mean “pays a license fee to Google.” In this respect it will work like other forms of DRM, and it will have the same effect of excluding new and smaller players from the market. Except in this case the market is the whole of the web.
No, there are no fees at all. Authentic just means approved device state, which will be defined by the website you go to I believe. So youtube might required many different things in order to be “authentic” like no ad blockers, genuine browser, non-rooted phone, etc., whereas bank-xyz may just check for one thing, like a genuine browser. Also, websites have to enable this on their side, so its not going to be used by default on all websites. The whole thing is crap though, even if only a few websites enable this, it could have huge impacts.
Yeah, definitely. Some form of extortion because ultimately that’s what it will be either way. I mean, that’s really the whole point of being the party that chooses what is authentic or not (and, what the definition of that word even means in this context). Monetary, data, whatever. Gotta keep the bottom line increasing for shareholders.
Not necessarily. With some forms od tracking being curbed, just being sent the who accesses which webpage on what device when (the bare minimum for attestation) has lots of value. And google won’t stop at the bare minimum of data grabbing, of course.
Yeah, definitely. Some form of extortion because ultimately that’s what will happen either way. I mean, that’s really the whole point of being the party that chooses what is authentic or not (and, what the definition of that word even means in this context). Monetary, data, whatever. Gotta keep the bottom line increasing for shareholders.
From my limited understanding as a common pleb, they are inserting DRM into Chromium browsers to prevent ad-blockers.
Internet with no ad-blockers is like a nightmare
Living the dream.
Yes, it is a nightmare. The insane volume of ads and clickbait injected into web pages is killing the internet as an information source. Most of the searchable stuff is unusable. Which explains why ChatGPT was so enthusiastically embraced - it’s really just synthesizing content into a readable form that doesn’t require navigating around a jungle of animated gifs and flashing ads. That’s also I think why Lemmy and Mastodon are so refreshing to use, and hopefully will stay that way - although money seems to find a way to ruin everything. Lemmy right now feels a lot like the internet used to be before the big money came along and ruined it with advertising and platform lock-ins.
Right - that’s a good approach, however if you’re looking for a quick answer to an immediate question by searching using a common search engine, the garbage SEO pages are the most irritating, even with adblocking.
@fuser @Lem0n, the only AI I most use and which is really useful for me is Andisearch.
https://andisearch.comhttps://andisearch.com looks like it might be a better option - thank you so much for posting. I’m mostly using duck-duck-go which is tolerable but by this point we should have come up with a more useful way to index relevant information. Google would rather we see ads than any relevant content, which wasn’t the case when they first launched google in the late 1990s. Google was refreshing at the time because of its cleaner interface than yahoo and uncluttered results, amusingly enough - it’s a far cry from what it once was.
@fuser, Andi certainly is a fresh wind, it was the first search engine with AI which appears, before Google, Bing and the others. Great work of two very nice and friendly devs, Angie Hoover and Jed White, with an open ear to the user in their Discord channel for suggestions, feature request, bug report (well, it’s still in developement) or simple chat.
Well, thanks again for the info - I’m trying it now and the results seem excellent, it took me to wikiwand, which I’d never used but it’s a front end for wikipedia - it’s quite nice. I’ve learned so much about alternative FOSS and great ad-free content by reading and posting here. I was never a great fan of reddit - liked to scroll but hardly ever posted there - I thought RPAN was the coolest thing they did - but Lemmy is great for conversation, despite the relatively small user base - I’m grateful that reddit’s nonsense drove so many helpful people here.
To be fair, it is useful for other purposes, but the cost to users is likely to be huge, with ad blocking being one of them. It probably also prevents other things even outside your browser because there’s no point in securing a browser running in an untrusted environment. IIRC there is/was an issue running Netflix on certain Android devices and rooted devices after a similar feature was added to Android.
This would also hurt users that need accessibility extensions so they can properly browse websites that don’t have good accessibility features.
My S7 was running a custom rom, I had to manually download and install the Netflix apk, as the play store wouldn’t let me do it. WhatsApp was weird too, it would let you install, but there were a bunch of aggravating bugs, like if your device was on it showed you as “online”. Got in trouble at work because my boss thought I was on my phone all day.
Can someone ELI5 how this could prevent a fork of Chromium from just not playing nice and telling the website “yeah yeah, it’s all untempered *wink wink*” and then still remove/alter stuff as it pleases?
Edit: ok I think I got it … it’s basically the server that decides if it trusts the judgment of the client or not. Can’t wait to see that cat-and-mouse game going on 🙄
it’s basically the server that decides if it trusts the judgment of the client or not. Can’t wait to see that cat-and-mouse game going on
This is partially correct. The server will check that you have a valid token issued by a trusted third party, who will almost certainly be Google, Microsoft, or Apple. When you connect to the web page, your browser will give this token to the server and say “hey look I’m legit.” The token will have enough information on it to identify that it is relevant (being provided by a client that matches the hardware it is meant to verify) as well as a cryptographic signature that verifies it is in fact from the trusted third party. So it’s less the server trusting the judgement of the client than it is the server trusting the judgement of whatever third party is attesting to your system.
Yeah, I can imagine a fork of chromium existing that takes all the data and does the rendering pipeline “”“normally”“”, but then on the side does something completely different and shows THAT to the user, while giving the server an idea that nothing is wrong and what it is doing is just normal chromium stuff.
But such an idea will be done entirely by enthusiasts, slowly, on an obscure basis. For the majority of users, that will never even be a conceivable notion of something they can do with the internet. Itll never be something you see on a top, mainstream browser.
In other words, Google wins.
