Google Chrome's Web Environment Integrity feature has been cancelled

dean [any pronouns]@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 380 points –
Chrome not proceeding with Web Integrity API deemed by many to be DRM
9to5google.com

While WEI is thankfully cancelled, it's not entirely cancelled... They're planning on making it available still in WebViews with the intention that websites can check if a malicious Android app is trying to do a phishing scheme.

Seems like such a niche "security" feature... what are they really trying to accomplish here? Something seems fishy to me

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He means this builds all the backend and proof of concepts necessary to force it on every other environment, and websites will be prepared for the switch, giving the public that much less time to react when they push it to desktop again

It’s basically “OK, we can’t stop the pushback, so we’ll tell the public it will only work on android web view, but all teams keep working full steam, we’ll wait to merge into the bigger systems until all this dies down, and we won’t have lost any dev time!”

That's what he wrote in his second paragraph and it's a fair point. In his third paragraph (the one I quoted) he claims that just having that functionality in webviews is already a "huge loss" though and I was curious what kind of scenario he was thinking of.

You don’t think having to go through all this to stop it again next time, but it’s even harder because it can now be implemented orders of magnitude faster than before, counts as a “huge loss”?

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