Many Popular Censorship Circumvention Tools Deleted or Archived since November 2, 2023

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 297 points –
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There'll never be peace for this kind of projects. The source can be saved on thousands of private computers, but as long as they maintain a main distribution site for convenience, it'll always be a target, along with any smaller ones.

Yeah but is the same as a hydra, cut one head and 10 grow in its place

And hopefully that will remain true forever, but the trajectory of the internet in the last few years has me worried.

Yeah with Chrome’s announcement they are bringing back “Manifest API” next year, the internet is going to become really fragmented. Many sites will slowly switch to only supporting browsers that support it, and in turn don’t support ad blockers. And switching to another browser, or changing your user agent string will no longer work.

Step 1. Get a lot of smart people interested in working on technology.

Step 2. Make the world a shitty place so many of those people will do whatever jobs pay the highest.

Step 3. Corner software markets so that the goal of widely used software is purely to accelerate quarterly profits.

“Manifest API” has always been a thing. It’s only for extensions and DO NOT affect website support. You’re misreading the situation with Manifest v3 almost completely. Here, “Manifest” refers to the API used for extensions. The biggest differences are 1. Switching from always-on pages to services 2. Sabotaging the Adblock API, basically. User agents are unaffected. Websites do not care about it (except those who are anti Adblock).

You may be confusing things with WebEnvironmentIntegrity, which has been canceled with the team shifting focus to an Android-exclusive WebViews API which I haven’t studied yet.