I hope **chrome **fails terribly. Just like Internet Explorer(IE). Firefox all the way
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.).
Are we seriously sitting here, in the shadow of the open internet's apocalypse, complaining yet again about Firefox's UI?
It's like Superman trying to rescue you from a fire and you complaining about his breath.
There's no UI in the world that will make the internet bareable without functional ad blockers.
Hey, I switched to Firefox because I liked its UI better (after Quantum though)
Yes. Because the UI and UX of a tool that you use everyday matters. The average user will hold ease of use over privacy 9 times out of 10. In my case though I wasn’t able to use FF for a while due to the lack of debugger support for a project I was working on. Now it comes down to me having to work on multiple projects at once so tab groups and organization are key. Now don’t get me wrong, once Chrome totally kills adblockers I’ll drop Chromium browsers like a bad habit, but the point still stands though, FF could use some UI improvements.
Id argue on mobile for instance, firefox is easier to use. One of the LARGEST differences between chrome and firefox from a UI standpoint is bottom search/site box over top one, especially for larger phones.
This of course doesnt consider anything related to addons yet.
Hey you have genuine wants and needs from a web browser and I respect that.
I'll say though that this sort of attitude (well Chrome has this little thing I like so I allow them to take control of what was once the independent internet) is what is going to screw us.
I use FF. But I also use Chromium based browsers out of necessity. I understand where you’re coming from but what’s also going to screw us is Mozilla not keeping up with the latest features which is something they’ve struggled with. At the end of the day they have to give people a reason to switch and use FF as their main browser. Simply saying “better privacy features” isn’t enough for the average user.
Anyone still using Google products is a fuckin idiot, IMO
I'm sorry but this sentiment is so utterly detached from the technical capabilities and general engagement of the average layman that it bears a response.
Tech savvy people have this awful habit of calling anyone not in our specific field an idiot when they don't do things our preferred way, and it's not a good look. Those people aren't the weird ones, we are. And if you're the sort of person who thinks you've elevated yourself above the commoners because you don't use Google's stuff ... yeah, that and 5 bucks will get you a latte. There are oceans of professional expertise you're not privvy to, and unless you really think you're doing better than everyone at everything, a little humility, temperance, and grace for others is warranted.
I have to agree with this.
I’m basically “the idiot”. Decently tech savvy, but non-IT. Very capable of learning what I need to know, but I haven’t really had the time or mental capacity to learn how to do a lot of the things I need to to get away from corporate overlords.
I’m working on it, and have been for a while, but in the meantime I do use several google services, because that’s what I’ve been using for many many years and change is really hard. Especially when you have to initiate the change yourself, and especially when you know if you switch to a stop-gap solution you’ll loose all impetus to actually keep making the change (which I will).
The biggest challenge is learning what is worth it to self-host, what hard/software to use for the configuration I want, what’s compatible with devices I own (windows, Linux, iOS and android), etc. I’ve been running Plex for like 10 years now (windows then Linux), but it’s a very basic setup on a host pc I don’t use for much else. Beyond that, I need to learn almost everything from the bottom up, and that’s a lot to learn -just- to avoid an existing company and their existing products that I’ve been using for years. Unlike my Plex content, I would actually care if I lost my other self-host data, so not something to fuck around half-ass with.
I can’t blame people for not wanting to/knowing how to do it. I like learning this shit (because of the end result, not because I have interest in it, sorry not sorry) and I still don’t actually want to do it.
OK, then let's check my idiocy.
Web-browser? I'm using Firefox since the beginning of this year.
Email? I've an account on ProtonMail for serious stuff, and Gmail for garbage, less serious stuff and spam collector.
Cloud storage? Well, unless anyone can gift me a Raspberry Pi, a hub and an ELI5 Nextcloud manual for dummies, I have to keep using Google Drive.
Videos? That depends. I'm watching videos on Youtube, but I'm uploading my own content on Peertube.
Phone? I need another ELI5 custom rom manual for dummies, and it has to be specific for my device. Otherwise, I'll keep using Android, but with most minimum usage of Google apps.
I think that's all.
Can't fix everything, but Google drive is easily replaced by proton drive. Google notes/keep or any kind of note taking is easily replaced (and improved) by Obsidian, and on android you can install f-droid as an alternative store.
Downside is that these thinks cost money. But everything has a cost, and at least here the cost is clear, and upfront.
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.
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
Vlans babe!!
They already do that from my Android phone, and I'm sure as hell not going Apple. Linux phones aren't there yet, maybe in a few years, but I'll still need an Android phone for the same reasons I'd need a Chromebok, bank apps will never support Linux phones. And yeah, like everybody said, VLANs. I already have one for untrusted IoT devices, I'll just spin up another for Chromebooks.
Not mine. I have a VLAN for that.
Yeah VLANs seem like a viable option for the average user. ;-)
It's true, but you can say that about almost anything. For example, for the "average" user lemmy is confusing compared to reddit.
Besides, I'm just talking about how I tackle diseases inside my network, not what the average user should do.
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.
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.
I wish google was as good at procrastinating as I am.
Their old principle was ‘don’t be evil’. The fact they no longer say that tells you everything
Somewhere, sometime, there was a meeting at Google where they decided that value would be dropped.
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
I don’t get the “/s”.
The #GDPR is absolutely a perfect example of ½-assed laws & loopholes. I have filed reports on dozens of GDPR violations; not a single one of them lead to enforcement. The GDPR is just a prop to make people feel comfortable as the EU destroys the offline infrastructure.
I did as well for the Catholic Church. I don't want to have my name associated with a gang of child molesters so I invoked the right to be forgotten. The church told me that baptism is sacred and cannot be undone. The Dutch institution for GDPR claims never did anything about it because they're overloaded with requests.
Oh well, I'm not willing to give it more energy either. It's mildly annoying but doesn't affect my day to day life.
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.
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.
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.
Alright, today is oficially the day I switch to Firefox
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.
a decade ago.
I believe that policy was reduced or removed many years ago. Around the time when all the cool new projects stopped, and Google scrubbed "don't be evil" from their site and company philosophy.
Just following orders is not the ironclad excuse some of you seem to think it is.
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.
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.
If it could be spoofed easily, wouldn't that defeat the point?
I mean you can't just "spoof" a ssl cert or private ssh key, I have to assume this is at least that good.
You're relying on the device to provide a signal of authenticity with this model. Firefox can simply say it's authentic. However this will just lead to any signals from Firefox being ignored by any site... So Firefox would actually just need to spoof whatever signals Chrome is using... And thanks to Chromium being open source that shouldn't be too hard. If it's a device ID or mac address that's being used to show uniqueness, that can be randomized and presented to sites...
I haven't looked at the spec... and from my understanding the Spec isn't even finalized yet... I could be wrong. But It's certainly not going to be a case that each webhost has a complete list of ssl certs from every client... That's never going to happen. It could be that a cert is issued to Apple and Google, and they sub-cert out to individual devices for identities. Not sure what would stop firefox from just pulling a glut of certs and rotating them out regularly.
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.
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.
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'm ready.
I can't get into discord. As an old EFnet user, it's just clunky to me? I'm not sure, but it's not sticking for me
I was a regular Teamspeak user and Discord is just more friendly than TS imo
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.
There is an author - Tad Williams, who wrote the "Otherland" series. One of the chapters has the some of the main ensemble going to "treehouse" - aka what happened in this universe when the nerds, geeks and techno wizards took their ball and went home.
The series as a whole is interesting if you like sci-fi. That chapter however seems more and more on the nose the older I get.
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.
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.
I still find it ironic that I use their products (Pixel) specifically to not use their products (GrapheneOS). Though in the past it was OnePlus with LinageOS.
It is ironic, but the Pixel is good piece of hardware. So you discard the crap (Google software) and keep what is good (the hardware). That is the way forward. Discard chrome, keep Chromium or Brave for example.
I'm genuinely curious. Is it feasible that they maintain their own chromium forks, or will the work become too much if Google keeps inserting more and more crap into it?
Yup. Start by not using Google's search engine. Use DuckDuckGo, instead.
Duckduck is definitely a good start, but keep in mind it just anonymizes Google search for you. Brave, Quant, Mojeek and more have indexed their own databases. We need entirely different setups to get around Google's massive censorship and opinion shaping algos that Duckduck cannot bypass. Searx is also interesting as it allows you to choose from a large list of different search engines.
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..
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.
TIL about Mojeek. I know this wasn't the focus of your reply, but thanks for the tip.
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.
Google engineers want me to stop using anything from google
Already switched to proton mail, MEGA, startpage search , firefox. Hoping more people to donate to pine64 Linux phones so that they become mainstream.
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.
I've even seen websites that copy stackoverflow questions and answers word for word, and just displays them differently.
I think that's spammy SEO abuse though... Not circumventing ads or anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Smart people coming up with smart ideas to do dumb things. When will we start shaming such people?
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 retarded proposal are not constructive enough.
The most constructive that can ever be said about this is "fuck right off" dude.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes because that's beneficial to society and definitely not solely for the purpose of making the company and their executives richer.
They'll succeed if they keep it up. My Pixel is the buggiest phone I've ever had anyway. I hate a lot of the weird little iPhone restrictions but at this point Android is getting irritating. It should be best on the Pixel but it's not. All this BS trying to kill the open Internet is just a good reason to cut Google out, especially browser wise and device/OS.
Imagine if ads had remained a single static banner at the top/bottom of the page and was hosted by the site itself. Maybe there wouldn't be an arms race to infiltrate every aspect of our digital lives.
I'm working on the contrary, some sort of gemini web plus with modules, to keep the engine as small as possible to make porting/reinventions easier. The engine only provides basics like displaying text. Modules provide functionality like 'video player', gallery', 'search bar with filters', 'login', keeping webshops, company pages, etc. in mind. There's no JS or CSS, the styling is entirely in the hand of the browser/user (including dark mode, mobile view), the servers push only content. Likewise, active logins and payments will be handled by the browser, not the webpage. Though it will not be compatible with HTTPS/the current web. The protocol and the browser will be licensed open source.
I'm still planning, it's not even in the prototype phase yet. Should i push this further? If so, how would i get financial support? opentech.fund, ngi.edu, nlnet?
They can't stop dns filters :)
Yes they can. DNS blocking doesn't stop YouTube ads, for example. They could also force chrome to use their own DNS servers and use attestation to make sure you're not bypassing that somehow
This guy is amazing. He is asking for patience to move this to a proper place to discuss this website drm and then commits it to chrome lol.
Fuckers
I don’t think it’s an engineer problem as much as a management problem. The implementation is done by the engineers, sure, but it’s the product managers who decide the direction and it’s them who are at fault here
You're right, they can only try. They can express concerns, they can interpret goals a little differently to minimize harm, they can stretch the truth and make the project seem less feasible. None of that is going to do much if management is driving this through - loudly resigning in protest is the last move, and unless you have a big name it's not going to do much.
But you're wrong that I'm coming at this as a consumer - I'm a dev and I've been put in this situation before (although our work wasn't public).
You're also wrong on the googler front - most of them aren't making that much, better than they'd make most other places, but not life changing amounts
When you talk to a googler, there's a pride, and buried under that usually an insecurity. They got into the bleeding edge of tech... Or so they thought.
Last Thanksgiving I was talking to someone who worked for them, and once the conversation got technical I could see it in his eyes. I happened to be well versed in the topic, and so I started asking questions about his approach. And as much as I tried to hide it (he is family) he must've seen the disappointment on my face... He just deflated. He knew deep down what he was doing wasn't actually that cool or special - it's just a lie that he hears constantly
Working at a company like Google, you're constantly being told you're doing important work that could change the world. There's pride and status there. They've crafted a bubble where everyone reinforces that belief, that "what we're doing is good and important"
When you step outside that bubble and realize the technical community doesn't respect you, personally, not because of Google but because of your own actions? That pokes a person right in the place they put their self-worth
Sites that won't load unless I them ad-berserker over my web browser I just don't visit anymore. Seriously. There are a million bazillion web pages out there. The internet managed just fine with people posting pages of relevant links to other similar or recommended other websites back in the Day when Google didn't even exist yet (I had one myself) and other curated web search sites like https://curlie.org/en (and I contributed link suggestions to the ones like this back then). The only thing we can't do today that we could back then is run BBS sites for each other off our home land lines. I'm not so worried.
So, Google, the Overlord of the Internet apperantly, wishes to make his Kingdom an uninhabitable hellscape of constant ad harrassment that anyone who wants to keep their sanity will interact with as little as possible, only going there when necessary.
Ok, then. Good luck with that Business.
Just wondering, will one day Humanity, who has pretty much agreed in perfect unison completely independent from each other, since the golden age of television, that we all hate ads, finally be heard?
The issue tracker of the GitHub repo is just ridiculous.
Really curious about how they'll try this shit in the EU. That'll be fun.
Can someone shed some light for me? I'm a noob and I'm not sure I understand what is being proposed by google here. From what I can tell, they're proposing a cryptographically signed token that details information about a website user's 'environment', which I take to mean, their device OS and browser information, for the sake of verifying their humanity for website owners and advertisers. Isn't this sort of information already collected when a user visits a webpage, and doesn't google (or whomever) already collect and use this data (and more) for fingerprinting? How is this new proposal different, and something to be specifically concerned about?
I know there are anti-fingerprinting browser privacy addons that spoof this information, or prevent its collection. Is the concern that these tools will become inoperable?
For the record I don't like google or any company collecting any fingerprinting information, but it's already being done widely and in an unregulated manner, isn't it?
Using the proposed “Web Environment Integrity” means websites can select on which devices (browsers) they wish to be displayed, and can refuse service to other devices. It binds client side software to a website, creating a silo’d app. Web Environment Integrity on GitHub This penalizes platforms on which the preferred client side software is not available.
This will also affect all the Chromium based clients (Chrome, obviously, Brave, Vivaldi...)
USE FIREFOX(Librewolf), PEOPLE. SUPPORT THE OPENWEB
The thought here is that, a website could be programmed to, for example, only be accessible to users of chrome (or even an android device), correct? Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers? That could be really transformative for the web, because then you'd have microsoft doing the same thing with edge, apple doing the same thing with safari, other companies like fb or whatever launching their own bespoke 'browsers' to access their services. Will users actually put up with the degree of fragmentation that this move might bring? Won't it just push users to the 'old internet' where you can simply go to a website and interact with it?
Sorry, I'm kind of talking out loud here trying to wrap my head around this. I see people grousing about DRM and ads, and I'm struggling to connect all the dots.
I can't speak for how other people browse, but when I come across an article with a paywall, I tend to say "eh, it wasn't that important anyway" and leave. Or if it really is important, I'll search for the title and try to find the information on a site without a paywall.
If there ends up being a "browser wall", I'll certainly do the same thing. No article/web app is so important or unique that it's worth quitting my preferred browser (Firefox) and switching to something I like less.
But what's scary to me, as a Firefox user, is that Chrome & Safari are so extremely dominant. If companies are forced to choose between supporting Chrome (60% share), Safari (20% share), or Firefox (3% share), it's clear that Firefox users will run out of sites to use pretty quickly.
Right, if this sort of browser wall thing happens (which, the doctrine of enshittification seems to dictate that it probably will), and it can't be spoofed or worked around. Alright, I'm seeing the issues here. Thanks for chiming in with your thoughts. This is a huge deal, if it goes in this sort of direction.
Life finds a way
Yarr
I hope **chrome **fails terribly. Just like Internet Explorer(IE). Firefox all the way
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.).
Are we seriously sitting here, in the shadow of the open internet's apocalypse, complaining yet again about Firefox's UI?
It's like Superman trying to rescue you from a fire and you complaining about his breath.
There's no UI in the world that will make the internet bareable without functional ad blockers.
Hey, I switched to Firefox because I liked its UI better (after Quantum though)
Yes. Because the UI and UX of a tool that you use everyday matters. The average user will hold ease of use over privacy 9 times out of 10. In my case though I wasn’t able to use FF for a while due to the lack of debugger support for a project I was working on. Now it comes down to me having to work on multiple projects at once so tab groups and organization are key. Now don’t get me wrong, once Chrome totally kills adblockers I’ll drop Chromium browsers like a bad habit, but the point still stands though, FF could use some UI improvements.
Id argue on mobile for instance, firefox is easier to use. One of the LARGEST differences between chrome and firefox from a UI standpoint is bottom search/site box over top one, especially for larger phones.
This of course doesnt consider anything related to addons yet.
Or Mr. Incredible being sued for saving a guy commuting suicide..
I can send a tab from my mobile Firefox to my desktop Firefox by default, so that's at least one of those that doesn't need an extension.
Firefox already natively supports most of the features you listed.
Hey you have genuine wants and needs from a web browser and I respect that.
I'll say though that this sort of attitude (well Chrome has this little thing I like so I allow them to take control of what was once the independent internet) is what is going to screw us.
I use FF. But I also use Chromium based browsers out of necessity. I understand where you’re coming from but what’s also going to screw us is Mozilla not keeping up with the latest features which is something they’ve struggled with. At the end of the day they have to give people a reason to switch and use FF as their main browser. Simply saying “better privacy features” isn’t enough for the average user.
Anyone still using Google products is a fuckin idiot, IMO
I'm sorry but this sentiment is so utterly detached from the technical capabilities and general engagement of the average layman that it bears a response.
Tech savvy people have this awful habit of calling anyone not in our specific field an idiot when they don't do things our preferred way, and it's not a good look. Those people aren't the weird ones, we are. And if you're the sort of person who thinks you've elevated yourself above the commoners because you don't use Google's stuff ... yeah, that and 5 bucks will get you a latte. There are oceans of professional expertise you're not privvy to, and unless you really think you're doing better than everyone at everything, a little humility, temperance, and grace for others is warranted.
I have to agree with this.
I’m basically “the idiot”. Decently tech savvy, but non-IT. Very capable of learning what I need to know, but I haven’t really had the time or mental capacity to learn how to do a lot of the things I need to to get away from corporate overlords.
I’m working on it, and have been for a while, but in the meantime I do use several google services, because that’s what I’ve been using for many many years and change is really hard. Especially when you have to initiate the change yourself, and especially when you know if you switch to a stop-gap solution you’ll loose all impetus to actually keep making the change (which I will).
The biggest challenge is learning what is worth it to self-host, what hard/software to use for the configuration I want, what’s compatible with devices I own (windows, Linux, iOS and android), etc. I’ve been running Plex for like 10 years now (windows then Linux), but it’s a very basic setup on a host pc I don’t use for much else. Beyond that, I need to learn almost everything from the bottom up, and that’s a lot to learn -just- to avoid an existing company and their existing products that I’ve been using for years. Unlike my Plex content, I would actually care if I lost my other self-host data, so not something to fuck around half-ass with.
I can’t blame people for not wanting to/knowing how to do it. I like learning this shit (because of the end result, not because I have interest in it, sorry not sorry) and I still don’t actually want to do it.
OK, then let's check my idiocy.
Web-browser? I'm using Firefox since the beginning of this year.
Email? I've an account on ProtonMail for serious stuff, and Gmail for garbage, less serious stuff and spam collector.
Cloud storage? Well, unless anyone can gift me a Raspberry Pi, a hub and an ELI5 Nextcloud manual for dummies, I have to keep using Google Drive.
Videos? That depends. I'm watching videos on Youtube, but I'm uploading my own content on Peertube.
Phone? I need another ELI5 custom rom manual for dummies, and it has to be specific for my device. Otherwise, I'll keep using Android, but with most minimum usage of Google apps.
I think that's all.
Can't fix everything, but Google drive is easily replaced by proton drive. Google notes/keep or any kind of note taking is easily replaced (and improved) by Obsidian, and on android you can install f-droid as an alternative store.
Downside is that these thinks cost money. But everything has a cost, and at least here the cost is clear, and upfront.
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.
And then the plan to force everyone to abandon Firefox whether they like it or not.
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
Vlans babe!!
They already do that from my Android phone, and I'm sure as hell not going Apple. Linux phones aren't there yet, maybe in a few years, but I'll still need an Android phone for the same reasons I'd need a Chromebok, bank apps will never support Linux phones. And yeah, like everybody said, VLANs. I already have one for untrusted IoT devices, I'll just spin up another for Chromebooks.
Not mine. I have a VLAN for that.
Yeah VLANs seem like a viable option for the average user. ;-)
It's true, but you can say that about almost anything. For example, for the "average" user lemmy is confusing compared to reddit.
Besides, I'm just talking about how I tackle diseases inside my network, not what the average user should do.
Google Exec: "But you did buy it, yes?"
Not from them! They don't make a dime when I buy yours.
Also gotta make sure it doesn't "expire" or be the sucker buying ewaste that's "no longer supported"
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.
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.
I wish google was as good at procrastinating as I am.
Their old principle was ‘don’t be evil’. The fact they no longer say that tells you everything
Somewhere, sometime, there was a meeting at Google where they decided that value would be dropped.
When Gmail debuted and it was invited only 😊
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
I don’t get the “/s”.
The #GDPR is absolutely a perfect example of ½-assed laws & loopholes. I have filed reports on dozens of GDPR violations; not a single one of them lead to enforcement. The GDPR is just a prop to make people feel comfortable as the EU destroys the offline infrastructure.
I did as well for the Catholic Church. I don't want to have my name associated with a gang of child molesters so I invoked the right to be forgotten. The church told me that baptism is sacred and cannot be undone. The Dutch institution for GDPR claims never did anything about it because they're overloaded with requests.
Oh well, I'm not willing to give it more energy either. It's mildly annoying but doesn't affect my day to day life.
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.
"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.
Do? No, evil.
The internet is unusable without adblockers.
I’ve tried internet without adblock and it’s almost unusable.
Use Firefox.
Support Firefox.
Using alternative Chromium based browsers is not it.
Firefox is wonderful 💯
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.
Just when I thought the idea of DRM internet couldn't be any more depressing...
Alright, today is oficially the day I switch to Firefox
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.
a decade ago.
I believe that policy was reduced or removed many years ago. Around the time when all the cool new projects stopped, and Google scrubbed "don't be evil" from their site and company philosophy.
Just following orders is not the ironclad excuse some of you seem to think it is.
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 bitch.
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.
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.
If it could be spoofed easily, wouldn't that defeat the point?
I mean you can't just "spoof" a ssl cert or private ssh key, I have to assume this is at least that good.
You're relying on the device to provide a signal of authenticity with this model. Firefox can simply say it's authentic. However this will just lead to any signals from Firefox being ignored by any site... So Firefox would actually just need to spoof whatever signals Chrome is using... And thanks to Chromium being open source that shouldn't be too hard. If it's a device ID or mac address that's being used to show uniqueness, that can be randomized and presented to sites...
I haven't looked at the spec... and from my understanding the Spec isn't even finalized yet... I could be wrong. But It's certainly not going to be a case that each webhost has a complete list of ssl certs from every client... That's never going to happen. It could be that a cert is issued to Apple and Google, and they sub-cert out to individual devices for identities. Not sure what would stop firefox from just pulling a glut of certs and rotating them out regularly.
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.
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'm ready.
I can't get into discord. As an old EFnet user, it's just clunky to me? I'm not sure, but it's not sticking for me
I was a regular Teamspeak user and Discord is just more friendly than TS imo
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.
There is an author - Tad Williams, who wrote the "Otherland" series. One of the chapters has the some of the main ensemble going to "treehouse" - aka what happened in this universe when the nerds, geeks and techno wizards took their ball and went home. The series as a whole is interesting if you like sci-fi. That chapter however seems more and more on the nose the older I get.
I don't know if it's the Google engineers that "want" to do this
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.
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.
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.
I still find it ironic that I use their products (Pixel) specifically to not use their products (GrapheneOS). Though in the past it was OnePlus with LinageOS.
It is ironic, but the Pixel is good piece of hardware. So you discard the crap (Google software) and keep what is good (the hardware). That is the way forward. Discard chrome, keep Chromium or Brave for example.
I'm genuinely curious. Is it feasible that they maintain their own chromium forks, or will the work become too much if Google keeps inserting more and more crap into it?
Trouble is that means using an iPhone. I just came from there. Apple suck in their own unique ways and are no better really.
Yup. Start by not using Google's search engine. Use DuckDuckGo, instead.
Duckduck is definitely a good start, but keep in mind it just anonymizes Google search for you. Brave, Quant, Mojeek and more have indexed their own databases. We need entirely different setups to get around Google's massive censorship and opinion shaping algos that Duckduck cannot bypass. Searx is also interesting as it allows you to choose from a large list of different search engines.
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.
We live in a fascist society so I wouldn't be suprised of their audacity..
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.
TIL about Mojeek. I know this wasn't the focus of your reply, but thanks for the tip.
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.
Google engineers want me to stop using anything from google
Already switched to proton mail, MEGA, startpage search , firefox. Hoping more people to donate to pine64 Linux phones so that they become mainstream.
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.
I've even seen websites that copy stackoverflow questions and answers word for word, and just displays them differently.
I think that's spammy SEO abuse though... Not circumventing ads or anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Smart people coming up with smart ideas to do dumb things. When will we start shaming such people?
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 retarded 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.
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.
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
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.
What a cursed timeline this is
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
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain
They have become the villain a long time back.
I can’t imagine anyone who uses the internet thinking the current ad technology is effective, the web is broken because of ads
Google engineers need to fuck off.
Fixed that for you
👍
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.
Per the article, this is already being integrated into Chromium as we speak, as in days ago: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/6f47a22906b2899412e79a2727355efa9cc8f5bd
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?
Imagine someone telling you this is your job and you do it.
Maybe we should create another internet?
Something you can yell out during sex, like "Pied Piper!"
With blackjack? And hookers?
Kinda what we're doing here, right?
this is why I'm switching to firefox
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.
Yes because that's beneficial to society and definitely not solely for the purpose of making the company and their executives richer.
"Curse googles sudden but constant betrayal!"
Basically adware.
It's NOT the engineers. It's the executives and corporate management that decides that. The engineers just get paid to implement it.
I think the key is not Firefox but Apple. If Apple does not join the DRM web future, Google cannot force it.
Unfortunately Apple has a much worse track record than Google when it comes to giving it's customers control over their own hardware and software.
Apple has already joined DRN web future. Read Here:- https://opidea.xyz/post/4785
Well... https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
It's almost like Google wants me to trade my android phone in on an iphone.
You'll still be using a Chromium based browser. Best bet is to switch to Firefox.
Safari isn't Chromium based. Chromium's engine is forked from Safari.
They'll succeed if they keep it up. My Pixel is the buggiest phone I've ever had anyway. I hate a lot of the weird little iPhone restrictions but at this point Android is getting irritating. It should be best on the Pixel but it's not. All this BS trying to kill the open Internet is just a good reason to cut Google out, especially browser wise and device/OS.
Just use a Degoogled Android phone.
Imagine if ads had remained a single static banner at the top/bottom of the page and was hosted by the site itself. Maybe there wouldn't be an arms race to infiltrate every aspect of our digital lives.
Welp, there we go.
I'm working on the contrary, some sort of gemini web plus with modules, to keep the engine as small as possible to make porting/reinventions easier. The engine only provides basics like displaying text. Modules provide functionality like 'video player', gallery', 'search bar with filters', 'login', keeping webshops, company pages, etc. in mind. There's no JS or CSS, the styling is entirely in the hand of the browser/user (including dark mode, mobile view), the servers push only content. Likewise, active logins and payments will be handled by the browser, not the webpage. Though it will not be compatible with HTTPS/the current web. The protocol and the browser will be licensed open source.
I'm still planning, it's not even in the prototype phase yet. Should i push this further? If so, how would i get financial support? opentech.fund, ngi.edu, nlnet?
They can't stop dns filters :)
Yes they can. DNS blocking doesn't stop YouTube ads, for example. They could also force chrome to use their own DNS servers and use attestation to make sure you're not bypassing that somehow
This guy is amazing. He is asking for patience to move this to a proper place to discuss this website drm and then commits it to chrome lol.
Fuckers
I don’t think it’s an engineer problem as much as a management problem. The implementation is done by the engineers, sure, but it’s the product managers who decide the direction and it’s them who are at fault here
You're right, they can only try. They can express concerns, they can interpret goals a little differently to minimize harm, they can stretch the truth and make the project seem less feasible. None of that is going to do much if management is driving this through - loudly resigning in protest is the last move, and unless you have a big name it's not going to do much.
But you're wrong that I'm coming at this as a consumer - I'm a dev and I've been put in this situation before (although our work wasn't public).
You're also wrong on the googler front - most of them aren't making that much, better than they'd make most other places, but not life changing amounts
When you talk to a googler, there's a pride, and buried under that usually an insecurity. They got into the bleeding edge of tech... Or so they thought.
Last Thanksgiving I was talking to someone who worked for them, and once the conversation got technical I could see it in his eyes. I happened to be well versed in the topic, and so I started asking questions about his approach. And as much as I tried to hide it (he is family) he must've seen the disappointment on my face... He just deflated. He knew deep down what he was doing wasn't actually that cool or special - it's just a lie that he hears constantly
Working at a company like Google, you're constantly being told you're doing important work that could change the world. There's pride and status there. They've crafted a bubble where everyone reinforces that belief, that "what we're doing is good and important"
When you step outside that bubble and realize the technical community doesn't respect you, personally, not because of Google but because of your own actions? That pokes a person right in the place they put their self-worth
Sites that won't load unless I them ad-berserker over my web browser I just don't visit anymore. Seriously. There are a million bazillion web pages out there. The internet managed just fine with people posting pages of relevant links to other similar or recommended other websites back in the Day when Google didn't even exist yet (I had one myself) and other curated web search sites like https://curlie.org/en (and I contributed link suggestions to the ones like this back then). The only thing we can't do today that we could back then is run BBS sites for each other off our home land lines. I'm not so worried.
Edit: typo
So, Google, the Overlord of the Internet apperantly, wishes to make his Kingdom an uninhabitable hellscape of constant ad harrassment that anyone who wants to keep their sanity will interact with as little as possible, only going there when necessary.
Ok, then. Good luck with that Business.
Just wondering, will one day Humanity, who has pretty much agreed in perfect unison completely independent from each other, since the golden age of television, that we all hate ads, finally be heard?
The issue tracker of the GitHub repo is just ridiculous.
Really curious about how they'll try this shit in the EU. That'll be fun.
Can someone shed some light for me? I'm a noob and I'm not sure I understand what is being proposed by google here. From what I can tell, they're proposing a cryptographically signed token that details information about a website user's 'environment', which I take to mean, their device OS and browser information, for the sake of verifying their humanity for website owners and advertisers. Isn't this sort of information already collected when a user visits a webpage, and doesn't google (or whomever) already collect and use this data (and more) for fingerprinting? How is this new proposal different, and something to be specifically concerned about?
I know there are anti-fingerprinting browser privacy addons that spoof this information, or prevent its collection. Is the concern that these tools will become inoperable?
For the record I don't like google or any company collecting any fingerprinting information, but it's already being done widely and in an unregulated manner, isn't it?
From Young-Lord/fight-for-the-open-web.
This will also affect all the Chromium based clients (Chrome, obviously, Brave, Vivaldi...)
USE FIREFOX(Librewolf), PEOPLE. SUPPORT THE OPENWEB
The thought here is that, a website could be programmed to, for example, only be accessible to users of chrome (or even an android device), correct? Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers? That could be really transformative for the web, because then you'd have microsoft doing the same thing with edge, apple doing the same thing with safari, other companies like fb or whatever launching their own bespoke 'browsers' to access their services. Will users actually put up with the degree of fragmentation that this move might bring? Won't it just push users to the 'old internet' where you can simply go to a website and interact with it?
Sorry, I'm kind of talking out loud here trying to wrap my head around this. I see people grousing about DRM and ads, and I'm struggling to connect all the dots.
I can't speak for how other people browse, but when I come across an article with a paywall, I tend to say "eh, it wasn't that important anyway" and leave. Or if it really is important, I'll search for the title and try to find the information on a site without a paywall.
If there ends up being a "browser wall", I'll certainly do the same thing. No article/web app is so important or unique that it's worth quitting my preferred browser (Firefox) and switching to something I like less.
But what's scary to me, as a Firefox user, is that Chrome & Safari are so extremely dominant. If companies are forced to choose between supporting Chrome (60% share), Safari (20% share), or Firefox (3% share), it's clear that Firefox users will run out of sites to use pretty quickly.
Right, if this sort of browser wall thing happens (which, the doctrine of enshittification seems to dictate that it probably will), and it can't be spoofed or worked around. Alright, I'm seeing the issues here. Thanks for chiming in with your thoughts. This is a huge deal, if it goes in this sort of direction.
Don't blame the engineers. It's leadership.
I am also very worried about the privacy implications of storing these tokens (as mentioned in the post).
Apple and Cloudflare already added something like this called Private Access Tokens https://developer.apple.com/news/
Why don’t they collaborate with them?
Cash Rules Everything Around Me...