Re:Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not...
by manquer on Monday October 04, 2021 @09:56PM
(#28754687)
Standards control has been never always direct since JScript days, the dominant players do what they please, and by the nature of dominance web app developers have to comply follow their tools, and standards get established de-facto.
Specifically, moves like changes in manifest V3 and removal of chrome.webRequest is aimed squarely at adblocking, Forcing DRM in HTML5 is a step in this direction as well and can become dangerous in conjunction with AV1 enhancements .
For example it may become feasible to dynamically mux content and ad streams without a separate network request if encoding is not as expensive as H264 today with AV1 . Coupled with DRM on HTMl5 it would be impossible for any plugin as streams will never be exposed available for "Piracy reasons". Even HDMI has support for DRM , the only analog/open/accessible format left will be the light stream to your eyes.
Re:Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not...
by matheusmoreira on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @11:41AM
(#28760968)
This would make ad blockers straight up illegal under the DMCA since they cannot circumvent these protections. I already oppose copyright and DRM for many reasons, I never expected advertising to become one of them.
God I hate these "industries".
I'm sure people will figure out a solution. Maybe some machine learning thing that identifies brands and just deletes them.
We already have extensions such as sponsor block.
> Google is removing web APIs and actively making its browser poorer
Yeah, that sucks. I've already switched to Firefox and I also keep Brave around. Google made it easy for me when it killed sync for custom Chromium builds.
> controlling the web standards that is making it increasingly technically difficult to block ads
What, really? Do you have examples of this? What web standards have they proposed that would make blocking ads harder?
> only Firefox supports an ad blocker at all and Mozilla generates 95% of its revenue from Google
I agree, that's a massive conflict of interest. I think Mozilla should work to solve that.
> We need better regulations
Agreed, but I still believe that technology is a potent and subversive weapon. The mere existence of ad blockers has forced these tech giants to change the way they operate. If we keep up the pressure, either we'll win and drive them out of the internet or they'll become ever more tyrannical in their attempts to maintain control, drawing more attention to themselves and hopefully inviting public condemnation and regulation.