Is EFF still the place to send money?
It’s very likely governments will make this mandatory if they have the chance to regulate over this.
"At the same time, Schmidt has been appointed to numerous White House advisory positions, giving him privileged insight into the administration’s policies in technology, science and military defense, as well as unusual access to top policymakers."
https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/eric-schmid...
A quick Google of "eric schmidt obama" brings up a lot of articles discussing their close political relationship.
It could be said that Schmidt influenced important decisions in the tech realm, to a degree nearly equal to executive authority, because it presumably (and greatly) outweighs the opinions of the other heads of Big Tech, so long as Obama was naive enough to agree with him on key issues he didn't fully understand.
Of course, anyone could assert this about an advisor to a President depending on the President's level of knowledge and outright willingness to apply their advice, even if in spite of fairness, rights, laws, or precedents.
There have been many questionable advisor appointments by previous presidents. Including the last president.
The other side to this issue is despite the scrutiny towards big tech, they can still lobby and make any regulatory actions seem effective, when in practice, they've already gotten their fingers into influencing policy in such a way that doesn't ultimately address the consumers' concerns.
I'm a FF user since the early 00's and Firefox will mostly not go away because Google has an interest in using it against monopoly accusations but the reality is bleak..
And the reality is these people ( Google in this case ) are so far removed from any moral compass about the Web ( at least what most people here think of "the Web" ) that it's near impossible to do anything about it. These companies are huge and from top to bottom there are certain groups that are hired guns to do a job, no matter what "job" it is, they'll do it, achieve those KPIs, get promoted, get paid. Even for their own detriment in the future, it doesn't matter. Big money now, screw the rest.
Btw, this is how every big company operated since forever, the only "news" here is the disproportionate impact their acts do to the World due to their huge size and influence.
Live Nation is the name.
The only choice is to boycott your favorite artist because their record label made a deal with the wrong company. That's too many layers of indirection, for many fans.
Google Meet does have some key features missing on Firefox such as blurring / changing video background.
Firefox does some things better (like PiP video playback on most websites, like YouTube!) but others are so poorly done (like Profiles) compared to Chrome that it overall makes Chrome my first choice browser.
Which sort of underscores the monopoly point. There’s no universal free/cheap alternative to Meet, further entrenching Chromium.
It's free and open source, works everywhere, has stuff like background replacement, and doesn't require signup at all.
He provides a nice piece of anecdata there: for one-on-one meetings, you can just send people a link and usually they just join. Even if they've sent a link to Zoom or Meet or whatever, you still can say “hey, join this instead” and it will work. I haven't tried this yet, but sounds plausible to me.
A chrome browser on the same device has maps behave almost instantaneously.
I mostly use maps via an app (Apple or Google, they seem to be the same for basic use). Usually if I’m using a map, I’ll be using it in my car for navigation, so Firefox doesn’t even come to mind.
I suspect, on top of the “maybe it is internal apps” thing I mentioned at first, some of the really bad sites are the really interactive ones, I probably just use the app without even thinking of it.
So its a regular drag for me. If I really need to move quick to find something, I'll begrudgingly open chrome.
It's just the latest Firefox release, recompiled without all the Mozilla telemetry, and with all the settings flipped to more secure/private defaults so all the tracking features are opt-in instead of opt-out.
Firefox is actually a pretty good example of good branding. It’s short, rolls off the tongue, has pleasant alliteration, and evokes mental imagery.
Seriously, how is this a question? (Unless you want to go with another independent option, then sure)
I don't see how this matters, it's an open source project, if people find enough value, it will be forked and improved by community or a new organization will form around it. This is the beauty of open source, you must embrace.
Making FF more prominent will not give Google more power, it will give Mozilla more power to negotiate better deals with Google and Bing to become the default search engine, because in the world of browsers, that's what pays the bills.
Giving more power to Mozilla hinges on them having a larger user-base so their voice is heard on these technical issues.
I'm tired of people complaining about how much better they could do "if only" this, or that FF was % slower on some tasks 10 years ago.
Firefox is a better alternative. It's the only alternative, and we can make more demand on its direction if we actually use it.
It doesn't mean that we shouldn't hold Mozilla to higher standards, but if we keep waiting for them to be perfect before we will consider using and pushing FF, we're just going to lose the only alternative not controlled by Google or Microsoft.
It's Firefox here and now. There probably won't be a tomorrow otherwise. Google is making that very clear.
About the only use case I still need Chrome for is for sites requiring experimental web APIs not supported by Firefox, such as Web USB or Web Bluetooth. Site compatibility for everything else, including very heavy web apps, is just fine.
History sync is encrypted, which is what made me switch over in the first place (Chrome deactivates history sync when activating end-to-end encryption – go figure…)
The only site I have compatibility issues with on desktop is MS Teams and even then it's only for voice/video calls, everything else works fine.
Firefox Android is a slightly less happy place. The password manager doesn't work very well (am moving away from the built-in one) and I can't log in on Amazon (which is important because I can't buy Kindle books in the app because of the Play Store).
This is why I don't use FF (although I'm on Linux). It's unusably slow for me. My experience is not the most common one (indicating that there's something about my ecosystem that FF hates), but I haven't been able to make FF work in any of the releases starting a couple of years back, I think.
I don't browse on my phone at all, so I won't be using FF there purely for that reason.
I don't doubt your experience, but it's clearly not universal.
Regardless, I have Googled this for you: please return the favor by helping others learn to use search engines in the future before leaving comments insinuating that they are lying.
The tldr (as you'll probably insist on that also) is that Firefox finds Mozilla, not the other way around, as the latter is a non-profit while the former is a FOR-profit, so Mozilla actually can't directly fund Firefox.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ow9k0y/is_there_a_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...
Do you think Google is better managed?
One company dominates "the Web" and pulls these shenanigans all every other year, the other one is totally dependent of the former to pay their bills.
So yeah, Google has been better managed than Mozilla. That doesn't invalidate Google's execs are a bunch of lizards on the now common SV ego trip and screw up all the time, but they can and ensure they can continue to do so, Mozilla is not in the same position and part of blame must be attributed to them.
- ie6 which was a security nightmare for everybody
- browsers like Opera developed by very small companies against which competition was more based on merit
The only way for Mozilla have been able to maintain its market share against chrome would have to manage to reach both these requirements:
- build the #1 smartphone OS in the market in term of market share to have it preinstalled everywhere
- build the #1 search engine in term of market share to advertise using it everytime the user search for something.
Both feats requiring:
- financial means that were out of reach from the Mozilla foundation at any moment in time regardless of its management.
- giving up on mozilla ethics and values to be on same level as the definitely evil competitor.
The second best time is today.
Maybe it's too late, maybe it's not, but it's literally the only option we have if we want an open web.
At this point, anybody who runs Chromium is just enabling Google and has become part of the problem.
Is that a realistic goal? I don't know, maybe not, but it seems like there's little will even in tech to try.
There was a time when tech was the biggest driver of alternate browser adoption, and even managed to make serious inroads into the mainstream. It's a huge shame that this attitude seems long gone.
No that ship has sailed.
It would mean focusing on developing the best browser and spending money on marketing so people download and install the best browser. Cut every other expense. Take FF from the politics of Mozilla and make it a real open source project.
If I look at Opera marketing, they seem to aim for young people with themes and video integration.
I do think FF has no vision and no clear strategy to get back market share, even it this is the only way to save the web. Perhaps market share isn't even their goal, I have no clue what they want.
I think that was just a side effect of browsers like Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera offering numerous tangible benefits over IE and the other browsers of that era.
They offered things like better functionality, better security, better extensibility, better performance, better ad blocking, and so on.
There were many compelling reasons to switch to them, and many compelling reasons to suggest them to others.
I could easily show less-technical users how those browsers could make their lives better in many ways.
For a while now, though, that just hasn't been the case. Using Firefox today, for example, doesn't really leave most people any better off, but it does come with its own set of new problems. I can't bring myself to recommend it.
Most websites aren’t bank websites. If a website doesn’t support Firefox, leave. If a website doesn’t support good old HTML, it is probably made by some kind of dummy who is trying to replace lack of content with glitz, this sort of person shouldn’t be listened to.
Firefox performs way better and is a more pleasant experience. (This is a fair comparison because my ad-laden Chrome experience is internet as Google intends!)
Mozilla developers will then try to reach out to the website’s owners, add a fix or workaround in Firefox, or (as a last resort) spoof Chrome’s User-Agent string to bypass the website’s Firefox block.
I did have issues during an interview in Microsoft Teams refusing to play my video. "Your browser is not supported", yeah fuck you it's not supported. I explain why, ask if we can switch to Hangouts and send a link.
Works fine, if more people had the balls to do the same we wouldn't be in this situation today. It's our duty to educate people instead of conforming to the path of least resistance.
When the usage metrics drop for Chrome based browsers they would need to start respecting other users, instead of just ignoring them.
Currently they can just ignore the users and continue as they do. As the rest would not hint a dent on their bottom line.
However.
Try opening any article from The Guardian on Firefox mobile. Even a good phone will start feeling sluggish and laggy and weird. An old phone will just go catatonic, get hot, and OOM the whole browser.
Surely this is partly The Guardian's fault. (Should it surprise me that the paper that poses "left" for the upper middle class is also incompatible with any but corporate software from Big Tech?)
But it's also definitely Firefox' fault too. Something is wrong with the implementation. If Chrome can render these sites smoothly, Firefox should be able to.
Firefox would only have an excuse if Google had some special APIs on Android, or were doing something to actively sabotage the Firefox experience. I'm not willing to get quite that paranoid yet.
There are some other browsers, but who the hell wrote them? How much of what you see in the app store is legitimate open source, and how much is OSS that some opportunist put their own trackers into? I'd love a good alternative, but I don't see a lot worth trusting.
So it's Firefox for most things, and Chrome when Firefox gets all slow and laggy. Or, Firefox for news articles, and Chrome for businesses' websites.
"An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past."
Ben Wiser ( https://benwiser.com ) turned off comments altogether.
The Open Web. Creators: TBL et al, Destroyed-By: Google et al.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
for a personal blog it has quite a lot of PR speak
Consider incentives from Google's standpoint. They want to provide users a safe and secure experience. They want to simplify maintenance of software and provide developers the ability to simplify maintenance of software (a problem simplified by chopping the unbounded set of possible user agents down to a blessed, vetted subset). They have the resources to make their site screen-reader compatible, so they're not concerned about damage that could be done to screen-readers because they'll just bless one and support it. And, of course, they implicitly trust themselves to do all this.
In that ecosystem, Weiss's viewpoint is completely reasonable. The old model of the web is old, and led to gestures broadly at all the bad things about the web today... fraud, users getting owned, CP, botnets, misinformation factories. I can definitely see the viewpoint where someone concludes "It's time for a new model, and this company has the resources to do it."
I don't agree with him (and in fact I think the idea will fail; I think Google actually overestimates its ability to provide an equivalently-good user experience to what we have now if they aren't leveraging the unpaid labor of other vendors putting the effort into making their own houses work with Google's house without Google even being aware of their work). But I think it's useful to wrap our heads around how one gets into that headspace without thinking oneself a monster.
Nothing in the proposal requires the third party be Google. The proposal does decrease the control the user has over their own hardware, in the sense that it provides a channel for a site to decide the user-agent / hardware stack is the wrong pedigree to serve; that's not universally considered evil either (nobody really gets bent out of shape that you need a Nintendo Switch to use Nintendo Switch Online services).
Google sells ads. They want to kill ad blockers. This is how.
> Weiss's viewpoint is completely reasonable
Chasing diversions around in circles is not neutral. Someone wins by default. Diversions exist and they exist to tempt you into poor attention allocation decisions. This is not about safety, security, and providing an excellent experience. It's about ads and making sure you can't stop them.
Ockham's Razor doesn't apply in an adversarial situation.
"Google is an advertising company and does whatever leads to more profitable advertisements" does a much better job of explaining Google's actions than "Google just wants to build the best possible browser", so it should be preferred even though it is a more complicated explanation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857676
85 points by KoftaBob 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 109 comments
Edit: I suppose I need to add—no, we're not pro-$MegaCorp or pro-$web-destroying-dystopia. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck, and you guys need to make your substantive points without degenerating into mob behavior.
Please don't do this here. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Edit: I suppose I need to add—no, we're not pro-$MegaCorp or pro-$web-destroying-dystopia. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck, and you guys need to make your substantive points without degenerating into mob behavior.
We are capable of going to elsewhere to free and open access to information, and we would be better off spending our energy on positively influencing others to follow us in that direction. They can’t take away tcp, http, ftp, irc and all the other protocols that these megaliths have built their empires on, and we can still use those tools even if it’s a demoralizing regression to move back to the basics. Giants like google, Amazon and others depend on our unwillingness to rebuild. Let’s use our efforts and our ingenuity to show them that they’ve underestimated us.
We have the tools, we have the knowledge. Let’s be builders instead of petty complainers.
And what do we have to show for it? Our tools power their botnets and they flaunt the CoCs in our faces when we try to do something about it as “not constructive”.
More explanation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881929
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881034
In addition: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Therefore, one of the most efficient ways to kill a dangerous new standard is to endlessly harass anyone who works on it.
Sorry, the poor individual can not hide from their responsibility.
More explanation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881929
There are enough top voted people demanding harassment in this and other threads to say that well, maybe that's what HN is, actually.
The only pressure that Google has been shown to consistently respond to is political. Get a couple of senators (... of the right party) to send them a mild rebuke and they will indeed retreat a little (... and try something else later). But that's a lot harder than posting angry comments until the next piece of outrageous news comes along, isn't it?
I'm not on board with harassing people (sad that I have to include this disclaimer).
That said, the people are not simply implementing this. They're actively and publicly justifying and defending it.
let it burn
focus on building something new, new protocols, new networks, new browsers
Normies can f&$% off and enjoy the data-mined, DRM'd, ad-infested, CCP-propagandized, upload-your-photo-ID-to-post-here, privacy-free dump their illiteracy, careless disregard for harm, and data exhibitionism fetish has allowed the clearnet to turn into.
Anti-communism and fascism are historically in lock-step. No one is going to use the services if you basically create web4 stormfront.
“What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.” Network, 1976
Further, free speech must be defended despite the modern liberal tendency to cut off the majority’s noses to spite nazi faces. If you’re gonna fight nazis, fight nazis, don’t throw out fundamental human rights. They know they can taint principles, signs, and symbols with their stench. Don’t give up essential freedoms out of guilt by association. These charlatans have no political theory, no examined ideology. It’s a power struggle and we’ve already ceded too much power.
> so fascism would be firmly out
This goes to prove my point, that there's a gross misunderstanding of history in the general population.
Fascism doesn't use force to get political power, it gains political power through reactionary ideas based on false assumptions that leads to a fascist regime where the violence then occurs on the "other".
It comes through ideas such as "protecting your family", "returning to tradition", and other feel good sayings that mean almost nothing. Think of the phrase "Woke", taken from black community vernacular and twisted to mean almost nothing at all. It describes everything and anything that can make a conservative person upset, from queer people to mental health professionals.
Despite meaning nothing, oh boy has it taken root. Beer is woke, tv is woke, the black guy in star wars is woke for existing. And oh man look how easy it is to take root and now millions of people live their life by the "anti-woke" lifestyle. What does that lifestyle mean? idk, buying shes just to light them on fire, i guess.
This is why communist regimes had gulags. Fascism takes root through reactionary(meaning feelz over realz) ideas, typically against change. A revolution is something hard fought, why would they allow it to be derided by some idiots who miss when they owned all their neighbors land?
What I'm trying to say is one end of the spectrum is at a huge advantage when it comes to free speech environments, for the fascist does not need to argue in good faith. Going by "philosophies that support the use of force..." will get you a lot of a certain group.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how they were being anti-communist or fascist in your eyes.
Consider the phrase "tankie", what was once a term used by communists to describe a militaristic member who supported the USSR sending tanks into Hungary, has become a general phrase for anyone showing critical support to any socialist project.
Socialists are essentially told they are not allowed to support any previously or currently existing project because bad things were done, are told they're doing whataboutism if they compare the actions to western actions, and are called a tankie if they decide to stop caring about what liberals and right wing people say.
China IS a socialist project, are they strictly a socialist country? No. Did they perform the most thorough and equitable land reforms in the history of Humanity? Yes. Do they wield central power for central planning economic activities? Sometimes. Are they operating on a 100% worker ownership of industry? no, but they have a non-insignificant public ownership of industry, co-opting privately owned industry to steer activities with greater control and hold certain business leaders accountable.
I'm sorry to say, but "current day CCP conforms to the definition of fascism" just isn't correct and goes to prove the point that the meaning of words is mostly ignored. Fascism != Authoritarianism. There was a massive effort post WWII through the cold war to create anti-communist propaganda that simply wasn't true. You had actual ex members of the Nazi party leading anti-communist endeavors. The black book of communism counts Nazis as deaths from communism. The Victims of Communism memorial foundation is literally a mask on far-right thinktanks such as the heritage foundation.
That being said, the West is grossly lied to about China day to day. It is in various interests to have an enemy. To the point where one man can write a report identifying a "future cultural genocide" which was simply a reduction in growth of a population due to 1 and 2 child laws being imposed on a group that was exempt prior, as an actual, in-progress genocide. If you point this out, people call you a genocide denier.
That same man is a director of China Studies, at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
I apologize for this long winded rant, but yes, if you found an internet presence on being "anti-ccp", you're starting off on a literal fascist foot. The community will deride any left leaning voice, call any voice that says "hey china did a good thing here", as a "tankie", and it will become an echo chamber for right-wing hate speech.
Cory Doctorow came up with the phrase "The War on General-Purpose Computing", which describes the situation perfectly.
What we really need is for the collective browser vendors to refuse to implement this and, if Chrome pushes forward, to bring Google to court over it. Nothing short of legal intervention is going to help here.
Legislation around device ownership rights are already present, especially in the EU.
If this ever helped, we wouldn't have absolutely unethical products created. Turns out people's morals have a price tag, that Google and others are willing to pay their employees.
It is quite incredible actually, because it was not many years ago that working at Google had this coolness factor to it. Hopefully, it is a broader change of view, other than mine?
WEI tries to shortcut that process by creating a secured sign-off system that would allow the server to only respond to queries from a blessed hardware and software configuration. This wildly constrains the user agents that would be possible. The pro for web developers is that they wouldn't have to concern themselves with whether their server or the HTML they are. Emitting is broadly standards compliant and compatible; they can just make sure it works with the target platforms they care about and rest easy knowing no other platforms can touch their system. But this is bad for anybody who, for whatever reason, can't use the blessed platforms (user agent and hardware combinations).
Immediate practical consequences are that a lot of the screen reader solutions people use would probably break (because the screen readers wouldn't be certified user agents), a lot of clever hacks would be far less feasible (the website somebody hacked together to track whether the ice cream machine was broken at McDonald's restaurants relied upon being able to pretend it was the McDonald's smartphone app well enough to attempt to put ice cream in the shopping bag), and it would basically become impossible to build a new browser or operating system from scratch compatible with the web (they wouldn't work with the websites people wanted to use because they wouldn't be certified as authentic on any of those sites).
This proposal grossly changes the balance of power on how the web works and places most of it in the hands of the incumbent browser and computer hardware vendors.
Multiple US states, France, Germany and the UK are going to make the web unnavigable unless you type your credit card number or scan your face for age verification in two out of every three sites.
We are going to need to at least try to create ways to secure those credentials in as zero trust model as possible.
(Note that the legislation is a disaster, but it is done. Nobody paid enough attention. It has passed or will pass in weeks.)
A fresh web doesn't exempt you from the legal requirements unfortunately.
This year has seen the biggest state attacks by legislators on any electronic distribution of speech across most Western states for fifty years, and by and large the technology community has completely failed to even engage with that never mind stop it. We are all going to have to live with the consequences for decades.
AI is going to completely change search if it hasn't already, and google is not even close to compete in this space.
Video has some massive competition from the likes of TikTok. Anyway, YouTube isn't the only option on the market.
Gmail is still popular but since google has been pressuring users to pay, it's been easier than ever to find a reason to try another service.
Chromium can always be forked and have some parts removed or added, and as we all know quite a few browsers do this, some are quite popular.
Is google also losing IOS ads like Meta? If they do, that's another reason for alarm for them.
I'm not sure google is in the best position for the future and WEI is not going to be their golden ticket either.
And, if your prediction that web will change actually comes to pass, well then it'll be just another cycle for this space that has changed countless times since the age of dialup. The web is going to change, again and again, but as long as people are still free to set up a server and let the world access it, we can still do what we like with it.
The Halloween memos called this "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Google didn't just ignore the moves that provided M$ dominance.
If websites implement this, it will effectively make building a web search engine impossible for new entrants. The current players can whitelist/attest their own clients while categorizing every other scraping clients as bots.
If not for other reasons, I can't see how Google a search company can be allowed to push something that can kill competition using its market dominance in other areas like browsers.
Because antitrust has been dead for a while. Chrome is a tool to drive people to Google and Google ads and nothing more.
I will say, I did appreciate Microsoft having a browser engine with IE and Edge, even if the former was notoriously a pain, it gave competition in the space. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore and everything is either Chrome (Blink), Firefox (Gecko), or Safari (WebKit). And it's pretty clear what Chrome has done once that have amassed a dominant market share.
I'm sure there are Googlers who think they're legitimately making the web a safer place, but I think the real reason is pretty clear if you take a birds eye view.
My mother's new Windows 11 laptop's out-of-the-box configuration had me clicking through half a dozen things attempting to manipulate me or her into spending more money. There are (I can only assume paid-placement) news and adfotainment in the start menu! Repeat pop-up reminders from Lenovo to subscribe to their protection package. Emotionally-manipulative reminders to subscribe to virus protection services. To Microsoft Office. Etc. etc.
It's been the same thing in the mobile market, where the move to "apps" means you are running their software on your device all the time, so they can optimally surveil you, and target the advertisements and behaviourally-modifying nudges. Quite a few messaging services now actively mess with delivery of notifications, spacing them out, delaying them, according to research that shows what maximizes engagement.
I saw the trend 20 years ago and switched to free software around that time -- I liked Linux anyway, but it was partly on principle. Still, the new laptop was eye-opening. The degree of intrusion, the degree to which even desktop computers have turned into user-hostile advertising terminals serving the purposes of their manufacturer, rather than a computer for the user to accomplish their work, is quite shocking.
Everything networked is becoming like that - twisting the user's hardware, turning it into nothing more than a terminal, an extension of the corporation, serving their interests at all times. Even smart TVs now have ads built-in to their menus and such.
There is no other end state in capitalism. If you want tools and products that serve you instead of an owner, you must do it outside capitalism like with truly open source stuff.
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
One thing about your comment above: Hulu can't start implementing attestation until Google turns the knob to 0 because they can't start randomly dropping 5% of Chrome users. So in your comment above it should be "and" not "or". If I understand correctly Hulu cannot act unilaterally with the currently planned implementation of this.
If let's say they did turn the knob for Chrome, wouldn't it take a while for websites to start implementing this? For me not knowing as much about this it feels like this is a step in an ambiguous direction which could be good or bad still. But since it's Google everyone is thinking ahead in the causal chain. Can you help me understand why this is such a big and clearly bad step against the open web? Thank you!
Hulu has DRM issues in Firefox and their DRM just fails with unknown errors on about ~15% of content they host (anecdotally, of course, I have no specific data). There's no way for me to tell if a specific episode of a show will fail or not, some succeed, others don't. I at least find no pattern for this. From this perspective, they are essentially randomly breaking 100% of Firefox users some seemingly random percentage of the time.
They have "good" business reasons to require this DRM and whatever this random broken user percentage is, I'm sure it meets their bottom-line criteria as a business.
"95%" uptime for Chrome users is only "one-9", but it's still got that one 9. That's an acceptable SLA to many businesses. A business might easily decide attestation is worth that "uptime risk" because it sells more ads or makes the DRM vendors happier (and thus the content owners are happier) or any other number of "good" business reasons.
I don't see how it is against their interest, it would cement Google into power in a way that is very difficult to undo barring government intervention (which I doubt is going to happen).
> It seems like the project is explicitly stating their goal isn't to allow for websites to do this, and they are implementing it in a manner consistent with that.
If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.
> If I understand correctly Hulu cannot act unilaterally with the currently planned implementation of this.
Hulu will keep their attestation implementation ready to turn on at a moment's notice because it's patently obvious that the hold-back stuff will be gone when it's ready to go, and it's obvious because the currently described implementation (with the hold-back) does not really serve any real purpose.
The hold-back is only on the spec to keep people from revolting while the thing is built and tested.
I have no way of knowing if they are honest or not and even if they are there's no guarantee that they won't change their mind later.I cannot take the risk and be on guard forever.
I would much prefer not to allow them into the house in the first place.
Google should not have brought this proposal but they did.So, I will not place my trust in Google doing the right thing irrespective of their claims and promises.
> However, a holdback also has significant drawbacks. In our use cases and capabilities survey, we have identified a number of critical use cases for deterministic platform integrity attestation. These use cases currently rely on client fingerprinting. A deterministic but limited-entropy attestation would obviate the need for invasive fingerprinting here, and has the potential to usher in more privacy-positive practices in the long-term.
I think any holdback will eventually go away because of the "critical use cases for deterministic platform integrity attestation"
I hadn't really considered this. In a roundabout way, is there a process for this to be rejected on grounds of "fair use" limitations?
Can't they already do this by having scrapers send plain-old client certificates? Or even just a request header that contains an HMAC of the URL with a shared secret?
Actually, taking a step further back: why does anyone need to scrape their own properties? They can make up an arbitrary backchannel to access that data — just like the one Google uses to populate YouTube results into SERPs. No need to provide a usefully-scrapeable website at all.
The only way to stop Google from treating the Web as their own OS is to take that power away from them, by switching to other browser engines.
Not every Mozilla critic is a Chrome user; I'd even expect that the most vocal critics are Firefox fans and users.
The bigger picture is that Google et al are actually part of the control structure. The governance system wants deanonymised Internet. Corporate interests are how this is being promoted - government legislation would be a harder pill for the masses to accept.
But all the recent mega changes tell us (Elon buying twitter, etc) tell us that this is on the way. Apparent anonymous internet will be sandboxed. Knowing everything about everyone all the time, and having that data being crunched by ai's is an amazing, audacious goal, that seems close to being achieved.
It's even funnier with the auto-reply "Thanks for your pull request! It looks like this may be your first contribution to a Google open source project. Before we can look at your pull request, you'll need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA)."
Not on HN, please. I realize that you're trying to protect something you care about (and that maybe we all care about) but this leads to ugly mob behavior that we don't want and won't allow here.
The only way around the dystopia this will lead to is to constantly and relentlessly shame and even harass all those involved in helping create it. The scolding in the issue tracker of that wretched "project" shall flow like a river, until the spirit of those pursuing it breaks, and the effort is disbanded.
And once the corporate hydra has regrown its head, repeat. Hopefully, enough practise makes those fighting the dystopia effective enough to one day topple over sponsoring and enabling organisations as a whole, instead of only their little initiatives leading down that path.
Not a pretty thing, but necessary.