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AMP pages displaying your own domain

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Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#31

Post by sandov »

48309248302 wrote: post #11

This sounds terrible. Does it mean that browsers will begin lying to users and say that the users are visiting the website's server when they are really visiting a restricted version of the website that is hosted in Google's cache? I don't want my content restricted or hosted in Google's cache. AMP doesn't load in a privacy sensitive way. It's on Google's servers and it takes many seconds to load if you have JavaScri…

I didn't even know about "HTTP Exchanges", and I'm more interested than ~98% of the population about this kind of stuff.

Showing the name of the "signer" in the address bar, instead of the server where the content is actually hosted goes against decades of browser UI design.

Good on Mozilla for marking it as harmful.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#32

Post by 48309248302 »

skybrian wrote: post #28
chii wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want my content restricted or hosted in Google's cache. how is this different than using your own domain, but pointing it to a github.io page? Or using medium, but with your own domain (but still being served from medium's servers)? Is it just google you're adverse to, or the entire idea of someone else hosting your content?

That's a good point! Domain owners can host their websites wherever they like, and yes that includes Google's cloud. If they go through a content network like Cloudflare, you can't even tell who's hosting the site by looking at the IP address. It drives home the point that websites are abstractions that have no necessary relationship to any particular physical hardware. Network tools may or may not tell you a bit mor…

There is a difference between the web publisher controlling that abstraction and a web publisher that has been strong armed into one abstraction or another.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#33

Post by Operyl »

48309248302 wrote: post #29
Operyl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per point 6, I wouldn’t take what was said there as a statement from Google, or potentially even an employee of Google. They did it as a throwaway .. anybody wishing to kick the hornets nest could have posted that, employee or not.

It's not written like someone trying to kick a hornet's nest. It's written like someone who has been conditioned inside of a culture that has begun to view the Web as a Google product on some level.

And if somebody was wanting to kick a hornets nest, that’s exactly how you’d want to write it :).

My point is, you cannot just blindly trust anonymous comments to be who they say they are, it’s an easy way to get yourself in trouble.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#34

Post by ehnto »

48309248302 wrote: post #12
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP is like Brussels Sprouts. If it's forced on you when you are young, you will grow up hating it.

Brussels sprouts are good for you. AMP is more like medical experiments performed on you during an alien abduction.

It's solely the search engine boost you get from AMP that bothers me. Because of the money involved many sites have no choice but to implement AMP and stay competitive. If it weren't for that, it would just be another technology and the fact that it only works in few circumstances would probably make many sites not bother with it. The UX downsides would probably see many sites actively avoid it.

The fact that it has seen such adoption is testament to Google's ability to influence with it's rankings alone.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#35

Post by millstone »

The headline is an outright lie: these AMP pages are loaded from Google and not your domain.

The new feature is that Google's browser displays your domain, obscuring the fact that Google is doing the serving. The change is what is displayed, not the server.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#36

Post by gregable »

48309248302 wrote: post #11

This sounds terrible. Does it mean that browsers will begin lying to users and say that the users are visiting the website's server when they are really visiting a restricted version of the website that is hosted in Google's cache? I don't want my content restricted or hosted in Google's cache. AMP doesn't load in a privacy sensitive way. It's on Google's servers and it takes many seconds to load if you have JavaScri…

The browser displays the URL from the origin that digitally signed the unmodified content.

A browser already doesn't show you what server delivered the content. That would be your wifi AP, cell phone tower, or ISP node. The internet has already long established that we can trust content without trusting intermediaries.

There are two elements that are important: integrity and privacy. The content integrity is protected via a digital signature, the "signed" part of "signed http exchanges". The signature proves that the document hasn't been tampered with.

Regarding privacy: The intermediary (a search engine in this case) already has the content being delivered as a result of crawling it. It also knows the user clicked on a link to get that content, and knows the user's ip address. Even without AMP or Signed Exchanges, the privacy situation is the same. Once the page is loaded, all further interactions with the origin are normal https traffic, so later requests are not different in privacy either.

What this enables, for search results, is the ability to load the bytes of the content before the user clicks a search result. If the browser prefetched those bytes with the origin's awareness, then the user's privacy with respect to the search query would be violated, making prefetch problematic. With this setup, documents can be prefetched while preserving user privacy and after the user clicks all browser behavior continues as normal from that point forward.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#37

Post by millstone »

chii wrote: post #16
48309248302 wrote: post #11

This sounds terrible. Does it mean that browsers will begin lying to users and say that the users are visiting the website's server when they are really visiting a restricted version of the website that is hosted in Google's cache? I don't want my content restricted or hosted in Google's cache. AMP doesn't load in a privacy sensitive way. It's on Google's servers and it takes many seconds to load if you have JavaScri…

> I don't want my content restricted or hosted in Google's cache. how is this different than using your own domain, but pointing it to a github.io page? Or using medium, but with your own domain (but still being served from medium's servers)? Is it just google you're adverse to, or the entire idea of someone else hosting your content?

DNS is the answer to the first two questions.

However the last question is a fair point - nobody complains about CloudFlare's caching of your web page as you designed it.

The critique of AMP is that it receives privileged placement in search results, and that content authors are being pressured into adopting this de-facto Google-controlled spec, where they host your content and control its presentation. Anything that furthers AMP helps Google in this effort.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#38

Post by lern_too_spel »

48309248302 wrote: post #11

This sounds terrible. Does it mean that browsers will begin lying to users and say that the users are visiting the website's server when they are really visiting a restricted version of the website that is hosted in Google's cache? I don't want my content restricted or hosted in Google's cache. AMP doesn't load in a privacy sensitive way. It's on Google's servers and it takes many seconds to load if you have JavaScri…

> AMP doesn't load in a privacy sensitive way. It's on Google's servers

Only if you load the page from a Google SERP, in which case, Google would already know if you visit the page. If it's loaded from a Bing SERP, it's served from a Bing server, and the same for Baidu and other AMP caches. This is far more privacy preserving than preloading a page from some third party web server that the user might never visit.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#39

Post by sieabahlpark »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #7

Let’s hope AMP, like most google products, is shut down within the next 2-3 years

Nah I see AMP staying around long enough to capture a significant portion of web share that they mine data from. Essentially is just a way to insert themselves as "the internet"

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#40

Post by gregable »

rob-olmos wrote: post #22

Semi-related, I think Web Packages and Signed Exchanges could have some usefulness outside of Google's caches. One of their spec examples was for verifiable web page archives. Another idea it could be used for a wifi "drop box" (drop station?) when there's no internet connection around. That isn't uncommon at some popular spots up river into the woods in the US. The idea is that as people enter the area, they can upd…

You may be thinking of this use cases section here: https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-webpackage-u...
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