91–100 of 876 posts
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Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here? Chrome and Android are open source, and there are several forks of both thriving in the ecosystem. Yeah it would be cool if there was a decent open source alternative to GMail and Drive, but no one else seems to have figured out how to get the incentives right for something like that.
That "incentive" for Google is "80% of our revenue comes from ads". Google's open source projects are open in name only.
The link at the top of the page is pointing to the GitHub repo, where you can see literally over a million contributions from thousands of people working at hundreds of companies: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commits/main
I've worked on both Chrome and Android (Chromium and AOSP) professionally, and never worked at Google.
One of the proposals for WEI is to make it probabilistically fail. Ie. on a given device, for 10% of websites, WEI pretends to be unsupported. That means websites can't deny service where WEI is unsupported. Yet it still allows statistical analysis across bulk user accounts. If WEI was implemented like this, I would support it as being good for the web ecosystem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here? Chrome and Android are open source, and there are several forks of both thriving in the ecosystem. Yeah it would be cool if there was a decent open source alternative to GMail and Drive, but no one else seems to have figured out how to get the incentives right for something like that.
Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here? No, it didn't, it restructured itself into Alphabet, with many subsidiaries. But, all the core businesses are still under that umbrella organization, with most web-related businesses remaining inside the current Google entity. A forced divestment of the browser business might help. Same for the productivity products.
No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.
And also, to switch back to Firefox
Wherever you live, you should contact your government representatives and regulators and put a spotlight on this issue for what it is--monopoly abuse of power.
Grassroots efforts are great and it is good to let your friends, family, and associates know what they are doing and why it is wrong. However, government regulation of this abuse is needed to stop it by force of law.
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Nothing will happen. People have been making the same complaints about every new crypto standard for decades, and yet here we are. TPMs are a thing, EME has been around for over a decade now, DRM on the web is as pervasive as it's ever going to get, and yet no one's user experience is any worse than it was before these technologies existed.
Yes, and I am still unable to play 4K Netflix on a PC that has been able to play 4K videos for about 7 years now. It's permanently blocked to prevent piracy, or something, mumble, mumble...
The temporary nature of any licensing deals behind these services and the resulting lack of reliable long-term access to content have become more and more obvious.
Increasingly the streaming services seem to be so paranoid about piracy that they are blocking "unapproved" players from getting the highest quality versions of the content - as if anyone who wants to pirate any blockbuster movie can't already find a way to get it in 4K somewhere else if they really want to. Meanwhile you can't watch your 4K movie on a service you're literally paying to provide that movie. IIRC Amazon Prime Video still won't even let you have HD content if you're on Linux.
It feels like the commercial incentives for tech firms to create walled gardens and a culture of never owning anything permanently are going largely unchecked and by now the governments who are supposed to act in the interests of their people should really be stepping in with regulation to counter those negative trends.
One of the proposals for WEI is to make it probabilistically fail. Ie. on a given device, for 10% of websites, WEI pretends to be unsupported. That means websites can't deny service where WEI is unsupported. Yet it still allows statistical analysis across bulk user accounts. If WEI was implemented like this, I would support it as being good for the web ecosystem.
Except for Google's pinky swear, I mean.
I feel like I have to repeat this, since so much is at stake here, where it is about the preservation of the web as we know it today, at the peril of having it turned into yet another walled garden: 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 l…
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?