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Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

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Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#121

Post by goffer »

px43 wrote: post #51
mozball wrote: post #26

If this isn't the straw that breaks the camel's back, there is never going to be one. Google needs to be broken up. They own the browser market. They own the web (through Adwords). They own Search. They own mobile. They own most of the video sharing market with 2.5 billion monthly annual users. They own a good chunk of email with 1.2 billion monthly annual users. They have amassed an incomprehensible amount of power…

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.

Say that to Huawei.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#122

Post by MildRant »

bee_rider wrote: post #111
PedroBatista wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has been mismanaged for at least a decade and depends on Google to pay their bills.. 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 We…

I hear Firefox is mismanaged all the time, but it seems to be a perfectly fine browser for the most part. I hear all about sites that won’t render in comments on this website, but they must all be internal tools or something because I never encounter them.

I sparingly run into sites that don't render properly on Firefox but they do exist. As an example, Ticketmaster's account page has problems on Firefox that I don't get on Chromium.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#123

Post by j1elo »

pluc wrote: post #44

This is a crisis of our own making. You don't want Google taking decisions for the web at large? Then don't let them own 85% of the browser market share. When that's the case they don't need W3C or anything to implement whatever they want, they effectively control the client-side internet.

It's proven that mass marketing works. Tell me how a minority of informed and caring users can avoid on their own that a single large scale bad actor pours millions over millions of dollars to convince the uninformed masses about whatever they want. It even happens in actual elections when some factions use misinformation campaigns to alter the average voter's perception! So not an easy task to solve without help.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#125

Post by mdale »

johnnymorgan wrote: post #95
ep103 wrote: post #34

And also, to switch back to Firefox

You mean Brave

Brave runs on Chromium; I am sure if WEI helped some crypto scheme for attention token it would be embraced there. But not as relevant as this relates to the "on by default" nature of these tools to validate web viewers.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#126

Post by jsjohnst »

scarface_74 wrote: post #94
alistairSH wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What browser “business”? Chrome makes no money. Don’t you think they are going to fund themselves the same way that Firefox does - via Google ads? No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.

> No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.

Considering NCSA Mosaic’s initial release was just 30 years ago this year and it’s considered the first browser, think you might be using a bit of hyperbole there? Twenty years would’ve been more accurate.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#127

Post by jgrahamc »

thejosh wrote: post #33
csomar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need an "approved" browser and potentially "approved" hardware to access the web. Since Cloudflare is on this too, most of the web will be locked for anyone who doesn't use mainstream hardware.

Cloudflare want to be the internets backbone. And they've honestly succeeded. Now it's almost impossible to access websites in an automated way -- the CTO posted you can just email him ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212 ) and he'll sort it. Because that scales. edit: Mispoke about the CTO, said he would approve you, I was wrong. Apologies. Their DNS is "privacy focused", but they provide "aggregated resu…

I don't have a mechanism to "approve you". We don't have any clue who people are and so even if I wanted to "approve you" I couldn't.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#128

Post by mozball »

scarface_74 wrote: post #59
mozball wrote: post #26

If this isn't the straw that breaks the camel's back, there is never going to be one. Google needs to be broken up. They own the browser market. They own the web (through Adwords). They own Search. They own mobile. They own most of the video sharing market with 2.5 billion monthly annual users. They own a good chunk of email with 1.2 billion monthly annual users. They have amassed an incomprehensible amount of power…

[flagged]

Google Search is notably absent in your list.

If this proposal becomes standard in Chrome, You can be sure Microsoft and Apple will follow Google's lead with the same or their own similar implementations.

See Microsoft Pluton and Apple's Private Access Tokens. Or read this article which provides an excellent overview of these developments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282305

Make no mistake. If this becomes standard on Chrome, this is going to be standard on the web.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#129

Post by btown »

wasmy wrote: post #15

Another tame article in The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/25/google_web_environmen... Despite the spec's half-baked state, the blowback last week was swift – in the form of a flood of largely critical comments posted to the WEI GitHub repository, and abuse directed at the authors of the proposal. The Google devs' response was to limit comment posting to those who had previously contributed to the repo…

Also worth noting that this locks reactions (thumbs up, hearts, etc.) - providing plausible deniability that "only a small number of people raised concerns about specificTopicX." Journalists should be more aware of this!

On a separate note, for journalists and others who wish to communicate with the spec's author directly, his public website (which lists a personal email) is one of the other repos on the Github profile under which the specification was published. It's painfully absurd that he wrote this sentence in 2022 [0]:

> I decided to make this an app in the end. This is where my costs started wracking up. I had to pay for a second hand macbook pro to build an iOS app. Apple’s strategy with this is obvious, and it clearly works, but it still greatly upsets me that I couldn’t just build an app with my linux laptop. If I want the app to persist for longer than a month, and to make it easy for friends to install, I had to pay $99 for a developer account. Come on Apple, I know you want people to use the app story but this is just a little cruel. I basically have to pay $99 a year now just to keep using my little app.

[0] https://benwiser.com/blog/I-just-spent-%C2%A3700-to-have-my-...

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#130

Post by glogla »

goalieca wrote: post #115
LikelyABurner wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until your bank requires you to use it to pay your bills and tax preparation websites require it to pay for taxes.

It’s bad enough google captcha is broken on Firefox with all the privacy extensions on.

It is not broken. They are punishing you for not wanting to be tracked, profiled and manipulated.
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