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Google vs. the Open Web

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Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#91

Post by urda »

xNeil wrote: post #88
urda wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had." - Isaac Asimov, Foundation

While that's a very nice saying, and I appreciate you applying in this context, what you're basically saying is we can never ever assess any organization as strong whatsoever, since every organization that breaks up seems strong at some point.

That's not what was said at all in context, and I do not appreciate you putting words in my valid comment. You dismissed the original argument with your own personal truths.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#92

Post by tlogan »

This is how the situation will unfold...

- The WEI check will be designed with a level of simplicity that tech-savvy individuals or hackers can easily bypass. Criticisms or objections will be quieted with comments like, "You just need to initiate the browser using these 50 different settings and you're good."

- On the other hand, the WEI check will be intricate enough that an average user won't be able to circumvent it, resulting in them being obligated to view ads.

In this way, it's a win-win situation: the hackers maintain their access to an "open" web, while the vast majority (99%) of the population will navigate through a "Google" web.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#93

Post by bmacho »

xur17 wrote: post #83
exceptione wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to reach official authorities is a good idea. I will quote and extend part of my call to action I did in an other thread - ban Google all together in your personal life. No chrome and no excuses. Stop the bullshit or leave this profession. Use startpage, duckduck or whatever for searching. - develop with and for firefox and friends only, introduce usability problems for chrome - employ the same tactics as goog…

> show a popup urging users to download firefox, provide a link to download or page with more explanation. Tell that you detected that their current chrome has security and privacy risks and that you recommend to take action immediately. Average user is easily scared into action. If I recall correctly, this was Google's approach with Chrome.

So were the other items in the "employ the same tactics as google." list.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#94

Post by ocdtrekkie »

I'm still really irritated by all the people at Google who claimed "Team Web" like they were the good guys, while working on things like AMP designed to proprietize the web.

What we really need is to get the W3C and IETF to straight up throw out vendors who repeatedly push user hostile proposals.

Do not let anyone with employed by Google contribute a web standard. Period. And reevaluate the ones already accepted while we're at it.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#95

Post by smoldesu »

lancesells wrote: post #23

I'm of the opinion that Google is no longer "Organizing the world's information" but "Stealing the world's information". Their last keynote proved that with all of the AI products. Regardless of this proposal (which is awful) they are a data vampire using all your info for themselves without permission or compensation.

It's not stealing if the content is lawfully acquired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild%2C_Inc._v._Googl....

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#96

Post by helen___keller »

protocolture wrote: post #79

This is kind of overblown isnt it? I remember sites doing all sorts of hacks to identify and shut down IE back in the day. "Works best in Chrome/Firefox". "The proposal calls for at least the following information in the signed attestation: The attester's identity, for example, "Google Play". A verdict saying whether the attester considers the device trustworthy. " So a user agent string and a weak attestation? This…

It’s a signed attestation. A user agent can be spoofed, this attestation needs to be signed cryptographically with a trusted key, for example a hardware key shipped in your device by an approved vendor. Think Apples Secure Enclave.

The goal is a verified stack - the hardware key proves you have approved hardware. The approved hardware proves you don’t have a tampered OS. The untampered OS proves you have approved binaries. The approved binaries disallow certain actions that users want such as blocking ads or downloading YouTube videos.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#97

Post by Pannoniae »

andersa wrote: post #36
Alifatisk wrote: post #12

So, how can this be bypassed in theory? Any ideas? Brainstorming is allowed. EDIT: Saw a few mention two solutions to disable the automatic verification on iOS & macOS. https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-enable-private-access-tok... https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213449

It can't, that's the point. Unless you steal the attestation key from Google. Disabling the feature on your device will make you fail attestation and thus websites requiring it will just stop working.

Well, you know what we must do now..... ;)

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#98

Post by kmeisthax »

tlogan wrote: post #92

This is how the situation will unfold... - The WEI check will be designed with a level of simplicity that tech-savvy individuals or hackers can easily bypass. Criticisms or objections will be quieted with comments like, "You just need to initiate the browser using these 50 different settings and you're good." - On the other hand, the WEI check will be intricate enough that an average user won't be able to circumvent…

WEI is a proxy to Play Protect which is already a pain in the ass to circumvent for techies.

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#99

Post by Daril »

surajrmal wrote: post #61
Daril wrote: post #41

This is a clear sign of Google's weakness. They are losing their monopoly and are desperately trying to hold on to the net. In the last few weeks, they have announced that they will try to block navigation if you have an ad blocker installed (for example, when watching a video on Youtube). Take a look at Fuchsia for another example ... they are losing the control on Android, so they started this new project ... it is…

> Take a look at Fuchsia for another example ... they are losing the control on Android, so they started this new project I work on fuchsia and can honestly say I have no idea what you're talking about. Fuchsia and android are more complimentary than they are competitive. I've noticed that when there is a lack of information, people tend to invent things that fit their narrative, but that's a really dangerous habit.

Perhaps you mean Flutter ?

Re: Google vs. the Open Web

#100

Post by jsnell »

lrem wrote: post #37

> In general, bots are pretty easy to exclude. They usually advertise themselves by a user agent string. Yes, that can be faked – but it seems highly unlikely that bots using faked user agents create such a large number of impressions that Google has to use this route against them. Is this serious?

The author is embarrassingly uninformed on this.

There are two kinds of bots.

There's legits ones that the site owners will generally find to provide a positive tradeoff. These bots identify themselves by the user-agent, the requests come from a predictable set of IPs, and the they obey the robots.txt. Think most crawlers for search engines (though not Brave's), bots that handle link previews for apps like WhatsApp, even RSS readers!

Then there's the abusive ones. These are usually hitting resources that are expensive and contain valuable information. The will not obey robots.txt. They'll run residential IP botnets to avoid IP blocks. They'll make their bot as similar to legit traffic as possible, the user-agent is literally the first thing they'd look at changing. They'll hire mechanical turks to create fake accounts to look like signed in users.

Now, it's pretty obvious why the author's methodology for supporting the statement is so silly. First, it was circular. They identified bots by user-agent, and then declared that since there were bots that had a distinguishing user-agent, the other traffic can't have been bots. The other is that they looked at the logs of a server that doesn't contain any data that somebody would be scraping maliciously. Ocean's 11 will do a heist of a casino, not a corner store. Likewise the professional bot operations are scraping valuable information from people trying to actively defend against it, not your blog.

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