Smells of vendor lock-in. Someone in the EU should report this. It is quite easy:
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/selling-in-eu/competit...
Google vs. the Open Web
111–120 of 207 posts
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#112So, 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
My semi uninformed theories:
1. Someone could set up a server that proxies WEI required requests to regular clients. The client initiates the process, the request goes to the middleman, the middleman makes the proper WEI authorized request, gets the response, passes the response back to the client.
2. The private key could leak somehow, and so, software can forge the required signature.
I'm not holding my breath for either one. Some kind of regulation has to step in, otherwise Google puts the internet in a chokehold.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#113I'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.
Y'all ought to read Rainbow's End, where a Google-alike is trying to OCR all written information to make it accessible online… while shredding the originals in the process. That book was prescient on so many levels.
Same with Accelerando.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You can bet that the Google crawler will have its own "attestation token" but if you want to crawl the Web with your own code you'll be SOL." Let's be real here and note that while most web properties welcome Google crawlers, there are many, many other scrapers/crawlers that offer zero value to web operators while costing resources.
Ok... but the result of fixing that by whitelisting only Google is a de facto full-on monopoly for Google search.
That isn't remotely what I said, now is it? The classic downvote/snark reply is such a rote cliche here.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#115> 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,…
> Now, it's pretty obvious why the author's methodology for supporting the statement is so silly.
i also found this odd. the target matters.
when i did more sophisticated dual tracking (js interaction and http logs), the js interaction detected 2x-3x the bots vs pure logs from just UA strings and ip ranges.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#116Makes me sad to think how locked-down modern computing is becoming. Between app stores, DRM, TPM, and proposals like WEI future generations of hackers will have a very different experience of what you can and can't do with a computer than I did.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ?
Hiroshi Lockheimer once confirmed that Fuchsia at this stage (to be exact, 4 years ago) is more of testbed for OS technologies that cannot be readily integrated into Android. It is quite absurd to say that Fuchsia is a competitor against Android. It is more close to Midori with a slightly clearer path to productization.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are losing their monopoly and are desperately trying to hold on to the net > they are losing the control on Android What do you mean by this and what does Android have to do with trying to hold on to the net?
A huge number of people only use the internet with their phones, and Google is doing their best to tie the entire system to Google services and the Chrome browser.
Exactly. And why the phones are sold with preinstalled with all the Google software and services and it is difficult to remove them if not via adb cli ?
If they are the best in the World as someone else has stated, the people will flock to install them on a "vanilla" phone, right ?
All your SMS, contacts, emails, location positions, photos ... One time my mother was at a funeral at a cemetry, nearby is a cafè. 20 minutes later she got a notification from Google : "How was your experience at the cafè ?" What have this to do with their own products, their free tier levels, the freedom to not watch Youtube or use Gmail ?
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#119Another year closer to a Shadowrun future, minus the magic, where the most powerful corporations run everything, are more powerful than most nation states, and where your only allowed role in life is a consumer/corpse-servant for life (unless you want to risk the harsh penalties of being illegal and running the shadows). I think we will get to a PostCapitalist future. The decisions we make in the next 7 years will li…
The sort of Shadowrun/Snow Crash/ancap future you're talking about is what Cory Doctorow is calling technofeudalism[0]: one in which the primary driver of economic activity reverts to passive income scams[1] instead of active economic activity.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
[1] Economists call these "rents", even though they're more general than just rent paid to borrow some real property
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#120I'm sorry, but using the term "generative system" and complaining that this undermines the internet founded on "generative systems" is perhaps the least impressive way to get anyone to care about the open web. Using buzzwords from some random paper just overwhelms people and doesn't convince them to care. Tell my uncle, or my aunt, that "Google wants to undermine the internet of generative systems!" Whatever. Tell th…
Even that won't get your uncle or aunt to speak up.
"Google wants to block any devices you repaired yourself" might get some traction.