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Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

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Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#21

Post by stjohnswarts »

c0l0 wrote: post #15

In 2012, I interviewed at Google Ireland for an SRE position. I ended up not taking the job due to family issues, but I somewhat regretted having missed the opportunity to tackle Google-sized problems and make FAANG-sized money for a few years after. This feeling has ceased entirely in the meantime, due to what Google has become, and how its understanding of its role in the world seems to have shifted. Or maybe its t…

They used to be innovative and forward looking and send to be having fun at contributing new tech. Under Pichai they seem to only want to lock in their position, kill all competitors, convert the WWW to GWWW

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#22

Post by skybrian »

This is attributing intentions to Google when it's unclear what they're going to do. Probably even unclear to them. Not all anti-fraud measures are DRM. If "holdout sets" get implemented then it can't be used as DRM, because it will randomly fail.

What we know now is that they wanted to run an experiment to gather some data. Since it's in Chromium, they needed to explain it, and they explained it poorly.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#23

Post by komali2 »

zoom6628 wrote: post #9

I lived in china and put effort into de-googling my phone. Now I’m back in the open world and seems need do all over again. Must be a biz opp to run a proxy that strips everything google from pages and web communications. I would pay a few $/month to not be farmed without consent.

No need to proxy, you can just use https://brave.com/. Add a pihole to strip it from other devices and non-browser web traffic.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#24

Post by stjohnswarts »

zoom6628 wrote: post #9

I lived in china and put effort into de-googling my phone. Now I’m back in the open world and seems need do all over again. Must be a biz opp to run a proxy that strips everything google from pages and web communications. I would pay a few $/month to not be farmed without consent.

Options are Linux, and half broken "phone"

or Apple, the hardware is their profit center, as well as getting you to buy their software product, but your info isn't sold to 3rd parties (yet?)

or Google (circumvent some of it with firefox+adblock origin)

or just don't participate at all and get a flip burner.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#25

Post by rplnt »

Google might have pretended to stood for something, but they have been an evil corporation since they have been a corporation. That's what corporations do by design.

One relevant example is that they've been doing the "only for ie5+" with their services for 10+ years now. They killed most of their browser competition not by having a good product, but by having or buying up good services that they used to force chrome onto users - voluntarily (billions worth of advertisements) or not (lies about compatibility, performance or outright blocking other UAs).

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#27

Post by Buttons840 »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #10
TekMol wrote: post #3

As I understand it, Google wants to add some signal to http requests which tell the server that the user is using a system made from some specific software. For example an unaltered stock Android phone. What would be the one-sentence technical explanation of how Google wants to achieve this?

Every request first goes through "trusted attesters" (read: Google and pretty much Google alone) along with some information about your device (hardware information, browser data, executable hash, etc) for them to sign it and decide whether or not you're legit. See the Play Integrity API on Android for similar implementations.

So there's some hardware level support for this? Could you man-in-the-middle the connection and alter the message to say whatever needs to be said to convince the other computer that my computer is working the way it expects?

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#28

Post by worrycue »

mg wrote: post #7
saagarjha wrote: post #2

Google used to be cool and now it’s not. Wonder which companies of today will end up completing the cycle tomorrow?

Google was made possible by a platform shift: From desktop apps to websites. First they positioned themselves very early in the web user experience: After the user turned on their Dell computer, booted Windows and started Internet Explorer, the next step was to use Google. Then they moved one step closer to the user by building their own browser: Chrome Then they moved even closer to the user by building their own OS…

Frankly, I think it’s less “moving closer to the user” and more just securing control over the path users use to get to their service.

Chrome was made to prevent whoever controls the browser from blocking users’ access to Google.

Android was created because they were afraid Apple would block them on mobile.

All tech companies do this kind of positioning.

Apple made Apple Maps to make sure Google Maps isn’t the only choice on iOS fearing Google could withdraw Google Maps and hurt the utility of iOS devices - at least in the short term.

It’s why Apple made Safari and enforces it as the only browser on iOS.

Apple learnt relatively early the dangers of being dependent on another company, https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#29

Post by robertlagrant »

c0l0 wrote: post #15

In 2012, I interviewed at Google Ireland for an SRE position. I ended up not taking the job due to family issues, but I somewhat regretted having missed the opportunity to tackle Google-sized problems and make FAANG-sized money for a few years after. This feeling has ceased entirely in the meantime, due to what Google has become, and how its understanding of its role in the world seems to have shifted. Or maybe its t…

It's also been a massive boost to FOSS as well. I don't think Google is a single entity with a true nature. It's just people deciding things. Sometimes we get VP8 open sourced, a world-level value adding move. Sometimes we get them running an experiment whose intentions should've been better articulated.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#30

Post by robin_reala »

komali2 wrote: post #23
zoom6628 wrote: post #9

I lived in china and put effort into de-googling my phone. Now I’m back in the open world and seems need do all over again. Must be a biz opp to run a proxy that strips everything google from pages and web communications. I would pay a few $/month to not be farmed without consent.

No need to proxy, you can just use https://brave.com/ . Add a pihole to strip it from other devices and non-browser web traffic.

Using a browser powered by Google’s technology stack is hardly deGoogling.
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