The article applies this terrific Doctrow quote about Secure Computing to WEI: > Should your computer be able to be compelled to tell the truth, even when you would prefer that it lie on your behalf? Should there be a facility in your computer that you can’t control that other people can remotely trigger? It is an apt application of the quote, and a fundamental question that is likely based on culture and each person…
A bit similar dilemma with self-driving cars that they don't necessarily serve their owners but rather "what is right" (aka the truth); in case of unavoidable collision, should they save the interests of the current owners, or the interests of the manufacturer, or the interests of everybody on average, etc.
Trying to avoid collisions even if theyseem unavoidable seems like it would lead to more robust software then solving trolley problems and driving over lower value people on purpose.
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…
That’s not how I remembered it. Chrome really was a good browser and I would argue is still a good browser (for now). IE got displaced by Firefox’s predecessors because MS got caught napping - they disbanded the IE team thinking they have won. Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome as Google went crazy making it faster and faster. Firefox fell behind often enough that Chrome managed to take almost all of its market…
This is partly rewriting history. Yes, Chrome literally outperformed Firefox, but there are other parts to this story. First, Google pulled engineers it had paid to work on Firefox, including the project lead, to kick-start Chrome instead. That's fair game (and Mozilla's fault for not seeing it coming), but it obviously set back Firefox as Mozilla had to scramble to fill those gaps without much of a forewarning. Secondly and perhaps most importantly, Google dumped countless millions of marketing money and often engaged in dark patterns to promote Chrome, e.g. bundling it with random shareware and freeware that would automatically make Chrome the default browser. That was even before they paid laptop vendors to preinstall Chrome, something that Mozilla could never afford, and Google could only afford because of its monopoly in search / advertising.
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…
That’s not how I remembered it. Chrome really was a good browser and I would argue is still a good browser (for now). IE got displaced by Firefox’s predecessors because MS got caught napping - they disbanded the IE team thinking they have won. Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome as Google went crazy making it faster and faster. Firefox fell behind often enough that Chrome managed to take almost all of its market…
That’s the “nerd history”, which I mostly agree with. Normal users however don’t care much about performance and whatnot. Their PC came with Chrome, so they use it. If you give them some other browser, they probably won’t be able to tell the difference.
Chrome didn’t “win” because it was good. It won because of Google’s hyper-aggressive marketing on all channels. They basically did was Microsoft was fined for by the EU back in the day.
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.
It's not unclear. They "lost" 22 Billion due to ad blockers.
That's nothing. I actually lost a trillion dollars just now. Apple is worth about $1T, and because Apple and its shareholders didn't simply gift me their entire company, I've now lost $1T. And that's just a drop in the bucket for money I've lost in the last few minutes!
It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup. It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition. - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more. - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites. - Analytics - services to web sites. - Cloud - the money-los…
Browsers aren't a business for Google (or any of the other big browser suppliers), they are an adjunct to other businesses, in Google’s case a way to shape the web—initially through client performance—to support the kind of online app environment that Google’s actual profit making ventures rely on.
Using a browser powered by Google’s technology stack is hardly deGoogling.
I don't really know much about how Brave is made, but you make it sound like they're using proprietary Google libraries, whereas I was under the impression that it was built from open-source software. If I'm right, the fact that this software originally came from Google is immaterial. If it's open source, Brave have full control over what it does and Google has zero.
Brave uses Chromium: an open source project controlled by Google. They can submit patches back to Google, but if Google don’t want to take them they don’t have to integrate them. So that leaves Brave with three options: they can take Google’s Chromium as is and focus on the browser interface potentially flipping a few config switches, they can maintain their own set of patches and update over time, or they can fork and go it alone. So far they’re hovering between options one and two. The closer they get to three the less influence Google has but the more it costs Brave. At the moment they’re not being particularly courageous with reducing their Google alignment.
The article applies this terrific Doctrow quote about Secure Computing to WEI: > Should your computer be able to be compelled to tell the truth, even when you would prefer that it lie on your behalf? Should there be a facility in your computer that you can’t control that other people can remotely trigger? It is an apt application of the quote, and a fundamental question that is likely based on culture and each person…
Doctorow demonstrably knows more about this, and has thought about this, than me, but to me the answer seems somewhat straightforward: > Should your computer be able to be compelled to tell the truth In the context of the soldered chip that "can't be removed" that can report the "truth" of the kernel etc, the answer to me is a simple, "it's impossible to know if the computer is telling the truth or not." Go to defcon…
> No matter what, there's always a way in. There's always a hack. The harder you make it to hack, the more motivated those crazy people at defcon will be to break it.
Absolutely, but I don't want to have to use 0days like a criminal or to open up a TPM chip in an $1M electron microscope just to have my PC render webpages the way I want it to (without ads that is).
I wonder if Google has considered how this technology can be used against themselves? If WEI is deployed, we ought to use it to lock out Googlebot!
You can already lock out Googlebot because it respects robots.txt and its IP ranges are documented.
It's very hard to "turn the tables" on companies when it comes to remote attestation because companies rarely directly lie to consumers about the true nature of their operations. When they do they tend to end up like Sam Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes. That's why all the big cloud vendors support remote attestation of servers to clients:
So not only do they want you to demand remote attestations from their servers but they even document how to do it and provide significant infrastructure support to do so.
Not many people are using it though, and when they do it's usually to generate trust in non-tech firms running software on top of those clouds. Which is certainly a decent use case, but it's more like defense in depth than something existential for most companies. Whereas the inverse can be existential (multiplayer shooters without anti-cheat will rapidly become unplayable because so many players will lie to get ahead).