It's wrong to trust the URL bar. For example, this search [1] has as top link an ad that boasts "google.com", and it really is! And if you click on it, you'll end up on a google.com site, which nominally helps with printers, but in reality it's a tech support scam. So much of the distrust here is that google wants to be everything: to host their content and publisher content and user content; to broker ads and recomm…
As an advertiser, you can write whatever you want into the url displayed there. This does not need to match the real target.
This has been all over HN since amp was released, and this is a two paragraph article with no new info or opinion. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+amp
I suppose 328 votes so far show the usefulness of repeat discussions. This article is a catalyst to keep this one going. The votes prove that it's an important enough issue to continue talking about.
AMP seems like a solution in search of a problem. Are people really having trouble with loading speed in 2020? I travel to remote areas in third world countries regularly for work and still don't really have problems loading pages with mobile data. Even if it didn't have all of the problems associated with it I just don't get the point. I don't need Google to repackage a website with less useability. It's frequently…
I lived in Africa and the only internet I had was cellular and by the gb. Amp is a massive improvement over the extremely large web pages we now have to endure. It's also much faster to render, which makes a huge difference on the crappy Android phones that are everywhere. Hell, I'm using a $200 Android phone right now because my iPhone broke and browsing the web is painful on it. And with the terrible hauwei $40 pho…
But does AMP makes internet usable on those $40 phones? I have a recent mid-range $200 phone and pretty much the only website the regularly hogs my browser is Google News, which coincidentally is also the only one that uses AMP. It's anecdote, but in my experience AMP (or whatever else Google News does) degrades performance to an amazing extent.
The plan is bad because google currently tracks all of your activities inside AMP hosted pages site in their support article. Google controls the AMP project and the AMP library. They can start rewriting all links in AMP containers to Google’s AMP cache and track you across the entire internet, even when you are 50 clicks away from google.com.
While that's theoretically possible, the library can be inspected and does not do these things.
Could Google give specific persons different versions or is technically impossible?
The plan is bad because google currently tracks all of your activities inside AMP hosted pages site in their support article. Google controls the AMP project and the AMP library. They can start rewriting all links in AMP containers to Google’s AMP cache and track you across the entire internet, even when you are 50 clicks away from google.com.
Publishers who use AMP were already allowing Google to track everything through either Analytics or Ads. Likewise, AMP pages are mostly accessed from Google search that's already tracked.
As a user I can choose to block GA, either through URL blocking or through legally mandated cookie choices in some regions (e.g. France). When served from Google I have no choice in the matter.
IMO the core point of the article is false. > To be blunt, this is a really dangerous pattern: Google serves NYTimes’ controlled content on a Google domain. No, "Google serves NYTimes' controlled content" is an oxymoron. Google controls the content that is served, and that's all your browser is verifying. Google could very well make the NYTimes content on there display something else and your browser wouldn't show a…
With Signed HTTP Exchanges, for Google to modify the content that is served, Google would need access to a private key for a certificate for nytimes.com, no? Either nytimes.com has handed over that key or Google would have to create a key/certificate for nytimes.com. Believing Google would maliciously issue certificates seems a stretch to me. I don't like AMP nor much of how Google has behaved with it ( http://exple.…
I don't get this. Clearly the contents is served by Google, and so they can do whatever they like with it. How is an end user going to know whether the message was signed before it was passed on or not?
The AMP spec REQUIRES you include a Google controlled JavaScript URL with the AMP runtime. So technically the whole signing bit is a little moot, given that the JS could do whatever it wanted.
The same could be said of any CDN hosted javascript library. For example: jquery. There is an open intent to implement support for publishers self-hosting the AMP library as well.
> The same could be said of any CDN hosted javascript library
Yes, and? What’s your point? It’s actually a security weakness to include third party JS. The whole thing runs on trust.
The whole AMP thing seems anti-competitive and hostile to the open web. It's a really bad look on Google's part to be pushing this.
I am conflicted Yes, AMP is an anti-competitive move by Google At the same time AMP is "faster" because it gets rid of all the nagware and JS crap that the original page has. So yeah, I don't like what Google is doing but I don't like what NYT is doing neither
> At the same time AMP is "faster" because it gets rid of all the nagware and JS crap that the original page has
Google gives preference to AMP content whether the source page is lightning fast or not. I get the frustration with crappy web pages, but a big part of the reason web pages are getting increasingly crappy is because Google and Facebook (and to a much lessor extent Amazon in a weird way) have a stranglehold on the web advertising market and publishers are getting smaller and smaller slices of advertising revenue. AMP increases Google's lock on the market. Since AMP pages can only really be monetized by the publisher, this puts even more power in Google's hands.