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Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

theinternetbytes.com

201–210 of 381 posts

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#201

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.

In what way is it anti-competitive? Google's competitors also consume AMP pages and prerender them using AMP caches. Anti-competitive would be requiring the publishers to integrate directly with Google like Apple News, not asking the publishers to publish pages that all link aggregators can consume.

Google Search uses its monopoly to push their own AMP cache. I can't search in Google and load the content through Bing's AMP cache.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#202

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…

Agreed, that's problematic. But Google didn't even have to not host content, they would just have to use a different domain. They have such weird blind spots.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#203

New York Times and all the other publishers don't have to participate in this crap. It's shameful that they cede authority over their content so easily in exchange for a vuage promise of more visibility. There are so many better ways.

In an ideal world where they would not rely on ad revenue and page views but are supported by the readers that assumption would be correct.

But right now we are not living in that ideal world and because all other publications are doing that they have to follow if they don't want to risk losing visibility against the competition.

So of course they don't "have to" but they also kinda do.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#204
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the library can be inspected Really? Could you publish how you are inspecting an unknown program to determine if it exhibits a specific behavior? There are a lot of computer scientists interested in your solution to the halting problem . Joking aside, we already know from the halting problem[1] that it you cannot determine if a program will execute the simplest behavior: halting. Inspecting a program for more compl…

By reading the source code? def divisors(n): for d in range(1, n): if n % d == 0: yield d n = 1 while True: if n == sum(divisors(n)): break n += 2 print(n) I don’t know if this program halts. But I’m pretty sure it won’t steal my data and send it to third parties. Why? Because at no point does it read my data or communicate with third parties in any way: it would have to have those things programmed into it for that…

> at no point does it read my data

Tracking doesn't require reading any of your data. All that is necessary is to trigger some kind of signal back to Google's servers on whatever user behavior they are interested in tracking.

> or communicate with third parties

Third parties like Google? Which is kind of the point?

> [example source code]

Of course you can generate examples that are trivial to inspect. Real world problems are far harder to understand. Source is minified/uglified/obfuscated, and "bad" behaviors might intermingle with legitimate actions.

Instead of speculating, here is Google's JS for AMP pages:

https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js

How much tracking does that library implement? What data does it exfiltrate from the user's browser back to Google? It obviously communicates with Google's servers; can you characterize if these communications are "good" or "bad"?

Even if you spent the time and effort to manually answer these questions, the javascript might change at any time. Unless you're willing to stop using all AMP pages every time Google changes their JS and you perform another manual inspection, you are going to need some sort of automated process that can inspect and characterize unknown programs. Which is where you will run into the halting problem.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#205

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 do, and I don't even live in 3rd world country - I live in Germany in one of the largest cities in the country.

But even if I can load both pages at roughly the same time AMP experience is just so much better, they always load at the very least at the same speed as the original website, there's no weird scrolling implemented, there's no annoying popups, etc.

I always choose AMP pages when possible, compared to the "native" ones - because I know for a fact that I'll get fast loading, and other stuff mentioned above.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#206
post #2

Yes this has been a big issue for a very long time now. Google wants to push a release where it will display the hostname of the amp site even if the content is being served from google.com[1]. Mozilla (and Apple) are strictly against it and thank god for Mozilla. If Google had a bigger market share this would already be something we would have been living with. I'm sure there are better sources for this, but here is…

Aren't we essentially reinventing http proxies with this?

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But why allow a third party (Google in this case) to collect data on your reading behavior on NYT?

If you loaded the megabytes of JS served by the actual nytimes.com, they’ll certainly be sending your data to Google as well for advertising purposes.

(Albeit, that’s far more blockable)

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#208
post #5
post #2

Yes this has been a big issue for a very long time now. Google wants to push a release where it will display the hostname of the amp site even if the content is being served from google.com[1]. Mozilla (and Apple) are strictly against it and thank god for Mozilla. If Google had a bigger market share this would already be something we would have been living with. I'm sure there are better sources for this, but here is…

I don’t really think Google’s plan is that weird. And it would be amazing for decentralized networks, archiving, and offline web apps. Google can’t just serve nyt.com — they can serve a specific bundle of resources published and signed by nyt.com verified by your browser to be authentic and unmodified.

I agree, if we finally got a way to have working bundles on the web, that would be extremely useful. (And would also restore some of the capabilities of browsers to work without internet connection).

It seems to me, a lot of the security concerns come from the requirements to make pages served live and pages served from bundles indistinguishable to a user - a requirement that really only makes sense if you're Google and want to make people trust your AMP cache more.

I'd be excited about an alternative proposal for bundles that explicitly distinguishes bundle use in the URL (and also uses a unique origin for all files of the bundle).

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an advertiser, you can write whatever you want into the url displayed there. This does not need to match the real target.

But the real target is google.com. I just made https://sites.google.com/view/whalefacts , took me literally ten seconds, confirmed it was accessible from multiple IPs and multiple browsers. Google wants to be a content host and an ad broker and a search engine. Each of these is reasonable in isolation. Yet you can search on google, and Google will serve you an ad linking to a google.com site, and that site scams you…

Super boring answer, and this is not an admonition to you, but in general; shouldn't this lead to lawsuits? It needs to be tried in court.
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