Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

android-developers.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 247 posts

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#201

Post by danShumway »

smoldesu wrote: post #188
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google tried to take actions that would trivially lead to the end of the open web and enforce complete control over the software people ran on their own hardware. You can't accuse people of "hyperbole wars" when the worst-case is realistic (and indeed most likely).

It's arguable that the "open web" will exist for as long as Linux and KHTML exists. There will always be agnostic choices available, even if people choose outdated, locked-down or underdeveloped devices. Unlike the situation with AdSense, I'd argue it's really hard to identify any potential harm in this scenario. Multiple companies (Apple included) have also built their own remote attestation services, and nobody cri…

> Multiple companies (Apple included) have also built their own remote attestation services, and nobody cried bloody murder then.

HN, at the time, crying bloody murder about Apple's attestation system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31751203

This argument keeps getting brought out about Google, but in reality people are critical of iOS and Apple all the time. Yes, it is harder to get widespread reactions from people who are disengaged from web standards because Apple doesn't have Google's reputation. Yes, people tend to be more worried about Chrome than Safari in part because Safari is sitting at 20% market share.

But people do (and did) criticize Safari. It's not separate standards; if you pay attention to the people who are most engaged on these issues, Apple's DRM systems get criticism.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#202

Post by jppittma »

wkat4242 wrote: post #119
jjoonathan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof, that hyper-aggressive whitewashing of the DRM proposal from yoavweiss_ was a harsh lesson in realpolitik. Nerds were bringing good faith arguments to a bad faith optics war and getting slaughtered.

I don't think they were. After reading this my view of this person is just a corporate drone. Obviously this proposal is to serve the content owners, not the users, whatever the thoughts behind it are. And yes it may not be intended to block adblockers but it certainly can easily be used for that once it's ubiquitous. Attestation which is basically what this is, always implies a move of some measure of control from t…

Hey, look, it's the bad faith optics war again.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#203

Post by jppittma »

JohnFen wrote: post #38
londons_explore wrote: post #31

> Android WebView Media Integrity API is narrowly scoped I don't see any benefit to the user... Surely any app which wishes to embed a webview can simply add an api to said webview with native code to use existing android integrity API's? To me, this looks like a backdoor way to prevent people making "hacked" apps which, for example, play youtube but without ads. This API doesn't benefit the users.

It's not intended to benefit the user.

Do you really believe that the ability for people to play YouTube without ads benefits the user? I mean, it sounds great on some level.

Perhaps browsers should just ship with ad blocking by default. Everybody the world over can use the internet and have a better experience without anybody ever seeing any of those pesky paid ad things.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#204

Post by danShumway »

happytiger wrote: post #130
riku_iki wrote: post #3

Probably started working on some more cryptic solution already.

I mean this is the problem with the entire situation. I immediately read the article looking for any evidence that they would abandon the direction of the idea rather than do what Google does sometimes and roll out a POC on some other less controversial part of their infrastructure and then come back to it when the timing is more right (like after a large cybersecurity event happens, mark these words). They did exact…

> They rolled it back to the Android team and promised to perfect a smaller effort in a less controversial sandbox

Conveniently this also seems to mean (assuming I understand the announcement correctly) they get to roll it out for the webview and finalize everything without going through the web standards process and without dealing with any community feedback because it's not technically a web standard anymore.

They get to build a working implementation in Chromium (oh, sorry, not Chromium. Android Webview, an entirely different browser that just happens to be based on V8 and the same rendering engine, but is definitely not Chromium) and they get to make sure everything is working and even get websites using it for webapps. And then if they come forward again to standardize it they can say, "look, developers are already using the API so we're not going to change anything, and it's not controversial, and we're just slightly expanding it so that browsers are all compatible with each other, so it's fine if we just launch this in Chrome and ask the standards committee to sign off, right?"

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#205

Post by [deleted] »

danShumway wrote: post #200
ajross wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google tried to take actions that would trivially lead to the end of the open web and enforce complete control over the software people ran on their own hardware. So did Apple though, years ago. And no one freaked out like this. It just seems like maybe the argument is about something else.

People did complain about Apple; fewer because it's harder to get press attention about Apple on privacy issues, but it's pure revisionism to say that Apple's attestation systems weren't criticized. This is how HN reacted to Apple's announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31751203 I have my own set of negative comments in that very thread where I literally call Apple's system DRM. So do I pass this ridicul…

[deleted]

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#206

Post by JohnFen »

jppittma wrote: post #203
JohnFen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not intended to benefit the user.

Do you really believe that the ability for people to play YouTube without ads benefits the user? I mean, it sounds great on some level. Perhaps browsers should just ship with ad blocking by default. Everybody the world over can use the internet and have a better experience without anybody ever seeing any of those pesky paid ad things.

I think there are some end-user benefits, but they're more side-effects than the reason the technology was invented.

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#207

Post by zlg_codes »

smoldesu wrote: post #188
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google tried to take actions that would trivially lead to the end of the open web and enforce complete control over the software people ran on their own hardware. You can't accuse people of "hyperbole wars" when the worst-case is realistic (and indeed most likely).

It's arguable that the "open web" will exist for as long as Linux and KHTML exists. There will always be agnostic choices available, even if people choose outdated, locked-down or underdeveloped devices. Unlike the situation with AdSense, I'd argue it's really hard to identify any potential harm in this scenario. Multiple companies (Apple included) have also built their own remote attestation services, and nobody cri…

> If you think this is bad, then I regret to inform you that your war is probably lost.

There's an awful lot of gust in that sail, and yet no wind... Got anything to back it up or are we just being a corporate sycophant?

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#208

Post by userbinator »

cesarb wrote: post #175
trinsic2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you keep track of the changes to the BIOS firmware, you can see the changes. Their minuscule but happening. We don't have full blow preventing from disabling secure boot yet, but it appears to me that's were this is going. (Disabling usb ports, having keys that prevent disabling Secure boot unless you clear them or change them. All it takes is some event to bring these companies over the edge. The Asus MB developm…

> > I’ve complained about this before, but I’ve been hearing “Microsoft is going to block you from installing Linux!” since like 2004 [...] > If you keep track of the changes to the BIOS firmware, you can see the changes. Their minuscule but happening. We don't have full blow preventing from disabling secure boot yet, but it appears to me that's were this is going. Case in point: until recently, even with SecureBoot…

Yes, it's all about boiling the frog slowly. Very slowly.

Also, from that link is a somewhat notable cultural nugget:

"For their part Lenovo intimate that it is "

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#209

Post by zlg_codes »

riku_iki wrote: post #3

Probably started working on some more cryptic solution already.

This is part of what's concerning about 'open' platforms like the Web; large and influential parties inevitably end up steering things to serve someone's bottom line somewhere.

I'm beginning to think we need hard forks of the Web, because we already have two "spheres" of the Web: the JS-heavy sites-are-apps Web, and the documents-and-links Web. The former can be argued to be a superset of the latter, but with continued anti-user efforts coming from that crowd and their diametrically opposite endgoals compared to an open platform... what real choice do the major parties have but to part ways...?

Re: An experimental Android WebView Media Integrity API early next year

#210

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dmoy wrote: post #140
mcpackieh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "P.S. I'd love to discuss this with y'all like professional adults. Can we do that?" You can tell somebody is a snake when they aren't from the South but use "y'all" . It's become a sort of corporate snake shibboleth.

Uhhh, what? I use y'all 'cus that's how all the kids in my school talked growing up. I ditched a lot of the lexicon because after my family moved to the suburbs, I got made fun of by my new friends, literally calling me "less white". So no more finna', for example. I will die on the hill of having a good second person plural pronoun though.

Here in the rural parts of Ontario (well not in my rural part of Ontario, but further north), that pronoun is "youse"

As a long boy visiting from Alberta I was astounded that this existed.

It might be dying out tho

Post reply on HN