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Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

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Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#221

Post by summerlight »

reaperducer wrote: post #142

People have been railing against Google's Amp on HN for years, and I think I finally figured out what it's for. It's Google way of combatting phone apps. If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so…

Apple and Facebook really doesn't care if the web dies as long as their platform take the lion's share. But for Google, search as a product can exist only if the web itself remains relevant and this is why it's trying to keep display ads alive even though it doesn't really give them much money compared to search ads but all the privacy complication coming from third party tracker.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#222

Post by cjhopman »

kebman wrote: post #118
gsnedders wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's nonsense. Take a moment to breathe. Think about just typical https, when you request some nytimes.com content that is actually being delivered to you througha bunch of intermediaries. So, by your logic any of those could just change that content. But it turns out, this was a problem solved like 50 years ago. With https, the content is signed by some key that you trust to represent nytimes.com.

Sidenote (this is really not targeted at the specific comment): Is there some site where people actually have a clue? On any topic that I have any passing knowledge about, HN is just completely spewing nonsense and the worst part about it is that they think they have a clue. I have to assume that HN's comments are just as useless on things that I don't know about.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#226

Post by eeZah7Ux »

snowwrestler wrote: post #98
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #46

I think the main issue is limited AMPCache providers and inability for the publisher to choose their own AMPCache providers. Which is being exploited the two search engines. AMP project by itself is open-source and it explicitly states 'Other companies may build their own AMP cache as well'.[1] There are only 2 AMP Cache providers - Google, Bing. Further, 'As a publisher, you don't choose an AMP Cache, it's actually…

Can we please stop trying to pretend AMP is some sort of community-driven open source project? AMP was created by Google, for the benefit of Google. We are not obligated to play along every time a company says “open source.”

> We are not obligated to play along every time a company says “open source.”

This is the point.

People easily confuse "open source" with "free software" and "community driven".

A lot of corporate-driven open source greenwashed the dark patterns of closed source: centralized development, user lock-in, walled gardens, poor backward compatibility, forced software and hardware upgrades.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#227

Post by popcorncolonel »

rtsil wrote: post #74
quadrifoliate wrote: post #41

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…

The pattern is dangerous because it trains the user to dissociate URL and legitimate content, and the best tool at our disposal against phishing is still the ability to use the URL to ascertain the legitimacy of a content.

Do you really think most smartphone users look at the URL anymore? Or even know what a URL is?

From the non-technical people I've talked to, the answer is no, they don't know what a URL is, and that was happening before AMP came around.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#228

Post by dependenttypes »

realusername wrote: post #6
superasn wrote: 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…

Being completely against AMP for obvious reasons, I'm personally not against signed exchanges itself, this feature could spawn a whole new class of decentralised and harder to censor web hosting, that sounds like a great addition.

> this feature could spawn a whole new class of decentralised and harder to censor web hosting

How so?

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#229

Post by Kiro »

> Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are lightweight pages designed to load quickly on mobile devices. AMP-compliant pages use a subset of HTML with a few extensions. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), is a very accessible framework for creating fast-loading mobile web pages.

That itself sounds awesome and something we should promote. The other part of AMP is of course that it's served through Google's servers. While their global edge caches probably bring the speed up I think that's less important.

I other words: AMP as a framework to force users to build light-weight pages without bloat is a good thing. Google's control is a bad thing.

I think many of the comments here make it a borderline topic where there's either all or nothing. I want to see a more nuanced discussion on what the possible alternatives and solutions are instead of just "Google bad, AMP bad".

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#230

Post by appleflaxen »

hortense wrote: post #189
reaperducer wrote: post #142

People have been railing against Google's Amp on HN for years, and I think I finally figured out what it's for. It's Google way of combatting phone apps. If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so…

Amp was a reaction to Apple News and Facebook News: using those applications to read the news was a much better experience than using the web. Why? Mainly for two reasons: 1/ Apple and Facebook were hosting all the content. 2/ The content did not come with megabytes of JS and other unnecessary crap. Amp is an attempt at saving the web, and Google is interested in that for the reason that you gave: they make their mon…

> Amp is an attempt at saving the web, and Google is interested in that for the reason that you gave: they make their money from the web.

Yes; attempting to save the web in much the same way that the parasitic wasp is trying to oviposit in your thorax and take over your behavior, in order to save you from being eaten by the spider.

No thank you, sawfly.

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