Where Am I? NYTimes or Google? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#241

Post by acdha » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:29 PM UTC

popcorncolonel wrote: post #227

rtsil wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might want to back that up with research: people don’t look at full URLs but that’s exactly why it’s so important that the highly-prominent domain name display is accurate.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#242

Post by collinmanderson » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:35 PM UTC

aronpye wrote: post #180

AMP is the main reason I switched to DuckDuckGo from Google. Webpage rendering often used to break on iOS, in particular scrolling where the page would just go blank.

Yeah AMP is one of many reasons I switched to DuckDuckGo. “Why am I giving Google this much power? Why am I contributing to them being a monopoly?” were the general reasons.

Hearing people mention low quality search results was what kept me off, but I’ve actually only needed to do a google search about once a week, far less than I was expecting.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#243

Post by izzagilani » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:35 PM UTC

gorgoiler wrote: post #200

Clausinho wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm out of the loop, care to elaborate which PM software you are referring to?

Edit: it’s too controversial I think to introduce it by name. Googling “RedHat’s replacement for Linux init” would be a good start.

So systemd, right?

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#244

Post by gsich » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:42 PM UTC

gorgoiler wrote: post #195

With the utmost respect to you and the other commenters here, when I see positivity about the abstract, hypothetical technical merits of something with a long history of, in practice, being part of an extremely controversial power play it reminds me a lot of the comments I see promoting a widely installed piece of process management software — one which a lot of people don’t really want, whose subtle changes to layer…

>Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time.

Yeah, because Google is cheating.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#245

Post by acdha » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:44 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #114

twhitmore wrote: post #15

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

> AMP is "faster" because it gets rid of all the nagware and JS crap that the original page has.

AMP is faster only for poorly-optimized JS-heavy pages but the design is fundamentally flawed to require all of its own large amount of JavaScript to run before anything displays, whereas most of the traditional bloat doesn’t block rendering. That means any optimized page - Washington Post, NYT, etc. – loads noticeably faster even before you factor in how often you need to wait for AMP to load, realize that some part of the content is missing, and then wait for the real page to load anyway.

That design forces it to be less reliable, too: before I stopped using Google on mobile to avoid AMP, I would see on a near-daily basis failed page loads due to the AMP JS failing in some way and when it wasn’t failing it was still notably slow (5+ seconds or worse on LTE). Since all of that JavaScript is forced into the critical path, anything less than unrealistically high cache rates means the experience is worse than a normal web page.

WPT examples:

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200704_GR_62165b7f695e300...

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200704_5F_f5c36a7c41cf4c2...

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#246

Post by deadelvis » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:45 PM UTC

m-p-3 wrote: post #110

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…

I'm still waiting for general support of addons for the next version of Firefox on mobile just so that I can have the Redirect AMP to HTML[1] addon. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Here's a user script to get rid of AMP (I use it with adguard): https://userscripts.adtidy.org/release/disable-amp/1.0/disab...

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#247

Post by Spivak » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:51 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #192

ignoramous wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a way of getting the benefits of a CDN without turning over the keys to your entire kingdom to a third party. https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-ssl-the-nitty-gritty-tec... is a thing now.

The session key, which is given carte blanche by the TLS cert to sign whatever it wants under the domain, is still controlled by Cloudflare. To put it simply, Cloudflare still controls the content. The proposal here would avoid that, by allowing Cloudflare to transmit only pre-signed content.

Your browser would have a secure tunnel to CloudFlare which is encrypted with their key. But then that tunnel would deliver a bundle of resources verified your browser differently that CF doesn’t have the key for.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#248

Post by ddevault » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:56 PM UTC

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.

No... no, it would not. It would centralize web hosting and make it less censorship resistant.

Sure, you could move it somewhere else and have it show up in the address bar the same, but the actual URL has changed and you need to somehow get the new URL into people's hands. And ultimately you've centralized a lot of websites under a smaller number of service providers which, before, would have been on their own domains.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#249

Post by gorgoiler » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:56 PM UTC

gsich wrote: post #244

gorgoiler wrote: post #195

With the utmost respect to you and the other commenters here, when I see positivity about the abstract, hypothetical technical merits of something with a long history of, in practice, being part of an extremely controversial power play it reminds me a lot of the comments I see promoting a widely installed piece of process management software — one which a lot of people don’t really want, whose subtle changes to layer…

>Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time. Yeah, because Google is cheating.

By the way, I was referring to a common English aphorism about punctuality on 20th century Italian railways:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/03/...

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#250

Post by 7leafer » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 12:56 PM UTC

"Does google rig the system to squash its rivals and hurt us?"

Well, this is one kind of modern skepticism I particularly like: Does gravity kill if one jumps off a cliff? Is a sphere round? Is it really bad if we give up our freedom? Who are we to think for ourselves?

When questions like this are asked, the damage is already done. And it seems like it's already beyond repair.