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Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#241

Post by nativeit »

dceddia wrote: post #183
jeroenhd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attestation is a great concept for stuff you're in control of. Employee laptops, your own servers, your own phone, you name it. You want to be able to control and verify your devices are still under your control, preferably without manually entering the data center every week to check. The concept isn't inherently bad. That said, the concept is seemingly aimed at blocking ad blockers and preventing browsers like Brav…

> In practice this will just mean "no Firefox, no Linux, no adblockers" And no curl, no yt-dlp or youtube-dl, no alternative YouTube frontends, no scraping the web to build an alternative search engine.

Also no assistive devices and archive.org(s).

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#242

Post by deafpolygon »

mabbo wrote: post #32

> Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though. Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest advertising network, the world's biggest search engine, the world's most popular operating system, and some of the world's most popular websites. So really, Google can do whatever it wants. This is the point that company breakups start to make a lot of sense.…

The reason why Google hasn't been and won't be is that everything they make is "obstensibly" open-source. (Minus the advertising network)

Google Chrome is "open source".

Android is "open source".

ChromeOS is "open source".

Nevermind the truth being more "open source" with proprietary bits (the bits that matter).

So the opening argument often is; well, someone else can enter the market and do what they do. But that's missing the trees for the forest (and the devil's in the details).

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#243

Post by deafpolygon »

jimbob45 wrote: post #205
mabbo wrote: post #32

> Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though. Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest advertising network, the world's biggest search engine, the world's most popular operating system, and some of the world's most popular websites. So really, Google can do whatever it wants. This is the point that company breakups start to make a lot of sense.…

Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest advertising network, the world's biggest search engine, the world's most popular operating system, and some of the world's most popular websites. Their hold on these claims are extremely tenuous. No one would be surprised if Firefox, Bing, or iOS resurged and killed Google’s offering, for example.

Microsoft is way too busy shooting themselves in the foot with Bing and OpenAI along with telemetry and all the tracking/dark pattern crap they do on Windows or any of their offerings.

They're quite happy scrambling for the crumbs as it is.

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#244

Post by smaudet »

acomjean wrote: post #221
Dalewyn wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was Firefox that defeated IE6. Chrome came and defeated Firefox; Firefox's reign was rather shortlived. It seems this particular moment in history has been either forgotten or rewritten, judging from this thread and another one from yesterday.

This is true. As someone who had a work time card I could fill out on Solaris using Firefox. This the new time card website came out that was “ie” only and we had to log onto a virtual NT server do our time card. Ugh. It was a nightmare. Then slowly Firefox came back. It was short lived majority but I still use it. I rather like it.

The "death knoll" was dev tools for chrome - they hired the firefox guy who was doing better work, then you couldn't lift an arm without hitting some web dev thinking they were cool for using chrome.

Firefox got better dev tools and mozilla did random crap for a bit, meanwhile brain-dead devs insisted on continuing to use chrome. When the devs supported it, they started favoring the googlified things.

Honestly it's a terrible browser - we are back to the bad old IE days (almost).

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#245

Post by smaudet »

tiltowait wrote: post #146
mabbo wrote: post #32

> Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though. Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest advertising network, the world's biggest search engine, the world's most popular operating system, and some of the world's most popular websites. So really, Google can do whatever it wants. This is the point that company breakups start to make a lot of sense.…

This line is what makes me roll my eyes whenever I hear someone say "Safari is the new IE". Safari missing a couple of features few websites use is far less of an issue than the dominant browser company can just invent new "standards" that make the web actively worse for everyone. (Sorry, I should say "everyone except for the scummy advertisers".)

Safari is just Apples Opera (before they went Blink and made themselves irrelevant).

They aren't great, just another proprietary browser. Every time I've used it has been sub-par. It reminded me a lot of Opera in that it was very opinionated, even if it tried to offer some feature. Apple makes money off of apps, not websites, though, so it makes sense they don't invest much into their browser.

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#246

Post by jameshart »

ineptech wrote: post #93
kelnos wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Google can do something that every one of it's users hates I don't think this is remotely the case. Quite a few tech-savvy people I know (some of them software developers) use Chrome and mostly don't care about whatever Google does with it. I mention "manifest v3" and get a blank stare. I talk about advertising and ad blockers, and most people don't care, with some of them not even using ad blockers. We really…

I don't buy this. I'm sure most iphone users don't care when you ask them about privacy or manifest v3 as an abstract concept, but remember what happened when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit. They may not write blog posts about privacy or donate to the EFF, but they have deeply personal relationships with "their" phone and they absolutely hate being reminded that it isn't reall…

> when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit.

Yeah, Apple was toast after they did that. Their share price in 2014 when they did that was $24, and immediately afterwards it rose to $33 over the next 12 months. And since then, it's just been one long slow decline to almost $200 a share, as their global mobile market share has gone from the 24% it enjoyed in 2014 to the measly 29% it enjoys today.

Online outrage does not translate to action.

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#247

Post by nativeit »

javajosh wrote: post #102

Surprising even myself, I actually like this proposal. It does two things, one which is good, and the other which is not as bad as people are saying. The good thing is to give browsers a way to attest to their inviolability to systems on the other end. This is generally useful! In particular, it opens up a huge potential for people to run what are effectively servers in their browsers - which was TBL's vision for the…

What happens when things like braille readers, TTS devices, and software to reformat websites to facilitate accessibility are blocked because they are modifying webpages’ content?

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#248

Post by no_time »

superkuh wrote: post #89

Even if this DRM doesn't get accepted and used Google's QUIC protocol they call "HTTP/3" that they whitewashed through the IETF with MS makes it so it's impossible to establish a connection to a server unless it gets 'attestation' from a third party CA TLS corporation. It's the same thing in different clothing but everyone is cool about it for some reason. Google should've just called this HTTPS+ Everywhere and there…

Can you post the relevant part of the spec or discussion of it? This sounds wack but I'm not seeing it.

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#249

Post by urda »

voramok wrote: post #193
EvanAnderson wrote: post #92

The proposal author (who locked the issue[0] on Github) also commented on HN and has, so far, remained silent here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36825097 [0] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

As far as I am concerned the reputation of this Ben Wiser guy is so far down the toilet that there’s practically nothing he can do or say to recover it. Like the old joke goes “you screw a goat once…”

Both RupertBenWiser and yoavweiss reputations are fully gone from this. Pretty much the moment they closed an issue without a single comment [1], locked the repo from everyone else, and then a much later time claiming it was "spam" is a pretty dirty tactic [2].

[1] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

[2] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

Re: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

#250

Post by WhyCause »

crimsontech wrote: post #218
rebeccaskinner wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care, and I've basically stopped using my iphone for anything because the web is an abysmal experience full of ads even with the maximum amount of ad blocking possible on iOS. I hate the iPhone and the only reason I haven't switched back to android is that it seems to manage to, somehow, still be even worse. We are well and truly on the other side of the enshitification event horizon on mobile, and it looks like Go…

You could use Brave or Orion and get adblocking on iOS

Or Firefox Focus, which is what I use. It does a pretty good job.
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