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

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#301

Post by ehsankia » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

boomlinde wrote: post #175

wmf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is NYTimes's use of Fastly also a cover-up?

Does NYTimes' use of Fastly subvert the meaning of the URL by literally covering it up in the address bar? Nope? Not the same thing, then. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the fundamental concept of signed exchanges. The only problem is that it's just that: a signed exchange of content, which should have nothing to do with the domain name authority in the URL. By all means, display "Content from:…

> the meaning of the URL

The issue is that the technical meaning of the URL is very far from what most user think of.

Is the URL an address for NYT's server? Not really because you are actually hitting Fastly's server. So when NYT sets up a magical DNS config, it suddenly is fine, but using crypto to sign the package and serve it on a CDN that way, then it's suddenly "subverting the meaning of the URL"?

We can have a real discussion of what the meaning of a URL is, but I think your interpretation is unfair. I think it's entirely fair to argue that it makes sense for URLs to be an address to a specific content.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#302

Post by FabHK » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #182

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don’t know if this program halts. Be cool if you did ;)

If you didn't catch the joke: It is currently unknown whether there are any odd perfect numbers (and the program halts on encountering the first).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number

https://oeis.org/A000396

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#303

Post by henryfjordan » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #289

realusername wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you describe sounds a lot like URL spoofing, which is already pretty much used entirely to trick and scam unsuspecting users into clicking malicious links. Signed exchanges would just be an even harder to detect version of this.

Signed exchanges make it super easy to detect fraud. You can verify the signature...

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#304

Post by rblatz » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #284

Noumenon72 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me all the difficulty is caused by the obscuration. Once you get to the point where he refuses to say which software he's talking about, your attention scatters to all the different things he might be referring to. If I talk about Oracle's subtle changes to layers of abstraction, you can read the sentence and decide whether that describes Oracle well or not. If I talk about "a widely installed piece of process man…

I think thats part of the point. It makes his statement conversationally non-falsifiable because if I say something about (taking a guess here) systemd, that will say more about my own biases than what I am responding to.

My best guess was Jira, not everything made sense but it was the only thing I could think of.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#305

Post by ehsankia » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

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.”

Yet Google's own competitor, Bing, is clearly also using it. Isn't that part of the point of open-source? That anyone can see and use your work?

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#306

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

w-ll wrote: post #4

The shenanigans Google been doing to the url bar is super hostile. Trying to copy the domain of a url without the protocol just infuriates me.

Try sending someone a link of a PDF you found using google.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#307

Post by vincentmarle » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

AMP is a lot like how I was browsing the web on my phone before the iPhone came out. Opera Mini’s servers would proxy every single page I visited and fetch and pre-compile it before sending it compressed to my phone. It was way more performant than trying to render the page natively on my crappy phone. (That’s why the iPhone was so unique, it was the first phone that could natively render websites really well). Sure, there were a lot less security and privacy concerns back then, but I think the majority of users simply don’t care as long as it works.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#308

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #77

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…

All this does is rapidly devaluate the google.com domain. Not a bad thing per-se.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#309

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

metalliqaz wrote: post #281

I don't like AMP and I wish we just fixed the problems it is designed to handle at the root cause.

Get rid of Google?

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#310

Post by ehsankia » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #201

lern_too_spel wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> their own AMP cache

I'm confused, you make it sound like a free CDN is somehow a bad thing. You do realize people actually pay money to have their content on a CDN. I don't think Bing makes money on their AMP cache, and doubt they would want or even allow Google to link to content on their AMP cache...

The point of AMP cache is for Google (and Bing) to waste money making content faster for their users, in the hope that the user will then spend more time on search so they see more ads. The cache itself has nothing to do with the monopoly, and the fact that Bing can use AMP at all (since its open source) to get the same benefits actually shows the exact opposite.