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

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311–320 of 484 posts

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

#311
I think this is one of the shittiest things I've seen so far. The thing with this is that is invisible to 98% of regular users out there. It's already hard to explain things clearly to non-tech persons as why certain policies are harmful at the privacy level.

And even if they do understand you, in most cases their perception of you is as someone really paranoid about privacy, and yes they will undoubtly ask things like: "so you don't have twitter, facebook, instagram, ...". It's really hard to convince people or at least make them truly see all these dark things going on behind the scenes.

Regular people won't even talk about this, they don't/won't care. As long as they still able to see the content they are requesting this is something that do not affect them, it affects the people that know the shit is going on under the hood because we understand how machiavelic a move like this is.

On the other side if this somehow manages to ever see the light of the day, it's a huge opportunity for other people to come up with alternatives that effectively fight back this initiative and/or bypass it. If there's something that we do not run out of in this industry is creativity, for all sort of things, even the craziest ones, and that's something no corporation will ever be able to mitigate.

Also keep in mind that no browser is going to ever be in the podium eternally. Chrome has a expiry date, we just don't know when it will expire.

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

#312
post #152
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one I knew really cared much about the U2 album except that it was a bad album and they didn't want it in their collection. From the people I know there no one upset about the power dynamics - everyone who complained would have been 100% happy if Apple had given them an album they liked.

And also, in a bug I'm not sure was entirely on Apple, when plugged into many car stereos iTunes would start playing the first song in your library, so users were annoyed because everythime they'd plug their phone into their car to charge it would start playing a 3rd tier U2 album.

It still happens it’s still The Miracle / Song Of Innocence / U2 and it’s still annoying.

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

#313
post #68
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.…

But that's the catch, company breakups are extremely hard to perform especially when you're talking about such a giant company being tackled by an organization that only has ~400m in funding. Especially when they can point to the other giant companies as defense against claims of monopolist behavior. See Google using Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon as a reason for why their ad business should not be broken up in the Jan…

I think one of the major problems preventing a tech breakup is that every politician has a portfolio in an index fund and they all know how top heavy in the same seven tech companies that portfolio and the SP500 is. You have the people that should be breaking tech up afraid to do so because their own personal finances would suffer. I don’t know how we get around that problem. It involves personal integrity and putting your own gains below the greater good- both things politicians aren’t known for.

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

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

#314
post #104

> The goal of the project is to learn more about the person on the other side of the web … The intro says this data would be useful to advertisers to better count ad impressions, stop social network bots, enforce intellectual property rights, stop cheating in web games Go f yourself, Google. Browser’s purpose is to serve me web pages, not to learn about me.

As long as Google is still leading in the browser market share, they do not care or give a shit and will never change.

So many people are harsh Google critics, yet still never use duckduckgo, don't try to migrate from gmail, or stick to firefox.

Complaining is easy, but apparently even small compromises like these are hard.

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

#315
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".)

That line is not (primarily) about lack of features, but about its engine being the only option on iOS.

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

#316
> So if you root an Android phone and get flagged by the Android Integrity API, several types of apps will just refuse to run.

That's just messed up. If like saying if your car detect you have been doing maintenance yourself, you can use this particular brand of carburetor because they will refuse to work.

And they want that... for the web?

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

#317
post #63
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.…

> 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 have to disagree with Firefox... in terms of functionality and configurability it's by far and away my preferred browser but in terms of performance it just crunches to a crawl on my Mac. Load times of pages are absolutely fine but changing tabs crunch , scroll down the webpage judder freeze whereas Edge is just silky smooth.

Maybe it's an extension or three I'm running but I just want to use the bloody thing not sit there and figure out what extension is not working nicely (and then potentially find out it's none of them) on one platform but is fine on another.

Every so often I go back and have look to see if it's improvised but it hasn't in the last few years for me.

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

#318

One thing from the blink-dev discussion caught my eye: > Anything we might decide would ultimately be influenced by the larger societal debate around privacy (regulations etc.) since perfect privacy means perfect immunity for criminals. Ensuring that your devices don't spy on you on behalf of a government or company does not imply "perfect immunity for criminals". Putting aside attestation for the moment, consider th…

It's funny how they frame laws and regulations designed to prevent companies from abusing people's rights as a "larger societal debate". Yes, the debate is between people who want companies to respect their rights and companies who don't wanna. That's not a debate and framing it as such is just an obvious attempt to narrativize their stance for lobbyists. Also "perfect privacy" is a red herring (binary fallacy or what is it called?) because the compromise between no privacy and perfect privacy doesn't have to be "Google gets to harvest users' data against their wishes".

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

#319
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.…

Doing stuff their customers hate is the default MO of most tech companies. There's very little recourse.

For example, when Apple makes a user-hostile hardware change, every major Android vendor will copy it in a matter of months[0]. The only thing you can go to after that is niche Chinese phone makers that will cause you a bunch of other pain.

I'm basically completely disconnected from Google at this point. My phone requirements forced me to get a phone without Google Play Services, and I live in a country where Google is not dominant. The only thing that still pops up is YouTube occasionally. (Also it would be nice if I could get my old Google Photos archives exported from Photos, but the export in Takeout keeps erroring! Oh well...)

[0]: Back when I worked at Google, there was a mailing list thread on a big internal engineering mailing list, where somebody point-blank asked "Did we remove the headphone port on the Pixel because Apple did?". The answer from the product team was a whole bunch of wishy-washy word soup, amounting essentially to "Yes".

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

#320
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 see a huge difference between Firefox and Chrome these days, as they implement everything Google tells them to (and pays them to)

This just isn't true, have look through https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ and check the authors of some of the proposals Mozilla are negative about.

There's even a post on front page right now about Mozilla's position on the very proposal we are discussing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857032

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