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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

#331

Post by kuschku »

gary_0 wrote: post #156
pessimizer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISPs will not be letting that traffic through. So no little romantic underground. No cycle; the internet is happening just once, and we're in it. The assumption that everything is necessarily part of a little epicycle of history somehow mashes together Whig history and and an inert nihilism. Don't worry, nothing matters? We're not in a movie. When they close the open internet, there will be no reason for them to open…

If we're talking cyberpunk dystopias, we'd have to resort to hand-soldered audio couplers that use our locked-down phones as modems. Once the next Android/iOS update detects and blocks unauthorized binary carriers, we'll have to steganographically hide our traffic in fake voice calls. Crappy baud rate, but good enough for encrypted text. Augment with sneakernet and local hard-wired networks running under lawns and do…

You already can't run modems over the phone network anymore. Modern noise reduction algorithms helpfully remove as much modem data as they can.

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

#332

Post by Dalewyn »

sanxiyn wrote: post #267
smaudet wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope firefox still runs gecko. It's a small difference, perhaps, but its "my" browser in a way chrome will never be. Blink sucks. Also, not a clue what you are on about - I don't have an issue with firefox. Chrome is basically for dealing with google stuff, and for the rest of the web I don't care about them.

Which Google stuff requires Chrome? I run even Google sites on Firefox and they seem to run fine.

I've ironically found it's the not Google stuff that only accepts Chrome. Online banking is by far the most prominent of them.

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

#333

Post by archerx »

allarm wrote: post #310
archerx wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am the bad guy for defending my sites from being defaced and my clients private data stolen from the bad actors coming from those two countries specifically. It is totally me making the internet a shittier place. If only I had the strength and energy to unblock those countries to tolerate the unrelenting abuse and attacks so I won't be such a terrible, horrible person.

> Yes, I am the bad guy What's the point of asking a question (...does this make me a bad person for discriminating?) if you're not ready to accept some of the answers? Yes, geoblocking totally makes the internet a shittier place. In the same way as the hackers and scriptkiddies make it the shittier place. It's a chicken and egg situation. You're blocking part of the world because it's dangerous waters. I am blocking…

I wonder if locking my doors as well is discrimination according to you? No geoblocking doesn't make the internet a shittier place, you're blaming the symptoms/victims not the true cause.

What is actually making the internet a shittier place is the bad actors, bots, scammers, scrapers, psychopaths and etc. Maybe those countries that get blocked should do more to stop those bad actors in the first place.

Has China or Turkey ever contributed or paid for one of my projects/services? Nope, not once. Have they caused me grief and wasted my time dealing with bullshit? Yes, absolutely!

So I don't think I am a bad, unless you think preventing myself from getting punched makes me bad guy.

Maybe you should change your frame of thought and start pointing the fingers at the actual bad guys who actually ruining the web and stop accusing people of self defense of being "bad guys".

Basically if you don't want to be treated like an asshole (geoblocked) don't act like an asshole. I know it's a very hard concept to grasp.

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

#334

Post by bloppe »

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.…

There are some weird implications of this and I don't think the economics point to a viable futures:

1. Unlike EME (the controversial web DRM backed by Google that was standardized somewhat recently), the Web Integrity API requires a third-party service, which involves maintenance costs, as well as development costs to constantly adjust to the arms race against all the hackers who really want to thwart these tests.

2. In a "functioning attestation industry", many attestation servers would compete on price to validate users, making the network efficient and robust. I struggle to see this becoming reality because decent attestation would require very complicated techniques for each supported browser, and there is only 1 company that does both significant browser development and also wants to run an attestation server.

3. In a monopolized attestation industry, Google would be the single point of failure for all DRM-protected media on the internet. Google's down? So is Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. because they can no longer validate that their users are running an approved version of Chrome. This also give Google an incredible amount of leverage over other companies, because they can change fees and policies unilaterally and there are no alternative games in town. Companies have an incentive not to put themselves in that position.

If the entire media industry coalesces around Google Chrome as the only supported browser for media on the internet, and bestowed this incredible market power and leverage upon Google, then it could work. I find it hard to believe that this will slip past every significant regulatory body on Earth, and any significant gaps in market control would make the scheme unworkable.

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

#335

Post by xvector »

allarm wrote: post #282
archerx wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I block China and Turkey from some of my websites to reduce bots and hacking attempts, does this make me a bad person for discriminating or should I have to tolerate the script kiddies, ddosing and exploit searches? I’m not defending google’s crap but I should be able to block anyone I want from my websites if I choose.

> does this make me a bad person for discriminating Yes. And not only for discriminating. You make the web shittier than it already is, and more fragmented. > or should I have to tolerate the script kiddies, ddosing and exploit searches? This part is unrelated to the first part.

Defending the integrity of the internet isn't OP's job. He's not making the internet a shittier place, the governments of China and Turkey are. Blame them, not some random web host.

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

#336

Post by xvector »

fouc wrote: post #327

I think the wisest course of action is to boycott all chromium-based browsers. Yes it might be painful, yes you might not have your favorite extension or add-on. Suck it up. I've been exclusively using Safari for years, even after extensions were killed.

Safari has had functional, good extensions for years.

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

#337

Post by xvector »

urda wrote: post #237
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/...

They have also violated an important Code of Conduct [1], to the point of even aggressively closing valid complaints [2]. The Googlers RupertBenWiser [3] and yoavweiss [4] are really just toeing the Google line. What's super gross is even yoavweiss tried to play pretend that the original issue they forced closed, without comments or reading, was "spam" [5]. I believe both of these users are acting in very-bad-faith,…

Do not dox individuals. You do not understand their situations, pressures, etc.

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

#338

Post by xvector »

didntcheck wrote: post #98
crote wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehhh, it depends. In theory one could imagine a scenario like a bank website refusing to be accessed unless the entire OS & browser stack pass attestation - as that would rule out things like keyloggers, malicious browser extensions, and session hijacking. In practice it'll just be used to lock down content and force unskippable ads on users, of course.

And in practice it will eventually mean being unable to do online banking if you're on Linux. My Android phone with a custom ROM doesn't pass even a basic SafetyNet check, and this means I essentially cannot use mobile banking. For now, using a browser on my phone is a "workaround", but this proposal could change that

And yet millions of users benefit from SafetyNet every day. Just because something constrains openness does not make it inherently bad.

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

#339

Post by xvector »

doctor_eval wrote: post #57
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #6

Google seems to be escalating the speed of its efforts to restrict its user base to the completely non-technical, but Apple and Facebook already own that market. It also sounds like they're promoting yet another way to make "the internet" slower, more bloated, and have greater impediments to usage.

I have never understood why Google has remained the esteemed vendor for a subset of technical users. They lost me more than a decade ago when they hoovered clear text passwords from their wifi scanning and blamed it on a single engineer.

Well, perhaps because Chromium is the most well-hardened browser engine on the planet, for better or worse.

I might user Firefox personally, but I'll have my company use Chrome.

Other Google products (Maps, Docs, Gmail) are excellently engineered and usually ahead of their competitors in terms of reliability and feature set.

It's not hard to understand why people use Google products despite the occasional moral qualm.

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

#340

Post by realusername »

deafpolygon wrote: post #242
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…

At this point, the "open-source" parts are just legal arguments that they can throw in courts whenever they are attacked for antitrust behavior, nothing more.

They know that making it so tedious means it will only be used by a handful of hobbyist and nothing more significant.

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