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Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

theinternetbytes.com

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Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a reference to "Say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time." This quip is generally used sarcastically or wryly. "Say what you like about [something that's seriously bad], at least [frivolous matter] has improved."

Actually it’s a joke about concentration camps and it’s in bad taste and offensive.

> Actually it’s a joke about concentration camps

No it isn't.

Gorgoiler says "a common English aphorism about punctuality on 20th century Italian railways" and links to https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/03/... Both are clearly about Mussolini making trains run on time (or rather, not actually doing so.) Wikipedia describes the origins of the quip as such:

> Mussolini was keen to take the credit for major public works in Italy, particularly the railway system.[109] His reported overhauling of the railway network led to the popular saying, "Say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time."[109] Kenneth Roberts, journalist and novelist, wrote in 1924: "The difference between the Italian railway service in 1919, 1920 and 1921 and that which obtained during the first year of the Mussolini regime was almost beyond belief. The cars were clean, the employees were snappy and courteous, and trains arrived at and left the stations on time — not fifteen minutes late, and not five minutes late; but on the minute.[110]"

The dubious premise of Mussolini being responsible for reliable trains predates the Holocaust.

As for "it’s in bad taste and offensive", I agree that comparing fascism to systemd is in bad taste.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this feature could spawn a whole new class of decentralised and harder to censor web hosting How so?

https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/dnslink/ this is how it should be

There is an issue opened around supporting HTTP exchanges for IPFS in the browser as well.

https://github.com/ipfs/in-web-browsers/issues/121

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#343
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is providing a framework which forces greedy publisher to keep their websites light "cheating".

Chrome (at least on Android) preloads AMP sites after searching. It doesn't do it for other sites. I would classify that as cheating.

It can't do that on other sites, it's a technical limitation. Part of the reason why they push AMP and provide every website with free CDN hosting is exactly to enable caching. If the "purpose" of AMP counts as cheating, then sure?

Once signed exchanges become a thing, that may change, but as seen in this thread, there's a lot of push back for that.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are not obligated to play along every time a company says “open source.” This is the point. People easily confuse "open source" with "free software" and "community driven". A lot of corporate-driven open source greenwashed the dark patterns of closed source: centralized development, user lock-in, walled gardens, poor backward compatibility, forced software and hardware upgrades.

>"community driven" This concern has been raised time again with every major Google open-source project e.g. Android, Chromium, Golang etc. and that concerns have helped improve certain aspects of the project. But, I wonder whether a huge corporate like Google can build such large scale projects without such criticism, if the the project needs to be successful they to gain from it after-all they are investing their e…

> But, I wonder whether a huge corporate like Google can build such large scale projects without such criticism

Yes: they could at least develop large projects in a foundation with many other companies

> And them being invested in it, is a major reason for adoption by other parties and resulting in a successful open-source project.

...and the main source of pain when the projects are "pivoted" or just dropped due to a single company business needs, as it happened many times.

> such large projects have helped overall SW ecosystem and even startups economically.

They hugely harmed competing projects and competing companies including Mozilla, many phone OSes, many grassroots programming languages.

It's well known that google developed various projects to kill competitors or buy startups cheaply and drop the project afterwards.

There isn't an infinite pool of open source developers - far from it!

Any large corporation that drains the pool to create a competitor to already existing FLOSS projects is actively harming the ecosystem.

> being a complete walled garden and just asking to 'trust us' is much worse.

Closed source can be less harmful that fake-open source. A lot of people actively avoid closed source and fall for the latter.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#345
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome (at least on Android) preloads AMP sites after searching. It doesn't do it for other sites. I would classify that as cheating.

It can't do that on other sites, it's a technical limitation. Part of the reason why they push AMP and provide every website with free CDN hosting is exactly to enable caching. If the "purpose" of AMP counts as cheating, then sure? Once signed exchanges become a thing, that may change, but as seen in this thread, there's a lot of push back for that.

An arbitrary technical limitation. You could preload any site you want. Google wants to push AMP, so they only preload those.

Well of course it's cheating if you compare load times between pre-loaded sites vs. not preloaded ones. And then argue that "AMP is faster", which is obviously wrong because the conditions are not the same.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an advertiser, you can write whatever you want into the url displayed there. This does not need to match the real target.

But the real target is google.com. I just made https://sites.google.com/view/whalefacts , took me literally ten seconds, confirmed it was accessible from multiple IPs and multiple browsers. Google wants to be a content host and an ad broker and a search engine. Each of these is reasonable in isolation. Yet you can search on google, and Google will serve you an ad linking to a google.com site, and that site scams you…

I'm confused, that's sites.google.com, the URL says that, and it's right, what's the problem?

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#347
post #332
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The New York Times surely already serves their pages through a CDN, silently, and with the CDN having the full technical capability to modify the pages arbitrarily. Signed exchange allows anyone to serve pages, without the ability to modify them in any way. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

My objection is that it's no longer clear if you're dealing with content addressing or server addressing. If I see example.com in the URL bar, is it a server pointed from the DNS record example.com (a CDN that server tells me to visit), or am I seeing content from example.com? If I click a link and it doesn't load, is it because example.com is suddenly down, or has it been down this whole time? Is the example.com ser…

What if there was a `publisher://...` or `content-from://...` or `content://...` protocol, somehow? (visible in the address bar, maybe a different icon too, so one would know wasn't normal https:)

And by hovering, or one-clicking, a popup could show both the distributor's address (say, CloudFlare), and the content's/publisher's address (say, NyT)?

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#348
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does centralizing content on Google from multiple sources improve decentralization? The web is already decentralized. That's why it is a web. AMP is a scourge. It's a bad idea being pushed by bad actors.

The current implementation of the AMP cache servers obviously doesn't help the decentralization. I think what Spivak is saying though is right. If we could move from location addressing (dns+ip) to content-addressing , but not via the AMP cache servers, in general, anyone could serve any content on the web. Add in signing of the content addressing, and now you can also verify that content is coming from NYTimes for e…

Thank you for this explanation. AMP has put a really bad taste in my mouth but what you describe here does have some interesting implications. Something to consider for sure.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#349

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.

> 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.

That's nonsensical. That would reveal what the person searched for to a third party (Microsoft) even if they don't click on any results. The AMP Cache has to be controlled by the link aggregator in order to support safe prerendering, so Bing's AMP cache is used to prerender Bing results, and Google's AMP cache is used to prerender Google results. Compare to directly integrating with Google, in which case, Bing wouldn't get to take advantage of prerendering. The latter (the Apple News setup) is anti-competitive. AMP is not.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#350
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this. Clearly the contents is served by Google, and so they can do whatever they like with it. How is an end user going to know whether the message was signed before it was passed on or not?

That's nonsense. Take a moment to breathe. Think about just typical https, when you request some nytimes.com content that is actually being delivered to you througha bunch of intermediaries. So, by your logic any of those could just change that content. But it turns out, this was a problem solved like 50 years ago. With https, the content is signed by some key that you trust to represent nytimes.com. Sidenote (this i…

Please review and stick to the site guidelines when posting here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). They explicitly ask you not to lead with things like "That's nonsense. Take a moment to breathe." The rest of your first paragraph is just fine.

Re the second paragraph: people are wrong on the internet. If you want a site that doesn't have this problem, you're going to have to look for something considerably smaller, where countering entropy is an option. I think you might be running into the notice-dislike bias, though: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Edit: I'm dismayed to see that your last 7 comments have all broken the site guidelines. Trashing this place because you don't like some of what other people post, or because you feel superior to the community, is not ok. I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park, so please stop doing the equivalent here.

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