Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 876 posts

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#361

Post by bradleyy »

jsjohnst wrote: post #126
scarface_74 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What browser “business”? Chrome makes no money. Don’t you think they are going to fund themselves the same way that Firefox does - via Google ads? No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.

> No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did. Considering NCSA Mosaic’s initial release was just 30 years ago this year and it’s considered the first browser, think you might be using a bit of hyperbole there? Twenty years would’ve been more accurate.

As someone who worked in this space at the time (Webmaster at Spry, Inc. in 1994), and we sold a web browser in the 1994-ish timeframe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox, no, saying "almost 3 decades" isn't hyperbolic at all. 29 years is close enough.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#362

Post by TeeMassive »

refulgentis wrote: post #316
tomschlick wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FTC isn't going to do anything as Google/Alphabet is a big donor to the Democrats. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/recipients?id=... Here is them lobbying specifically around antitrust reform legislation: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/bills/specific_...

? This is provably false. FTC filed 6 months ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/technology/google-ads-law... n.b. I've found a lot of comfort by conciously rolling away from any subject that leads me to do "They"-ing, i.e. name an enormously large group, then talk about them as a unit. The more I avoid it, the more I realize how prevalent it became and drives how a lot of us feel society shifted.

It's called saving appearances.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#363

Post by MSFT_Edging »

anonym29 wrote: post #338
nfw2 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiktok is literally controlled by the CCP. If consumers don't care about that, they aren't going to care about DRM.

Tech-literate folks really should make a concerted effort to move to our own darknet, something like freenet or I2P, to recreate the internet before the advent of mass adoption of smartphones by the public. Forums, IRC, vent/TS, webrings, XHTML 1.0. No WebGL. No Canvas. No WebAssembly. No damn WEI. Normies can f&$% off and enjoy the data-mined, DRM'd, ad-infested, CCP-propagandized, upload-your-photo-ID-to-post-here,…

While I like this idea, starting from the foot of "CCP-propagandized" based on the tiktok service hosted by Oracle in the US is an amazing way to start off on a Nazi infested foot.

Anti-communism and fascism are historically in lock-step. No one is going to use the services if you basically create web4 stormfront.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#364

Post by rightbyte »

lopis wrote: post #262
c0l0 wrote: post #5

I feel like I have to repeat this, since so much is at stake here, where it is about the preservation of the web as we know it today, at the peril of having it turned into yet another walled garden: The only way around the dystopia this will lead to is to constantly and relentlessly shame and even harass all those involved in helping create it. The scolding in the issue tracker of that wretched "project" shall flow l…

> constantly and relentlessly shame and even harass all those involved in helping create it If this ever helped, we wouldn't have absolutely unethical products created. Turns out people's morals have a price tag, that Google and others are willing to pay their employees.

Well at least you can increase the price tag for Google, Facebook etc by taunting their employees as bad people.

It is quite incredible actually, because it was not many years ago that working at Google had this coolness factor to it. Hopefully, it is a broader change of view, other than mine?

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#365

Post by jjoonathan »

qjx wrote: post #312
jjoonathan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yoav Weiss is closing concern threads, calling them "spam." Ben Wiser ( https://benwiser.com ) turned off comments altogether.

Yoav Weiss has a blog post from 6 days ago on his website. https://blog.yoav.ws/ for a personal blog it has quite a lot of PR speak

Oof. It does check, though, that the guy CoC-blocking all the github comments would have blog posts like the Professor Umbridge of the W3C.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#366

Post by zaggynl »

xyzal wrote: post #223
csomar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need an "approved" browser and potentially "approved" hardware to access the web. Since Cloudflare is on this too, most of the web will be locked for anyone who doesn't use mainstream hardware.

This needs to get to the European Parliament, we need legislation to protect web interoperability ASAP.

Have at it: https://european-union.europa.eu/contact-eu/write-us_en

I'm having trouble grasping how WEI works, providing examples of what would and could happen and what to ask/tell the EU specifically.

From my limited understanding it would mean the lockout of people with non-compliant hardware/software, greatly increase the fingerprinting of web browser users and further vendor lock in to Google as a company?

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#367

Post by jjoonathan »

rapnie wrote: post #79
jjoonathan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yoav Weiss is closing concern threads, calling them "spam." Ben Wiser ( https://benwiser.com ) turned off comments altogether.

May their names reach eternal infamy on Wikipedia. The Open Web. Creators: TBL et al, Destroyed-By: Google et al.

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#368

Post by scarface_74 »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #356
scarface_74 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how will “breaking up Google” help if the “Chrome company” is still implementing DRM?

Because you break the interest of showing ads from google search/adwords, to the interest of surfinh web freely of those who would work on chrome Now google has both the need to show ads, and direct power on what people use to see those ads

How do you think the “Chrome company” would be funded?

How is Firefox funded today.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#369

Post by HeckFeck »

jwells89 wrote: post #359
oxygen_crisis wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised not to see more love for Librewolf here on HN. It's just the latest Firefox release, recompiled without all the Mozilla telemetry, and with all the settings flipped to more secure/private defaults so all the tracking features are opt-in instead of opt-out.

Honestly I think the name of the project might be limiting its adoption. It’s sometimes annoying for the more technically inclined among us, but branding matters a lot. You need a name that’s snappy and memorable, which “Librewolf” is not. Firefox is actually a pretty good example of good branding. It’s short, rolls off the tongue, has pleasant alliteration, and evokes mental imagery.

I wonder how those ‘use GNU IceCat’ conversations went, if they ever happened.

Re: Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

#370

Post by carapace »

qjx wrote: post #312
jjoonathan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yoav Weiss is closing concern threads, calling them "spam." Ben Wiser ( https://benwiser.com ) turned off comments altogether.

Yoav Weiss has a blog post from 6 days ago on his website. https://blog.yoav.ws/ for a personal blog it has quite a lot of PR speak

> When thinking about a new proposal, it's often safe to assume that Occam's razor is applicable and the reason it is being proposed is that the team proposing it is trying to tackle the use cases the proposal handles.

Ockham's Razor doesn't apply in an adversarial situation.

Post reply on HN