391–400 of 484 posts
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.
The use cases for the WEI proposal are pretty clear from the explainer ( https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/ ...): Google "will be able to request a token that attests key facts about the environment their client code is running in." Google "will ultimately decide if they trust the verdict returned from the attester." "Allow" Google "to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest repre…
> Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
This phrases itself as ensuring news sites can block unpaid users, but also targets the Internet Archive, other webpage archives, possibly Reader modes, and more.
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>Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. The problem is that it isn't. Do you know why Firefox managed to usurp IE6 in the first place? Because it won the adoption and appeal of tech enthusiasts and professionals. Mom and pop (read: the general population) switched to Firefox from IE6 because their tech nerd kids installed it for them, and the enterprise largely moved off of IE6…
Firefox did not defeat IE6. That was Chrome. Firefox has basically been a fringe browser since Netscape imploded. The original reason Google started the Chrome project was that the stagnation of IE6 was a barrier to implementing the web software they wanted to build. At least that's what they told us.
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More importantly, a company of the size, scope and sophistication of Google trying to hide its fundamental redefinition of how people access the web, behind “it’s only a technical change” is unacceptable. As if something with multiple downstream non-technical effects, is only a technical change As if you can minimize and dismiss everyone’s fears and concerns as hollow, invalid and irrelevant by waving the magic wand…
This defies my Occam's Razor view. You seem to be assuming Google is an extremely well connected organism with vast coherency: each limb knows what the others are doing, they are working together in close fashion, & doing things for ulterior motives. This is such a horrific & bastardly case - of creating unparalleld rank awfulness hither-to-fore unimaginable - that I am tempted to agree. And I do think there probably…
Nah dog, you're overcomplicating it. All it requires is a person or two in a management chain to recognize the hint of long term business potential in a technical change. It doesn't have to be a sure thing, or a big thing, the bare minimum is that they just notice a business model that could be enabled, and choose to explore it. Then once the company takes on the initiative, some combination of communication and intuition spread the understanding of what they're doing across some of the buisness. For the wider scale, all the rank and file need to do is play dumb, or be legit unaware, about the obvious incentive they're working towards.
That's not a vast complicated conspiracy. That's every single business' outward-facing messaging strategy.
When parent poster talks about the "size, scope and sophistication of Google," the point doesn't have to be that they're meticulously coordinating. The point can simply be: there's no fucking way they're not playing dumb.
This is my problem with people using Occam's Razor to understand business decisions. They often assume the idea that someone could be employed in business development and spend months championing and refining an idea is a level of complexity that must fail to a more simplistic explanation. But we know that shit happens all the time.
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I don't buy this. I'm sure most iphone users don't care when you ask them about privacy or manifest v3 as an abstract concept, but remember what happened when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit. They may not write blog posts about privacy or donate to the EFF, but they have deeply personal relationships with "their" phone and they absolutely hate being reminded that it isn't reall…
>when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit and that's exactly it. putting something in your music library is a hugely more visible and tangible thing than all the nebulous privacy concerns the internet wants me to be afraid of. nobody gives a shit if google or apple or facebook or whoever else introduces some techical measure that could be used for nefarious things. they only care i…
May I introduce you to Tobacco?
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>when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit and that's exactly it. putting something in your music library is a hugely more visible and tangible thing than all the nebulous privacy concerns the internet wants me to be afraid of. nobody gives a shit if google or apple or facebook or whoever else introduces some techical measure that could be used for nefarious things. they only care i…
So your argument is that as long as the harms are invisible enough to the consumer that no action should be taken? May I introduce you to Tobacco?
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Yeah, that was when I realized that Mozilla wasn't really able to stand up to the bad guys as much as we'd hope.
You can still disable EME if you don't want it. That's a lot harder to do on other browsers. I would probably have dropped Firefox back then if it was the only browser that I couldn't watch Netflix in, and I wouldn't be the only one. I don't think Mozilla can bear the loss of userbase.
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> 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…
> after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use I don't use Firefox because it's slower than Chrome and because their behavior regarding limiting which extensions are available in phones, requiring signed extensions, Firefox Pocket, ads in new tab page, etc, does not exactly give me confidence that Mozilla truly has my interests in mind. In fact I bet they'll implement the ni…