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

Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

immich.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 713 posts

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#411

Post by shadowgovt »

pjc50 wrote: post #347
kossTKR wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm beginning to seriously think we need a new internet, another protocol, other browsers just to break up the insane monopolies that has been formed, because the way things are going soon all discourse will be censored, and competitors will be blocked soon. We need something that's good for small and medium businesses again, local news and get an actual marketplace going - you know what the internet actually promise…

It's very, very hard to overcome the gravitational forces which encourage centralization, and doing so requires rooting the different communities that you want to exist in their own different communities of people. It's a political governance problem, not a technical one.

This is the key idea.

Companies have economy of scale (Google, for instance, is running dozens to hundreds of web apps off of one well-maintained fabric) and the ability to force consolidation of labor behind a few ideas by controlling salaries so that the technically hard, detailed, or boring problems actually get solved. Open source volunteer projects rarely have either of those benefits.

In theory, you could compete with Google via

- Well-defined protocols

- That a handful of projects implement (because if it's too many, you split the available talent pool and end up with e.g. seven mediocre photo storage apps that are thin wrappers around a folder instead of one Google Photos with AI image search capability).

- Which solve very technically hard, detailed, or boring technical problems (AI image search is an actual game-changer feature; the difference between "Where is that one photo I took of my dog? I think it was Christmas. Which Christmas, hell I don't know" and "Show me every photo of my dog, no not that dog, the other dog").

I'd even risk putting up bullet point four: "And be willing to provide solutions for problems other people don't want solved without those other people working to torpedo your volunteer project" (there are lots of folks who think AI image detection is de-facto evil and nobody should be working on it, and any open source photo app they can control the fate of will fall short of Google's offering for end-users).

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#412

Post by shadowgovt »

squarefoot wrote: post #396
sureglymop wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it seem like the problem is of technical nature (instead of regulatory or other). Would you mind explaining why? Technical alternatives already exist, see for example GNUnet.

Problem is that as soon as some technology takes traction, it catches the attention of businesses, and there is where the slow but steady enshittification process begins. Not that business necessarily equals enshittification, but in a world dominated by capitalism without borders soon or later someone will break some unwritten rules and others will have to follow to remain competitive, until that new technology will…

I'm interested to see how this will work with something like Mastodon.

Since Mastodon is, fundamentally, a protocol and reference implementation, people can come up with their own enshittified nodes or clients... And then the rest of the ecosystem can respond by just ignoring that work.

Yes, technically Truth Social is a Mastodon node. My Mastodon node doesn't have to care.

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#413

Post by bloomingeek »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #408
armchairhacker wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a “new internet”. We have the indie web, VPNs, websites not behind Cloudflare, other browsers. You won’t have a large audience, but a new protocol won't fix that. Also, plenty of small and medium businesses are doing fine on the internet. You only hear about ones with problems like this. And if these problems become more frequent and public, Google will put more effort into fixing them. I think the most pract…

"Google will put more effort into fixing them" Why would they do that? Do they lose money from these people? Why would they care? they're a monopoly they don't need to care

Perhaps we need a different "type" of internet. I don't have the expertise to even explain what this would look like, but I know that if politics, religion, junk science and a hundred other influences have anything to do with it, it will eventually become too stupid to use.

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#414

Post by bo0tzz »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #410
bo0tzz wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Immich domains that are hit by this issue are -not- user generated content.

They clearly are? It seems like GitHub users submitting a PR could/can add a `preview` label, and that would lead to the application + their changes to be deployed to a public URL under "*.immich.cloud". So they're hosted content generated by users (built application based on user patches) on domains under their control.

I'm the guy that built the system, lol. Labels can only be added by maintainers, and the whole system only works for PRs from internal branches.

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#415

Post by MrDarcy »

dmoreno wrote: post #288

Happened to me last week. One morning we wake up and the whole company website does not work. Not advice with some time to fix any possible problem, just blocked. We gave very bad image to our clients and users, and had to give explanations of a false positive from google detection. The culprit, according to google search console, was a double redirect on our web email domain (/ -> inbox -> login). After just moving…

File a small claim for damages up to 10,000 to 20,000 USD depending on your local statues.

It’s actually pretty quick and easy. They cannot defend themselves with lawyers, so a director usually has to show up.

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#416

Post by romanows »

whatsupdog wrote: post #365
ZenoArrow wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox should be on that list. It's clearly a lot closer in functionality to Chrome/Chromium than Servo or Ladybird, so it's easier to switch to it. I like that Servo and Ladybird exist and are developing well, but there's no need to pretend that they're the only available alternatives.

Majority of users are on mobile now, and Firefox mobile sucks ass. I cannot bring myself to use it. Simple things like clicking the home button should take you to homepage, but Firefox opens a new tab. It's so stupid.

I use Firefox Mobile Nightly on Android and appreciate it for the dark mode extension and ad blocking. There are some issues but the benefits outweigh them for me.

I don't even have a Home button that I can see, I must have turned it off in settings? I describe my tab count using scientific notation, though, so I'd be a "new tab" guy, anyway. But I'd also be a proponent of it being configurable.

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#417

Post by sureglymop »

lucideer wrote: post #371
kevincox wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both things can be problems. 1. You should host dev stuff and separate domains. 2. Google shouldn't be blocking your preview environments.

A safe browsing service is not a terrible idea (which is why both Safari & Firefox use Google for this) & while I hate that Google has a monopoly here, I do think a safe browsing service should absolutely block your preview environments if those environments have potential dangers for visitors to them & are accessible to the public.

However, why does it work in such a way that it blocks the whole domain and not just the subdomains?

Is it far fetched that the people controlling a subdomain may not be the same that control the domain?

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#418

Post by shadowgovt »

andrepd wrote: post #379
kossTKR wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm beginning to seriously think we need a new internet, another protocol, other browsers just to break up the insane monopolies that has been formed, because the way things are going soon all discourse will be censored, and competitors will be blocked soon. We need something that's good for small and medium businesses again, local news and get an actual marketplace going - you know what the internet actually promise…

Stop trying to look for technological answers to political problems. We already have a way to avoid excessive accumulation of power by private entities, it's called "anti-trust laws" (heck, "laws" in general). Any new protocol not only has to overcome the huge incumbent that is the web, it has to do so grassroots against the power of global capital (trillions of dollars of it). Of course, it also has to work in the f…

I don't really see how anti-trust would address something like Google Chrome's safe browsing infrastructure.

The problem is that the divide of alignment of interests there is between new, small companies and users. New companies want to put up a website without tripping over one of the thousand unwritten rules of "How to not look like a phishing site or malware depot" (many of which are unwritten because protecting users and exploiting users is a cat-and-mouse game)... And users don't want to get owned.

Shard Chrome off from Google and it still has incentives to protect users at the cost of new companies' ease of joining the global network as a peer citizen. It may have less signal as a result of a curtailed visibility on the state of millions of pages, but the consequence of that is that it would offer worse safe browsing protection and more users would get owned as a result.

Perhaps the real issue is that (not unlike email) joining the web as a peer citizen has just plain gotten harder in the era of bad actors exploiting the infrastructure to cause harm to people.

Like... You know what never has these problems? My blog. It's a static-site-generated collection of plain HTML that updates once in a blue moon via scp. I'm not worried about Google's safe browsing infrastructure, because I never look like a malware site. And if I did trip over one of the unwritten rules (or if attackers figured out how to weaponize something personal-blog-shaped)? The needs of the many justify Chrome warning people before going to my now-shady site.

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#419

Post by shoelessone »

I don't see how this is an issue. To me, this does seem at least confusing, but possibly dangerous.

If you have internal auth testing domains at the same place as user generated content, what's to stop somebody thinking a user-generated page isn't a legit page when it asked you to login or something?

To me this seems like a reasonable flag.

Re: Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

#420

Post by lkjdsklf »

sofixa wrote: post #264
smaudet wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having all those APIs in a sandbox that mostly just work on billion devices is pretty powerful and a potential succesor to HTML would have to beat that, to be adopted. I think the giant major downside, is that they've written a rootkit that runs on everything, and to try to make up for that they want to make it so only sites they allow can run. It's not really very powerful at all if nobody can use it, at that poin…

> to try to make up for that they want to make it so only sites they allow can run What do you mean, you can run whatever you want on localhost, and it's quite easy to host whatever you want for whoever you want too. Maybe the biggest modern added barrier to entry is that having TLS is strongly encouraged/even needed for some things, but this is an easily solved problem.

The blog post and several anecdotes in the comments prove otherwise
Post reply on HN