All this… all this multi billion dollar development, all those ‘brains’, all the time and space a tech company occupies in it’s lifetime… just to force you to watch ads?
What a shitty society and what a shitty communication system we have, just because some morons want to earn some billions more…
There is no endgame when it comes to greed, those pricks will always want more.
I feel it’s worse than this. Imagine being the brightest mind in college, have a ton of experience, just to invent new algorithms to get people to click on more ads.
I consider it close to going to school for engineering or design and winding up being the guy in charge of making airplane seats ever smaller and more uncomfortable.
Yeah, the brightest minds of recent generations are figuring out how to get people to watch ads. We probably could have had fusion energy by now, but instead have ads.
But think of the investors! How can we give them month-after-month gains without forcing ad’s down our user’s throats? /s
It’s more about doing what investors think will give them gains, so that they keep investing, don’t quit, and don’t press out the people in charge of the company.
Dunno why I have this association, but when directors of Apple pressed out Jobs, Apple’s stuff in the following decade was rather cool. I just played with MacOS 9 a bit, with its classical software like Hotline, and it really had a “culture” and an “ecosystem”, and not what Apple’s ads after 2000 tell you, but these seem to have been real.
Ain’t no short term profits in a fusion generator
A lot of these people are probably H-1B status workers.
Doesn’t make them less clever.
Multiple billionaires have answerd the question, “when is it enough?” With the reply: “when I own everything.”
We should treat these cocksuckers like addicts and start looking at reform and rehabilitation! Think of the children!
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Vanderbilt answered “how much is enough” with “more”.
What a shitty society
It has shittier sides than the one you are looking at.
and what a shitty communication system
Well, Zuck and others found the way to assemble all blonde girls from your town on one site. It was decided then.
At least until the general humanity realized that this doesn’t change shit except that we no longer have the normal Web itself, the truly miraculous one which we got used so quickly to.
I like Gemini, but I’ll take the ActivityPub-based Web. Better both, of course. With old Skype-like IM on top of that as well.
However, the identities being not cryptography-based and being tied to an instance I don’t really like, that should be fixed in future versions if we want to have stuff working differently from e-mail, which is not as decentralized as one would like.
And frankly maybe one should separate content instances from authentication instances. The latter would only present identities.
Long ago, we praised Chrome for helping destroy Internet Explorer. Now it has become the same. No for-profit corporation is your friend.
Mozilla really did that with Firefox and Thunderbird to help kill IE and Outlook Express. Chrome came quite a bit later, but was instrumental in bringing about a performance reckoning, and a push for universal standards, sort of creating that movement. Really shocking now when you think of Google doing that.
That’s a bit revisionist.
Mozilla and Thunderbird existed as decent alternatives, but they had a tiny market share of generally tech minded people, which was a much smaller subset of the population than it is now.
Chrome and Gmail came in and completely demolished the market. They came in with a strong brand name, and a huge suite of features that worked well, and really ignited the Cloud app paradigm.
I have mained Firefox on desktop throughout the decades. But give credit where credit is due.
Not rewriting history or anything. The Mozilla Foundation made those apps to directly compete with Microsoft to offer free and open-source alternatives to the built-in apps of IE and Outlook Express, and they succeeded at that.
You’re pointing out a different thing from the original comment I responded to, and Firefox+Thunderbird were in the mix years before Gmail and Chrome, and if you want to get “revisionist” about it, Mozilla had the browser and mail client as one single app prior to that in an attempt to do the same thing, which was an entire decade before Chrome was released.
You asserted that it was really Mozilla that set up IE’s downfall, and that’s what my dissent is about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Mozilla/Netscape hovered around 20-30% throughout the 2000s. I.E. was the clear winner without any danger of losing its throne until Chrome came along.
Being a steady competitor != destroy. Chrome and the Google suite is what upended the lopsided browser war.
You’re arguing with me (for some reason) that what I said is false. It is not. If you want to talk about impact on MS’s monopoly, you could be correct over time, but that’s decades. Not what my original comment was about.
Mozilla 100% setup the downfall of IE and OE because they made a case that it could done, and also sued Microsoft in court over the Monopoly. Chrome still was years away from showing up on the scene when this all happened.
You’re 100% right. For years Firefox was really the only game in town that was competitive with IE. Even Mac OS had a “IE for Mac OS” because otherwise the Internet (mostly) wouldn’t work on a Mac.
By the time Chrome was released, Google basically had to explain why they were creating their own browser given that IE, Firefox, Safari, and other browsers (WebKit was a fork of KHTML from KDE) were already available. At the time, they justified it with performance enhancements and a different process model for Chrome. There was a good case to be made and Chrome was indeed faster when it was launched.
It’s pretty obvious at this point that the only business model available for Google and most of the other big tech companies is to hoover up your data and use it for the presentation of ads. If I were a more of a conspiracy believer (or even thought that Google had some foresight), I would think that the only reason Google launched Chrome was to eventually do away with ad blockers.
Why is everyone forgetting Opera?
Because it was paid or ad supported until 2005. In 2008 chrome was released, so it had only 3 years as a free (as in free beer) browser without google as a competition
Firefox replaced IE everywhere around me before Chrome ceased to be some funny curiosity.
I personally used Opera, though.
I never praised for Chrome destroying IE. I praised Chrome for standardizing many of the web protocols, which inevitably made it easier to switch between web and mobile.
It lived long enough to become the villain.
Write to your country’s anti-trust body if you feel Google is unilaterally going after the open web with WEI (content below taken from HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880390).
US:
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation antitrust@ftc.govEU:
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.euUK:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition… general.enquiries@cma.gov.ukIndia:
https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/ https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atdExample email:
Google has proposed a new Web Environment Integrity standard, outlined here: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md This standard would allow Google applications to block users who are not using Google products like Chrome or Android, and encourages other web developers to do the same, with the goal of eliminating ad blockers and competing web browsers. Google has already begun implementing this in their browser here: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/6f47a22906b2899412e79a2727355efa9cc8f5bd Basic facts: Google is a developer of popular websites such as google.com and youtube.com (currently the two most popular websites in the world according to SimilarWeb) Google is the developer of the most popular browser in the world, Chrome, with around 65% of market share. Most other popular browsers are based on Chromium, also developed primarily by Google. Google is the developer of the most popular mobile operating system in the world, Android, with around 70% of market share. Currently, Google’s websites can be viewed on any web-standards-compliant browser on a device made by any manufacturer. This WEI proposal would allow Google websites to reject users that are not running a Google-approved browser on a Google-approved device. For example, Google could require that Youtube or Google Search can only be viewed using an official Android app or the Chrome browser, thereby noncompetitively locking consumers into using Google products while providing no benefit to those consumers. Google is also primarily an ad company, with the majority of its revenue coming from ads. Google’s business model is challenged by browsers that do not show ads the way Google intends. This proposal would encourage any web developer using Google’s ad services to reject users that are not running a verified Google-approved version of Chrome, to ensure ads are viewed the way the advertiser wishes. This is not a hypothetical hidden agenda, it is explicitly stated in the proposal: “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.” The proposed solution here is to allow web developers to reject any user that cannot prove they have viewed Google-served ads with their own human eyes. It is essential to combat this proposal now, while it is still in an early stage. Once this is rolled out into Chrome and deployed around the world, it will be extremely difficult to rollback. It may be impossible to prevent this proposal if Google is allowed to continue owning the entire stack of website, browser, operating system, and hardware. Thank you for your consideration of this important issue.Thanks! Here’s the message without all the BBC quotes to make it easier to copy for app users:
Dear FTC,
Google has proposed a new Web Environment Integrity standard, outlined here: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/…
This standard would allow Google applications to block users who are not using Google products like Chrome or Android, and encourages other web developers to do the same, with the goal of eliminating ad blockers and competing web browsers.
Google has already begun implementing this in their browser here: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/6f47a22906b28994…
Basic facts:
Google is a developer of popular websites such as google.com and youtube.com (currently the two most popular websites in the world according to SimilarWeb) Google is the developer of the most popular browser in the world, Chrome, with around 65% of market share. Most other popular browsers are based on Chromium, also developed primarily by Google. Google is the developer of the most popular mobile operating system in the world, Android, with around 70% of market share.
Currently, Google’s websites can be viewed on any web-standards-compliant browser on a device made by any manufacturer. This WEI proposal would allow Google websites to reject users that are not running a Google-approved browser on a Google-approved device. For example, Google could require that Youtube or Google Search can only be viewed using an official Android app or the Chrome browser, thereby noncompetitively locking consumers into using Google products while providing no benefit to those consumers.
Google is also primarily an ad company, with the majority of its revenue coming from ads. Google’s business model is challenged by browsers that do not show ads the way Google intends. This proposal would encourage any web developer using Google’s ad services to reject users that are not running a verified Google-approved version of Chrome, to ensure ads are viewed the way the advertiser wishes. This is not a hypothetical hidden agenda, it is explicitly stated in the proposal:
“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.”
The proposed solution here is to allow web developers to reject any user that cannot prove they have viewed Google-served ads with their own human eyes.
It is essential to combat this proposal now, while it is still in an early stage. Once this is rolled out into Chrome and deployed around the world, it will be extremely difficult to rollback. It may be impossible to prevent this proposal if Google is allowed to continue owning the entire stack of website, browser, operating system, and hardware.
Thank you for your consideration of this important issue.
Email sent
Someone needs to make a button on the Internet that sends the email from you.
A mailto link
Thank you, sent. While I’m crossing my fingers that someone reads/notices this, I am just as doubtful that any valuable action will be taken before it is too late. Democratic governments are simply too slow.
FYI, the two web links in the example email seem to be cut off, as they end in ellipses. ?
Thanks, fixed.
I just tried them again, and they’re still not working. Both give 404s.
Yeah whoever copied it, copied an abbreviated version of the links.
Thanks, mail sent.
How is this not anti competitive behaviour?
because the us govt doesn’t give a shit about monopolies.
EU might get up in their shit though.
I sure hope so.
This is way worse than what Microsoft did back in the day with Internet Explorer. They were forced to build a browser selection popup into their operating system because of that.
And poured every browser and their sister into it just to make the whole selection process shitty.
ARE YOU SUPER DUPER FUCKITY SURE YOU DON’T WANT USE SUPER AWESOMESAUCE EDGE??!
Canada doesnt either. We are run by oligopolies
So blatantly too
It is. Anyone who cares is powerless to change it. Anyone with the power to change it doesn’t care. That goes for a lot of things.
In the same way it’s not anti-competitive for Apple to require Safari on iOS.
Oh wait. It is. But only google and microsoft get in trouble and apple always gets a free pass.
Methinks there is a history lesson you haven’t learned.
MS didn’t get into trouble just for bundling their browser. They got into trouble using every strongarm tactic they could think of to kill the browser market. They broke competitors, deliberately crippled APIs while IE used undocumented faster ones, and put IE in customer faces whether they wanted it there or not. MS used this tactic repeatedly to corner other markets, such as productivity suites. That’s why MS got nailed.
At one point it went from an optional download to being required for the offering system. At that point you weren’t allowed to uninstall it.
Of course that was back before the government was completely owned by tech corporations.
Isn’t that unchanged? Edge is installed by default and I don’t think you can fully remove it…
It was way worse back then. Nowadays you can actually remove it. Back then they hooked IE into numerous core UI things like the desktop wallpaper and file manager, so any attempt at actually removing it completely fucked your system
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/uninstall-microsoft-edge-windows-11
It’s not impossible, but they try pretty hard to prevent it.
- But that was IE, now they’re back at it again
Back then, the US government was three corporations in a trenchcoat, *since then they shed the trenchcoat…
Google execs can rot in hell honestly
I really cant put it into words how much I hate google right now… Capitalism at its finest
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To be more specific, i mean uncontrolled capitalism. There should be a healthy middle ground as with everything, but people tend to go with the extremes unfortunately. There are good things in socialism (ex. public healthcare) and good things in capitalism (ex. free market.)
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Yep, pure evil. Trying to use as less of Google’s stuff as possible, which is easier said then done.
Some alternatives you could try:
- Search: Brave search / kagi search
- Mail: Protonmail
- Drive: filen / Proton drive
- Maps: openstreetmap (there are multiple applications integrating it)
- TOTP: Aegis (android)
- Android: LineageOS
- (Or self hosting, which can replace google services)
These are the things that just quickly came to mind, hope it helps :)
Why would it be difficult? The only Google service I use occasionally is YouTube and I can do without, honestly. My Android phone is free from Google stuff and I use DuckDuckGo for searching since it launched. I pay a small subscription fee for my email and cloud storage.
And then I ran out of things I know people use Google for. Aside from YouTube (in EU and US) I am certain you can easily do without them. People just choose not to.
Because of work. I’m a software developer and one in a while I’m forced to develop stuff using Google software. Also developers search the internet a lot to speed things up, you can use an alternative for Google but usually not getting the best results. Now I can live with that, but my boss doesn’t like it if I take more time to finish my work just because I refuse to use Google :p
As a software developer for 20 years who hasn’t used Google in roughly 14 years, I can assure you that you don’t need it for development or looking up stuff :-). Give it a shot, do without for a week or two; DuckDuckGo works superb and the main reason most people think other search engines are worse is because their Google profile is trained to find stuff they tend to click on, like Meta does.
When your employer uses Google software in development there’s obviously not much you can do there.
Here it is on PeerTube, since we’re on the Fediverse and probably wanting to avoid Google.
Batter way would be to just watch youtube video on youtube while ad block being enabled that way all the server load goes to google and they can’t get the ad revenue. Isn’t it win win?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=NLaePqv5Sec
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot.
TL;DW version?
It’s basically all the bad things that tech writers have already warned about, except shit just got real. Google is actually shipping WEI in Chrome and large important sites and services are no longer working except in Chrome and with Goggle’s blessing.
The author makes a very good comparison with Android, where you need a locked-down device and Google Services installed to be able to use Netflix, or your bank’s services.
The rest of the article dives into what WEI claims to achieve vs what it’s actually doing, and who it really benefits. Good read if you’re still unclear about that.
Who’s already using this thing? I know Google ships it, but is anyone checking it yet
It’s good odds that banks and streaming services are scrambling to implement it as we speak. You know they are. DRM is the perpetual wet dream for the music & film industry and for streaming services. And banks are paranoid as a matter of course.
It’s going to be very hard to say no, especially since they can say “but Chrome is working on all platforms, nobody’s pushing you out of anything”. Will you drop stream subscriptions? Everybody loves to say they’ll drop Netflix “as soon as they push me one more time”, but what about a service you actually like? And what about banks, are those as easy to switch?
I’ve been through this for years now with Android and SafetyNet and it’s a lot of hoops to have to jump through to stop being considered a second class user on your own device. It’s going to suck extra bad when it comes to PC.
As for Google services themselves, I’m very curious to see in what order and how they choose to make WEI mandatory. Maybe not for Search and Gmail, at first, but what about accessing your Google Account, surely that must be secured? And YouTube of course, that’s got DRM written all over it.
My way of saying “no” is going to be cancelling my subscription to whatever service implements this and then pirating and seeding as much of their content library as is feasible and will fit on my NAS.
Hope my bank likes paying people to answer my calls, because that’s how I’ll be interacting with them if I can’t use a web page.
Will you drop stream subscriptions
Yes, I’ve got one foot out the door already. Shits too expensive, they kill all the best shows, they take down movies and stuff before I get a chance to watch them. I don’t even have Netflix, in my opinion is one of the worse streamers. I cancelled HBO a couple months ago, I only have ESPN+ and Apple TV
what about banks
If you’re not using a local bank or credit union I can’t help you, shit sucks and who is actually going to the branches anymore. Bank where old people bank.
Beyond that Google search is ass (everyone knows this) Gmail is fine but only because it’s “free”, you can easily switch to a cheap alternative. YouTube is the only compelling product Google has anymore and honestly I’ll just pay for nebula if I really care about losing it
Wait Nebula is actually built out? The YouTubers I listen to make it sound like it’s in its early infancy.
Google search is ass
It feels incredibly weird using Bing… I don’t even use it as an FU to Google, it’s just somehow weirdly a better search engine right now.
I use kagi, all that money I saved from not paying for cable (streaming) lol
Yeah nebula rules, (practical engineering legaleagle minute physics etc) I’m procrastinating dropping Apple TV for it but I figure as soon as I do I’ll be happy I did, YouTube isn’t so good anymore either. The other good one imo is dropout tv, it’s comedy and dnd type stuff with some surprisingly big names imo
The through line is that now figuring out streaming services is cheap enough that smaller companies can do it, so buying a streaming thing from a company the creators actually work for is a better business model for both viewers and creators than YouTube or other streaming platforms
so buying a streaming thing from a company the creators actually work for is a better business model for both viewers and creators than YouTube or other streaming platforms
Sounds like a Uoptian paradise. I just assumed there wouldn’t be enough content for it ever to be worth it.
I was looking for the same. No one is, yet.
Logitech and multiple others are now blocking Firefox, for example.
That’s a completely unrelated issue with Logitech. Firefox is “blocked” because it doesn’t support WebUSB (nor does Safari). I understand this web DRM is bad tech and we want to be morally outraged, but spreading misinformation makes the Lemmy crowd look less like activists/enthusiasts and more like chicken little.
I can log on to logitech.com from Firefox just fine?
In what way? I was just now able to go to Logitech’s site on my Ubuntu laptop using Firefox with no discernible issues.
Google is actually shipping WEI in Chrome
Is this confirmed? Last I saw, it was still a proposal on github.
They ignored the objections to the proposal, pushed it directly into their tree and it’s already live. I’ve had the prompt to enable it just today.
Switched to ff yesterday.
I’ll switch to FF today and flood the support of whatever shit site is going into that. There will be so much drama to harvest. (I’ll not insult any service employee as they just do their job)
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I mean the next step is publicly shaming them but the last few years have shown that companies don’t really care about that anymore. Not real encouraging tbh.
Well, fuck.
On what website?
Yeah, they pushed it in chrome very soon after the proposal made the rounds
It’s pretty telling seeing as it happened so fast it must’ve predated the proposal. The proposal was super vague - if you take it (and their statements) at face value, this was a nebulous idea with none of the details ironed out.
And then like a week later, they push this update that would lock people out of sites? No way in hell they didn’t test the crap out of this.
Nah, this is definitely being done in bad faith.
I was multitasking while watching but I’m pretty sure this is the idea.
Googles “web DRM” makes it impossible (or extremely difficult) to lie to a website about your browser, operating system, and whether or not you’re human (or a bot). Websites can then use this info to deny access if they decide not to trust any of the info given.
This could easily be used to suppress the use of open source software which is probably why so many FOSS projects and foundations oppose it.
It doesn’t prove you’re not a bot though, only that the request is coming from a ‘genuine device’. You just need to pipe your malicious requests through a ‘real browser’ to get them approved and you’re set.
How could I browser not know you’re “piping” in commands tho? I don’t know what qualifies as a bot but if input doesn’t come from a keyboard or mouse they’ll probably classify it as such.
DRM is easy to evade by those that want to evade it. I read something on mastodon the other day that was saying some cheater hackers are using direct hardware connections to their machines to cheat.
DRM makes it difficult for Joe six pack to easily pirate, use an ad-blocker, not use one of big brother’s approved devices to get a paltry boner from watching Milf Island on Peacock, but it does nothing to people with the ways and means to get around these things…those evasive maneuvers are often illegal though.
DRM is a malignant technology just by its very nature, and this has been fought about for decades. But it’s just simply not tenable to protect the content that is being replicated on demand by a customer paying for its replication from being replicated to others.
Seriously, think about how stupid the above is for a minute.
Couldn’t agree more. The script kiddies might be out of luck but they’ll just have to go back to side channels like torrents or Usenet where the experienced hackers show off the stuff they stole.
WEI could require secureboot, so you could no longer modify the OS or Chrome to “pipe” those requests.
DRM in your web browser to forcibly require you to be running an “approved” browser (ie.: Chrome) in an “approved” configuration (ie.: no ad blockers) to load certain websites, and probably all major websites.
I love that bot that goes around and does it. No idea who made it etc but it’s great.
The bot works with written stuff so idk if there’s a TL;DW bot yet.
Ahh didn’t see the youtube link even with the piped link below just the text article lol.
Summon the bot!
The bot works with written stuff so idk if there’s a TL;DW bot yet.
Then use the article version linked at the bottom of the post?
If this isn’t a reason to trust bust Google, I don’t know what is.
So the old Internet we knew is dead, time for Internet 2.0?
Technically, this is web
3 or 3.54 or 4.5This has happened before.
Web3 must be around ten years ago by now. I had laptop stickers.
You are right, where have I been. I changed it, thanks. I will say the jump from web 2 to web 3 was a downgrade. Web 4 seems to be concerned with social media and AI, though, so I guess that’s where we’re at.
3.0 as the original internet died when SEO and ad driven sites took over. Unfortunately that was decades ago now.
That was quick (Google integrating it). But of course it was…
About time I finally switch (back) to Firefox then. Have been using Vivaldi, but the only real solution is to move to a non-Chromium browser.
Thing is, if this takes off and websites adopt it, FF will be forced to integrate it aswell. I’d be fine with some websites not working in FF, but my mother will call me and say “the internet is broken”. I guess Mozilla doesn’t want and/or cannot afford that.
That is correct, but for now, Mozilla has the right stance on the matter.
I’m still waiting for what Apple’s stance is. They integrated functionality into Safari that technically works similarly, but that’s only used for captcha verification. I can see them choosing either side to be honest. They can embrace the Web Integrity API because it fits their “closed ecosystem” (in case of iOS devices) type of product quite well, but on the other hand they don’t really have a website that would be suitable to use the Web Integrity API, so why would they give in to what Google wants? If Apple doesn’t integrate Web Integrity API into Safari, I don’t see any major website using it. They can’t afford to lose ~28% of the mobile market.
Apple will follow suit: don’t be taken in by the ‘we love our customers’ nonsense they like to present. They make billions in selling ads too, they just do it a little more quietly than Google.
They don’t sell ads on the web though, so I don’t see how this would be related.
I kinda have two answers to this:
-
Not yet,
-
It was more an intent to show that they’re not some shining defender of the ad-free private internet, who would never take action to defend a potential future revenue stream if they thought it might be profitable later.
Remember everyone, corporations are not your friends, your buddy, your pal, or even slightly gives a shit about you beyond how much money they can extract from your wallet and anything that’s in the way of them doing so they’ll work around, stomp on, and kill by any means necessary.
-
Agreed. Apples stance on privacy is more about PR and keeping ad competitors at a disadvantage on their platform than actual privacy. Only reason they might not fall in line is if they feel there is enough public opposition to it to get some PR and make Google look bad. Not too optimistic on that though since most people are oblivious to the issue.
Likely true, but as someone pointed out in another thread, it should be possible to “technically” comply with WEI enforcement, and then have a transparent abstraction layer to extract the “enforced” markup and code, exposing it to the user-facing browser to interpret like it normally would.
It’s some real asinine bullshit software engineering that shouldn’t be necessary, but it should work.
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What’s keeping Vivaldi from removing it?
Exactly, why don’t all these chromium-based browsers which came out against WEI don’t fork Chromium to maintain a base version without this bullshit? And manifest V3 while they’re at it.
It’s likely a lot of work to maintain a fork of the Chromium/Blink engine with your own changes applied to it. I’m not sure how deeply the Web Integrity API is integrated into the code, but if it’s anything more than a flag to disable it, it will likely be hard to keep integrating upstream changes timely while ensuring your fork still works.
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Although Chromium/Blink is forked from WebKit, it’s far from being WebKit these days.
But of course, Vivaldi could base their browser on WebKit or Gecko. Many of these “smaller” browsers tend to be based on Chromium though, likely because it’s the most compatible (because of its marketshare).
And it’s likely too much work for them to switch engines now.
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Sadly the only real move the average person has to play in all of this is if they do this, refuse to use any site that blocks access or extensions based on it.
Go back to paying your property tax with checks, etc if you have to. But the only way to deal with these companies is being willing to go to whatever lengths are required to avoid using their products and services.
Which is of course way easier to say than do.
Abandon Chrome and Chromium en masse and this will go away. But normies suck.
This video is a really good explanation of why this is a horrible thing for the web.
Based on the post title, I was expecting some new revelation here, but it basically just explains everything that we already knew.
i don’t quite get why can’t the attester just… lie… about who he is like if I’m using firefox on linux, why cant my linux attester claim to be actually windows attester and say I’m using chrome?
I am not an expert, but it’s likely signed and cryptographically secured. Change a single byte in the be Browser executable and your browser goes on the naughty list. This is total lockdown of the browser, and in principle you can extend certification of both software and hardware all the way down through the OS into the hardware.
The same host could fake the payload to the attestation server. Cat and mouse game with security through obscurity.
If you are on android or ios the phone already cryptografically verifies that the operating system has not been tampered with on a hardware level. Since the operating system is then “trusted” it can verify anything you do on it
Doesn’t work. It’s possible to let many banking apps think they are running on a normal device although it is rooted.
Yup Play attestation is dead, even the new and shiny “secure” one is bypassed. It’s now just a hinderence.
Attestation depends on a few things:
- The website has to choose to trust a given attestation provider. If Open Source Browser Attestation Provider X is known for freely handing out attestations then websites will just ignore them
- The browser’s self-attestation. This is tricky part to implement. I haven’t looked at the WEI spec to see how this works, but ultimately it depends on code running on your machine identifying when it’s been modified. In theory, you can modify the browser however you want, but it’s likely that this code will be thoroughly obfuscated and regularly changing to make it hard to reverse engineer. In addition, there are CPU level systems like Intel SGX that provide secure enclaves to run code and a remote entity can verify that the code that ran in SGX was the same code that the remote entity intended to run.
If you’re on iOS or Android, there’s already strong OS level protections that a browser attestation can plugin to (like SafetyNet.)
WebChain of trust, the site only trusts certain attesters (yes this would be really bad for Linux).EDIT: Used the wrong “of trust”
Every time somebody calls this “web of trust” I feel the need to remind that really Web of Trust is a system of, well, decentralized manual trust, like with PGP. Like in Retroshare or Freenet for some people.
Every such attempt at replacing the actually relevant meaning of a thing which is still good and needed is suspicious.
Gah, I actually meant chain of trust… Oops…
Don’t be evil.Don’tbe evil.FTFY
Mine was a joke about that being their former corporate motto. Yours works just as well though :)
Ah, that makes sense.
