In recent news, Google has put forth a proposal known as the "Web Environment Integrity Explainer", authored by four of its engineers. On the surface, it
And then the plan to force everyone to abandon Firefox whether they like it or not.
Implement the misfeatures.
Movie and music websites will be the first to announce requiring DRM to be able to watch movies or listen to tunes.
The banks will be next. "For your safety, you must use an Official Approved Browser™ to be allowed access to your money!"
Then ecommerce sites. "You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything."
Then comes the social media sites. For your safety, of course...
At that point, the userbase of anything that's not Chrome or not DRM'd to death will be so eroded that virtually everyone else will abandon Firefox support, DRM will get enabled by default. Also, comes the lobbyists to Congress demanding changes to the DMCA to throw users in prison who dare to try to crack the DRM to block ads. "Ad-blocking is stealing!"
Google is such a bad company. People should discontinue use of all their software and at the very least stop using chrome or chromium. They’ve got the internet by the balls.
The year is 2023, every single major tech companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No. 1. And the only Hero we have is the EU, will it be able to save the day?
Google and Chrome really need to be broken up. Maybe people should start writing (physical) letters to the FTC asking to review Google's recent actions as monopolistic behavior.
It wouldn't be the first time. But showing the interest is the best way to get the ball rolling that we can do.
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. And it's a death knell of the internet as we know it. It won't be today or tomorrow, but slowly, over the next few years, expect surface level internet services to be extremely user unfriendly. I expect normies to just accept their fate and pay access fees to literally every website and service they use, while more tech savvy or explorative people might find their way to federated spaces or Usenet, etc.
I find it disturbing that there are people out there who spend much of their time thinking about new ways to get people to see adverts. Surely it falls under the "bullshit jobs" category that David Graeber once wrote about.
And another question: did someone already lay out a roadmap to google's collapse?
Right now we're going through a financial crisis, big tech needs to start making proper money so they try to squeeze the users. Google hopes to "drm the internet" to maximise ad revenue. Let's assume they succeed. 3 years from now the dystopia of dead adblockers is live, google and other leeches make bank off ads.
But there's no more adblockers and no more ad revenue left to squeeze out (because every internet user is already chained to a screen and force fed ads within ads). And shareholders demand increase in profits. What do they do then? Is there any hint of a long-term strategy? How long before the maximum theoretical ad revenue is reached and plateaus? Then COVID29 or something comes, fed raises rastes again and...?
Google controls way too much. People need to stop using their products. Many people complaining right now are still using Google stuff. If everyone concerned stop using Google stuff, that would cause them to reconsider very quickly.
There are no laws stating that we have to watch or see ads, so forcing us to watch them feels like a huge overstep. Companies shouldn't be able to have this much control over a public service.
Even if they do that, some people will just create illegal website mirrors that remove ads.
On reddit, people already copy paste articles when there's a paywall. I can totally envision that thing to be more common.
I am not fucking kidding, I will stop using websites if I cannot block ads. This is non negotiable. I don't care about your business model, I have zero money to give you. I tried the official reddit app, and uninstalled within a week.
When will they understand, if I'm introduced to your product through an advertisement, I do not want to buy it. I will make a point not to. Do not annoy me. If your product is good enough, it will be bought.
Their examples are business issues where they want a tech solution.
These are working on a foundation that the internet today, with all it's venture capital money, "free" websites and services that run at a loss is how the internet should look. So they are building technical solutions to force some "trust" facilitate this internet. If a business or website cannot function or be profitable without this, that company does not deserve to survive. It's putting businesses ahead of users.
It works off the assumption that websites should know who the person visiting their website is (or that it's even a human.)
IMO, we need to return to the assumption that users are anonymous and remind people that you don't know who is on the other side so we should not trust at all.
Similar things are done with TV and streaming unfortunately. You ever notice how commercials/ads have louder volume than whatever content you're watching? It's intentional. If you're someone who doesn't skip them and doesn't mute them, they want you to be able to hear them from another room and then they hope you'll come back to see the ad. It's so dumb.
I don't know that we're watching the internet collapse. I think we are witnessing tech companies respond to growing financial pressure by accelerating their monetization plans, and it's blowing up in their faces. The result will be the reinvention of the web. I don't necessarily know if decentralized apps are going to take off, but I do think the internet will shift towards smaller (possibly open source) sites in retaliation.
Sometimes it is unbelievable. They want to make the Internet their own, following their model... luckily there will always be people fighting to keep the Internet free, where anyone can decide, in this case, whether to swallow ads or not
I really need to ween myself off the Internet so that, once it becomes an unusable hellhole in the next 20 years or so, I'll be able to give it up entirely and move on to better things.
Back when Threads got released someone told me on Lemmy that Meta will not pull an EEE on ActivotyPub because something something antitrust Microsoft long ago millions of dollars.
So, we will be forced to see ads, while they can’t yet control who’s publishing those ads. I wonder why Google (and any other ad company) hasn’t been sued yet for showing and infecting malware into the people who click on their ads. Maybe is not that critical or easy for a domestic user, but corporations or governments?
And it’s not because it’s impossible to verify malware before accepting their ads, it’s because THEY DONT CARE. If they can detect music on videos for copyright claims, they can analyze everything, they can also verify publishers. And if they can’t with an algorithm, they should use humans to manually verify publishers.
Forced to implement is the wrong term - they were tasked with designing it. They can't just swap one person out for another - losing the lead dev or designer would be delay or kill the effort
They could've pushed back - software ethics is a required course for very good reason - but it's easy to never ask if you should do something and skip straight to how. It gets easier to skip that piece every time, and the company isn't going to respect it - we need outside pressure so they can point to us and say "this will have repercussions"
They don't deserve death threats, but trashing everything they push on GitHub is fair. Measured steady pressure - save the most extreme stuff for upper management and shareholders
For the engineers you have to make them understand they did bad and they should feel bad, they need to feel that their peers have lost respect for them, not that this is the public lashing out
Imagine if ads had remained a single static banner at the top/bottom of the page and was hosted by the site itself. Maybe there wouldn't be an arms race to infiltrate every aspect of our digital lives.
I'm working on the contrary, some sort of gemini web plus with modules, to keep the engine as small as possible to make porting/reinventions easier. The engine only provides basics like displaying text. Modules provide functionality like 'video player', gallery', 'search bar with filters', 'login', keeping webshops, company pages, etc. in mind. There's no JS or CSS, the styling is entirely in the hand of the browser/user (including dark mode, mobile view), the servers push only content. Likewise, active logins and payments will be handled by the browser, not the webpage. Though it will not be compatible with HTTPS/the current web. The protocol and the browser will be licensed open source.
I'm still planning, it's not even in the prototype phase yet. Should i push this further? If so, how would i get financial support? opentech.fund, ngi.edu, nlnet?
You're right, they can only try. They can express concerns, they can interpret goals a little differently to minimize harm, they can stretch the truth and make the project seem less feasible. None of that is going to do much if management is driving this through - loudly resigning in protest is the last move, and unless you have a big name it's not going to do much.
But you're wrong that I'm coming at this as a consumer - I'm a dev and I've been put in this situation before (although our work wasn't public).
You're also wrong on the googler front - most of them aren't making that much, better than they'd make most other places, but not life changing amounts
When you talk to a googler, there's a pride, and buried under that usually an insecurity. They got into the bleeding edge of tech... Or so they thought.
Last Thanksgiving I was talking to someone who worked for them, and once the conversation got technical I could see it in his eyes. I happened to be well versed in the topic, and so I started asking questions about his approach. And as much as I tried to hide it (he is family) he must've seen the disappointment on my face... He just deflated. He knew deep down what he was doing wasn't actually that cool or special - it's just a lie that he hears constantly
Working at a company like Google, you're constantly being told you're doing important work that could change the world. There's pride and status there. They've crafted a bubble where everyone reinforces that belief, that "what we're doing is good and important"
When you step outside that bubble and realize the technical community doesn't respect you, personally, not because of Google but because of your own actions? That pokes a person right in the place they put their self-worth
So, Google, the Overlord of the Internet apperantly, wishes to make his Kingdom an uninhabitable hellscape of constant ad harrassment that anyone who wants to keep their sanity will interact with as little as possible, only going there when necessary.
Ok, then. Good luck with that Business.
Just wondering, will one day Humanity, who has pretty much agreed in perfect unison completely independent from each other, since the golden age of television, that we all hate ads, finally be heard?
Can someone shed some light for me? I'm a noob and I'm not sure I understand what is being proposed by google here. From what I can tell, they're proposing a cryptographically signed token that details information about a website user's 'environment', which I take to mean, their device OS and browser information, for the sake of verifying their humanity for website owners and advertisers. Isn't this sort of information already collected when a user visits a webpage, and doesn't google (or whomever) already collect and use this data (and more) for fingerprinting? How is this new proposal different, and something to be specifically concerned about?
I know there are anti-fingerprinting browser privacy addons that spoof this information, or prevent its collection. Is the concern that these tools will become inoperable?
For the record I don't like google or any company collecting any fingerprinting information, but it's already being done widely and in an unregulated manner, isn't it?
I don't understand how this will make ad blockers unusable. This new API might tell the site the user is using an ad blocker, but that tech seems to exist already..?
They can try. Maybe it gets more people to learn about pinhole or other adblocking, with a little bit of luck it even rescues one or two people from the claws of windows.
So let's say the API sever for the authentication that the browser has not been altered goes down. Does that mean that all sites that require the browser are unreachable?
For a tech community there are a lot of uninformed and fear mongering posts in here. From the article:
What About Browser Modifications and Extensions?
Google's proposal remains ambiguous about its impact on browser modifications and extensions. It attests to the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack without restricting the application’s functionality.
However, how this plays out with browsers that allow extensions or are modified remains a grey area. As the proposal vaguely mentions, "Web Environment Integrity attests the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack, it does not restrict the indicated application’s functionality."
Basically it can be summed up as “nothing in the new thing actually says it will make blocking ads impossible or even harder, but who knows right? So just trust that it will based on nothing other than fear mongering”
Sites have been detecting ad blockers and refusing to show you content unless you disable them for years. Sites already have paywalls as drm to restrict what you can see. This really isn’t bringing the ability do any of these DRM things since those already exist.
Having said all that - is there much of a reason for this new thing to exist? Debatable at this stage. The only benefit I can see to users is it could eliminate captchas and other “are you human?” checks, as well as maybe reduce cheaters in browser based games (which tbh I don’t even know if that’s a thing).