Google executives want this, NOT the engineers.
Their engineers are super fucking shady too. For example, the issies with the WebHID “browser” APIs
And you think it was the engineer’s idea to do that?
They put their name on it. I hope it was monetary worth it because the public should not cut them any slack.
Guess who’s opinion matters here?
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.
The silver lining here might also be that the internet that we knew and loved 25 years ago might actually reappear. The ‘other’ stuff would just become background noise to the ones ‘in the know’.
Lol wouldn’t that be epic. IRC becoming a big thing again because discord, whatsapp, and all thr other business social media go to shit.
I’m ready.
I can’t get into discord. As an old EFnet user, it’s just clunky to me? I’m not sure, but it’s not sticking for me
I was a regular Teamspeak user and Discord is just more friendly than TS imo
I sometimes wonder if this would be best outcome. Rather than spending so much effort trying to fight for the internet at large, those of us “in the know” just take our balls and go play in our own corner.
The fediverse might be a test of this it continues to survive but never turns mainstream.
There is an author - Tad Williams, who wrote the “Otherland” series. One of the chapters has the some of the main ensemble going to “treehouse” - aka what happened in this universe when the nerds, geeks and techno wizards took their ball and went home. The series as a whole is interesting if you like sci-fi. That chapter however seems more and more on the nose the older I get.
Then don’t let Chrome be a super majority of users.
You can’t win this battle by telling normies to go download firefox. They don’t care. And that’s the issue. People need to care about these issues and that starts with education. If we taught kids about computers and intellectual property at a young age, they might care. Instead I learned how to write in cursive.
Exactly this is the problem, when I talk non-geek (including my wife) about privacy they answer “what the hell have you to hide !” … It’s so difficult to convince people :'(
If you have a better plan, let me know.
Otherwise you can roll over and let the internet die and ill do what i can.
Allrighty mr. Dramagoodie. You go fight the good fight, or whatever your psykosis is called. Firefox is life, but normies be normies. You make zero impact.
Firefox literally used to be a significant browser before Chrome showed up. Users have to download Chrome. It’s not like it default. It’s just a matter of changing habits. They swapped from Firefox to Chrome they can back. They’ll do it for thr same reason so many people left IE for Firefox: it sucked.
When ads get overbearing and scammy, your favorite neighbor IT guy will install Firefox for them or something and tell them to use it. A child or grandchild will do the same. So it has always been. That’s how adblock even became so big. People didn’t use it before.
Ads are so bad now, I actually went out of my way to install Firefox on my phone. My less technical relatives just refuse to use anything but apps.
I think some people must be young and have not witnessed the late 90s, early 00s, before Firefox.
You had way more new users whose only notion of the internet was the blue e icon. Macs were less popular and of course there were no smartphones.
Microsoft pulled all the bullshit. “Extending” the standards so standards compliant browsers would not work, serving broken pages on non IE browsers and convincing an enormous amount of moron webmasters to tell you to go “upgrade” to IE while your browser could perfectly render their site.
Yet Firefox did break that stranglehold.
But you need to connect with people. Don’t try to do it via relatively abstract concepts such as privacy or freedom. Tell them that they won’t be able to block any ads in a year or so if they keep using Chrome. That they won’t be able to download whatever they want… etc etc.
The internet was better before the normies joined. “I don’t see the problem, Chrome is fine, I don’t care if it spies” is a very common thing I hear.
But they do care about their money. Explain it in ways that will resonate with them.
Without ad blocking, they’ll encounter “scam ads” that take over the browser and demand calling “support” that collects their credit card info and costs them hundreds of dollars in fraudulent charges. At the very least, it’s a pain in the ass they have deal with by calling their credit card provider to cancel the charges.
Security extensions from antivirus/antimalware applications won’t work and subject them to even more of the above.
Malicious “attestation” services can falsely verify unscrupulous websites as legitimate.
“Google engineers want…”
No. Google executives want this to happen. Google’s CEO wants this to happen.
They want to change the internet and remove any little bit of freedom for their own corporate profits.
Fuck “do no evil” Google.
Use Firefox.
Even the Android version lets you install uBlock Origin.
The issue tracker of the GitHub repo is just ridiculous.
why has no news site also added, “and they are using their monopoly over the web to do it” as part of their title. 😭
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.
This guy is amazing. He is asking for patience to move this to a proper place to discuss this website drm and then commits it to chrome lol.
Lmao yoavweiss seems to have recently broken the 4 year hiatus on his personal blog to make a new post about how the discussions around this retarded proposal are not constructive enough.
The most constructive that can ever be said about this is “fuck right off” dude.
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You think they acted alone?
They acted.
That’s petty as fuck. I’m an ex google eng and it’s not up to us what we work on. We get paid to work on shit and if we don’t do it someone else will. Plenty of resumes in the pool ready to hop in and take someone’s spot. Blame the company not the people doing the grunt work.
It’s like blaming the barista for the menu.
More like blaming the chef in a restaurant chain for the menu. Some corporate entity might be the one crafting the menu, but they’re still the ones cooking.
That isn’t to say we should hound the devs, but I thought we could use a better example.
“Just doing my job” is a poor excuse. That’s no different than saying, “I’m just doing it for money”. When you’re a software engineer who could get another job without much trouble. Otherwise, you’re choosing to do what google tells you.
A menu you don’t like at a barista isn’t even remotely the same.
“The restaurant told me to not care and use rotten food for your meal, not my fault” is basically what I can relate it to
I fail to see how the engineers building the technical side of this are relevant to this case. It’s not their decision to put this into Chromium or not.
True, it was not their decision, but they had the choice to show google the middle finger.
The next person would do it then. I don’t see that as a solution.
Anyone able to come up with this tech has the choice to just leave and work elsewhere.
Of course they have the choice. But be realistic. There is ALWAYS someone willing to do something for money. Not everyone thinks the same way as you do.
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Dude they’re not murdering people they implemented tech use a new browser
Also, it is ‘they’re’, not ‘their’.
Thanks really picked what mattered from an auto correct
An unethical tech which they could’ve refused and turned whistleblower about.
No point in whistleblowing when they are posting blogs about it…asking for feedback.
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You always have a decision. Especially when you’re a highly qualified engineer that could choose to work somewhere else easily.
You say that like it’s easy to deal with a sudden loss of income and the potential that their living situation will radically change before they land that new job. I can’t imagine that working at that level leads to particular quick interview and hiring processes.
Please don’t blame the people who were forced to implement this. There are engineers to blame behind all shitty tech in the world. They’re just trying to work a job. There aren’t exactly a lot of jobs in the tech industry where you don’t work for some of the evilest motherfuckers alive building unimaginably evil stuff. I’m all for directing as much hate, vitriol, credible threats of violence, etc at the people on top, but let’s leave the poor sap who they forced to do their dirty work alone.
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challenge accepted
In recent news, Google has put forth a proposal known as the “Web Environment Integrity Explainer”, authored by four of its engineers.
Imagine someone telling you this is your job and you do it.
This is why I recently switched back to Firefox.
While nice to do, it’s not going to solve the problem when the likes of Cloudflare are already on board with this. Apple has already implemented a similar system in Safari as well. Feels like the horse has already left the barn.
Philosophically I want to agree with you, but when sites like banks and employment finders are going to require this it’s really going to create a horrible world of the haves and have-nots.
If google really does away with adblockers I expect many more will follow. I’m not even against unobtrusive ads but the few times I’ve been away from my own pihole / ublock browser setup and rawdogged the internet those ads were next level obnoxious. I can’t live like that.
I can’t imagine anyone who uses the internet thinking the current ad technology is effective, the web is broken because of ads
Google engineers want me to stop using anything from google
