It's untenable to have a fox as guardian of the chicken coop, this shit will return again and again as long as Google controls Chrome. Come on, lets see some serious anti-trust action.
What action specifically? A breakup? The entity that ends up owning Chrome would have to continue to pay for maintenance, at least to keep on patching security holes and responding to new laws and regulations. How is it going to get the money to do that? The Firefox way?
Google controls way to much of the interaction on the internet. Between Gmail, search, android, and chrome they can and do abuse their position. And this isn't even looking at the backend and ad stuff. It should probably be broken up in to multiple companies each of which would have different business strategies and areas of focus. Allowing a company to essentially break the current internet so that they can guarantee more ad revenue seems like what anti-trust rules were built for. Honestly, google has much more control on the internet with chrome than MS ever did with IE.
Since we're talking about breakups, how about asking Android to pay up for Chrome?
And how about asking customers to pay $50 license for Android when they buy a smart phone? Or an annual fee, for updates and maintenance.
I mean, those payments are already done, except they are currently obfuscated because we only see the purchase price when we buy a phone, not the money passed under the table in exchange for yielding our privacy.
Because no one will pay for the updates and then they are left with an out of date phone that gets connected to a botnet and drains their bank account. Like what happened with Windows.
Donations, the firefox way, freemium or simply charging like most other things on Earth. At one point you had to pay for the best version of the old Netscape browser. We got too used to "free", when in fact we became the product of big corporations "giving away" the tech.
I really hope Chrome becomes paid software, the fallout in my immediate family is going to be glorious.
On a less cheeky note, I’m all for breaking up Google but the reality is that outside of this small tech circle nobody cares. People like the current system and they have no problem with web DRM either because if anything it might benefit them (no stupid captchas for example).
I would put WEI together with a together with a number of other recent changes that I think signal that the land grab error of the web is over, and that web based businesses need to get real about their economics.
1) Netflix restricting password sharing
2) RedHat pushing the limits of the GPL to restrict RHEL re-distribution
In some ways, I think this could be a good thing, in that it clearly separates the advertising funded web (the commerical web) from the altruistically funded web (the free web). Maybe with a little luck, the free web becomes something more akin to the web circa 2000 even it has alot less information. That might be better than the open sewer of a web that we have today.
drug-or-money addicted jerks with computer science training the world over appear to be opportunistically and unrelentingly filling open space with harmful garbage; spiritually similar to open piles of garbage around the street homes of deeply suffering people to my eye. There have to be fences and sanitation of some kind. Handing the entire process over to profit-motivated corps is not the answer, either. It is looking pretty bad today, from here
I agree, greed or drug addiction are the only motives I could see for why jerks with computer science training continue to work on products like chrome
"The worry is that WEI could potentially be used to disallow ad blocking, to block certain browsers, to limit web scraping (still largely legal, though often disallowed under websites' terms-of-service), to exclude software for downloading YouTube videos or other content, and impose other limitations on otherwise lawful web activities."
WEI gives too much control to browser-making big tech companies.
Should browser-making big tech companies get to control your computer more than they already do?
People think that ad blocking is the worst we'll lose. It's not. Attestation parameters are defined by an unknown 3rd party.
Want to visit this website? Is your webcam on? Has it been switched on for at least 4 hours/day on average. Do you have Meta written on your forehead as you smile?
If not, forget it buddy, are not getting in.
Have you installed this .exe file? No? Hit the road.
> People think that ad blocking is the worst we'll lose.
Either people will complain that the tangible example is narrowly scoped, or people will complain that the topic is abstract nerd bullshit will no real-world meaning, it won't actually change anything, and insinuate having an opinion about it is cringe.
This happens in every fucking conversation on this website about the technical details of a technical coordination (protocols, formats, platforms, interfaces, etc...).
Google is the tail wagging the dog. Everyone knows it. Maybe it's time we all give up on the fantasy of technology as an enabler. Just accept that everything will be maximally locked-down and we should only see it as something to interact with when absolutely necessary. Accept that bland cable tv-esqe milquetoast culture with some playskool business collab tools bolted on is the fate of the internet.
A blogger - I think The Last Psych - said that technology will be the biggest disappointment since the death of god. I think I understood his point 5 years ago. Recently though, I agree.
Convince everyone you know to switch browsers. Tell them the truth we all know: If people keep using Google Chrome, they'll take away ad blocking, they'll block you from copy-pasting, taking screenshots, anything you know the usual bastards have tried or you can imagine will try to restrict a device from doing to try to "extract value out of the user".
Firefox is the most obvious alternative, and for those who prefer a Chromium base: Brave, Iridium and ungoogled-chromium, in order of how much functionality has been stripped away from least to most, are open source, privacy-focused solutions.
If Google does this, I'll switch to sharing news stripped of ads via p2p.
I'm so sick of this bullshit. AMP, Manifest V2, buying their way into every corner of the web, ...
In the meantime, please call your legislators and regulators. Tell them Google's too big to be allowed to have a web browser and that one solution is splitting out their business units.
In this case, it's not even his salary: it's his comfort and ease of labor.
It's hard to support a heterogeneous space of user agents running on a heterogeneous set of platforms. Eventually, abstractions break and you end up with a weird bug that only manifests on such-and-such browser in so-and-so configuration.
How much easier life is if you only have to support a few browsers on hardware that checksums to have a known-good configuration...
It'd vary from person to person, but to a first approximation: Googlers are well-compensated and can be well-compensated at a lot of places. The next best compensation the company can offer them is minimizing drudgework.
Chasing down render errors in the deep interactions between declarative HTML rendering and an esoteric-but-important hardware / software configuration is drudgework.
On the other side, drudgework, in all its dullness and frustration, is still work. If there's less of it, some jobs may be disappear--cushy salary or not.
Some of my best ideas even, came out of clearing drudge.
Why would they dissent... you think Pichai is writing the code himself?
Google employees are the ones writing this code, doing the designs, the QA, the project planning.
You can't expect the people who work for these companies to do the right thing. Time and time again, it requires outside forces. Either customers or legislation.
Googlers only dissent about issues handcrafted to be distractions, anything Google does that threatens the preservation of open and free societies is fair play.
That's a good point, what do you use the Internet for anyways? News, banking, governmental rituals, maybe searching for a book or a topic to learn. Sometimes a work meeting or an email or wasting time watching YouTube or listening to music. These all don't need drm or whatever. Some don't even need internet, you can just download files like your grandfather did 10 years ago
A commonly repeated concern is that if WEI is implemented, banks will leap on it and it will become infeasible to do online transactions at most banks without either using a WEI-blessed software / hardware configuration or the bank's app in a commercial app store.
Banks don't need the "anonymous" part of the WEI, just the "authentic" chain of trust as in am I really identifying a life person rather than a robot impersonation.
Banks are lazy, they shouldn't need to rely on infrastructure of commercial app stores, blessed devices since they've already proven they could develop it themselves (chip cards, dongles, time-based one time codes, etc.).
WEI is mainly aimed at suppressing the unauthenticated noise, when reading a signal from GET requests (ie tracking) that was never meant to convey any information beyond what is asked for, in the first place.
Some examples of scenarios where users depend on client trust include:
* 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.
Ie.: To make sure that ads are only delivered to actual living humans bothering them with a login, payment or CAPTCHA and heavily invest add-blocker detection arms race, they want the web client to attest that the genuine user actually saw the ad.
I mean okay? Most banking security these days is comically bad compared to just the kind of 2FA that GH has. I'd like my broker to have better authentication options and if it securely identifies that my hardware really is my hardware that is probably an actual improvement that I'd want.
The rest of the time I can use a non-WEI browser and the sites that lock me out would probably be doing me a favor.
Already my two main banks, although having website, require me to authenticate via their app. I guess it's kind of understandable with real stealable money involved.
Only because Apple doesn't have enough marketshare. If everyone was using safari (probably including any browser on iOS which is just a reskin of safari) it would be just as bad. Maybe even worse, as you might get locked out of sites unless you are using apple hardware.
Really depends on the site. Our marketplace sees 50% Safari usage since 60% of the traffic is mobile and Safari has such high usage on mobile for our customers.
I am keen to hear from insiders on how upper management is framing this. I would love it even more if some of the devs involved would question the underlying (profit) motives before spearheading the next Chrome release.
Can someone help me understand what functionality this gives to the website makers over, say, checking your user agent and denying access for FF/safari users?
