zlacker

>>reacto+(OP)
This is pretty much the inevitable end-game of the web, in no small part funded by ad-based business models (as the analog gap pretty much destroys most attempts to use this stuff to do copy protection) and enabled by developers who have insisted we shove as much difficult-to-implement functionality (by which I am talking about CSS complex stuff, not powerful-but-easy-to-code APIs for OS-level access) into the browser as possible.

The result: there is now effectively one dominating web browser run by an ad company who nigh unto controls the spec for the web itself and who is finally putting its foot down to decide that we are all going to be forced to either used fully-locked down devices or to prove that we are using some locked-down component of our otherwise unlocked device to see anyone's content, and they get to frame it as fighting for the user in the spec draft as users have a "need" to prove their authenticity to websites to get their free stuff.

(BTW, Brave is in the same boat: they are also an ad company--despite building ad blocking stuff themselves--and their product managers routinely discuss and even quote Brendan Eich talking about this same kind of "run the browser inside of trusted computing" as their long-term solution for preventing people blocking their ads. The vicious irony: the very tech they want to use to protect them is what will be used to protect the status quo from them! The entire premise of monetizing with ads is eventually either self-defeating or the problem itself.)

>>saurik+L5
> who is finally putting their foot down and deciding that we are all going to be forced to either used fully-locked down devices

The person who wrote the proposal[0] is from Google. All the authors of the proposal are from Google[1].

I've been thinking carefully about this comment, but I really don't know what to say. It's absolutely heartbreaking watching something I really care about die by a thousand cuts; how do we protest this? Google will just strong-arm their implementation through Chromium and, when banks, Netflix & co. start using it, they've effectively cornered other engines into implementing it.

This isn't new to them. They did it with FLoC, which most people were opposed to[2]. The most they did was FLoC was deprecate it and re-release it under a different name.

The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal.

[0]: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser [1]: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/... [2]: >>26344013

>>tentac+H9
> how do we protest this?

You do not and you cannot. It was written in stone once Chrome dominated the browser market. What Chrome (Google) wants, Chrome (Google) gets. Despite all the good engineering Google wants to sell ads, that's all there is to it. And the result is this proposal.

> The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal.

It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority. Unless people switch to FF in droves the web is Chrome. And they won't because at the end of the day people just want to get home from their shitty jobs and stream a show. As long as that works everything else is a non-issue.

>>spysta+Bb
> It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority.

Heh. I was there when it was IE6, and people said the same.

>>pmlnr+Ec
I was there too, in the 1.0 days, and still am. But these days are gone, Firefox is not coming back. Back then Firefox was immensely better than IE. As long as the other alternatives are just as good, there is no reason for the mythical "average user" to change over. Why bother if you can do everything in Chrome? We may understand the differences, ideological or technical, but good luck explaining that out there. There's a massive disconnect between user and technology and as a result people will live in the perfectly curated technological bubble that's been served to them.

>>spysta+0h
"You can use adblock" is a pretty chunky benefit over Chrome

>>ixfo+uX
but "Netflix and my bank actually work in Chrome" is Google's endgame.

>>lygare+Zr1
the adblock "endgame" will be a self-hosted DNS system that blocks requests to ad-server urls (or return benign responses).

Then the game will switch to encrypted proxied traffic that you cannot block.

Then the adblocking software will switch to the GPU layer, and use machine learning and AI to wipe the region of memory in the GPU containing the ads (and replace it with something benign).

Then the next logical step from likes of google is a fully trusted computing environment - aka, you as an end user no longer control your own machine.

This is entirely predicted by Richard Stallman.