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[return to "Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible"]
1. Knobbl+c5[view] [source] 2023-07-26 10:50:46
>>pabs3+(OP)
A good and measured article marred only by a silly, clickbait title.

Unless there is a plan to allow attesters that are independent bodies then this is absolutely a threat to the open internet, or what's left of it.

The biggest dead canary for me is the lack of calling this out explicitly by Google or Apple. We're left to assume that Google is hand-wavingly saying "don't worry we can take care of that" when the private companies already monopolizing parts of the Internet are the absolute last people we want handling attestation.

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2. jackda+26[view] [source] 2023-07-26 10:57:38
>>Knobbl+c5
even assuming unbiased and objective attesters, the issue lies with the "baseline criteria" of attestation and who defines them.

There are two risks here (examples follow):

1. hostile requirements - "the agent won't feature adblockers", or "scraping without explicit website permission must be forbidden"

2. prohibitive requirements - "the agent implements protocols X, Y and Z and adheres to standards A, B and C" - all of these may be reasonable things, but en masse they may be too much work to carry by anyone but a reasonably big vendor

Additionally these criteria must be verifiable, so user can't basically modify the agent, because then the attestation is practically void.

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3. Knobbl+iM[view] [source] 2023-07-26 14:22:43
>>jackda+26
Absolutely. Independent bodies don't solve the other myriad issues with attestation, but they don't add the ones that corporate interests do either.
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