zlacker

>>luag+(OP)
Amazingly clever that they have hold backs! Make sure to read this before going along with the anti WEI train

> WEI prevents ecosystem lock-in through hold-backs

> We had proposed a hold-back to prevent lock-in at the platform level. Essentially, some percentage of the time, say 5% or 10%, the WEI attestation would intentionally be omitted, and would look the same as if the user opted-out of WEI or the device is not supported.

So this avoids the DRM or blocking certain browsers issue. Brilliant. I’m not entirely certain but I think this avoids the main issues which people had with the proposal.

I still think a lot of people will not read this and react with vitriol but I would like to expect more from hacker news, as a forum where people don’t simply downvote opinions they disagree with.

>>haburk+Nm
The existence of a configuration that limits attestation to a probabilistic phenomenon seems like a very thin foundation to stand on here - if it can be changed to requiring 100% attestation rate in the future I think it will be changed as soon as it is feasible to do so.

I haven't reviewed the proposal enough to see how they implemented that, and if it was done in a cryptographic way that prevents changing to 100%, then that could work. But the fact remains that control of our browsing computing environment is diminishing under this proposal.

>>steve_+Hq
It seems to me that “if it can be changed to 100% attestation rate in the future, it will be done” is a slippery slope argument and assuming bad faith on behalf of the proposal writer.

I think if it were changed to be 100% then it would be problematic. Also it seems the proposal writer would also agree that some form of opt out is required to make it viable so as to not forbid unknown clients.

I think its important to stay away from considering potential “what ifs” that completely defy the intent of the spec. For an example of why this isn’t effective discourse, we could have a potential addition to the spec to explicitly block users from certain countries. That’s not great but also its easy to understand why its not worth debating that point (even though it does sound scary).

>>haburk+BA
If you had said that 5 years ago, I would have believed you, but the latest trend of megacorporations and billionaires moving against the interests of their users and ignoring their complaints has changed my stance on that.

Google is a big dog and will not care about our yapping. If it's allowed to do as it will without consequence then it will do so, and there is nothing that individuals can do to stop it other than to cease using their products.