Make browsing the internet possible only on Chrome, Safari or Edge (with no modifications or extensions). No competition allowed in browsers.
Make browsing the internet possible only on macOS, Windows, Android or iOS (no custom Android distributions, definitely no LineageOS or GrapheneOS or whatever). No competition allowed in Operating Systems, especially no open source operating systems.
Make crawling the internet possible only to Google. No private crawling and no competing search engines.
Let me know if I've missed anything...
Remember the corporations will need to be more disruptive than a nuclear war to break the internet. We can always route around them ourselves.
Make browsing the internet possible only on SoCs allowed by Apple, Microsoft, Google. No competition allowed in SoC. [0]
Make browsing the internet possible only on form factors approved by Apple, Microsoft, Google. So no calculator with a web browser [1]. No competition allowed in form factor.
Make browsing the internet possible only on UX approved by Apple, Microsoft, Google. So backtracking 10 years ago, when Android made documents-oriented web browser (= each tab appears just like a standalone app in recent apps), that would have been abuse of that position. No competition allowed in UX. [2]
PS: I come from Android OS world, all those examples already apply to Google/Android.
[0] Well this one will depend on whether their Web Environment Integrity implementation will enforce full secure boot approved by them. Considering how it went for Android, I'd say it will, but can't say for sure.
[1] Yes you can find calculators running Android (but can't run Google/Android so no Chrome). Amongst a lot of other weird Android devices. You can find walking robots, toothbrushes, urinals running Android.
[2] You'll probably find a better example. Arguably it's the same as "competition allowed in browsers", but that was an OS-wide change, but saying it's "OS" IMO largely reduces it.
It'll kill open platforms like the rare open source RISC-V implementations, but for almost any platform in use today this can be implemented.
The real question is "but will it", and in practice websites will probably only whitelist Chrome, Edge, and (reluctantly) Safari.
Buying stuff is on a spectrum and I think a consumer should be able to chose a tightly regulated system for exchanging currency.
Most everything else should be free to choose.
The amount of effort that goes in to playing advertising metric games of YouTube is ridiculous to me. Anyone that says well people have to get paid I say maybe.
Real creators create and don't need the like, subscribe, patreon, mantra. Most of the gunsmithing sights on YouTube are moving towards this idea.
I don't believe in the discovery myth so many talk about as essential. It is only essential if you need inorganic growth.
I would say it's an emerging trend and that the more they tighten their grip the more creators will slip through their fingers.
The above is true only to the extent that you believe it. I don't believe it at all so I'm not part of the "you" I'm an "other".
The "News" is a whole other problem closer to truth. So not technical entirely. Individuals started newspapers and individual will deliver the news.
A big issue corporations currently face is that everything has become so cheap that their scale of effort is a hindrance.
If a corporation is not acting ruthlessly efficient the economy of scale breaks down quickly. The crux of this will cause the success of many smaller scale efforts that don't hold the overhead of a corporation.
The original promise of the public internet was the idea that broadcasting was dead and narrowcasting was the wave of the future. This was true up until ads became legal/common on the internet.
Take away the commercial interest and you are left with passionate publishers and audiences.
Forgive my stupidity, but isn't this only going to be the case for websites that will opt into the use of this api? Currently, websites can already do user agent sniffing, or hide their content behind a login wall; but we are not complaining that this is the end of the web. Or are we?
Do you mean a kind of Linux where root cannot do anything he wants? Like Android?
How many web sites still serve you http:// instead of https:// ?
The transition was (is) entirely voluntary. Transition happened more slowly until browsers made the lack of https:// look scary.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2017/01/20/communicating-t...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23774547/microsoft-sony-x...
The FTC lost that case.
I think at this point, if a big tech executive avoids doing something due to the threat of antitrust lawsuits, they're just incompetent.
More secure variants like Android, leveraging SELinux and such, help with sandboxing but I don't think that SELinux is a struct requirement.
Even still, there are ways to implement this using an open source, signed, reproducibly built daemon that gets loaded early in the boot process. Altering the daemon would've out of the question but it would solve the more immediate problem of "Netflix doesn't work" that most people would actually care about.
Financial transactions could become so streamlined that a "commerce fob" is likely to emerge. That would be a credit card with a screen and buttons.
Think about how streamlined all these tasks have become. Putting those in a single ROM that has a screen and is tied into some legitimate network will emerge.
It is only out of convenience that these services are currently tied to a "phone".
Reliable machinery always has a shop manual, diagrams and prints. Programming languages have tomes of documentation, computing infrastructure has man pages and volumes of commentary, scholarship and trouble shooting have been committed to characters.
Aside from the point and grunt visuals, solid presentations (viewed after the fact when the value of real time interaction is gone) work fine as text.
If you're dyslexic, I get it but TTS systems are extremely solid these days.
What is the point?
Maybe if I donate to NRA-ILA I can tilt their agenda towards gun control.
you’re not going to tilt a think tank against its master, and the point of Mozilla is controlled opposition so google can point out they’re not quite a monopoly.
Even after you manage to turn it on, it only verifies the kernel and cannot do anything about malware hiding in /usr. There is no Linux distro AFIAK that has verification of the entire system like ChromeOS, MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows have.
> Fedora includes support for the UEFI Secure Boot feature, which means that Fedora can be installed and run on systems where UEFI Secure Boot is enabled. On UEFI-based systems with the Secure Boot technology enabled, all drivers that are loaded must be signed with a valid certificate, otherwise the system will not accept them. All drivers provided by Red Hat are signed by the UEFI CA certificate.
Running your own secure boot CA is not enabled out of the box (for obvious reasons), but that does not pose a problem on most systems. Secure boot only needs special care if you need to load unsigned kernel modules (DKMS, Nvidia) or if you run on a super duper special Microsoft device that doesn't have the third party CA certificate by default.
[1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-ad...
And, again, it is complicated to get it turned on. How complicated? Take a look:
https://nwildner.com/posts/2021-04-10-secureboot-fedora/
>The kind of Linux 99% of Linux users are running today.
I severely doubt that even 5% of Linux installs have secure boot turned on because of how complicated it is to get it working. Specifically I imagine that the complicated instructions on the page I just linked will need to be modified depending on the specific secure-boot firmware.
> https://nwildner.com/posts/2021-04-10-secureboot-fedora/
Most motherboards ship with secure boot enabled out of the box. Fedora will install and boot in that configuration without any changes to your system or motherboard settings. You actually have to go out of your way to disable it. The manual (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f36/install-guid...) does not mention any such setting changes.
The page you link goes into custom secure boot keys, which are usually unnecessary. They're arguably more secure, but it's an entirely optional step unless you decide to load unsigned kernel modules.
For instance, initrd is not verified: >>36717975
>The page you link goes into custom secure boot keys, which are usually unnecessary.
You might be right about that.
To use secure boot without calls to mokutil and friends, Unified Kernel Images are introduced in Fedora 38. These images contain everything (kernel, initrd, and so on) in one, published package. If https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2159490 is to be believed, UKIs are live already in Fedora 38.
I can only find pregenerated UKIs for virtual machines in the Fedora repositories and I can't tell if they're properly signed or not, but support is being extended and this problem is being solved.
As for providing security: Linux really needs an easy, user-friendly GUI application for setting up proper secure boot. Of course at least one step is out of the control of Linux developers (configuring the firmware to load new keys) but right now "I want to load my system keys (and also the keys for my Linux dual boot)" is awful on any Linux distro. Every guide presents scripts to call scripts to call automated tools but none of them seem to make the process any easier or friendlier.
In my search I focused on the "immutable" distros like Silverblue because it seems to me that the immutability would make the implementation easier.
In contrast, all the other mainstream OSes can detect an alteration in something like the C library during boot.
There's also the venerable lynx, and elinks (which I reluctantly admit is better than lynx, even if I don't use it much), and Dillo+ [1] (a fork / continuation of Dillo that supports Gopher and Gemini). And could I forget NetSurf, with its graph-y history navigation? And of course, Ladybird, [2] probably the best-funded of the lot.
These are just the ones I've heard of. There are surely dozens more you'd be interested in, and thousands of little hobby projects. Why not try making your own web browser?
[0]: https://argonaut-constellation.org/
So? They can force you to pick between running old software or running new software. This is hardly new if you look at the broader "compatibility" scene. Old hardware and software are being dropped all the time. (Remember when MacOS dropped 32-bit support and wiped out a huge chunk of older games?)
If you want to stay in the old chain, you're free to do so, just like how you can still pick up a word processor made a couple decades ago and make documents on it. It only affects you if you want to use the Internet as that keeps evolving. (If you load up some '00s or '10s era browsers you'll see that many of them do not work at all for the popular Internet sites, which have all adopted things like newer TLS implementations and HTTP/3 or whatever the latest one is...