The only way around the dystopia this will lead to is to constantly and relentlessly shame and even harass all those involved in helping create it. The scolding in the issue tracker of that wretched "project" shall flow like a river, until the spirit of those pursuing it breaks, and the effort is disbanded.
And once the corporate hydra has regrown its head, repeat. Hopefully, enough practise makes those fighting the dystopia effective enough to one day topple over sponsoring and enabling organisations as a whole, instead of only their little initiatives leading down that path.
Not a pretty thing, but necessary.
We are capable of going to elsewhere to free and open access to information, and we would be better off spending our energy on positively influencing others to follow us in that direction. They can’t take away tcp, http, ftp, irc and all the other protocols that these megaliths have built their empires on, and we can still use those tools even if it’s a demoralizing regression to move back to the basics. Giants like google, Amazon and others depend on our unwillingness to rebuild. Let’s use our efforts and our ingenuity to show them that they’ve underestimated us.
We have the tools, we have the knowledge. Let’s be builders instead of petty complainers.
"An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past."
Ben Wiser ( https://benwiser.com ) turned off comments altogether.
And what do we have to show for it? Our tools power their botnets and they flaunt the CoCs in our faces when we try to do something about it as “not constructive”.
The Open Web. Creators: TBL et al, Destroyed-By: Google et al.
The only pressure that Google has been shown to consistently respond to is political. Get a couple of senators (... of the right party) to send them a mild rebuke and they will indeed retreat a little (... and try something else later). But that's a lot harder than posting angry comments until the next piece of outrageous news comes along, isn't it?
Is EFF still the place to send money?
It’s very likely governments will make this mandatory if they have the chance to regulate over this.
let it burn
focus on building something new, new protocols, new networks, new browsers
Cory Doctorow came up with the phrase "The War on General-Purpose Computing", which describes the situation perfectly.
What we really need is for the collective browser vendors to refuse to implement this and, if Chrome pushes forward, to bring Google to court over it. Nothing short of legal intervention is going to help here.
If this ever helped, we wouldn't have absolutely unethical products created. Turns out people's morals have a price tag, that Google and others are willing to pay their employees.
for a personal blog it has quite a lot of PR speak
Normies can f&$% off and enjoy the data-mined, DRM'd, ad-infested, CCP-propagandized, upload-your-photo-ID-to-post-here, privacy-free dump their illiteracy, careless disregard for harm, and data exhibitionism fetish has allowed the clearnet to turn into.
Multiple US states, France, Germany and the UK are going to make the web unnavigable unless you type your credit card number or scan your face for age verification in two out of every three sites.
We are going to need to at least try to create ways to secure those credentials in as zero trust model as possible.
(Note that the legislation is a disaster, but it is done. Nobody paid enough attention. It has passed or will pass in weeks.)
Anti-communism and fascism are historically in lock-step. No one is going to use the services if you basically create web4 stormfront.
It is quite incredible actually, because it was not many years ago that working at Google had this coolness factor to it. Hopefully, it is a broader change of view, other than mine?
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Ockham's Razor doesn't apply in an adversarial situation.
Therefore, one of the most efficient ways to kill a dangerous new standard is to endlessly harass anyone who works on it.
Sorry, the poor individual can not hide from their responsibility.
AI is going to completely change search if it hasn't already, and google is not even close to compete in this space.
Video has some massive competition from the likes of TikTok. Anyway, YouTube isn't the only option on the market.
Gmail is still popular but since google has been pressuring users to pay, it's been easier than ever to find a reason to try another service.
Chromium can always be forked and have some parts removed or added, and as we all know quite a few browsers do this, some are quite popular.
Is google also losing IOS ads like Meta? If they do, that's another reason for alarm for them.
I'm not sure google is in the best position for the future and WEI is not going to be their golden ticket either.
And, if your prediction that web will change actually comes to pass, well then it'll be just another cycle for this space that has changed countless times since the age of dialup. The web is going to change, again and again, but as long as people are still free to set up a server and let the world access it, we can still do what we like with it.
The Halloween memos called this "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Google didn't just ignore the moves that provided M$ dominance.
“What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.” Network, 1976
Further, free speech must be defended despite the modern liberal tendency to cut off the majority’s noses to spite nazi faces. If you’re gonna fight nazis, fight nazis, don’t throw out fundamental human rights. They know they can taint principles, signs, and symbols with their stench. Don’t give up essential freedoms out of guilt by association. These charlatans have no political theory, no examined ideology. It’s a power struggle and we’ve already ceded too much power.
The only way to stop Google from treating the Web as their own OS is to take that power away from them, by switching to other browser engines.
85 points by KoftaBob 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 109 comments
I'm not on board with harassing people (sad that I have to include this disclaimer).
That said, the people are not simply implementing this. They're actively and publicly justifying and defending it.
A fresh web doesn't exempt you from the legal requirements unfortunately.
This year has seen the biggest state attacks by legislators on any electronic distribution of speech across most Western states for fifty years, and by and large the technology community has completely failed to even engage with that never mind stop it. We are all going to have to live with the consequences for decades.
Consider incentives from Google's standpoint. They want to provide users a safe and secure experience. They want to simplify maintenance of software and provide developers the ability to simplify maintenance of software (a problem simplified by chopping the unbounded set of possible user agents down to a blessed, vetted subset). They have the resources to make their site screen-reader compatible, so they're not concerned about damage that could be done to screen-readers because they'll just bless one and support it. And, of course, they implicitly trust themselves to do all this.
In that ecosystem, Weiss's viewpoint is completely reasonable. The old model of the web is old, and led to gestures broadly at all the bad things about the web today... fraud, users getting owned, CP, botnets, misinformation factories. I can definitely see the viewpoint where someone concludes "It's time for a new model, and this company has the resources to do it."
I don't agree with him (and in fact I think the idea will fail; I think Google actually overestimates its ability to provide an equivalently-good user experience to what we have now if they aren't leveraging the unpaid labor of other vendors putting the effort into making their own houses work with Google's house without Google even being aware of their work). But I think it's useful to wrap our heads around how one gets into that headspace without thinking oneself a monster.
Not every Mozilla critic is a Chrome user; I'd even expect that the most vocal critics are Firefox fans and users.
The other side to this issue is despite the scrutiny towards big tech, they can still lobby and make any regulatory actions seem effective, when in practice, they've already gotten their fingers into influencing policy in such a way that doesn't ultimately address the consumers' concerns.
The problem is that the proposal has not yet been brought to W3C.
The bigger picture is that Google et al are actually part of the control structure. The governance system wants deanonymised Internet. Corporate interests are how this is being promoted - government legislation would be a harder pill for the masses to accept.
But all the recent mega changes tell us (Elon buying twitter, etc) tell us that this is on the way. Apparent anonymous internet will be sandboxed. Knowing everything about everyone all the time, and having that data being crunched by ai's is an amazing, audacious goal, that seems close to being achieved.
Legislation around device ownership rights are already present, especially in the EU.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how they were being anti-communist or fascist in your eyes.
There are enough top voted people demanding harassment in this and other threads to say that well, maybe that's what HN is, actually.
It's even funnier with the auto-reply "Thanks for your pull request! It looks like this may be your first contribution to a Google open source project. Before we can look at your pull request, you'll need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA)."
Google sells ads. They want to kill ad blockers. This is how.
> Weiss's viewpoint is completely reasonable
Chasing diversions around in circles is not neutral. Someone wins by default. Diversions exist and they exist to tempt you into poor attention allocation decisions. This is not about safety, security, and providing an excellent experience. It's about ads and making sure you can't stop them.
Not on HN, please. I realize that you're trying to protect something you care about (and that maybe we all care about) but this leads to ugly mob behavior that we don't want and won't allow here.
"Google is an advertising company and does whatever leads to more profitable advertisements" does a much better job of explaining Google's actions than "Google just wants to build the best possible browser", so it should be preferred even though it is a more complicated explanation.
Nothing in the proposal requires the third party be Google. The proposal does decrease the control the user has over their own hardware, in the sense that it provides a channel for a site to decide the user-agent / hardware stack is the wrong pedigree to serve; that's not universally considered evil either (few people really get bent out of shape that you need a Nintendo Switch to use Nintendo Switch Online services).
Please don't do this here. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Edit: I suppose I need to add—no, we're not pro-$MegaCorp or pro-$web-destroying-dystopia. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck, and you guys need to make your substantive points without degenerating into mob behavior.
Edit: I suppose I need to add—no, we're not pro-$MegaCorp or pro-$web-destroying-dystopia. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck, and you guys need to make your substantive points without degenerating into mob behavior.
More explanation:
In addition: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Consider the phrase "tankie", what was once a term used by communists to describe a militaristic member who supported the USSR sending tanks into Hungary, has become a general phrase for anyone showing critical support to any socialist project.
Socialists are essentially told they are not allowed to support any previously or currently existing project because bad things were done, are told they're doing whataboutism if they compare the actions to western actions, and are called a tankie if they decide to stop caring about what liberals and right wing people say.
China IS a socialist project, are they strictly a socialist country? No. Did they perform the most thorough and equitable land reforms in the history of Humanity? Yes. Do they wield central power for central planning economic activities? Sometimes. Are they operating on a 100% worker ownership of industry? no, but they have a non-insignificant public ownership of industry, co-opting privately owned industry to steer activities with greater control and hold certain business leaders accountable.
I'm sorry to say, but "current day CCP conforms to the definition of fascism" just isn't correct and goes to prove the point that the meaning of words is mostly ignored. Fascism != Authoritarianism. There was a massive effort post WWII through the cold war to create anti-communist propaganda that simply wasn't true. You had actual ex members of the Nazi party leading anti-communist endeavors. The black book of communism counts Nazis as deaths from communism. The Victims of Communism memorial foundation is literally a mask on far-right thinktanks such as the heritage foundation.
That being said, the West is grossly lied to about China day to day. It is in various interests to have an enemy. To the point where one man can write a report identifying a "future cultural genocide" which was simply a reduction in growth of a population due to 1 and 2 child laws being imposed on a group that was exempt prior, as an actual, in-progress genocide. If you point this out, people call you a genocide denier.
That same man is a director of China Studies, at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
I apologize for this long winded rant, but yes, if you found an internet presence on being "anti-ccp", you're starting off on a literal fascist foot. The community will deride any left leaning voice, call any voice that says "hey china did a good thing here", as a "tankie", and it will become an echo chamber for right-wing hate speech.
> so fascism would be firmly out
This goes to prove my point, that there's a gross misunderstanding of history in the general population.
Fascism doesn't use force to get political power, it gains political power through reactionary ideas based on false assumptions that leads to a fascist regime where the violence then occurs on the "other".
It comes through ideas such as "protecting your family", "returning to tradition", and other feel good sayings that mean almost nothing. Think of the phrase "Woke", taken from black community vernacular and twisted to mean almost nothing at all. It describes everything and anything that can make a conservative person upset, from queer people to mental health professionals.
Despite meaning nothing, oh boy has it taken root. Beer is woke, tv is woke, the black guy in star wars is woke for existing. And oh man look how easy it is to take root and now millions of people live their life by the "anti-woke" lifestyle. What does that lifestyle mean? idk, buying shes just to light them on fire, i guess.
This is why communist regimes had gulags. Fascism takes root through reactionary(meaning feelz over realz) ideas, typically against change. A revolution is something hard fought, why would they allow it to be derided by some idiots who miss when they owned all their neighbors land?
What I'm trying to say is one end of the spectrum is at a huge advantage when it comes to free speech environments, for the fascist does not need to argue in good faith. Going by "philosophies that support the use of force..." will get you a lot of a certain group.