8 ms·

Its deeply misleading to pretend stuff like signed exchanges and portals are purely about content distribution and security, and not control over said content b

by throwaway2048 6y ago

Its deeply misleading to pretend stuff like signed exchanges and portals are purely about content distribution and security, and not control over said content being shifted to Google, and away from authors and other sites. Its a similar vein to how many of the objections to AMP were being white-washed with "its open source, if you have a problem with it why aren't you submitting a pull request??"

joshuamorton 6y ago
I'll bite: how does signed exchanges provide control to Google?
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Because its cover to allow them to subsume content and serve it solely from google.com, and deny the originating page any traffic or recognition, or swap it out transparently when they feel like it. This is literally already happening with the info sidebar, the reason signed exchanges matter is so they can throw up the smokescreen about how its cryptographically verified to come from the original page, so why are people upset. Any site that objects and refuses to implement this stuff will just disappear from the first page which is reserved only for Accelerated By Google sites. (Which is already happening for AMP links on mobile searches).
  - Kalium 6y ago
    As I understood signed exchanges, a correct implementation makes it impossible for the intermediary to inject, alter, replace, or otherwise swap out any part of the page without failing verification. This would mean the original server gets to do all the branding and get all the recognition and integrity in transit that its controllers might wish. I've clearly missed something. Can you help me?
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      AMP already heavily restricts what the original page is allowed to put inside, including things like ads, javascript and branding. You can be certain anything google implements around this proposal will have similar very tight restrictions.
      - Kalium 6y ago
        That's definitely a scary thought! Can you share any details of what must be public plans to strip everything non-Google of branding? Surely there must be something out there beyond the IETF docs for the protocol, where I don't see any evil plans to Googlify everything in. If anything, it looks like a design intended to allow relaxing the restrictions imposed by AMP. Perhaps I need to read them more closely.
        throwaway2048 6y ago
        If you want an honest discussion try toning down the smarmy bullshit.
        Kalium 6y ago
        I was trying to be nice. I'll stop now. Got any material to back up your rather substantial claims? Right now you're coming across as wildly paranoid and offering absolutely nothing in support but more of the same. Someone else's personal incredulity is, IMO, not a great form of evidence.
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Your priors are terrible. Extrapolation from past experience is a perfectly valid form of reasoning: it's called “induction”, and most people consider it a valid form of reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning Or, to mirror your tone: Being paranoid does sound like an issue! However, just because other people's personal incredulity hasn't been a great form of evidence in the past, that doesn't mean it isn't a good form of evidence at the moment. Got any reason to believe it isn't?
    - lightswitch05 6y ago
      Yes, as you say, Integrity is preserved. However, Confidentiality is also another important aspect of Information Security. Making a 3rd party appear as a 1st party, is a privacy and confidentiality violation, which is why I do not like AMP and signed exchanges.
      - Kalium 6y ago
        Yeah, as near as I can tell signed exchanges are essentially a caching proxy. With integrity checks, so that you don't have to trust the proxy all that much and its agency is much reduced. I'm reminded of apt. The calculation appears to be that given the chance, some website controllers will choose to trade confidentiality of public pages for better load times. In business terms, this seems a pretty straightfoward win in many cases, so I can see why some would sign up.
        DevKoala 6y ago
        The publishers are not mentioning to the visitor they are adding one more third party looking at your data; one that maintains an ad exchange and will be an intermediary on every resource request. A publisher is free to switch to AMP, but choice needs to be given to the user to agree or leave the site the same way it happens with cookies. I wouldn’t opt in and now I cannot block Google tracking at the DNS level thanks to this.
        Kalium 6y ago
        Publishers can, and should, always make visitors aware of how many third parties are positioned to see all visitor data. We are, unfortunately, a long way from this being normal. Even as third parties doing things like running CDNs or doing TLS termination for other reasons has been pretty thoroughly normalized. Though offering it as a Firefox extension could be an interesting exercise. I think publishers view AMP as a question of their sovereignty and choice. Since it's their website that's being potentially served by Google, it's their choice to make. There's absolutely a lot of room to dispute if this is the morally correct stance, but I also think it's not wildly out of line with other questions publishers weigh in choosing what they serve and how.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > swap it out transparently > cryptographically verified to come from the original page Elaborate.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      The page results will be a tightly restricted iframe-esque window inside of google results (This is what the Chome "Portals" proposal is about). There will be no obvious distinction between a search result and google's own website, even though the "portals" will be showing cryptographically signed content (which will almost certainly be in a super restricted AMP-esque format that denies sites much control besides what the text says) If google swaps one result for another, 95% of users wont even notice.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        > If google swaps one result for another, 95% of users wont even notice. Right so exactly the same way the search results page works today? > The page results will be a tightly restricted iframe-esque window inside of google results This is completely independent of AMP. Portals work for non-AMP content too. > which will almost certainly be in a super restricted AMP-esque format that denies sites much control besides what the text says So you're suggesting that Google will create a new, even more restricted than AMP protocol to be viewed on the search page?
        searchableguy 6y ago
        Isn't that what those meta tags are for so google can quickly show scores, reviews and stuff?
- rgrs 6y ago
  Does it behave different in different countries? Will Google allow for example, Taiwan content in mainland China? Is it like VPN/Proxy or has more knobs?
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > Will Google allow for example, Taiwan content in mainland China? Google doesn't run in mainland china, so this is a bit of a strange question. But let's assume that Google did. How would AMP or signed exchanges change the accessibility of Taiwan related content on Google in mainland china? Are you saying that the current Google results page would show Taiwan related content, but signed exchanges wouldn't, or what? > Is it like VPN/Proxy or has more knobs? Neither. It's literally a way to say "a site had this html, css, and js, and cryptographically signed the blob so that we can re-host it and you can be certain that the person re-hosting hasn't modified it in any way."
    - rgrs 6y ago
      > Are you saying that the current Google results page would show Taiwan related content, but signed exchanges wouldn't, or what? My question is will signed exchanges serve content but where google search results are censored.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Google can choose today which site (original or AMP cache) to show in their search results. Today, as an end user, I know, via the URL, when I land on a Google AMP site. That said, Google already has control of every AMP page because the spec REQUIRES you to load a piece of Google controlled/hosted JS onto your page. That JS can change at any time without "signed exchanges" being aware.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > Google can choose today which site (original or AMP cache) to show in their search results. Today, as an end user, I know, via the URL, when I land on a Google AMP site. Ok why is this an issue? Note that HN is a bad place for this kind of socratic method discussion, we'll both quickly run out of the ability to post replies. Assume I'm someone who doesn't share whatever values you share about the purity of the url bar or whatever. Why is you being unable to know whether or not the content came from Google's IP or mysite's IP relevant to anyone as long as it's the same content (which signed exchanges ensure)?
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Centralised collection of metadata, without the users having any way of knowing it's going on.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      Combined with that second thing I mentioned (required Google hosted JS), it is total control by Google with no straightforward way for me to detect it, block it or go around it, as I can today.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        So if I understand correctly, your threat model is "Google will inject unwanted JS into a JS blob they host (like the amp.js from Google's CDN) and this will do nefarious (for some definition of nefarious) things to me without me knowing." How is this different than today, where many sites use js from google, either as a cdn or part of the ads infrastructure? I guess you can block some of those, but blocking the jquery provided by google's CDN isn't going to work too well. (And further, what kind of nefarious thing do you fear Google will do? How likely is it that they will do so, in your opinion?)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

joshuamorton 6y ago

I'll bite: how does signed exchanges provide control to Google?

throwaway2048 6y ago
Because its cover to allow them to subsume content and serve it solely from google.com, and deny the originating page any traffic or recognition, or swap it out transparently when they feel like it. This is literally already happening with the info sidebar, the reason signed exchanges matter is so they can throw up the smokescreen about how its cryptographically verified to come from the original page, so why are people upset. Any site that objects and refuses to implement this stuff will just disappear from the first page which is reserved only for Accelerated By Google sites. (Which is already happening for AMP links on mobile searches).
- Kalium 6y ago
  As I understood signed exchanges, a correct implementation makes it impossible for the intermediary to inject, alter, replace, or otherwise swap out any part of the page without failing verification. This would mean the original server gets to do all the branding and get all the recognition and integrity in transit that its controllers might wish. I've clearly missed something. Can you help me?
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    AMP already heavily restricts what the original page is allowed to put inside, including things like ads, javascript and branding. You can be certain anything google implements around this proposal will have similar very tight restrictions.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      That's definitely a scary thought! Can you share any details of what must be public plans to strip everything non-Google of branding? Surely there must be something out there beyond the IETF docs for the protocol, where I don't see any evil plans to Googlify everything in. If anything, it looks like a design intended to allow relaxing the restrictions imposed by AMP. Perhaps I need to read them more closely.
      - throwaway2048 6y ago
        If you want an honest discussion try toning down the smarmy bullshit.
        Kalium 6y ago
        I was trying to be nice. I'll stop now. Got any material to back up your rather substantial claims? Right now you're coming across as wildly paranoid and offering absolutely nothing in support but more of the same. Someone else's personal incredulity is, IMO, not a great form of evidence.
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Your priors are terrible. Extrapolation from past experience is a perfectly valid form of reasoning: it's called “induction”, and most people consider it a valid form of reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning Or, to mirror your tone: Being paranoid does sound like an issue! However, just because other people's personal incredulity hasn't been a great form of evidence in the past, that doesn't mean it isn't a good form of evidence at the moment. Got any reason to believe it isn't?
  - lightswitch05 6y ago
    Yes, as you say, Integrity is preserved. However, Confidentiality is also another important aspect of Information Security. Making a 3rd party appear as a 1st party, is a privacy and confidentiality violation, which is why I do not like AMP and signed exchanges.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      Yeah, as near as I can tell signed exchanges are essentially a caching proxy. With integrity checks, so that you don't have to trust the proxy all that much and its agency is much reduced. I'm reminded of apt. The calculation appears to be that given the chance, some website controllers will choose to trade confidentiality of public pages for better load times. In business terms, this seems a pretty straightfoward win in many cases, so I can see why some would sign up.
      - DevKoala 6y ago
        The publishers are not mentioning to the visitor they are adding one more third party looking at your data; one that maintains an ad exchange and will be an intermediary on every resource request. A publisher is free to switch to AMP, but choice needs to be given to the user to agree or leave the site the same way it happens with cookies. I wouldn’t opt in and now I cannot block Google tracking at the DNS level thanks to this.
        Kalium 6y ago
        Publishers can, and should, always make visitors aware of how many third parties are positioned to see all visitor data. We are, unfortunately, a long way from this being normal. Even as third parties doing things like running CDNs or doing TLS termination for other reasons has been pretty thoroughly normalized. Though offering it as a Firefox extension could be an interesting exercise. I think publishers view AMP as a question of their sovereignty and choice. Since it's their website that's being potentially served by Google, it's their choice to make. There's absolutely a lot of room to dispute if this is the morally correct stance, but I also think it's not wildly out of line with other questions publishers weigh in choosing what they serve and how.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > swap it out transparently > cryptographically verified to come from the original page Elaborate.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    The page results will be a tightly restricted iframe-esque window inside of google results (This is what the Chome "Portals" proposal is about). There will be no obvious distinction between a search result and google's own website, even though the "portals" will be showing cryptographically signed content (which will almost certainly be in a super restricted AMP-esque format that denies sites much control besides what the text says) If google swaps one result for another, 95% of users wont even notice.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      > If google swaps one result for another, 95% of users wont even notice. Right so exactly the same way the search results page works today? > The page results will be a tightly restricted iframe-esque window inside of google results This is completely independent of AMP. Portals work for non-AMP content too. > which will almost certainly be in a super restricted AMP-esque format that denies sites much control besides what the text says So you're suggesting that Google will create a new, even more restricted than AMP protocol to be viewed on the search page?
      - searchableguy 6y ago
        Isn't that what those meta tags are for so google can quickly show scores, reviews and stuff?
rgrs 6y ago
Does it behave different in different countries? Will Google allow for example, Taiwan content in mainland China? Is it like VPN/Proxy or has more knobs?
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > Will Google allow for example, Taiwan content in mainland China? Google doesn't run in mainland china, so this is a bit of a strange question. But let's assume that Google did. How would AMP or signed exchanges change the accessibility of Taiwan related content on Google in mainland china? Are you saying that the current Google results page would show Taiwan related content, but signed exchanges wouldn't, or what? > Is it like VPN/Proxy or has more knobs? Neither. It's literally a way to say "a site had this html, css, and js, and cryptographically signed the blob so that we can re-host it and you can be certain that the person re-hosting hasn't modified it in any way."
  - rgrs 6y ago
    > Are you saying that the current Google results page would show Taiwan related content, but signed exchanges wouldn't, or what? My question is will signed exchanges serve content but where google search results are censored.
tyingq 6y ago
Google can choose today which site (original or AMP cache) to show in their search results. Today, as an end user, I know, via the URL, when I land on a Google AMP site. That said, Google already has control of every AMP page because the spec REQUIRES you to load a piece of Google controlled/hosted JS onto your page. That JS can change at any time without "signed exchanges" being aware.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > Google can choose today which site (original or AMP cache) to show in their search results. Today, as an end user, I know, via the URL, when I land on a Google AMP site. Ok why is this an issue? Note that HN is a bad place for this kind of socratic method discussion, we'll both quickly run out of the ability to post replies. Assume I'm someone who doesn't share whatever values you share about the purity of the url bar or whatever. Why is you being unable to know whether or not the content came from Google's IP or mysite's IP relevant to anyone as long as it's the same content (which signed exchanges ensure)?
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Centralised collection of metadata, without the users having any way of knowing it's going on.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Combined with that second thing I mentioned (required Google hosted JS), it is total control by Google with no straightforward way for me to detect it, block it or go around it, as I can today.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      So if I understand correctly, your threat model is "Google will inject unwanted JS into a JS blob they host (like the amp.js from Google's CDN) and this will do nefarious (for some definition of nefarious) things to me without me knowing." How is this different than today, where many sites use js from google, either as a cdn or part of the ads infrastructure? I guess you can block some of those, but blocking the jquery provided by google's CDN isn't going to work too well. (And further, what kind of nefarious thing do you fear Google will do? How likely is it that they will do so, in your opinion?)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]