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Contra Chrome [pdf]
- adenozine 5y agoWell, I sure was hoping this was a good excuse to play some SuperC in the browser this morning...
- yashwastaken 5y agolol, same here lad
- bloopernova 5y ago"Error establishing a database connection".
- yashwastaken 5y agohttps://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf https://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf here pdf version.
- dorianmariefr 5y agoSeems like even the page 2 didn't have the time to get archived https://web.archive.org/web/20220402201945/https://contrachrome.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220402201945/https://contrachr...
- jitl 5y agoPDF version that doesn’t need to connect to any databases: https://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf https://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf
- mastazi 5y agoand if like me you're getting a DNS error, try https://web.archive.org/web/20220401202242/https://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20220401202242/https://contrachr...
- ghusto 5y agoFor some reason quad9 DNS servers don't resolve the domain (I'm guessing you're using those, like me?). No idea why.
- mastazi 5y agoYes, Quad9. Apparently it is blocked due to being part of DOMAINTOOLS hotlist https://www.quad9.net/result?url=contrachrome.com https://www.quad9.net/result?url=contrachrome.com I just used the form to report a false positive. I believe that you can use the "no malware blocking" settings in order to avoid occasional false positives like this one: https://www.quad9.net/service/service-addresses-and-features https://www.quad9.net/service/service-addresses-and-features
- mastazi 5y agoupdate: after I submitted the report, Quad9 have unblocked the domain, in under one hour! They are very responsive!
- dang 5y agoChanged from https://contrachrome.com/ https://contrachrome.com/ above. Thanks!
- throwmeariver1 5y agoWhy would I need to make a comic if I spent 80% of the comic close up in someone's face with text all around him.
- mda 5y agoI find it quite tasteless honestly.
- infp_arborist 5y agoWhat, Google's behaviour? Or the fact that this is the society we currently live in?
- mda 5y agoThe comic. It was something to convey technical aspects of Chrome, now it is defiled by someones personal rants put into mouths of engineers who created it. I find it disgusting actually.
- bayindirh 5y agoIs the comic lying? I don't think so. So, it might be tasteless, but agitation is a valid style to push ideas across for some people. Did you look to the comic? Seems yes. Did you read it? Seems yes. So it pushed its ideas across. So, it was successful in a sense.
- mda 5y agoI only looked at a few pages and closed. Not worth it.
- dessant 5y agoWhy are many of you still working for Meta and Google? I imagine you're well aware of all the harm they've been causing to society. We may never be able to counter or reverse the effects of their relentless efforts to normalize corporate surveillance. I'm sure you haven't ended up working for Meta just because you couldn't find a job at a less destructive company. You have a leverage, you could refuse to participate in this, so why are you still writing code that harms people?
- zerr 5y agoMid/high six-figures (sometimes low seven ones as well).
- southerntofu 5y agoNot that i disagree with your argument, but given the very competitive nature of corporate culture and the high rate of burnout, most people may feel better working for lower pay for less-sociopathic organizations (say, local non-profits or public IT services). Also, i find it interesting to note how tech salaries have climbed in the past two decades, precisely as IT was more and more employed as a means of ruining peoples' lives (micro-management based on metrics, surveillance industry, IoT and other scams, centralized monopolies like Amazon, etc). The price of keeping IT people complicit/quiet in the scheme has risen, but we as a privileged class of IT people should understand that we're precisely being paid for silence about the atrocities we help build. We are collaborators to an oppressive system, and if that's something that bothers you maybe you should consider alternatives.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Believer or not, there's a lot of wisdom in the Bible.
- mattcwilson 5y agoYes, there is. Including John 8:7
- c0l0 5y agoFeels like the right time to repost this aperiodic reminder: https://coloss.us.to/chrome_truth.png https://coloss.us.to/chrome_truth.png
- cpeterso 5y agoSo Google Chrome is Roko's Basilisk? https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
- amelius 5y agoCan tech companies please return to building ... tech? Leave behind all the peeking at user data and dark business models, and just do and sell what you're good at? Make hardware and software that users (and companies) can trust and build on? Products that are not tethered by the manufacturer for business strategic reasons? Thanks. If not, perhaps there should be laws. Because if the market starts working against the interest of the consumer, then we have a problem.
- antihero 5y agoWell if they don't chase getting as much money as possible they won't be able to pay people mid six (and sometimes low seven) figure salaries to developers. Or afford to become "philanthropic" billionaires.
- infp_arborist 5y agoActually we have solved nearly all technical problems. Just look at how the HN content has (not) changed over the last 10 years and how many times you have read: "... is a solved problem"? From the elite's point of view, the function of big tech companies nowadays is to keep the consuming masses in check. It doesn't matter if this means not executing anti-cartel laws.
- mixedCase 5y agoPeople at large don't want to pay for software and would much rather take ads instead. Not a lot of people care that much about privacy either, so unless data collection has a direct consequence --that they are made aware of-- on something impactful like being rejected when trying to take out a loan or insurance because of it, they don't mind either. So yes, you would have to look at laws to "fix" this, but you will find out that there is no way you will be able to get it passed in a democracy because almost no one wants to have to pay for social media, a web browser, search engines or other such commodity software.
- the_other 5y ago> People at large don't want to pay for software and would much rather take ads instead. But that’s not been the deal since the mid ‘00s. The deal is “ads, plus we build a model of you and rent access to that model for anyone who’ll pay, allowing them to manipulate your politics and world-view”. That’s the deal. But they just call it “ads”. > but you will find out that there is no way you will be able to get it passed in a democracy because almost no one wants to have to pay for social media, a web browser, search engines or other such commodity software. I suspect that people do care about their data, their privacy and such. But tech is so hard, the effects so distant and the public’s ability to affect change so minimal that people guve in to the privacy breach. That’s quite different from “not caring”. I admit, this is a hunch.
- lynguist 5y agoIs Chromium OK to use though?
- zozbot234 5y agoChromium should be OK if you use either the Ungoogled-Chromium build or Iridium Browser. Both of these aim to clean up all dependencies on Google services from vanilla Chromium.
- bigpeopleareold 5y agoI used these and I think they are OK, but I'd still just go with Firefox as the simplest solution, particularly if you want to convince others (particularly those close to you) whether to switch browsers. I dealt with multi-containers, didn't like it, and then I found this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc.... There is no reason to go back to Chrom(e|ium) with this.
- agumonkey 5y agoMakes using firefox+ddg tastes slightly better. That said the whole web is becoming swampy :) alas.. swings and roundabouts.
- armitron 5y agoIf you read DDG TOS (1) you'll see that they save your queries and are being somewhat disengunous about doing so (half-buried half-way down the page there's this gem): "We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings." I wonder how many folks that use DDG know this is taking place (or even bothered to read that far down the TOS). (1) https://duckduckgo.com/privacy https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
- richardsocher 5y ago+1 to this. If you search for your name or IP address etc. they will save that query forever and there's no way you can delete this. When we founded https://you.com https://you.com we read other search engines' TOS and decided to give users a choice: to have some personalization or be completely private. In private mode, we do not store any queries or anything else about the user. You can find details about our privacy policy here: https://youdotcom.notion.site/Privacy-and-Data-Protection-at-You-com-b5962158772a4835bf2bdf6169a87bc8 https://youdotcom.notion.site/Privacy-and-Data-Protection-at... Would love your feedback also.
- jefftk 5y agoFrom the first page it reads like this is Scott McCloud writing an update, but this "remix" is actually by Leah Elliot. There's more context in the introduction pages of the PDF, but the website skips them: https://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf https://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf (Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
- smitty1e 5y agoAs a Google employee, do you think the content accurate?
- jefftk 5y agoThis is an area that I have a decent amount of experience with, because I've been working in Ads on the response to third-party cookies going away, and giving public feedback on various proposals to build new privacy-preserving APIs to support advertising. I don't think the comic is very accurate, and I'd be happy to talk about specific points you're interested in? (Speaking only for myself)
- smitty1e 5y agoTo what degree is the Big Brother Freakout valid? We all love our shiny objects and the convenience they bring. Yet, even if we stipulate Noble Intent on the part of the FANG companies, there is no way to halt nefarious usage by some future actor. Do we invent some sort of agent layer that tries to let us use the internet while restoring a level of information control to the user? I can envision some cloud proxy that degunks the traffic for me, but that seems like: A) a lot of yak shaving that will never be smooth, and, B) a solution that would never scale or generalize, even if workable for the individual. Even if such an agent were turned into a business to support subscribers, the basic problem of leaky information still exists. However, some of the "monolitic" nature of Google could be mitigated.
- shaolinspirit 5y agohard problem. people want to make money -> unethical decisions on a mass scale -> people want to build ethical stuff -> get no reward for that. the incentive mechanism is broken in the world. I'm not completely anti-capitalist as it can be used for good, but the incentive mechanism is definitely one of the hardest problems I can think of.
- shaolinspirit 5y agoor it is actually right, it's just when VC's are investing they expect huge returns from investments and start to squeeze all of the juice on max levels. So moderate capitalism works, but massive growth and unnatural world scale corporations are always evil?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JasonFruit 5y agoThis is a good message to get out, and I wish it were more likely to make it into the hands of people who wouldn't otherwise get the message. I applaud the effort. I'm disappointed with a few things about it, though, because: - It makes it sound like Scott McCloud did this, but he didn't - It unfortunately includes a political viewpoint that is irrelevant to the message - It omits context on a few points to make them sound worse than they are, which is completely unnecessary, because the message is devastating without them When you're speaking truth about a powerful and deceptive entity, you have to be absolutely factual and focused, and this isn't quite there.
- Ourgon 5y agoThe first three sections are worth showing to those who stubbornly insist on either trusting that these companies (all of them) will not abuse their access to their data or insisting they don't care about what those companies know about them. Section four - the 'social psychologist' starts the introduction of some political slant ('muslim, LGBTQIA+, democrat' portrayed as 'vulnerable' who might not get a job/credit card/health insurance policy, terms like 'fat shaming'), section five is just littered with 'progressive' tropes where Trump == evil and BLM == good. This is both a shame as well as stupid, it severely limits the credibility and potential reach of what would otherwise be a non-partisan description of the practices of that data-hog farm named Alphabet. Scrap those sections and re-publish I'd say. If not, this is a lost cause, just more 'progressive' propaganda.
- maverick74 5y agoI was not aware of this comic. Everytime I read something new about this subject I realize things are always worst than I though. I really don't see why people keep using this thing... It's really amazing!!! Still the comic misses to mention the funny "I've got nothing to hide" argument
- Yawnzy 5y agoThe target audience for this doc seems to be people whose world view was shaped by the last two years of political messaging. Maybe the authors assume that most people working in tech fall into that category?
- nunez 5y agoThis is quite dishonest. I thought this was from people that used to be on the Chrome team that have defected, but it's just an adaptation from a third party. This is explained in the PDF but not on the slides.
- kkfx 5y agoVery, very nice, but to be more clear: it's not just Chrome. The modern web is the surveillance web because the modern web is "an endpoint" for users (witch means a new mainframe dumb terminal, at a far higher price and complexity than the old ones) and someone else service, typically run on giants cloud datacenters. To avoid that, and still have the modern level of life PLUS MANY MORE, we already have had a solution: the desktop computing. The first one on record the modern way AFAIK was the Xerox Star Office System, but even the older NLS (1968!!!) have networking, videoconferencing and screen sharing. YES, you read correctly. Dates are not wrong. So what? So it's a real mess because since Xerox except for LispM and Plan 9 we do not have developed desktop computing anymore, so the old model might still be rediscovered, at least it still exists, but on actual iron, very badly designed even if far more powerful in mere horsepower terms, and with essentially no modern software. The last living vestige is Emacs, witch is VERY good but not enough evolved for actual end-users, so we need: - public universities, paid enough by the government and government only, with a very effective separation from the private sector, to create a new old classic research not for short term business but for the society; - enough years to write a modern desktop, which means around a decade because it's not just a matter of code, it's a matter to learn how classic systems works and design a new one, a thing most today devs do not know and have issue imaging, than time to develop it, to spread it etc. The other option? Well... A small Canadian TV series (Continuum) recently gives a nice idea, perhaps mixed with a small French movie (Virtual Revolution) to see a more realistic one. Be prepared to a future where you will have to eat only if some IT giants gives food to you. Be prepared to live to work instead of working to live because yes, I'm not joking nor exaggerating, it's just a matter of observing the world today.