12 ms·

Become Ungoogleable

291 points by pabs3 3y ago

winddude 3y ago
> Google just doesn't matter on the modern web. It matters hugely, it's still pretty much the only thing that matters. That's the problem.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Probably depends on your market. I think I get about 20% of my traffic from Google. It's about on par with Baidu and DDG.
superkuh 3y ago
It's a fine idea. But what I'm taking away from this post is the link to the Google/Chromium web DRM prototype and summary ... yikes. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/main/explainer.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environ... >- The web page executing in a user's web browser >- A third party that can “attest” to the device a web browser is executing on, referred to as the attester >- The web developers server which can remotely verify attestation responses and act on this information. Chome only for now but I imagine after it's pushed to Chromium and all the browser based on that Mozilla will implement it too (just like all the other DRM FF has now).
- fooyc 3y ago
  Google would do anything to make it harder for others to crawl the web. Killing RSS was part of that strategy. News sites will implement these DRMs, but of course they will still allow Google because it is their source of traffic. Alternative search engines and good bots will be locked out.
  - shiftpgdn 3y ago
    Not just Google, Cloudflare is working hard on it too.
    - xwdv 3y ago
      Cloudflare works hard but Google works harder.
      - intelVISA 3y ago
        Honestly, credit to CF - for actual damage to the current internet they're pretty equal even if Google has had to work much harder for their share.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >Killing RSS was part of that strategy. Oh please. I get that it's more satisfying to blame Google than the faceless masses who had zero interest in RSS and who had a variety of alternatives to Reader in any case. I guess they also had a strategy to kill social media by axing Google+ and user-created encyclopedias by killing Knol.
    - fooyc 3y ago
      Not only Reader, but also the RSS support in Chrome and Firefox (whose Google used to be the primary source of funds). And Feedburner.
      - greiskul 3y ago
        > Firefox (whose Google used to be the primary source of funds) Google deal with Firefox was always about being the default search engine there, and that's it. They never had any power of cutting it adding features to the project.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        Officially, sure, but you shouldn't pretend that Google's funding isn't the main survival line for Mozilla as an entity, and that there isn't pressure there.
      - scrum-treats 3y ago
        Note: Brave (Chromium) has a RSS support. It's pretty good.
    - LightBug1 3y ago
      You can Oh please, but Google will never live that one down. It'll live on in the history of the internet ... foreverrrrrrrrrrr.
  - numlock86 3y ago
    > Killing RSS was part of that strategy. Oh boy. RSS died because it was "only for nerds". Never had I ever met a person outside my tech bubble that had used RSS yet knew what it was. That's not how the average Joe uses the internet.
- 38 3y ago
  actual link: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
  - superkuh 3y ago
    Nah, that's a link to a javascript application you can run that will eventually download and display the text if everything is just right. I linked to the actual text.
    - 38 3y ago
      Ok fair point. GitHub does suck
- yankput 3y ago
  The weirdest thing is that GOOGLE of all companies now wants to make an obviously anti-scraping technology. Oh well, the world we live in
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    Isn't it a feature? Now search engines will skip drm sites.
  - Karellen 3y ago
    "Every pirate wants to be an Admiral" -- Cory Doctorow https://nitter.net/doctorow/status/1387098297282621442 https://nitter.net/doctorow/status/1387098297282621442
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bakugo 3y ago
  I've been telling people for years that android's safetynet attestation would eventually arrive on PC, seems like it's finally happening.
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  Ooh, this is epic, the ultimate antiadblocker is here.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  Yeah... I don't think the original post is the best. This blog post doesn't add much context. Maybe the URL should just be updated to the github document the blog post links? [0] [0] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
  - sclarisse 3y ago
    On the contrary. The URL you post here has been submitted to HN several times (plus my attempt to make the title a little catchier as I linked to the GitHub issue #28, which I titled “Don’t add website DRM to Chrome” in a defensible attempt to expand the title the best I credibly could under HN rules - the issue title is just “Don’t.”) These all died in obscurity. This blog post by contrast had a catchy title that HN actually engaged with, and as such is measurably superior. Blame dang & co, for making forum software in which blogspam is the only way to add comment or meaningfully add context and editorialize. (Since blogspam is officially discouraged I’d say the software is not fit for purpose.)
    - userbinator 3y ago
      These all died in obscurity. I doubt they died "of natural causes". It's not HN's fault that the enemy is huge and yields great influence.
- deleted 3y ago
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- incompatible 3y ago
  I can't even visualise how this would work in any meaningful way. You are going to have some software that "attests" that, say, the user is running an approved version of Chrome. But you couldn't just distribute such software everywhere, since I assume it would be trivial to extract any keys from it and then attest whatever you wanted. The site mentions "Google Play" as a possible attestor, so it would perhaps work on locked-down mobile devices, at best.
  - tadfisher 3y ago
    You can have the same cryptographic chain of trust on PCs with Secure Boot enabled. Essentially the attestation is a signed hash of the computing environment, with Microsoft as its root authority in the PC ecosystem. The kernel+boot environment is next, then the system software stack, and finally the executable image. This is exactly what is provided by the trusted execution environment on Android devices, and Google Play is just the trusted arbiter of the software signatures.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. People were suspicious of TPM and the "trusted computing" initiative and were fed plenty of propaganda about how it will make things "safer" and more "secure". There are corporate mouthpieces spreading that FUD on any article that's even just slightly critical of them and their plans. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32234022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32234022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106 Start revolting against these hostile technologies before it's too late. They're slowly boiling the frog and hoping we don't notice.
- minimaul 3y ago
  I consider it an utterly disgusting premise, that will: - make OSS systems second class systems online - make older devices second class systems online - prevent people from modifying devices they own (as it'll break the chain of trust and therefore the attestation) - prevent people from modifying software (custom builds of Chrome, Firefox, etc won't be signed and therefore break the chain of trust and therefore the attestation) - prevent people from running browser plugins that do things browser authors don't approve of But hey, from google's PoV, it's a giant win, they can: - make it harder for anyone else to crawl the web, and therefore compete with google - make it harder for people to not watch ads, preserving google's revenue streams - make it harder for anyone to automate the web in ways they or other browser vendors don't like The 'holdback' mechanism is a joke and I imagine would disappear after a year or two. Feels like a really good reminder of why it's a terrible idea for google to both be in control of really large important web properties like google search, youtube, maps, ads, but also the single most popular browser. edit: I hope Apple and MS push back, as they're both vendors with significant marketshare (Mozilla too, but they're smaller). At least if Apple didn't do it, it'd be hard to rely on in US/UK.
AlbertCory 3y ago
I thought the method was to change your name to something extremely common, like "Janet Brown." A variant is to take the name of some celebrity, so that all the search results are for him or her.
- toast0 3y ago
  This works. I have the same name as a Pulitzer prize winning author, and it's pretty hard to find me by name. And since I've mostly worked at popular user-facing companies, searching for my name + employer just has stuff about him with share links that use my employer's services. Well except for the guy with my name in Florida who got arrested in connection with using my employer's service. What's not fun is hearing promos about upcoming interviews of your namesake on the radio and stressing out because you were unprepared for a conversation with Terry Gross.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- twelve40 3y ago
  Michael Jackson sounds pretty good too, there is him and then some VC dude apparently
  - exlurker 3y ago
    I wonder if Michael Jackson would have even more success with his beer guides if he chose a pseudonym. https://www.beerbooks.com/cgi/ps4.cgi?action=enter&thispage=1236 https://www.beerbooks.com/cgi/ps4.cgi?action=enter&thispage=...
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Frequently such people add a distinguishing middle name, which probably helps a little.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  This only helps until someone has an email address or some other detail like where you work. Then you have to use something like Optery which costs about as much as a premium netflix sub
deleted 3y ago
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Aurornis 3y ago
> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discoverable, but removing yourself from Google is terribly bad advice for anyone who wants to help people find their content. Many people do use Google to find content and people, even if you don't.
- epolanski 3y ago
  I guess it is kinda true for the author, average person isn't looking for his content and his public will find other ways.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using DuckDuckGo. And we told all our friends and family to do the same. Would it have an impact?
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    > If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using DuckDuckGo *Bing, DuckDuckGo's own indexing is fairly limited compared to other search providers like Brave. Most of DDG's index comes from Bing.
    - FireInsight 3y ago
      I used to love Brave search for this reason. Now I can never seem to find what I'm looking for, even for a simple search for some product a bit more obscure or smth the results are always wayy off from what I'm looking for. It is sad if it's due to their usage of entirely their own index, I was happy with that mix of Bing&Brave.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
    Everyone on HN isn't enough to have an impact. And telling friends and family isn't good enough because changing default behaviors is very difficult in practice and they would listen do you, but ultimately keep doing what they're doing.
shrikant 3y ago
How long does it take to actually remove your page from Google's search index? I just searched for the author's name and his site still shows up as the top result.
- skilled 3y ago
  I think you can do it instantly from Googles webmaster tools. As for robots, its like 3 days maximum.
revskill 3y ago
I'm not sure if Googlebot respects robots.txt.
- tommek4077 3y ago
  Most people are. And Google tells you at least the same.
twelve40 3y ago
disappointed, title hints at how to become ungoogleable as a person, was hoping to see something like the right to be forgotten which doesn't work in the US and would be useful, but instead just a bunch of whining and deindexing a website, nothing new.
- deleted 3y ago
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wittyusername 3y ago
The process is somewhat straightforward: - Search your full name, your username, your phone number, pieces of your last 3 addresses. - Check image search in particular For each result: - Google their remove me process and execute it, if they have one. - If not, find an email contact and ask nicely. Make up some excuse - If that doesn’t work, email a more formal GDPR right to be forgotten note if you are in EU. - If that doesn’t work, Google has a GDPR removal process if you are in EU. Now wait 1-2 months and do it again. Now wait 1-2 months and do it again. .. After about a year you should be able to reduce your surface area tremendously.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  There are several businesses that claim to help with this process, including providing convenient links to those removal processes for many big entities. I cannot advise whether they are grabbing all your info too.
_the_special_ 3y ago
Another approach of becoming anonymous is to flood the internet with fake content and fake AI generated personas that hold your name
picometer 3y ago
I think this could be a bad idea for some prople, and here’s why. I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her. She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her name was a Project Veritas video where they had cornered her to ask some questions about her workplace and skewer her for whatever soundbites they could get. It was heartbreaking. It’s an example of the benefits of the “security through obscurity” security posture. If there’s lots of info about you online, then it waters down the impact of any potential negative information. The “stay offline / stay ungoogleable” security posture, on the other hand, is fragile with respect to random spikes of negative information. Reality is that there’s a gray area and most people have middling risk tolerance in this area. As for me, I rarely post on social media and have never deliberately cultivated an online presence, so I’m somewhat ungoogleable. But not so much that someone couldn’t find me if they really tried. An seo-heavy event like that Project Veritas thing would probably take over my SEO presence, but I’m okay with that risk, and I also have the skills to spin up an official personal site if I want to.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > It’s an example of the benefits of the “security through obscurity” security posture. If there’s lots of info about you online, then it waters down the impact of any potential negative information. Only if your worst fear is bad PR. If there is some sophisticated enemy who might want to attack you, then the fact that the embarrassing video is the 4834th Google result doesn't protect you from anything, it means there's at least 4834 results for you, all of which contain potentially dangerous information, instead of one.
- ghaff 3y ago
  The worst is probably sharing a fairly uncommon name with someone notorious who is plausibly you at first glance. I had a classmate in pre-Web days who lived in NYC and shared a name with someone who was widely hated in many NYC circles (don't remember the details). Anyway, my classmate got literal death threats by phone.
karaterobot 3y ago
I've had a robots.txt disallow Google for 23 years, maybe that's why this sort of announcement doesn't seem like it warrants a blog post (but evidently warrants a comment on HN, I guess).
hospitalJail 3y ago
I know this is the title of the (3 line) article, but I was looking to remove my personal name from being googleable. Clickbait.
deleted 3y ago
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nobody9999 3y ago
I have a pretty common name, with a number of famous folks with the same name (mostly dead) and others who are listed on various sites. It used to be (>ten years ago), Google would return information about me, specifically, on the first page of results. I made an effort to remove specific references to me and it's been mostly successful. I can still be found on whitepages.com/yellowpages.com and various background check sites, along with a bunch of other folks with the same name. If you know where I live or my age, you can probably work out who I am from those, but otherwise I'm not googleable (or bing/ddg-able). Every few years I go and do some ego surfing[0] to make sure things stay that way. This post caused me to do so again and I was pleased to see that I'm not in Google or Bing results (except as noted above) at all. Even my pseudonymous handle here is used by other folks on various other public sites, although mine is reported on the first page of searches. Other pseudonyms I use are likewise mostly not reported either. Which is just the way I like it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosurfing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosurfing
Crontab 3y ago
Joey Hess. The first time I heard his name, it was an article for Linux Journal, which was about managing your home directory in CVS. He went up to create Git-Annex, which I understand works well.
tagyro 3y ago
This is the way! I thought about this the past couple of weeks: I get less than 10% of the visits to my website(s) from google [measured via Plausible]. I want to block google(bot) from visiting my website and I'm seriously considering adding a "Usage Policy" that specifically prohibits any crawler from visiting my site(s). Admittedly, I couldn't care less about the traffic, others might.
scottLobster 3y ago
That might work for this guy, but it's a big stretch from "this works for my niche use case" to "everybody should do this". You can dislike the game, but being a martyr and refusing to play it is just giving up potential benefit for virtue signalling, and if he's trying to start a "de-Google" revolution, I would expect a more serious effort than this lone page that many normies would mistake for an error message at first glance.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > being a martyr and refusing to play it is just giving up potential benefit for virtue signalling I don't know about this guy, but it might not be virtue signaling. It might be that he simply doesn't want to take part in that "game". So what if he's giving up some potential benefit? Not all benefit is worth the cost.
jklinger410 3y ago
This is a pointless exercise.
andrewaylett 3y ago
One slight problem: that won't remove any pages from Google's index. It tells the crawler not to crawl the pages, but it won't stop the indexer from recognising that the pages exist, or that they're authoritative for keywords like "Joey Hess", because -- and this was the magic of PageRank -- other people link to the site.
CacheRules 3y ago
Every google search I perform these days is pretty disappointing.
- olah_1 3y ago
  I know I’m not going to get results from smaller pages when I search google. It makes me think I might as well make a list of 20 popular websites and just search all of those and collate the results
coding123 3y ago
It's better to ask chatgpt instead of google now. tell me something interesting about joeyh.name website https://chat.openai.com/share/5497fc90-006a-47be-bf80-786a7ec75267 https://chat.openai.com/share/5497fc90-006a-47be-bf80-786a7e...
lynx23 3y ago
I have a lot of respect for Joey. But I cant help and think: it is rather easy to go full-protest-mode if you are as famous as he is. git-annex basically powers my whole long-term file archive. Not to mention all the infrastructual code he contributed to Debian. Or the fact that he apparently can make a small living off Patreons who use his Free Software. With that track record, its just a breeze to say "Google Fuck You".
thih9 3y ago
About DRMing the web, related HN discussion from 2 days ago about web environment integrity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999
50 3y ago
what about the robots meta tags[1], e.g., noindex, nofollow, noarchive? 1: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- tenplusfive 3y ago
  This is actually the correct way. Robots.txt only stops google from crawling your website, but it might still appear in the index. If you search for the site, then it is shown in the search results, but without any of the content of the page. If you want to prevent indexing as well, you'll have to do this. Also explained here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/robots-faq#h17 https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
kevincox 3y ago
If you really want to make a stance it is probably much better to keep your pages on Google but put up a "browser wall" that doesn't allow any Chomium-based browsers. "Using chromium based-browsers is harmful to the openness of the internet. See [link] for examples of harmful APIs that Chrome is pushing. Browser diversity is important to an open and user-friendly internet. Please use Firefox, Safari or any other non-Chromium browser to view this site"
bilekas 3y ago
> The web will end one day. But let's not let Google kill it. The web will end one day. Imagining google in it's form today will even exist is a stretch. Google and all the big players today are all fault to some degree of the cesspool we are in at the moment. I get the hate. But the hyperbole of blaming them for the destruction of the internet is just nonsense
- khushalz 3y ago
  yeah
- khushalz 3y ago
  [flagged]
vmoore 3y ago
My most sensitive searches are when I lookup people online. Google only gets you so far. With enough money, you can throw a few coins at data broker firms and get back solid 'dox' on many people. It depends on how online a person is, and how much they unwittingly divulged to various services (services that sell their data to people-search firms and other brokers). I have the real name of several so called 'anonymous' online personalities, but I won't divulge this info. I was curious recently about a Twitter account posting under a pseudonym and wanted to see if their opsec was tight. Turns out it wasn't. Their real name was discovered in ~15 minutes with some heavy Googling. Imagine if you can simply throw money at the problem and forgo Google entirely, getting not only their legal name, but other PII too?
- the_pwner224 3y ago
  Mind specifying what these services are? "how much they unwittingly divulged to various services (services that sell their data to people-search firms and other brokers)." Would a regular person have unwittingly given information to these services?
  - owyn 3y ago
    For example, Intelius does background checks, reverse phone number lookups etc. One small piece of information can lead to others. As far as unwitting, of course. The wikipedia page says that company has acquired background check companies, a facebook genealogy app company, classmates.com and a "people" search engine company... not to mention all the public databases that are available (criminal records, property records) The've been collecting online and offline data on people for almost 20 years. I'm sure they have data scraped from sites that don't exist any more. Combine that with the current terminally online population and I think it would be surprising to most regular people how much data is out there.
izzydata 3y ago
I find that google is "useless" in the sense that it is no longer the best search engine. There are many solid search engines as options now so why pick google in particular? I think for most people its just a habit. I don't need Google in particular to use the internet anymore so why should I?
runjake 3y ago
Didn't work. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%253Ajoeyh.name https://www.google.com/search?q=site%253Ajoeyh.name PS: lfsgg.com is neat! Wish we had this for my area.
damnesian 3y ago
> Over 30% of the traffic to this website is rss feeds. Google just doesn't matter on the modern web. RSS feeds are dead, long live RSS feeds.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"This is a unique time, when it's actually feasible to become ungoogleable without losing much." This is true. Some sites get buried in Google SERPs because of SEO but these sites can see a majority of their traffic from sources other than Google. In the author's case, the other source is RSS feeds.
renewiltord 3y ago
Well, that sucks, dude. I frequently forget about and then have to refind moreutils.
phendrenad2 3y ago
There is a better reason to "become ungoogleable": Simply make the content you want, how you want, and if it has value Google will have to adjust their index to account for it. Too long we've been slaves to the SEO wheel, spending so much time on SEO that we don't have time to make stuff.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
One of the hidden benefits of having the same name as a TV character is how hard I am to Google.
timetraveller26 3y ago
Joey is one of my favorite developers, you may not agree with him but you gotta respect a man with strong convictions.
pSYoniK 3y ago
I'm not sure why people are asking for search queries and posting search reaults. These are either way filtered by the profile determined for you as a "category" or cohort of users. So saying that Google is useful for a generic search like "the best gaming laptop" is a bit wrong. The issue starts when the response to this begins with "scrlling past the ads and sponsored content" to "SEO optimized but not necessarily useful content".

291 points by pabs3 3y ago

> Google just doesn't matter on the modern web. It matters hugely, it's still pretty much the only thing that matters. That's the problem.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Probably depends on your market. I think I get about 20% of my traffic from Google. It's about on par with Baidu and DDG.

superkuh 3y ago

It's a fine idea. But what I'm taking away from this post is the link to the Google/Chromium web DRM prototype and summary ... yikes. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/main/explainer.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environ... >- The web page executing in a user's web browser >- A third party that can “attest” to the device a web browser is executing on, referred to as the attester >- The web developers server which can remotely verify attestation responses and act on this information. Chome only for now but I imagine after it's pushed to Chromium and all the browser based on that Mozilla will implement it too (just like all the other DRM FF has now).

fooyc 3y ago
Google would do anything to make it harder for others to crawl the web. Killing RSS was part of that strategy. News sites will implement these DRMs, but of course they will still allow Google because it is their source of traffic. Alternative search engines and good bots will be locked out.
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  Not just Google, Cloudflare is working hard on it too.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    Cloudflare works hard but Google works harder.
    - intelVISA 3y ago
      Honestly, credit to CF - for actual damage to the current internet they're pretty equal even if Google has had to work much harder for their share.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >Killing RSS was part of that strategy. Oh please. I get that it's more satisfying to blame Google than the faceless masses who had zero interest in RSS and who had a variety of alternatives to Reader in any case. I guess they also had a strategy to kill social media by axing Google+ and user-created encyclopedias by killing Knol.
  - fooyc 3y ago
    Not only Reader, but also the RSS support in Chrome and Firefox (whose Google used to be the primary source of funds). And Feedburner.
    - greiskul 3y ago
      > Firefox (whose Google used to be the primary source of funds) Google deal with Firefox was always about being the default search engine there, and that's it. They never had any power of cutting it adding features to the project.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        Officially, sure, but you shouldn't pretend that Google's funding isn't the main survival line for Mozilla as an entity, and that there isn't pressure there.
    - scrum-treats 3y ago
      Note: Brave (Chromium) has a RSS support. It's pretty good.
  - LightBug1 3y ago
    You can Oh please, but Google will never live that one down. It'll live on in the history of the internet ... foreverrrrrrrrrrr.
- numlock86 3y ago
  > Killing RSS was part of that strategy. Oh boy. RSS died because it was "only for nerds". Never had I ever met a person outside my tech bubble that had used RSS yet knew what it was. That's not how the average Joe uses the internet.
38 3y ago
actual link: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
- superkuh 3y ago
  Nah, that's a link to a javascript application you can run that will eventually download and display the text if everything is just right. I linked to the actual text.
  - 38 3y ago
    Ok fair point. GitHub does suck
yankput 3y ago
The weirdest thing is that GOOGLE of all companies now wants to make an obviously anti-scraping technology. Oh well, the world we live in
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  Isn't it a feature? Now search engines will skip drm sites.
- Karellen 3y ago
  "Every pirate wants to be an Admiral" -- Cory Doctorow https://nitter.net/doctorow/status/1387098297282621442 https://nitter.net/doctorow/status/1387098297282621442
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bakugo 3y ago
I've been telling people for years that android's safetynet attestation would eventually arrive on PC, seems like it's finally happening.
GoblinSlayer 3y ago
Ooh, this is epic, the ultimate antiadblocker is here.
JeremyNT 3y ago
Yeah... I don't think the original post is the best. This blog post doesn't add much context. Maybe the URL should just be updated to the github document the blog post links? [0] [0] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
- sclarisse 3y ago
  On the contrary. The URL you post here has been submitted to HN several times (plus my attempt to make the title a little catchier as I linked to the GitHub issue #28, which I titled “Don’t add website DRM to Chrome” in a defensible attempt to expand the title the best I credibly could under HN rules - the issue title is just “Don’t.”) These all died in obscurity. This blog post by contrast had a catchy title that HN actually engaged with, and as such is measurably superior. Blame dang & co, for making forum software in which blogspam is the only way to add comment or meaningfully add context and editorialize. (Since blogspam is officially discouraged I’d say the software is not fit for purpose.)
  - userbinator 3y ago
    These all died in obscurity. I doubt they died "of natural causes". It's not HN's fault that the enemy is huge and yields great influence.
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incompatible 3y ago
I can't even visualise how this would work in any meaningful way. You are going to have some software that "attests" that, say, the user is running an approved version of Chrome. But you couldn't just distribute such software everywhere, since I assume it would be trivial to extract any keys from it and then attest whatever you wanted. The site mentions "Google Play" as a possible attestor, so it would perhaps work on locked-down mobile devices, at best.
- tadfisher 3y ago
  You can have the same cryptographic chain of trust on PCs with Secure Boot enabled. Essentially the attestation is a signed hash of the computing environment, with Microsoft as its root authority in the PC ecosystem. The kernel+boot environment is next, then the system software stack, and finally the executable image. This is exactly what is provided by the trusted execution environment on Android devices, and Google Play is just the trusted arbiter of the software signatures.
userbinator 3y ago
Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. People were suspicious of TPM and the "trusted computing" initiative and were fed plenty of propaganda about how it will make things "safer" and more "secure". There are corporate mouthpieces spreading that FUD on any article that's even just slightly critical of them and their plans. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32234022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32234022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106 Start revolting against these hostile technologies before it's too late. They're slowly boiling the frog and hoping we don't notice.
minimaul 3y ago
I consider it an utterly disgusting premise, that will: - make OSS systems second class systems online - make older devices second class systems online - prevent people from modifying devices they own (as it'll break the chain of trust and therefore the attestation) - prevent people from modifying software (custom builds of Chrome, Firefox, etc won't be signed and therefore break the chain of trust and therefore the attestation) - prevent people from running browser plugins that do things browser authors don't approve of But hey, from google's PoV, it's a giant win, they can: - make it harder for anyone else to crawl the web, and therefore compete with google - make it harder for people to not watch ads, preserving google's revenue streams - make it harder for anyone to automate the web in ways they or other browser vendors don't like The 'holdback' mechanism is a joke and I imagine would disappear after a year or two. Feels like a really good reminder of why it's a terrible idea for google to both be in control of really large important web properties like google search, youtube, maps, ads, but also the single most popular browser. edit: I hope Apple and MS push back, as they're both vendors with significant marketshare (Mozilla too, but they're smaller). At least if Apple didn't do it, it'd be hard to rely on in US/UK.

AlbertCory 3y ago

I thought the method was to change your name to something extremely common, like "Janet Brown." A variant is to take the name of some celebrity, so that all the search results are for him or her.

toast0 3y ago
This works. I have the same name as a Pulitzer prize winning author, and it's pretty hard to find me by name. And since I've mostly worked at popular user-facing companies, searching for my name + employer just has stuff about him with share links that use my employer's services. Well except for the guy with my name in Florida who got arrested in connection with using my employer's service. What's not fun is hearing promos about upcoming interviews of your namesake on the radio and stressing out because you were unprepared for a conversation with Terry Gross.
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twelve40 3y ago
Michael Jackson sounds pretty good too, there is him and then some VC dude apparently
- exlurker 3y ago
  I wonder if Michael Jackson would have even more success with his beer guides if he chose a pseudonym. https://www.beerbooks.com/cgi/ps4.cgi?action=enter&thispage=1236 https://www.beerbooks.com/cgi/ps4.cgi?action=enter&thispage=...
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Frequently such people add a distinguishing middle name, which probably helps a little.
chaostheory 3y ago
This only helps until someone has an email address or some other detail like where you work. Then you have to use something like Optery which costs about as much as a premium netflix sub

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Aurornis 3y ago

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discoverable, but removing yourself from Google is terribly bad advice for anyone who wants to help people find their content. Many people do use Google to find content and people, even if you don't.

epolanski 3y ago
I guess it is kinda true for the author, average person isn't looking for his content and his public will find other ways.
codetrotter 3y ago
If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using DuckDuckGo. And we told all our friends and family to do the same. Would it have an impact?
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  > If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using DuckDuckGo *Bing, DuckDuckGo's own indexing is fairly limited compared to other search providers like Brave. Most of DDG's index comes from Bing.
  - FireInsight 3y ago
    I used to love Brave search for this reason. Now I can never seem to find what I'm looking for, even for a simple search for some product a bit more obscure or smth the results are always wayy off from what I'm looking for. It is sad if it's due to their usage of entirely their own index, I was happy with that mix of Bing&Brave.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  Everyone on HN isn't enough to have an impact. And telling friends and family isn't good enough because changing default behaviors is very difficult in practice and they would listen do you, but ultimately keep doing what they're doing.

shrikant 3y ago

How long does it take to actually remove your page from Google's search index? I just searched for the author's name and his site still shows up as the top result.

skilled 3y ago
I think you can do it instantly from Googles webmaster tools. As for robots, its like 3 days maximum.

revskill 3y ago

I'm not sure if Googlebot respects robots.txt.

tommek4077 3y ago
Most people are. And Google tells you at least the same.

twelve40 3y ago

disappointed, title hints at how to become ungoogleable as a person, was hoping to see something like the right to be forgotten which doesn't work in the US and would be useful, but instead just a bunch of whining and deindexing a website, nothing new.

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wittyusername 3y ago

The process is somewhat straightforward: - Search your full name, your username, your phone number, pieces of your last 3 addresses. - Check image search in particular For each result: - Google their remove me process and execute it, if they have one. - If not, find an email contact and ask nicely. Make up some excuse - If that doesn’t work, email a more formal GDPR right to be forgotten note if you are in EU. - If that doesn’t work, Google has a GDPR removal process if you are in EU. Now wait 1-2 months and do it again. Now wait 1-2 months and do it again. .. After about a year you should be able to reduce your surface area tremendously.

mrguyorama 3y ago
There are several businesses that claim to help with this process, including providing convenient links to those removal processes for many big entities. I cannot advise whether they are grabbing all your info too.

_the_special_ 3y ago

Another approach of becoming anonymous is to flood the internet with fake content and fake AI generated personas that hold your name

picometer 3y ago

I think this could be a bad idea for some prople, and here’s why. I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her. She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her name was a Project Veritas video where they had cornered her to ask some questions about her workplace and skewer her for whatever soundbites they could get. It was heartbreaking. It’s an example of the benefits of the “security through obscurity” security posture. If there’s lots of info about you online, then it waters down the impact of any potential negative information. The “stay offline / stay ungoogleable” security posture, on the other hand, is fragile with respect to random spikes of negative information. Reality is that there’s a gray area and most people have middling risk tolerance in this area. As for me, I rarely post on social media and have never deliberately cultivated an online presence, so I’m somewhat ungoogleable. But not so much that someone couldn’t find me if they really tried. An seo-heavy event like that Project Veritas thing would probably take over my SEO presence, but I’m okay with that risk, and I also have the skills to spin up an official personal site if I want to.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> It’s an example of the benefits of the “security through obscurity” security posture. If there’s lots of info about you online, then it waters down the impact of any potential negative information. Only if your worst fear is bad PR. If there is some sophisticated enemy who might want to attack you, then the fact that the embarrassing video is the 4834th Google result doesn't protect you from anything, it means there's at least 4834 results for you, all of which contain potentially dangerous information, instead of one.
ghaff 3y ago
The worst is probably sharing a fairly uncommon name with someone notorious who is plausibly you at first glance. I had a classmate in pre-Web days who lived in NYC and shared a name with someone who was widely hated in many NYC circles (don't remember the details). Anyway, my classmate got literal death threats by phone.

karaterobot 3y ago

I've had a robots.txt disallow Google for 23 years, maybe that's why this sort of announcement doesn't seem like it warrants a blog post (but evidently warrants a comment on HN, I guess).

hospitalJail 3y ago

I know this is the title of the (3 line) article, but I was looking to remove my personal name from being googleable. Clickbait.

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nobody9999 3y ago

I have a pretty common name, with a number of famous folks with the same name (mostly dead) and others who are listed on various sites. It used to be (>ten years ago), Google would return information about me, specifically, on the first page of results. I made an effort to remove specific references to me and it's been mostly successful. I can still be found on whitepages.com/yellowpages.com and various background check sites, along with a bunch of other folks with the same name. If you know where I live or my age, you can probably work out who I am from those, but otherwise I'm not googleable (or bing/ddg-able). Every few years I go and do some ego surfing[0] to make sure things stay that way. This post caused me to do so again and I was pleased to see that I'm not in Google or Bing results (except as noted above) at all. Even my pseudonymous handle here is used by other folks on various other public sites, although mine is reported on the first page of searches. Other pseudonyms I use are likewise mostly not reported either. Which is just the way I like it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosurfing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosurfing

Crontab 3y ago

Joey Hess. The first time I heard his name, it was an article for Linux Journal, which was about managing your home directory in CVS. He went up to create Git-Annex, which I understand works well.

tagyro 3y ago

This is the way! I thought about this the past couple of weeks: I get less than 10% of the visits to my website(s) from google [measured via Plausible]. I want to block google(bot) from visiting my website and I'm seriously considering adding a "Usage Policy" that specifically prohibits any crawler from visiting my site(s). Admittedly, I couldn't care less about the traffic, others might.

scottLobster 3y ago

That might work for this guy, but it's a big stretch from "this works for my niche use case" to "everybody should do this". You can dislike the game, but being a martyr and refusing to play it is just giving up potential benefit for virtue signalling, and if he's trying to start a "de-Google" revolution, I would expect a more serious effort than this lone page that many normies would mistake for an error message at first glance.

JohnFen 3y ago
> being a martyr and refusing to play it is just giving up potential benefit for virtue signalling I don't know about this guy, but it might not be virtue signaling. It might be that he simply doesn't want to take part in that "game". So what if he's giving up some potential benefit? Not all benefit is worth the cost.

jklinger410 3y ago

This is a pointless exercise.

andrewaylett 3y ago

One slight problem: that won't remove any pages from Google's index. It tells the crawler not to crawl the pages, but it won't stop the indexer from recognising that the pages exist, or that they're authoritative for keywords like "Joey Hess", because -- and this was the magic of PageRank -- other people link to the site.

CacheRules 3y ago

Every google search I perform these days is pretty disappointing.

olah_1 3y ago
I know I’m not going to get results from smaller pages when I search google. It makes me think I might as well make a list of 20 popular websites and just search all of those and collate the results

coding123 3y ago

It's better to ask chatgpt instead of google now. tell me something interesting about joeyh.name website https://chat.openai.com/share/5497fc90-006a-47be-bf80-786a7ec75267 https://chat.openai.com/share/5497fc90-006a-47be-bf80-786a7e...

lynx23 3y ago

I have a lot of respect for Joey. But I cant help and think: it is rather easy to go full-protest-mode if you are as famous as he is. git-annex basically powers my whole long-term file archive. Not to mention all the infrastructual code he contributed to Debian. Or the fact that he apparently can make a small living off Patreons who use his Free Software. With that track record, its just a breeze to say "Google Fuck You".

thih9 3y ago

About DRMing the web, related HN discussion from 2 days ago about web environment integrity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999

50 3y ago

what about the robots meta tags[1], e.g., noindex, nofollow, noarchive? 1: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

tenplusfive 3y ago
This is actually the correct way. Robots.txt only stops google from crawling your website, but it might still appear in the index. If you search for the site, then it is shown in the search results, but without any of the content of the page. If you want to prevent indexing as well, you'll have to do this. Also explained here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/robots-faq#h17 https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

kevincox 3y ago

If you really want to make a stance it is probably much better to keep your pages on Google but put up a "browser wall" that doesn't allow any Chomium-based browsers. "Using chromium based-browsers is harmful to the openness of the internet. See [link] for examples of harmful APIs that Chrome is pushing. Browser diversity is important to an open and user-friendly internet. Please use Firefox, Safari or any other non-Chromium browser to view this site"

bilekas 3y ago

> The web will end one day. But let's not let Google kill it. The web will end one day. Imagining google in it's form today will even exist is a stretch. Google and all the big players today are all fault to some degree of the cesspool we are in at the moment. I get the hate. But the hyperbole of blaming them for the destruction of the internet is just nonsense

khushalz 3y ago
yeah
khushalz 3y ago
[flagged]

vmoore 3y ago

My most sensitive searches are when I lookup people online. Google only gets you so far. With enough money, you can throw a few coins at data broker firms and get back solid 'dox' on many people. It depends on how online a person is, and how much they unwittingly divulged to various services (services that sell their data to people-search firms and other brokers). I have the real name of several so called 'anonymous' online personalities, but I won't divulge this info. I was curious recently about a Twitter account posting under a pseudonym and wanted to see if their opsec was tight. Turns out it wasn't. Their real name was discovered in ~15 minutes with some heavy Googling. Imagine if you can simply throw money at the problem and forgo Google entirely, getting not only their legal name, but other PII too?

the_pwner224 3y ago
Mind specifying what these services are? "how much they unwittingly divulged to various services (services that sell their data to people-search firms and other brokers)." Would a regular person have unwittingly given information to these services?
- owyn 3y ago
  For example, Intelius does background checks, reverse phone number lookups etc. One small piece of information can lead to others. As far as unwitting, of course. The wikipedia page says that company has acquired background check companies, a facebook genealogy app company, classmates.com and a "people" search engine company... not to mention all the public databases that are available (criminal records, property records) The've been collecting online and offline data on people for almost 20 years. I'm sure they have data scraped from sites that don't exist any more. Combine that with the current terminally online population and I think it would be surprising to most regular people how much data is out there.

izzydata 3y ago

I find that google is "useless" in the sense that it is no longer the best search engine. There are many solid search engines as options now so why pick google in particular? I think for most people its just a habit. I don't need Google in particular to use the internet anymore so why should I?

runjake 3y ago

Didn't work. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%253Ajoeyh.name https://www.google.com/search?q=site%253Ajoeyh.name PS: lfsgg.com is neat! Wish we had this for my area.

damnesian 3y ago

> Over 30% of the traffic to this website is rss feeds. Google just doesn't matter on the modern web. RSS feeds are dead, long live RSS feeds.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"This is a unique time, when it's actually feasible to become ungoogleable without losing much." This is true. Some sites get buried in Google SERPs because of SEO but these sites can see a majority of their traffic from sources other than Google. In the author's case, the other source is RSS feeds.

renewiltord 3y ago

Well, that sucks, dude. I frequently forget about and then have to refind moreutils.

phendrenad2 3y ago

There is a better reason to "become ungoogleable": Simply make the content you want, how you want, and if it has value Google will have to adjust their index to account for it. Too long we've been slaves to the SEO wheel, spending so much time on SEO that we don't have time to make stuff.

squeaky-clean 3y ago

One of the hidden benefits of having the same name as a TV character is how hard I am to Google.

timetraveller26 3y ago

Joey is one of my favorite developers, you may not agree with him but you gotta respect a man with strong convictions.

pSYoniK 3y ago

I'm not sure why people are asking for search queries and posting search reaults. These are either way filtered by the profile determined for you as a "category" or cohort of users. So saying that Google is useful for a generic search like "the best gaming laptop" is a bit wrong. The issue starts when the response to this begins with "scrlling past the ads and sponsored content" to "SEO optimized but not necessarily useful content".