14 ms·

> who is finally putting their foot down and deciding that we are all going to be forced to either used fully-locked down devices The person who wrote the prop

> who is finally putting their foot down and deciding that we are all going to be forced to either used fully-locked down devices The person who wrote the proposal[0] is from Google. All the authors of the proposal are from Google[1]. I've been thinking carefully about this comment, but I really don't know what to say. It's absolutely heartbreaking watching something I really care about die by a thousand cuts; how do we protest this? Google will just strong-arm their implementation through Chromium and, when banks, Netflix & co. start using it, they've effectively cornered other engines into implementing it. This isn't new to them. They did it with FLoC, which most people were opposed to[2]. The most they did was FLoC was deprecate it and re-release it under a different name. The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal. [0]: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser https://github.com/RupertBenWiser [1]: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md#authors https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26344013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26344013

tapoxi 3y ago
I mean Firefox caved to support EME. This isn't the early days of the web anymore either, the enthusiasts are a small minority of global web traffic that this will probably succeed even with a large scale boycott.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  I still remember the controversy surrounding EME, a LOT of people came out against it (including the EFF[0]); despite that, they still triumphed on[1]. [0]: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-makes-formal-objection-drm-html5 https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-makes-formal-objectio... [1]: https://github.com/w3c/encrypted-media https://github.com/w3c/encrypted-media
  - ahahahahah 3y ago
    And thank god for that, otherwise we'd still need to support flash to use most popular websites.
    - tentacleuno 3y ago
      EME is for DRM'ing media. I don't see how that pertains to Flash. WebAssembly exists as a replacement now, too.
      - veave 3y ago
        If browsers didn't natively support DRM then they would have to come up with external extensions (such as Flash) to support DRM. DRM isn't going away.
        apostacy 3y ago
        DRM should be inconvenient and expensive. There have always been ways to implement DRM security theater for the comfort of content providers in board rooms. The media ecosystem is not going to be enhanced by making DRM more restrictive. Netflix could completely deactivate all DRM today, and it would change nothing. Apple completely abandoned their "FairPlay" iTunes music DRM because it became evident that it was not needed.
        HideousKojima 3y ago
        Every single Netflix show is available on the pirate bay, but Netflix still insists on using DRM.
        PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
        Because Hollywood mandates that legal distribution have DRM.
        Mindwipe 3y ago
        Apple in no way abandoned FairPlay. Every file on Apple Music, and iTunes Match is protected with it. And those greatly outnumber transactional sales through the iTunes store, by an order of magnitude. The customer picked the DRMed version, every time.
- riffraff 3y ago
  I think in this case Firefox is in a different position: if it didn't support EME netflix wouldn't work. But in this case it could report "sure, this is a real user alright" by being its own attester, can't it?
  - apostacy 3y ago
    So what if Netflix doesn't work?? That is the choice of Netflix. Big content will always want more control. Firefox will never be able to keep up. They will just do a mediocre job of working against their users. Microsoft and Real Player pushed hard for an integrated ActiveX based DRM ecosystem over a decade ago. I'm so glad that Mozilla flatly refused to entertain such idiocy. I sure wish that Mozilla still existed. Mozilla is now just a "pick me" [1] organization to big content. They should own being a browser that caters to users, not platforms. Because they will end up with nothing. [1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pick%20me https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pick%20me
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      The problem is, back then most people on the Internet were techies. They knew their shit. Today? Guess who Grandma's gonna call with "my Netflix isn't working"? And she won't care why, all she cares about is Netflix.
  - wmf 3y ago
    If Firefox lies, sites will refuse to load in Firefox.
    - riffraff 3y ago
      Of course, but if Google did that it would allow Firefox to complain about Google's abuse of monopoly power. I'm not sure that is a path they'd risk going through.
  - gizmo686 3y ago
    That depends on how the attestation is done. If done correctly, TPMs on every computer would be preloaded with signing keys (probably microsoft). The web browerser would then ask the TPM to sign the Platform Configuration Registers, which are a hash of a challenge nonce, the system firmware/kernel/configuration/etc. This signature is then sent (along with a description of the system configuration) to an external attester. This external attester validates that: A) the claimed configuration is "secure" (trusted kernel, bootloader, browser, etc) and B) The TPM's signature attests to the configuration. The validator then generates its own signed message that can be sent to the server. In practice, I think this is logistically unworkable in todays computing environment. But with enough big players pushing for it, I don't see anything fundamentally impossible.
spystath 3y ago
> how do we protest this? You do not and you cannot. It was written in stone once Chrome dominated the browser market. What Chrome (Google) wants, Chrome (Google) gets. Despite all the good engineering Google wants to sell ads, that's all there is to it. And the result is this proposal. > The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal. It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority. Unless people switch to FF in droves the web is Chrome. And they won't because at the end of the day people just want to get home from their shitty jobs and stream a show. As long as that works everything else is a non-issue.
- rodgerd 3y ago
  > the web is Chrome And lot of people here squeal like stuck pigs if you suggest anything other than the Chrome monopoly. HM is a constant barrage of demanding that legislators force the Chrome monopoly to be extended to iOS devices!
- freediverx 3y ago
  Doesn't Apple have some leverage here? They may not control the overall browser market but they mostly control the smartphone market (or at least the profitable segment of that market) and lots of those users prefer to use Safari. I'm aware Apple implemented similar tech a while ago, but I have infinitely less confidence that Google would use it responsibly.
- pmlnr 3y ago
  > It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority. Heh. I was there when it was IE6, and people said the same.
  - mavrc 3y ago
    I was there too. People always say this, but just because a thing changed once does not mean it will happen again. In this case, the population scale alone has changed by over an order of magnitude. Just doing some quick searching - the first numbers that come up when you search for "how many people used the internet in the year 2000" are on the order of 350 million or so. Comparatively, now, in 2023, Reddit alone has some 450 million users. It would seem right now that Tiktok has about three times the number of active users than there were total Internet users 23 years ago. Additionally, there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars now resting on Chrome remaining the dominant browser. Short of government intervention (or absolutely monumental fuckup on Google's part somehow), Chrome is here to stay.
pmlnr 3y ago
> how do we protest this The proposal for Chrome, you don't, because there's no stopping it. See DRM, Secure Boot, all the rest of the shitshow pursuing "trusted environment". It'll never happen, but CEOs won't accept reality. You can, however, embrace the rest: eg. keep serving your own content on http (along with https), gopher for retro compatibility, and because they are less prone to break. Keep using your current device for browsing, and whatever refuses to serve you either leave it for good or keep a spare chromebook for all the "services" you can't avoid to use, like banking. I don't have a better route. It's a bit like streaming: if I want resolution above 480p, I use a Chromecast with Android TV.
- t0astbread 3y ago
  Generally agree but I don't think Secure Boot falls in this category unless the keys are locked in firmware (and in that case the firmware is the problem). Root passwords aren't evil either just because they can be withdrawn from the user.
  - gizmo686 3y ago
    Secure Boot is often conflated with Measured Boot. Measured Boot is essential for any attestation based scheme.
- zzo38computer 3y ago
  > if I want resolution above 480p, I use a Chromecast with Android TV. I am one who specifically does not want a resolution above 480p. Unfortunately, some TV services had decided to remove that feature and now it wastes disk space due to the higher resolution. I also want to be able to use an external caption decoder and recorder (in my case, the same device does both), so will use the composite video and not HDMI (which doesn't have captions). Steven J. Searle wrote: "The sad fact of the matter is that people play politics with standards to gain commercial advantage, and the result is that end users suffer the consequences. This is the case with character encoding for computer systems, and it is even more the case with HDTV." > keep serving your own content on http (along with https), gopher for retro compatibility, and because they are less prone to break. Yes, it is reasonable. I think that "HTTPS only" is (mostly) no good, but having both is good. HSTS is no good.
gjsman-1000 3y ago
I'm doing this again, but here's my shameless plug for the article I wrote 1 year ago now, "Remote Attestation Is Coming Back," which warned that this was coming to the web and had quite a discussion about that idea at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282305
enumjorge 3y ago
> The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal. As others have said, FF doesn't have a lot of leverage left to influence those type of decisions, but Safari might. Not sure what their position is on this proposal. The one pager has a section on stakeholder feedback [0], but doesn't name them for some reason. [0] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md#stakeholder-feedback--opposition https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
- apostacy 3y ago
  Looking at it in terms of leverage and market-share is a huge mistake that Mozilla keeps making. Mozilla doesn't have a platform like Google does. What exactly is Mozilla even competing for? Popularity? They should hunker down and make the best browser they can, implementing their best web. It worked 20 years ago, and in many ways the circumstances are the same. We have tech monopolies proposing ludicrous "content security" mechanisms. Where would Mozilla have been if they tried making some sort of half baked "less evil" form of Microsoft Janus DRM[1]? People are going to get sick of how intrusive DRM is becoming, and there should be an alternative waiting for them. Every person who has content they thought they purchased "expire" and be erased from their device, or who can no longer use their expensive projector after the latest mandatory update. I evangelized heavily for Firefox in the 1.x days. People were sick of IE6, and were glad to have Firefox. I worked at a computer store and probably converted 100+ people. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(DRM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(DRM)
  - wmf 3y ago
    What exactly is Mozilla even competing for? Popularity? Mozilla's revenue is proportional to usage so they need enough users to cover their development costs.
    - 20after4 3y ago
      If only the wikimedia foundation would fork firefox, then the open web might have a chance. Wikimedia is honestly the only organization with the right ideology, the right business model, and enough money to do something like this sustainably.
wewxjfq 3y ago
Vote with your clicks. Google doesn't want me to install an ad-blocker on my phone, so I'm not browsing the ad-infested websites. And for the current integrity checks: If a site wants me to solve a captcha just to view it, I close the tab and never visit the domain again. In fact, I already close the tab when I see Cloudflare checking my browser. Let the corporate web die.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  Firefox on android has unlock origin support.
cesarb 3y ago
> It's absolutely heartbreaking watching something I really care about die by a thousand cuts; how do we protest this? Death by a thousand cuts can also happen in the other direction. Even if we do not have a single decisive way to oppose this disastrous proposal, we can fight it in as many ways and on as many avenues as possible. Spreading the word about it widely is an important first step, so that those best placed to oppose it know that they should act.
qingcharles 3y ago
I'm holding out hope for Ladybird to save us all one day: https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform-browser-project/ https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
- fieryskiff11 3y ago
  that site gave me a ton of hope and inspiration, thank you for sharing.
zzo38computer 3y ago
> How do we protest this? Perhaps, make a web page with something like: if(navigator.getEnvironmentIntegrity) window.location="[some URL with the protest]";
WhyNotHugo 3y ago
> how do we protest this? Probably the privacy angle is best. Given that this uses an "attester’s public key", this enables to uniquely identify a given device repeatedly over time with no margin for error. It's essentially "perfect fingerprinting". There's also the option that devices don't use a per-device key. If all the devices from a vendor use the same keypair, then this would be broken by just extracting the key from a single device (AFAIK, in the US this would likely not be legal to use).
erosenbe0 3y ago
Protest is easy and involves the ADA and COPPA. 1) You cannot all of a sudden provision content differently to a user who has an unapproved device with their preferred accessibility stack and/or hardware. 2) Even if attestation does not involve tracking, effectively forcing children into an ecosystem that tracks them can be deemed unlawful by the FTC. Providers cannot foreclose all means of access to content that are not in a tracking ecosystem, because it violates the rights of children. The proposal is probably legally negligent because it does not exercise the ordinary standard of care expected of senior technologists. Providing a tool that affects hundreds of million of children and people with disabilities is not a joke.
userbinator 3y ago
The person who wrote the proposal[0] is from Google. All the authors of the proposal are from Google[1]. It astounds me that people would actually associate their real identities with stuff like this publicly. how do we protest this? The same way we protest politicians doing things against our desires? We know exactly who the perpetrators are, so perhaps we should all give them a piece of our mind. I absolutely don't condone violence, but exercising our right to free speech is always a good idea.
lucasyvas 3y ago
It was just one example, but Netflix is trash in web browsers anyway. Firefox should say no to all of this - it doesn't feel like it now, but saying no could birth alternative services that don't operate in such a manner. Not technology related exactly, but until recent events I thought Reddit would survive and be untouchable. Now I'm wondering why I didn't join the fediverse sooner. There are rough spots but it will surpass centralized solutions. We are at a turning point and should say no to all garbage. They need us more than we need them.
fouc 3y ago
As long as online advertising is a primary source of revenue for many companies, the internet is going to increasingly have less degrees of freedoms. Probably the only solution is to bring harsh legislation against the very existence of online advertising. I don't know what that legislation would actually look like and how it can be done ethically.. but the alternative is probably worse.

tapoxi 3y ago

I mean Firefox caved to support EME. This isn't the early days of the web anymore either, the enthusiasts are a small minority of global web traffic that this will probably succeed even with a large scale boycott.

tentacleuno 3y ago
I still remember the controversy surrounding EME, a LOT of people came out against it (including the EFF[0]); despite that, they still triumphed on[1]. [0]: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-makes-formal-objection-drm-html5 https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-makes-formal-objectio... [1]: https://github.com/w3c/encrypted-media https://github.com/w3c/encrypted-media
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  And thank god for that, otherwise we'd still need to support flash to use most popular websites.
  - tentacleuno 3y ago
    EME is for DRM'ing media. I don't see how that pertains to Flash. WebAssembly exists as a replacement now, too.
    - veave 3y ago
      If browsers didn't natively support DRM then they would have to come up with external extensions (such as Flash) to support DRM. DRM isn't going away.
      - apostacy 3y ago
        DRM should be inconvenient and expensive. There have always been ways to implement DRM security theater for the comfort of content providers in board rooms. The media ecosystem is not going to be enhanced by making DRM more restrictive. Netflix could completely deactivate all DRM today, and it would change nothing. Apple completely abandoned their "FairPlay" iTunes music DRM because it became evident that it was not needed.
        HideousKojima 3y ago
        Every single Netflix show is available on the pirate bay, but Netflix still insists on using DRM.
        PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
        Because Hollywood mandates that legal distribution have DRM.
        Mindwipe 3y ago
        Apple in no way abandoned FairPlay. Every file on Apple Music, and iTunes Match is protected with it. And those greatly outnumber transactional sales through the iTunes store, by an order of magnitude. The customer picked the DRMed version, every time.
riffraff 3y ago
I think in this case Firefox is in a different position: if it didn't support EME netflix wouldn't work. But in this case it could report "sure, this is a real user alright" by being its own attester, can't it?
- apostacy 3y ago
  So what if Netflix doesn't work?? That is the choice of Netflix. Big content will always want more control. Firefox will never be able to keep up. They will just do a mediocre job of working against their users. Microsoft and Real Player pushed hard for an integrated ActiveX based DRM ecosystem over a decade ago. I'm so glad that Mozilla flatly refused to entertain such idiocy. I sure wish that Mozilla still existed. Mozilla is now just a "pick me" [1] organization to big content. They should own being a browser that caters to users, not platforms. Because they will end up with nothing. [1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pick%20me https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pick%20me
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    The problem is, back then most people on the Internet were techies. They knew their shit. Today? Guess who Grandma's gonna call with "my Netflix isn't working"? And she won't care why, all she cares about is Netflix.
- wmf 3y ago
  If Firefox lies, sites will refuse to load in Firefox.
  - riffraff 3y ago
    Of course, but if Google did that it would allow Firefox to complain about Google's abuse of monopoly power. I'm not sure that is a path they'd risk going through.
- gizmo686 3y ago
  That depends on how the attestation is done. If done correctly, TPMs on every computer would be preloaded with signing keys (probably microsoft). The web browerser would then ask the TPM to sign the Platform Configuration Registers, which are a hash of a challenge nonce, the system firmware/kernel/configuration/etc. This signature is then sent (along with a description of the system configuration) to an external attester. This external attester validates that: A) the claimed configuration is "secure" (trusted kernel, bootloader, browser, etc) and B) The TPM's signature attests to the configuration. The validator then generates its own signed message that can be sent to the server. In practice, I think this is logistically unworkable in todays computing environment. But with enough big players pushing for it, I don't see anything fundamentally impossible.

spystath 3y ago

> how do we protest this? You do not and you cannot. It was written in stone once Chrome dominated the browser market. What Chrome (Google) wants, Chrome (Google) gets. Despite all the good engineering Google wants to sell ads, that's all there is to it. And the result is this proposal. > The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal. It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority. Unless people switch to FF in droves the web is Chrome. And they won't because at the end of the day people just want to get home from their shitty jobs and stream a show. As long as that works everything else is a non-issue.

rodgerd 3y ago
> the web is Chrome And lot of people here squeal like stuck pigs if you suggest anything other than the Chrome monopoly. HM is a constant barrage of demanding that legislators force the Chrome monopoly to be extended to iOS devices!
freediverx 3y ago
Doesn't Apple have some leverage here? They may not control the overall browser market but they mostly control the smartphone market (or at least the profitable segment of that market) and lots of those users prefer to use Safari. I'm aware Apple implemented similar tech a while ago, but I have infinitely less confidence that Google would use it responsibly.
pmlnr 3y ago
> It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority. Heh. I was there when it was IE6, and people said the same.
- mavrc 3y ago
  I was there too. People always say this, but just because a thing changed once does not mean it will happen again. In this case, the population scale alone has changed by over an order of magnitude. Just doing some quick searching - the first numbers that come up when you search for "how many people used the internet in the year 2000" are on the order of 350 million or so. Comparatively, now, in 2023, Reddit alone has some 450 million users. It would seem right now that Tiktok has about three times the number of active users than there were total Internet users 23 years ago. Additionally, there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars now resting on Chrome remaining the dominant browser. Short of government intervention (or absolutely monumental fuckup on Google's part somehow), Chrome is here to stay.

pmlnr 3y ago

> how do we protest this The proposal for Chrome, you don't, because there's no stopping it. See DRM, Secure Boot, all the rest of the shitshow pursuing "trusted environment". It'll never happen, but CEOs won't accept reality. You can, however, embrace the rest: eg. keep serving your own content on http (along with https), gopher for retro compatibility, and because they are less prone to break. Keep using your current device for browsing, and whatever refuses to serve you either leave it for good or keep a spare chromebook for all the "services" you can't avoid to use, like banking. I don't have a better route. It's a bit like streaming: if I want resolution above 480p, I use a Chromecast with Android TV.

t0astbread 3y ago
Generally agree but I don't think Secure Boot falls in this category unless the keys are locked in firmware (and in that case the firmware is the problem). Root passwords aren't evil either just because they can be withdrawn from the user.
- gizmo686 3y ago
  Secure Boot is often conflated with Measured Boot. Measured Boot is essential for any attestation based scheme.
zzo38computer 3y ago
> if I want resolution above 480p, I use a Chromecast with Android TV. I am one who specifically does not want a resolution above 480p. Unfortunately, some TV services had decided to remove that feature and now it wastes disk space due to the higher resolution. I also want to be able to use an external caption decoder and recorder (in my case, the same device does both), so will use the composite video and not HDMI (which doesn't have captions). Steven J. Searle wrote: "The sad fact of the matter is that people play politics with standards to gain commercial advantage, and the result is that end users suffer the consequences. This is the case with character encoding for computer systems, and it is even more the case with HDTV." > keep serving your own content on http (along with https), gopher for retro compatibility, and because they are less prone to break. Yes, it is reasonable. I think that "HTTPS only" is (mostly) no good, but having both is good. HSTS is no good.

gjsman-1000 3y ago

I'm doing this again, but here's my shameless plug for the article I wrote 1 year ago now, "Remote Attestation Is Coming Back," which warned that this was coming to the web and had quite a discussion about that idea at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282305

enumjorge 3y ago

> The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal. As others have said, FF doesn't have a lot of leverage left to influence those type of decisions, but Safari might. Not sure what their position is on this proposal. The one pager has a section on stakeholder feedback [0], but doesn't name them for some reason. [0] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md#stakeholder-feedback--opposition https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

apostacy 3y ago
Looking at it in terms of leverage and market-share is a huge mistake that Mozilla keeps making. Mozilla doesn't have a platform like Google does. What exactly is Mozilla even competing for? Popularity? They should hunker down and make the best browser they can, implementing their best web. It worked 20 years ago, and in many ways the circumstances are the same. We have tech monopolies proposing ludicrous "content security" mechanisms. Where would Mozilla have been if they tried making some sort of half baked "less evil" form of Microsoft Janus DRM[1]? People are going to get sick of how intrusive DRM is becoming, and there should be an alternative waiting for them. Every person who has content they thought they purchased "expire" and be erased from their device, or who can no longer use their expensive projector after the latest mandatory update. I evangelized heavily for Firefox in the 1.x days. People were sick of IE6, and were glad to have Firefox. I worked at a computer store and probably converted 100+ people. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(DRM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(DRM)
- wmf 3y ago
  What exactly is Mozilla even competing for? Popularity? Mozilla's revenue is proportional to usage so they need enough users to cover their development costs.
  - 20after4 3y ago
    If only the wikimedia foundation would fork firefox, then the open web might have a chance. Wikimedia is honestly the only organization with the right ideology, the right business model, and enough money to do something like this sustainably.

wewxjfq 3y ago

Vote with your clicks. Google doesn't want me to install an ad-blocker on my phone, so I'm not browsing the ad-infested websites. And for the current integrity checks: If a site wants me to solve a captcha just to view it, I close the tab and never visit the domain again. In fact, I already close the tab when I see Cloudflare checking my browser. Let the corporate web die.

themoonisachees 3y ago
Firefox on android has unlock origin support.

cesarb 3y ago

> It's absolutely heartbreaking watching something I really care about die by a thousand cuts; how do we protest this? Death by a thousand cuts can also happen in the other direction. Even if we do not have a single decisive way to oppose this disastrous proposal, we can fight it in as many ways and on as many avenues as possible. Spreading the word about it widely is an important first step, so that those best placed to oppose it know that they should act.

qingcharles 3y ago

I'm holding out hope for Ladybird to save us all one day: https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform-browser-project/ https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...

fieryskiff11 3y ago
that site gave me a ton of hope and inspiration, thank you for sharing.

zzo38computer 3y ago

> How do we protest this? Perhaps, make a web page with something like: if(navigator.getEnvironmentIntegrity) window.location="[some URL with the protest]";

WhyNotHugo 3y ago

> how do we protest this? Probably the privacy angle is best. Given that this uses an "attester’s public key", this enables to uniquely identify a given device repeatedly over time with no margin for error. It's essentially "perfect fingerprinting". There's also the option that devices don't use a per-device key. If all the devices from a vendor use the same keypair, then this would be broken by just extracting the key from a single device (AFAIK, in the US this would likely not be legal to use).

erosenbe0 3y ago

Protest is easy and involves the ADA and COPPA. 1) You cannot all of a sudden provision content differently to a user who has an unapproved device with their preferred accessibility stack and/or hardware. 2) Even if attestation does not involve tracking, effectively forcing children into an ecosystem that tracks them can be deemed unlawful by the FTC. Providers cannot foreclose all means of access to content that are not in a tracking ecosystem, because it violates the rights of children. The proposal is probably legally negligent because it does not exercise the ordinary standard of care expected of senior technologists. Providing a tool that affects hundreds of million of children and people with disabilities is not a joke.

userbinator 3y ago

The person who wrote the proposal[0] is from Google. All the authors of the proposal are from Google[1]. It astounds me that people would actually associate their real identities with stuff like this publicly. how do we protest this? The same way we protest politicians doing things against our desires? We know exactly who the perpetrators are, so perhaps we should all give them a piece of our mind. I absolutely don't condone violence, but exercising our right to free speech is always a good idea.

lucasyvas 3y ago

It was just one example, but Netflix is trash in web browsers anyway. Firefox should say no to all of this - it doesn't feel like it now, but saying no could birth alternative services that don't operate in such a manner. Not technology related exactly, but until recent events I thought Reddit would survive and be untouchable. Now I'm wondering why I didn't join the fediverse sooner. There are rough spots but it will surpass centralized solutions. We are at a turning point and should say no to all garbage. They need us more than we need them.

fouc 3y ago

As long as online advertising is a primary source of revenue for many companies, the internet is going to increasingly have less degrees of freedoms. Probably the only solution is to bring harsh legislation against the very existence of online advertising. I don't know what that legislation would actually look like and how it can be done ethically.. but the alternative is probably worse.