18 ms·
Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible
- wg0 3y agoJust switched to Firefox and madde it default browser. Forcing someone to use their approved list of hardware to browse open web is the most absurd thing I have heard so far.
- reedf1 3y agoIt will be hard to beat any AR level ad filtering. Ultimately AI will make ad avoidance easier rather than harder.
- nurpax 3y agoAR?
- karamanolev 3y agoAugmented Reality? The semi-real-world version of VR?
- mosen 3y agoAugmented reality
- Borealid 3y agoThe grandparent likely means Augmented Reality; they may be imagining a strange world where you wear glasses that filter ads out of your vision, and yet those ads are on a computer screen you view rather than right there in the headset being projected onto your eyes.
- weego 3y agoI don't understand what AR has to do with this
- perihelions 3y agoAnalog gap. An AR headset that classifies ads in its field of view and filters them in real-time. Adversary model being, the evil Googleborg fully control your web browser and the locked OS it's running on – but you still control the gap between the display screen and your eyeballs.
- perihelions 3y agoTheir AI agents will be stronger than yours. They'll watch you 24/7 and make sure you're not doing that – verify there are no non-approved gadgets in front of your eyes; verify that there are no visible analog-gap-defeating tools anywhere in your physical proximity. Nothing will escape the machine's notice: no detail too small or subtle for a bored yottaflop God with nothing in the world to do but watch you. You'll be free to opt out, though most of the internet will be unusable without Environment Integrity.
- wiz21c 3y agoremember the UEFI story...
- gonzo41 3y agoWaving that don't be evil flag proudly eh team.
- yreg 3y agoI hate ads as much as anyone but providing a free service that runs ads and shares part of that income with content creators is hardly particularly evil.
- lucidguppy 3y agoAn internet where ads take over is a dystopian nightmare.
- _ZeD_ 3y agowell, the whole concept of "ads" is a bit evil by itself
- mosen 3y agoCould you please elaborate?
- bt4u 3y ago[dead]
- merth 3y agoemotional brainwashing(entertaintment, fear etc) people to buy stuff that they don't need. taking advantage of people's weakness. it's not like "this is our product, this is what it does, and this is the price of it" instead "your neighbour has this cool stuff but you don't means you are lesser person if you don't buy also", "if you don't buy this stuff, you won't get a girlfriend and die alone", "if you don't buy this stuff, you will miss out amazing opportunity of becoming rich and stuck as poor"
- paulluuk 3y agoIt really depends on whether you see ads as "bringing to the user's attention that there is a product out there that might improve their lives" or if you see them as "attempts to manipulate people into spending money on things they don't need or want". I'm definitely in the latter group, but I can see how some market purists might believe in the first version.
- k4rli 3y agoBlaming the engineers themselves?
- mihaaly 3y agoThe management is completely innocent! They only mandate the engineers what to do. ; )
- ModernMech 3y agoThey are the ones doing the work. They certainly have a choice not to.
- rovr138 3y agoThe same engineers doing this in exchange for money, healthcare, etc to put food on their tables and provide for their families? Not everyone has the ability to act on said 'choice' and risk their jobs, income, benefits.
- ModernMech 3y agoIf anyone does, it’s Google engineers. How much are they paid again? $100k? $200k? $300k? Seriously they have no agency here?
- rovr138 3y agoHow much is the cost of living? Lifestyle creep? Do they have anyone at home sick and they're the only ones working while also living in a high cost of living area? It's not that easy.
- maeil 3y agoI'm not joking when I say it's very hard to tell whether you're sarcastically making fun of the facetious arguments they could hypothetically put forth or if you're serious.
- progbits 3y agoEach WEI article should begin with section on Safari (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862494) but sadly that doesn't fit their narrative. This isn't Chrome/WEI defense btw. All attestation in web browsers ("user agents" my ass) is bad. Base your complaints on objective problems, not hate of one brand.
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoI can hear the screams from the executives now..."The engineers made us do it."
- d--b 3y agoI think they are signing the end of chrome dominance. People are going to flee to Firefox.
- testtestabcdef 3y agoThat won't happen. "Normies" don't care. At all. They just want the fastest thing and are happy to watch ads popping up all 5 minutes all day.
- cgio 3y agoNormies used to use IE. Then their techier friends asked them if they have used FF or Chrome and they moved on. Don’t underestimate the impact of local experts on the choices of people who don’t care/have time to explore.
- testtestabcdef 3y agoBecause both were a lot faster than IE. Nowdays almost everyone uses Chrome, Safari or Edge. Because Firefox is rather slow given the current competitors, not because the others care more about privacy (Also because that's just what their devices come with)
- erklik 3y ago> Because Firefox is rather slow given the current competitors Currently Firefox is faster than Chrome : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoThe "normie" internet is some kind of hell, but they seem to be content. "We" need to do more / better to educate them! I tried to implement pi-hole for some extended family members. They asked me to turn it off within a week because they couldn't watch advertising videos to earn a new 'life' on candy crush (or something closely resembling that). I can't relate to "normies" anymore, it's too late for me...
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoA good and measured article marred only by a silly, clickbait title. Unless there is a plan to allow attesters that are independent bodies then this is absolutely a threat to the open internet, or what's left of it. The biggest dead canary for me is the lack of calling this out explicitly by Google or Apple. We're left to assume that Google is hand-wavingly saying "don't worry we can take care of that" when the private companies already monopolizing parts of the Internet are the absolute last people we want handling attestation.
- jackdaniel 3y agoeven assuming unbiased and objective attesters, the issue lies with the "baseline criteria" of attestation and who defines them. There are two risks here (examples follow): 1. hostile requirements - "the agent won't feature adblockers", or "scraping without explicit website permission must be forbidden" 2. prohibitive requirements - "the agent implements protocols X, Y and Z and adheres to standards A, B and C" - all of these may be reasonable things, but en masse they may be too much work to carry by anyone but a reasonably big vendor Additionally these criteria must be verifiable, so user can't basically modify the agent, because then the attestation is practically void.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoAbsolutely. Independent bodies don't solve the other myriad issues with attestation, but they don't add the ones that corporate interests do either.
- heisenbit 3y agoWhat is wrong when walking into a web shop with disclosing how much money you earn and may be able to part with?
- smeej 3y agoIt terrifies me that I'm actually unsure whether this comment is sarcastic.
- mihaaly 3y agoIt may not have the desired effect they seek. I already feel my reluctance growing towards opening my browser when it is not absolutely necessary. Are they sure that even more user hostility is what the modern internet misses?....
- aerhardt 3y agoThe article mentions that this is a trade-off in trust vs privacy… An ad-backed site’s trust on not being visited by bots, vs my privacy… Doesn’t even sound like a trade-off from a user’s perspective.
- raxxorraxor 3y agoYou can add this in the dictionary under false dichotomy.
- qwertox 3y agoMaybe each household should host its army of noise-making AI which spews out page visits and random searches in order to let the people hide in the noise. Projects like these existed, I think it was an extension, but we'd probably need to do better than that.
- suction 3y ago[dead]
- bondarchuk 3y agoYes it was AdNauseam.
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoWhy would anybody expect them to do anything different. They are an ad company. Their revenue comes from selling your attention and profile. People seem to have some severe cognitive dissonance when it comes to commercial web sites. They are crucified for selling ads and tracking then when they have the temerity to try and charge for their work people will start posting archive.is links to route around their paywalls. If you don't like advertising then don't visit advertising funded sites or use their "free" tools. If you don't like paywalls then hit the back button and spend your attention elsewhere.
- snowstormsun 3y agoFrom the explainer: > Detect non-human traffic in advertising to improve user experience and access to web content As if the goal to do that would be improving UX...
- varjag 3y agoDoubt it's the engineers tbh.
- andrenotgiant 3y agoThis is a dumb article that's trying and failing to tie Attestation to ad blocking. > However, how this plays out with browsers that allow extensions or are modified remains a grey area. As the proposal vaguely mentions, "Web Environment Integrity attests the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack, it does not restrict the indicated application’s functionality." That's not vague at all.
- FormulatedEdits 3y agoAnd if ad-blockers are considered illegitimate software? This would be entirely in line with financial incentives of the proposed attesters and even logically defensible (oh well, we haven’t vetted uBlock, so you can’t browse with that installed).
- nottorp 3y agoAnd if I want to use links on z80? And aside from niche platforms, do you want the 3 big companies to decide what you're allowed to see on the internet?
- anthk 3y agoMore like Links on a 486. If this happens, I won't use anything else but IRC, XMPP, NNTP, Gopher and Gemini.
- FormulatedEdits 3y agoI think you may have misunderstood my comment, which was disagreeing with the parent comment. I do not want those companies (or anyone, really) to be able to decide what is or is not an allowed hardware/software setup to access anything.
- anthk 3y agoYou can't block a hosts file, or a firewall between you and your ISP.
- tjpnz 3y agoMy home network has a peculiar quirk where it won't resolve DNS for domains known to serve ads. Why do I deserve be penalised?
- Adverblessly 3y agoIt isn't just "make ad-blocking (near) impossible" as the current title of the submission suggests. It is: Make browsing the internet possible only on Chrome, Safari or Edge (with no modifications or extensions). No competition allowed in browsers. Make browsing the internet possible only on macOS, Windows, Android or iOS (no custom Android distributions, definitely no LineageOS or GrapheneOS or whatever). No competition allowed in Operating Systems, especially no open source operating systems. Make crawling the internet possible only to Google. No private crawling and no competing search engines. Let me know if I've missed anything...
- hef19898 3y agoIf successful, that would make the anti-trust suites against MS seem like childs play.
- fallingknife 3y agoThere won't be an anti-trust suit. The implicit deal will be we will prevent "misinformation" (favor news sources you support and censor anything you request with our algorithm) and you will allow us to monopolize the internet.
- pjc50 3y agoOther countries can do anti-trust as well.
- fallingknife 3y agoWhat I am getting at is this is fundamentally a pro-government proposal. Governments like the open web even less than Google.
- awesomeMilou 3y agoThat's far fetched. Mozilla still breathes and they have enough cash to start an anti-trust lawsuit in Europe.
- naillo 3y agoThis kind of behaviour makes me not trust security researchers (something they should desperately try to protect given that trust in the field is essential).
- robbie-c 3y agoGoogle haven't built enough trust to say "here's something we want to do that could have huge negative consequencies, but trust us".
- Filligree 3y agoThey did. Then they lost it. You can't get that back.
- edg5000 3y agoWhat event are you referring to? Android? Chrome? Search?
- c0l0 3y ago"Yes."
- robbie-c 3y agoMany different things, big and small, that shows that their principles are to make the maximum amount of money possible at every given moment, rather than thinking about long term consequencies or any moral values. One extremely small example from the last 60 minutes of my life is that many Google workspace products don't work very well in non-Chrome browsers. I have to switch from Firefox to Chrome whenever I call someone in Google Meet, because the system load is higher and some features are not supported (e.g. visual effects like background blurring). I'm skeptical that these features can't be done in Firefox, but when you try to use them you get a warning to use a supported browser. I dug into this a little more and they have a page https://support.google.com/meet/answer/10058482?hl=en-GB&expand_all_zippies=true#requirements&zippy=%2Clearn-what-you-need-to-apply-visual-effects-on-a-computer%2Clearn-what-you-need-for-cloud-based-effect-processing https://support.google.com/meet/answer/10058482?hl=en-GB&exp... which asks you to check for WebGL support, without a major performance caveat, and link to https://webglreport.com/?v=2 https://webglreport.com/?v=2 On Firefox on a M2 mac, I see "Major Performance Caveat: No".
- ranting-moth 3y agoThis was mentioned in a different post the other day but HN moderators shot it down: https://hnrankings.info/36778999/ https://hnrankings.info/36778999/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999
- est 3y agoI don't have trust issues with Google, how ever I have anti-trust issues with an ads-company and browser-vendor.
- kome 3y agothat's what the best minds of our generation are doing in their 9 to 5... making ad-blocking (near) impossible... good job!
- zb3 3y agoThe latest, tone-deaf response from a Google engineer: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues/28#issuecomment-1651129388 https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
- bob1029 3y agoI like how he changed his GitHub profile photo to a picture of a yellow duck. I'd do the same thing if I was working for the devil and I knew it.
- layer8 3y agoIs that like a reverse canary?
- kafrofrite 3y agoIn the above he's mentioning that Privacy features like user-agent reduction, IP reduction, preventing cross- site storage, and fingerprint randomization make it more difficult to distinguish or reidentify individual clients, which is great for privacy, but makes fighting fraud more difficult. This matters to users because making the web more private without providing new APIs to developers could lead to websites adding more: - sign-in gates to access basic content - invasive user fingerprinting, which is less transparent to users and more difficult to control - excessive challenges (SMS verification, captchas) My question is whether there is any data to back up those claims.
- award_ 3y agoThis was my take away as well. I see a lot of imaginary, proposed future problems and no concrete issues that this is currently trying to solve. It gives the impression that it's just being put out there to muddy the waters and give some credence to an otherwise awful barrier to entry for the web.
- mysterydip 3y ago"it's clear we need a larger discussion (so you understand why I'm right" and not "it's clear this was a bad idea"
- danielovichdk 3y agoI know ads is a huge business. I never click them. Who clicks on ads? Really? What segment of Internet users does?
- pbronez 3y agoWhich implies the click fraud problem. I thought that Google was strongly disinterested in robust counter measures because so much as engagement is straight fraud. If you shine a light on it the market shrinks a lot.
- clbrmbr 3y agoSure they have known for a long time. What is changing is advertisers awareness of the fake clicks. Creates an opportunity for ad platforms that can prove the humanity of their viewers.
- beefield 3y agoYou might want to check almost anyone else searching something on google and see if they get past the first few paid links/ads.
- bujak300 3y agoBots? The ad impressions are like 60% fake, no? I click from time to time when delayed loading puts an ad right where I was about to click.
- yeputons 3y agoSometimes they are relevant and I click. Maybe few times in the last year. Quite a handy way to discover something you had no idea existed. A specialized driving school in my area, for example. Not searchable through Google Maps or Google; it's specific, but not specific enough.
- testtestabcdef 3y agoI assume you don't have to click them anymore nowadays? Should be fairly simple to find a correlation between ads shown to users and products sold, no?? I guess tracking solves this case. Also as others said, there are quite a few people who still click them or click the first ad-links in google searches
- jwr 3y agoUnfortunately, we will all happily accept this. Because using Chrome is "convenient". People will accept anything for convenience — WhatsApp is a good example, where millions of people worldwide happily share and sync their entire phone book with Facebook/Meta. If you care, stop using Chrome. If you criticize this evil move, but continue using Chrome, you are part of the problem.
- edg5000 3y agoI switched over to a fully open source environment, at least for mobile/desktop OS, browser, almost all software as well as cloud file storage etc. But with a notable exception where I still use Google Search. Perhaps with the rise of LLMs, one day I will run my own LLM to complete the move to being no longer reliant on monopolists.
- erklik 3y agoDepending on the use-case, I find DDG is far better in many cases in returning sane search results. Might be a option to try. Not entirely open-source but better than the GOOG.
- calgoo 3y agoSame here, been using DDG for several years now and have not had any issues. I have tried switching to google a few times when im not finding what i need, but get turned off by their recommendations as well as just bad search results. I remember it took be a few weeks to get used DDG when i first switched. In a way it felt like going back to how search used to work, more keyword based, less trying to guess my life story to try to figure out what i really want.
- bogwog 3y agoAnd kagi.com is way better than DDG if you're willing to pay
- westernpopular 3y agoWhatsApp and Chrome is apples and oranges - not using WhatsApp comes at a social cost (especially in countries like Germany and India where almost everyone uses it) because you can no longer communicate with other WhatsApp users or participate in group chats. Not using Chrome comes with zero cost - you can use the same websites everyone else is using, just use Firefox.
- nfriedly 3y agoI hate to say it, but if you used Chrome to read this, then you're part of the problem. Awful stuff like this wouldn't stand a chance if Google didn't have such a near-monopoly position. For the sake of the open internet, please switch to a different browser. IMO, Firefox is best*, but even something chromium based is probably fine. Just not Google Chrome. * On desktop - Firefox is a bit weaker on Android, with an extemely limited set of extensions (but still better than Chrome with no extensions) and just a Safari wrapper on iOS, with no extensions. (But sync works everywhere!) (I posted something similar in a different thread recently but I think it bears repeating.)
- cft 3y agoI use Edge. I think Edge is a realistically viable competitor, especially with Bing chat sidebar. It's also faster than Safari on MacOS
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's just exchanging one demon on your shoulder for another.
- slondr 3y agoEdge is just chromium. It is not a competitor.
- mrweasel 3y agoWith few exceptions the browser market is a lot like the Volkswagen Group. They design key components and depending on market segment they slap a Audi, VW or Skoda label on it, do a few tweaks to the look and feel and add a few features that they know that a particular segment wants. Under "chrome" it's a Volkswagen.
- dillydogg 3y agoI think the person you are responding to would say that edge is just another chromium skin. It doesn't exactly relieve Google's monopoly on browser technology
- irusensei 3y ago> Websites funded by ads require proof that their users are human and not bots...Social websites need to differentiate between real user engagement and fake engagement...Users playing online games want assurance that other players are adhering to the game's rules. The whole ad based web industry is really desperate to authenticate humans from bots isn’t?
- EvanAnderson 3y agoIt’s not authenticating humans, though— just sanctioned software and hardware. There’s no reason you couldn’t hook a bot up, via video feed and inputs, to an “attestable” device and have it use the Internet that way. This just raises the bar on bot sophistication. In another thread somebody talked about pointing a camera at a phone and using a robot “finger” to interact with it. If anything WEI would make that easier because you’re not getting CAPTCHAs anymore! You’re a “human”, after all.
- AlexandrB 3y agoThis is also how sophisticated game cheating systems work[1]. No amount of rootkit-like anti-cheat will help when you're cheating with a capture card and emulated mouse and keyboard. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-computer-vision-auto-aim-that-works-on-any-game/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...
- boesboes 3y agoNah, they want us to think they do. But bot clicks are clicks and can be charged. I read somewhere that 80-90% of facebook ad clicks were bots. That seems inline with the traffic I see on some commercial website I work on. Most traffic is from bots, crawlers, scanners and 'security researchers'. Sometimes I pick up on actual fraud, like 'affiliate marketing' traffic 'boosters' that just result in someone clicking through a banner, making and order and not paying. 200 times in a day. Nobody cares, as long as the stats look good
- SgtBaker 3y agoYou really shouldn't be using Chrome anyway at this point.
- stevage 3y agoIf this gets up, you may not have a choice.
- nubinetwork 3y agoGoogle can't be trusted with ads. I've seen 3 ads today pretending to be Macy's and Bed Bath & Beyond, that were actually from Hong Kong, as well as the fake Mr Beast ads are back on YouTube. I won't even get into the borderline porn Queen's Blade ads.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoYouTube shows ads for investment advice scams. I just don't know how this is possibly conceived as ok, or how they can possibly justify trying to block ad-blockers - I consider ad-blockers as a more important security barrier than a virus scanner - that's been the case for me going on a decade.
- yeputons 3y ago> Attesters will be required to offer their service under the same conditions to any browser who wishes to use it and meets certain baseline requirements. I'm slightly suspicious this won't work in any way, but I'm not exactly sure why... Maybe because "will be required" is a huge non-technical issue that has to be resolved separately in non-technical means.
- nextlevelwizard 3y agoHow does this prevent ad-blocking? If website you visits asks you to confirm that you are a human user from some 3rd party API isn't that same as requiring captcha? You can still have browser extensions that filter the ads away after the website sends you the final HTML, right?
- stevage 3y ago>You can still have browser extensions Not if there's only one browser that you're allowed to use, and it's owned by the world's largest advertising company.
- nextlevelwizard 3y agoHow can you prevent modifications of memory when the software is running on hardware I own? Also what would be the benefit for other companies to agree to have their customers be vetted by Google run API that excludes portion of customers?
- hhjinks 3y agoThe point of attestation is to verify the integrity of your execution environment. With a "compromised" execution environment, access to websites could be blocked. Presumably, the attestation process would send a fingerprint of your browser configuration to the attester, who would then be able to see whether you're using "compromised plugins," and deny you access by not attesting your browser. There might be ways to filter away the ads after they've been served, such as memory manipulation, but the problem can't be solved with a plugin anymore, as browser attestion could let websites deny you access altogether if you use a plugin they don't like.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago> Websites funded by ads require proof that their users are human and not bots. Half the web is bots. And it's essential. Scrapers and bots give machine access to the internet.
- liendolucas 3y agoDo you know what puzzles me most? How can software engineers work on something like this? Don't those paid engineers or involved ones have the balls or dignity to walk away? I'm just wondering how they would feel about this (if they feel anything at all). I mean, if I'd be in such a position and asked to push something like this I'd have walked away on the spot, no matter what you offer me. No one at Google is standing up against this? I really hope that if this ever sees the light of the day, somehow in the end this backfires badly on them.
- o1y32 3y agoJust look around in this thread you can find people defending Google. It is not hard to think an engineer would actually want to work on this themselves.
- tekla 3y agoThey get paid lots of money.
- liendolucas 3y agoBut surely those folks can walk away and put in their CV that they quit because they were in charge of implementing one of the worst ideas the history of internet has seen so far. Wouldn't you hire someone that puts that in their resume?
- gabereiser 3y agoPeople don't work for the dignity, they work for the paycheck. As long as people are willing to pay others more for doing this than saving the internet, it will continue the trend. Lashings will continue until morale improves.
- liendolucas 3y ago> People don't work for the dignity, they work for the paycheck. I'm sorry but I don't believe that. I do understand that line of thought if you are in a very complicated personal/financial situation but you're stating that the only driver is money, which is clearly wrong...
- poulpy123 3y agoI sometimes go on the web without adblocks, and it would be a nightmare
- Havoc 3y agoInstead of ads in an open internet content eco system google wants in the content to exist in their controlled ad eco system. If they pull this inversion off it’ll move us significantly towards death of the free open internet as we know it.
- Greenpants 3y agoGoogle is checking through Opinion Rewards whether users can watch a certain advertisement video. On Android I'm using the Adguard DNS and their ad video wouldn't load twice. This occurred last week and fits this article to a tee. I'm sure I'll get a new advertisement video soon which will load despite my Adguard DNS. That's how Google can confirm whether their ad-blocking-blocking works. Opinion Rewards is great not just for being able to get apps for 'free', but also to be one of the first to see what Google is researching.
- dist1ll 3y agoIs the attestation zero-knowledge? Or does the attestation carry metadata that can uniquely identify a device?
- JacobSeated 3y agoTechnically we do not need "proof" that our users are human, not even when using AdSense to monetize our websites. The only reason Google think we do is because they implemented AdSense incorrectly. E.g. Using an impractical and underpriced PPC model. If they used a fixed pricing model this would not be a problem, and fake clicks would not even be an issue.
- jefftk 3y agoHow does fixed pricing mean you don't need to care about bots? The site claims they get 1M visitors per day; should an advertiser believe them?
- nulbyte 3y agoNo, of course not. An advertiser should conduct do actual diligence, experiment, and find what works. I am reminded of a story of a retailer who adódnak l accidently stopped advertising online and so no adverse change in sales. While I can't find the exact one I have in mind, it seems this isn't rare. https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
- jefftk 3y agoIt depends what kind of advertising you're doing. For performance advertising, where you want someone to take an action right away (click an ad, complete a sale) not totally works. Performance advertisers are generally willing to deal with counterparties they don't trust at all because it's easy for them to see if they are getting their money work. On the other hand, most of the money in advertising today is in brand advertising. No one clicks through an ad for Ford or Coke and buys immediately. You can run experiments on these at a very coarse level, but that level is approximately "the English speaking internet". Which means brand advertisers are willing to pay far more if they know real people are seeing their ads. (I used to work in ads, but quit a year ago and have no plans to go back)
- danwee 3y agoGoogle engineers or Google managers/business units? I don't think regular engineers have the voice to drive these kind of things. Sure, engineers are the ones implementing it, but at the end of the day it needs the approval of management.
- suyash 3y agoThat's cheap argument to try to remove responsibility. Everyone who is part of this is responsible because they have a choice. It's like saying nuclear scientists is not responsible for making bombs that kills so many people, govt is responsible only who makes those decisions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 3y agoI remember AMP. If they push this through I'll be taking our business off Google. That would mean a lot of workflow changes but there is absolutely no way this gets a pass. Quitting Twitter was annoying and quitting Google will be a lot harder but I do believe that if you don't stand up against stuff like this that you're effectively part of the problem.
- anoncow 3y agoI keep reminding myself to uninstall Chrome from my phone and desktop.
- evnix 3y agoI did my part, my website shows "Not available on Chrome, Use a more modern and open browser instead... and some explainer text" if most of us Devs do this, this change would have no chance. What would be even nicer is If someone can build a JS file that the rest of us could include to show a hard blocking pop up just to show how the future web might look like, supported with a nice explanation and link to good videos, that would be nice too.
- bogwog 3y agoI think I might do that for my own sites lol
- no_time 3y ago>Google ensures that the tokens will not include unique identifiers Let me get this straight, so they want to establish "personhood" without attesting a unique ID to also preserve privacy. Then how will they prevent a single secure element attesting an entire FSB worth of fake internet users? I feel like these two goals are mutually exclusive. This is of course the least of my concerns. The whole thing should've been uprooted ages ago.
- 2d8a875f-39a2-4 3y agosome cognitive dissonance from that explainer github > "Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in." Nope, websites depend on the advertisers trusting them. WEI is solving a website vendor problem, not a user problem. > "The web page executing in a user's web browser" From a user perspective web pages "render" in the browser, not "execute". Vendors that want "execution" on a client machine should distribute a rich client app, where many OS platforms already support environment attestation. WEI is web page vendors wanting to have their cake and eat it.
- rpastuszak 3y agoIn practical terms, what’s the best think and individual can do to make this less likely to happen? I’ve been doing webdev for 20+ years, haven’t used chrome for the past few years besides using its inspector in Chrome canary. I’m content, I don’t feel like I miss it. I will try to convert my family to FF as I did in the past. But this makes me feel hopeless, unless there’s a strong legislative pushback (probably from the EU) or we break up the behemoth… It’s the first time I can’t see a way out of this.
- kklisura 3y agoLet's say WEI is all good - we trust Google and all of the people involved and it gets passed and implemented. Later on, by gradually changing it, it becomes all of what we feared it will become. How do we get back at that point? Can we even get back to a state before it? How would we fight against it? Do we just stop surfing the web as way of protest? Obviously that won't work. There's an immense power disbalance about this and any privacy limiting or freedom limiting features. Once they go through, there's no coming back from it.
- usrbinbash 3y agoThis is very simple, really: Any browser that implements this, I will not use. So any webpage that requires that API to be present, I will not be able to use. If your webpage requires this, I will not be a user of your website. It is really that simple.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoA hobbyist I found that sells vintage computer replicas uses Wix to host his site. My older machines with an older Safari (OS has peaked, Safari version capped out on those devices) are apparently disallowed on Wix sites. "Your browser is too old..." No doubt Wix is doing this for my own protection. I can definitely see the majority of the web going in a similar direction.
- memetomancer 3y agoSounds great in theory but I'd suspect that you'd cave pretty soon after your bank adopts this (or whatever essential site/service you aren't considering is captured here).
- usrbinbash 3y ago> after your bank adopts this There are a lot of banks, and jumping ships and reopening my account elsewhere is always a choice.
- prakhar897 3y agoI use Brave Browser and Brave Mobile. They started out to tackle these kinds of issues but they've adopted chromium since. Should I ditch them for Firefox?
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoThis is such a good idea for the next stage of the surveillancification of the Internet that it could possibly get Google, if they go ahead with attempting to implement this, in the very-good-books with the increasingly paranoid, control-freakish western governments. It will voluntarily segregate the happy conformists into their safe, normalised, walled-garden whilst the, likely technically proficient types that can wrangle hardware and software and therefore the single most dangerous group of individuals on the planet, non-conformists are easily identified by their continued participation in the wild-west-web of yore, eschewing, or at least not exclusively joining, the new utopia. Maybe we'll get back the web we keep saying we miss, with Eternal September nicely walled-off, but maybe it'll be a case of be careful what you wish for, because now it'll put us on watch lists, not because law enforcement understand the technology any better, but because they've got their own tools to build what they think is a better mousetrap. And law enforcement love their own tools.
- DarkmSparks 3y agoBeen using vivaldi on mobile for about 8 months now. Firefox/Safari on the Linux box/Macbook Chrome is dead to me, it started getting unstable about 12 months ago, not looked back since I ditched it.
- Garvi 3y agoI wonder how future historians are going to look back at this. The vast majority of people letting themselves be forced into wasting a portion of their lives on adds make me pessimistic for the survival of this race. Might seem like hyperbole, but I'm not talking about ads anymore, I'm talking about submissiveness.
- jeroenhd 3y agoPeople get mad at Google for implementing something Apple already implemented up to a point, that the economic driving force behind the free internet is asking for. It's a shit idea but honestly Google isn't even the bad guy here. Everyone is mad at the theoretical anti-adblock usage of theoretical websites. Be mad at those websites instead! Almost every free service out there runs on ads. If you pay your subscriptions, you probably won't even notice these shitty websites. There is exactly one group of people who will be hit the worst, and that's people who want everything for free with no ads and no requirement to provide anything of value in return. Guess what? No business can operate like that! Google is in some very deep shit if the alleged ad fraud stories are true. They need to be able to verify that people are human or they will collapse under lawsuits. We wouldn't need this crap if we, as a society, hadn't decided that we want everything for cheap or for free. Remote attestation can actually be valuable (i.e. for company owned devices entering a corporate intranet) but the fact everyone fears getting locked out of everything is a symptom of a much bigger problem with the internet today, one we're probably not willing to face. I'm all for killing the big tech giants and bringing back competition, but Google quickly going bankrupt will be disastrous. Youtube and about fifteen years of human existence will disappear from the internet, billions of phones will stop receiving updates, gmail.com will disappear and businesses all over the world will be ruined as a result. Even if this falls through, Google will still need to validate real browsers somehow. Expect CAPTCHAs for every news article instead. Maybe solve some puzzles before you can comment. This is their user friendly, unobtrusive attempt to get this tech through; if it fails, I expect their next attempt to be much worse. The web may very well end up being like browsing through Tor.
- Drakim 3y ago> It's a shit idea but honestly Google isn't even the bad guy here. Everyone is mad at the theoretical anti-adblock usage of theoretical websites. Be mad at those websites instead! Absolutely not, Google is the driving force giving them that power, knowing it's very ripe for that sort of abuse. Google is experimenting with detecting adblockers on YouTube. Don't for a moment think that the fact that this can be used to stop adblocking is lost on google. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that was secretly one of the main drivers behind it all.
- merricksb 3y agoEarlier discussions: Web Environment Integrity API Proposal – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 (618 points/4 days ago/442 comments) Google Chrome Proposal – Web Environment Integrity – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999 – (117 points/7 days ago/94 comments) Web Environment Integrity Explainer – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36785516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36785516 (87 points/6 days ago/44 comments)
- jvolkman 3y agoAnd related: Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862494 - (530 points/1 day ago/398 comments)
- Brian_K_White 3y agoAs has been pointed out, Apple's captcha-skipper is rather different.
- jsnell 3y agoWhere was that pointed out? To me it seems that they are not all that different on any level[0]. Not in terms of expressed goals, nor in terms of technical capabilities for capacity to exclude minority browsers or operating systems if misused. The only real difference was PATs being launched with a very specific PR spin of "fewer captchas". [0] https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2023-07-25-web-integrity-api-vs-private-access-tokens/ https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2023-07-25-web-integri...
- can16358p 3y agoWe should really start a movement to de-Google-ize our entire lives. I personally avoid any Google products and services when possible. That evil company has grown simply too big and we need to take its power down. Now.
- codedokode 3y agoThis will also speed up separation of Internet into national networks. American websites won't trust attestation from Russian browsers, and vice versa, Russian sites won't trust American browsers.
- encody 3y agoI'm doing my part! I added a "try Firefox" message to my website that appears only on Chromium-based browsers. https://geeklaunch.io/ https://geeklaunch.io/
- onion2k 3y agoThere's an elephant in the room. That is the question "Is internet content so good that people will consume it even if they're forced to see adverts?" Google thinks it is. I don't. The impact of this tech will only shrink audiences when their ad blockers stop working. It won't persuade people to carry on watching or reading with adverts switched back on.
- honeybadger1 3y agoFirstly, Google's notion of a trust-privacy trade-off seems to be an oversimplified solution to a complex problem, which in effect could mean a bargain with the devil. Yes, the digital world needs more trust, but to gain that at the expense of privacy, strikes me as a hasty solution which smacks of Orwellian overtones. Would you trust a lock that promises to protect your home but allows the locksmith uncontrolled access? The possibility that this is a thinly veiled attempt at introducing Digital Rights Management into web pages is a concern that should not be dismissed lightly. This may well be a sly effort to muzzle ad-blocking capabilities, thus reducing the web to a cacophonous bazaar of incessant advertisements, a capitalist wet dream at the expense of user experience. I echo the critics who view this as a potential threat to the open web. Furthermore, the question of who controls the "attesters" is a serious concern that evokes dystopian scenarios of a digital oligarchy. In a world increasingly reliant on digital verification, the potential to manipulate trust scores essentially hands over the reins of the digital world to a select few. This, far from enhancing trust, could potentially further erode it. The ambiguity surrounding browser modifications and extensions further fuels suspicions. In its guise of ensuring legitimacy, the proposal seems to conveniently overlook the diversity and customization that has been a hallmark of the digital world, creating an environment of dubious one-size-fits-all integrity. Moreover, the vague explanation of the enforcement and establishment of baseline requirements does little to allay fears of vendor exclusion. What are these requirements and who indeed gets to decide them?
- Arnt 3y agoI wish people wouldn't say stupid things. For example, elsewhere on this page someone is saying that Google is trying to do [x], where x is something that would kill one of the main apps on Samsung's phones. Of course Samsung would submit an antitrust complaint and win. Assuming Samsung wouldn't is stupid. I really wish people would put forward their arguments without such stupidity. It reminds me of the Microsoft criticism of 10-20 years agom, when there was so much stupid criticism of Micosoft that it devalued the substantive, intelligent criticism. Lots of people assumed that the substantive criticism was just more ranting, and ignored it. </digression>
- nologic01 3y agoAs year after year passes and nothing happens on the anti-trust front it is clear that the do-no-evil embrace of the boa constrictor will end in a fatal bone crushing event that no alternative vision of technology could survive. The open minded tech comminity can move mountains but this is now bigger than a mountain. At this point about the only slingshot manouevre that could help us escape this fate is a reasonably resourced sovereign entity fully underwriting an open source stack (desktop, mobile, browser, cloud, fediverse) and nudging / seeding a mass user base by making it mandatory for engaging with public functions, paying taxes, transacting is sovereign money etc. Effectively by declaring a tech "liberation" war. I don't give this scenario high odds of happening but hopefully not every sovereign is captured. History is not made by the dazed and confused indulging in debilitating apathy.
- fooyc 3y agoNot only adblocking, but also crawling. They want to kill competition.
- xnx 3y agoI'm surprised we haven't seen more soft/semi DRM-like behavior through WASM+canvas.
- goodjob7 3y ago[dead]
- friend_and_foe 3y agoWhy the fuck we let an ad company have any say whatsoever in web standards is beyond me. Of course they want to turn the web into a billboard. If they could they'd beam ads directly into your dreams. The answer to this, and anything else proposed by google until they can prove good faith, is "no".
- seaghost 3y agoSeems like we’ll have to regulate this space by forcing companies to make their web apps and websites to working in Firefox.
- 4oo4 3y agoFriendly reminder to don't just comment and complain, contact your antitrust authority today: US: - https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation - antitrust@ftc.gov EU: - https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en - comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.eu UK: - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition-or-market-problem https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition... - general.enquiries@cma.gov.uk India: - https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/ https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/ - https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atd https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atd Canada: - https://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/frm-eng/GH%C3%89T-7TDNA5 https://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/frm-e...
- lamontcg 3y agoI'll probably still use an ad blocker and those sites can just lock me out. Bonus points if a search engine like Kagi automatically filters out sites for me that block ad-blockers.
- dahwolf 3y agoI have a counter proposal. Us humans should fully embrace this and then work to become even more useless than a bot. We're going to maximize watching and clicking ads without every buying a damn thing again. We never convert, making online advertising pointless.