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Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

• saagarjha 3y ago
  Google used to be cool and now it’s not. Wonder which companies of today will end up completing the cycle tomorrow?
  • TAForObvReasons 3y ago
    > You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain
  • mg 3y ago
    Google was made possible by a platform shift: From desktop apps to websites. First they positioned themselves very early in the web user experience: After the user turned on their Dell computer, booted Windows and started Internet Explorer, the next step was to use Google. Then they moved one step closer to the user by building their own browser: Chrome Then they moved even closer to the user by building their own OS: Android Then they moved even closer to the user by building their own computer: The Pixel Phone The question is what the next platform shift could be. And if the big players will miss it so that a new player can emerge. And if there will be a new player which is as smart and driven as the Google founders.
    • gbin 3y ago
      Ad Chromebooks too.
    • worrycue 3y ago
      Frankly, I think it’s less “moving closer to the user” and more just securing control over the path users use to get to their service. Chrome was made to prevent whoever controls the browser from blocking users’ access to Google. Android was created because they were afraid Apple would block them on mobile. All tech companies do this kind of positioning. Apple made Apple Maps to make sure Google Maps isn’t the only choice on iOS fearing Google could withdraw Google Maps and hurt the utility of iOS devices - at least in the short term. It’s why Apple made Safari and enforces it as the only browser on iOS. Apple learnt relatively early the dangers of being dependent on another company, https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt
    • izacus 3y ago
      The next platform shift are obviously DRM locked closed app platforms like TikTok, ChatGPT, Meta ecosystem and Apple apps. No APIs, no freedom. Everyone is very actively working on making the browser dead and serving you content exclusively via corporate controled apps on locked platforms. You can kill off Chrome, but the result isn't going to be a renessaince of Firefox, but a move into your content being only available on locked iPhone.
      • skydhash 3y ago
        > Everyone is very actively working on making the browser dead and serving you content exclusively via corporate controled apps on locked platforms. Aka cable box.
    • tannhaeuser 3y ago
      Google was made possible by US antitrust turning a blind eye towards Google's acquisition of DoubleClick and YouTube. Considering Alphabet is dominating both search and ads and also offers services via searches, the EU commission already hinted at a breakup as a viable measure to lead the web out of its misery. [1]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_3207 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
      • mg 3y ago
        Google's market cap was already at over $100B with billions in revenue and hundreds of millions in profits when it bought DoubleClick and YouTube. So while those were big aquisitions (Around $3B and $2B) they only accelerated the process of Google turning into the web's central player. It was already set in motion before the aquisitions.
        • rwmj 3y ago
          The large market cap is exactly why they shouldn't have been allowed to acquire either. (Same goes for Facebook with Instagram, Whatapp).
  • ender1235 3y ago
    Remember when they use to say “Don’t be evil”?
    • colordrops 3y ago
      crazy that they just unashamedly removed it.
      • IshKebab 3y ago
        I doubt their motivation was "now we want to be evil". Probably more like "evil isn't actually well defined and people keep pointing to this and having dumb arguments about it".
        • wds 3y ago
          Thankfully, there is an apt definition for evil nowadays: Google.
        • colordrops 3y ago
          That doesn't sound like a typical corporate thought process. There is plenty of cognitive dissonance around logos and mottos and whatnot by corporations, and unless it affects the bottom line, they won't do anything about it.
        • saagarjha 3y ago
          Ok but people still do that.
        • account42 3y ago
          Hint: If there are "dumb discussions" about whether what you are doing is evil, it probably is.
          • IshKebab 3y ago
            Do you really think the world is neatly divided into good and evil?
  • offices 3y ago
    Are there any cool companies left? I think consumers and employees have become more cynical. - OpenAI is already 'evil'. - Apple has staying power but I still wouldn't consider it cool anymore. - Likewise Tesla.
    • NoobPretender 3y ago
      What did OpenAI do? I know they refused to share their proprietary model even though they're called "Open", is this what you're referring to?
      • progbits 3y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35960125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35960125 Regulatory capture attempts to prevent others from releasing actually-open models.
        • NoobPretender 3y ago
          Thanks! I wasn't aware of this, sounds like a dystopic horror story in the making :|
• TekMol 3y ago
  As I understand it, Google wants to add some signal to http requests which tell the server that the user is using a system made from some specific software. For example an unaltered stock Android phone. What would be the one-sentence technical explanation of how Google wants to achieve this?
  • ohgodplsno 3y ago
    Every request first goes through "trusted attesters" (read: Google and pretty much Google alone) along with some information about your device (hardware information, browser data, executable hash, etc) for them to sign it and decide whether or not you're legit. See the Play Integrity API on Android for similar implementations.
    • Buttons840 3y ago
      So there's some hardware level support for this? Could you man-in-the-middle the connection and alter the message to say whatever needs to be said to convince the other computer that my computer is working the way it expects?
      • danielheath 3y ago
        Not without a machine key signed by a trusted (by google) manufacturer - which is held in the secure enclave, so you can’t just read it from your machine.
      • ohgodplsno 3y ago
        If they intend to copy the Play Integrity API, it indeed has different levels of attestation, going from software "should be alright" to hardware "actively signed in a secure enclave that the user will never have access to". >Could you man-in-the-middle the connection and alter the message to say whatever needs to be said to convince the other computer that my computer is working the way it expects? If you're willing to break modern cryptography for that to happen, sure. Also, requests include a hash and a timestamp to prevent replay attacks and delayed attacks too. So you better crack that cryptography _fast_
• verisimi 3y ago
  Google have long been a trojan horse for corporate and governmental interests. This was clear with the approach they took with rss - make a fantastic product to draw in lots of users, then kill it as rss disintermediated the web, with little scope for google to direct you to where they want you to go. I suppose they told us what they are when they scrapped their "don't be evil" motto.
• dotancohen 3y ago
  The article applies this terrific Doctrow quote about Secure Computing to WEI: > Should your computer be able to be compelled to tell the truth, even when you would prefer that it lie on your behalf? Should there be a facility in your computer that you can’t control that other people can remotely trigger? It is an apt application of the quote, and a fundamental question that is likely based on culture and each persons or organizations past experience with abusive overlords. I personally opposed it.
  • komali2 3y ago
    Doctorow demonstrably knows more about this, and has thought about this, than me, but to me the answer seems somewhat straightforward: > Should your computer be able to be compelled to tell the truth In the context of the soldered chip that "can't be removed" that can report the "truth" of the kernel etc, the answer to me is a simple, "it's impossible to know if the computer is telling the truth or not." Go to defcon once and you'll know this as true as well. No matter what, there's always a way in. There's always a hack. The harder you make it to hack, the more motivated those crazy people at defcon will be to break it. > Should there be a facility in your computer that you can’t control that other people can remotely trigger? "Other people" will never be "just the people you want." It will always include criminals, stalkers, and authoritarian governments. So the answer is a simple, "no."
    • alex7734 3y ago
      > No matter what, there's always a way in. There's always a hack. The harder you make it to hack, the more motivated those crazy people at defcon will be to break it. Absolutely, but I don't want to have to use 0days like a criminal or to open up a TPM chip in an $1M electron microscope just to have my PC render webpages the way I want it to (without ads that is).
    • tremon 3y ago
      I think the importance of the quote is not in the answer, it's about how to frame the problem.
  • rvnx 3y ago
• zoom6628 3y ago
  I lived in china and put effort into de-googling my phone. Now I’m back in the open world and seems need do all over again. Must be a biz opp to run a proxy that strips everything google from pages and web communications. I would pay a few $/month to not be farmed without consent.
  • komali2 3y ago
    No need to proxy, you can just use https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/. Add a pihole to strip it from other devices and non-browser web traffic.
    • robin_reala 3y ago
      Using a browser powered by Google’s technology stack is hardly deGoogling.
      • Timwi 3y ago
        I don't really know much about how Brave is made, but you make it sound like they're using proprietary Google libraries, whereas I was under the impression that it was built from open-source software. If I'm right, the fact that this software originally came from Google is immaterial. If it's open source, Brave have full control over what it does and Google has zero.
        • robin_reala 3y ago
          Brave uses Chromium: an open source project controlled by Google. They can submit patches back to Google, but if Google don’t want to take them they don’t have to integrate them. So that leaves Brave with three options: they can take Google’s Chromium as is and focus on the browser interface potentially flipping a few config switches, they can maintain their own set of patches and update over time, or they can fork and go it alone. So far they’re hovering between options one and two. The closer they get to three the less influence Google has but the more it costs Brave. At the moment they’re not being particularly courageous with reducing their Google alignment.
• smitty1e 3y ago
  Stipulate that Google itself has noble intent at the moment. There is zero control over the future. That is, we don't have to ascribe malice to Google while running away from this potentially evil mechanism.
• ldehaan 3y ago
  [dead]
• c0l0 3y ago
  In 2012, I interviewed at Google Ireland for an SRE position. I ended up not taking the job due to family issues, but I somewhat regretted having missed the opportunity to tackle Google-sized problems and make FAANG-sized money for a few years after. This feeling has ceased entirely in the meantime, due to what Google has become, and how its understanding of its role in the world seems to have shifted. Or maybe its true corporate nature has only become more apparent? I am not sure - but I was a firm believer that Google was a force of good in the corporate landscape of the 00s, and I am fully convinced it is not any more. It actually makes me sad, and I am afraid of the damage it will end up doing to the places (the 'net) and communities (most of the FOSS world) I love.
  • stjohnswarts 3y ago
    They used to be innovative and forward looking and send to be having fun at contributing new tech. Under Pichai they seem to only want to lock in their position, kill all competitors, convert the WWW to GWWW
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's also been a massive boost to FOSS as well. I don't think Google is a single entity with a true nature. It's just people deciding things. Sometimes we get VP8 open sourced, a world-level value adding move. Sometimes we get them running an experiment whose intentions should've been better articulated.
    • rvnx 3y ago
      Some gifts along the way like AMP aka "Better internet"
    • JeremyNT 3y ago
      Certainly, there are many incredibly talented and passionate programmers there. These people want to make interesting things and many of them want to share them with the world. The company has gotten to where it is by being an exciting place to work for these people and supporting their endeavours. But let's not fool ourselves, Google at the end of the day is still an ad company. So while we can appreciate what they've contributed using this approach, we can never ignore the fact that ultimately business priorities will always trump everything else, which means they can use their creations against us on the turn of a dime.
• Animats 3y ago
  It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup. It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition. - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more. - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites. - Analytics - services to web sites. - Cloud - the money-losing data center service. Probably gets sold to AWS or Hurricane Electric. - Android - phones and similar devices - Chrome - browsers - YouTube - streaming content. Probably gets sold to Netflix or AT&T or Comcast. - Waymo - self-driving cars. Probably gets sold to a car company. - Alphabet - all the other stuff. Now, some of these have conflicting interests. That's a good thing. With Chrome separated from Google and Doubleclick, and forced to fight for market share, it's not in Chrome's interest to prevent blocking ads from DoubleClick or Google. Google wants people to see ads on search pages, while Doubleclick wants people to leave the search site and see ads elsewhere. Now there's competition. Antitrust action against Google is already underway. The State of Texas and several state attorneys general have a case pending.[1] There are other cases.[2] All these cases benefit from Google's move to entrench their monopoly by technical means. So make lots of noise politically about that. It's quite likely to make Google dump this proposal, on the advice of their antitrust lawyers. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-05/google-antitrust-suit-over-ad-tech-sent-back-to-texas-court https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-05/google-an... [2] https://www.lanierlawfirm.com/google-antitrust-lawsuits-explained/ https://www.lanierlawfirm.com/google-antitrust-lawsuits-expl...
  • DeathArrow 3y ago
    That's wishful thinking. Politicians will never break up Google since they benefit from it.
    • caesil 3y ago
      Fundamentally, Big Tech is an outsized part of what sets America's economy apart. Breaking up any of them would potentially be a footgun.
      • 3y ago
• nullc 3y ago
  Your computing device is your agent, more than any doctor, priest, or lawyer-- you share greater intimacies with it, and you have far less ability to go about an ordinary life without access to one. Your computers mediate an increasing share of your interactions with other people, with the world at large. You need one to communicate, to obtain essential services. You take it into your home, into your bedroom. It should be required to act in your best interests and it certainly should not against your best interests. This shouldn't be an unusual demand or even a demand at all-- it should be table stakes. Even back when the concept of Free Software had just become an identifiable thing people advocated it in terms of respecting the user. But for a long time the disrespect was largely banal-- rent seeking, over priced, indifference to features or bugs that matter to you, rules that benefit the author but didn't care about the user's needs. The fact that software could actively and intentionally work against its users wasn't a surprise-- the freedom to inspect, modify, and share the results answers those risks too, at least in theory. But back then it wasn't a common problem. Somehow software and systems that actively betray their users became common, even normalized. And in large part it seems most people never noticed.
• skybrian 3y ago
  This is attributing intentions to Google when it's unclear what they're going to do. Probably even unclear to them. Not all anti-fraud measures are DRM. If "holdout sets" get implemented then it can't be used as DRM, because it will randomly fail. What we know now is that they wanted to run an experiment to gather some data. Since it's in Chromium, they needed to explain it, and they explained it poorly.
  • ogn3rd 3y ago
    It's not unclear. They "lost" 22 Billion due to ad blockers.
    • midoridensha 3y ago
      That's nothing. I actually lost a trillion dollars just now. Apple is worth about $1T, and because Apple and its shareholders didn't simply gift me their entire company, I've now lost $1T. And that's just a drop in the bucket for money I've lost in the last few minutes!
  • devsda 3y ago
    Holdout sounds like it is explicitly added to ward off any criticisms insinuating DRM. If a server is not denying access for clients with no valid attestation then what exactly are the servers gaining from implementing WEI? CAPTCHAs also reasonably prove that the user is a human and legitimate but not all captcha challenges are solveable by humans in one go. Businesses have denied access for those failures and they just repeat the challenge until the captcha is solved successfully. If the failures are less per client they can easily be treated as tradeoff against security. What's stopping websites from doing the same with WEI? They can always deny access and repeatedly request attestation until a positive reply comes. This is acceptable for those "attested" clients where the failures are random and within an upper bound. But a client without attestation can always be denied or they can be shown different limited content altogether. In both the cases the unapproved clients are at a disadvantage.
    • hurutparittya 3y ago
• rplnt 3y ago
  Google might have pretended to stood for something, but they have been an evil corporation since they have been a corporation. That's what corporations do by design. One relevant example is that they've been doing the "only for ie5+" with their services for 10+ years now. They killed most of their browser competition not by having a good product, but by having or buying up good services that they used to force chrome onto users - voluntarily (billions worth of advertisements) or not (lies about compatibility, performance or outright blocking other UAs).
  • worrycue 3y ago
    That’s not how I remembered it. Chrome really was a good browser and I would argue is still a good browser (for now). IE got displaced by Firefox’s predecessors because MS got caught napping - they disbanded the IE team thinking they have won. Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome as Google went crazy making it faster and faster. Firefox fell behind often enough that Chrome managed to take almost all of its market share. I’m not happily with Chrome’s dominance, and Google’s abuse of its market position, but it was a good product for most of its life span.
    • maccard 3y ago
      > Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome as Google went crazy making it faster and faster. I disagree - if that was the case then people would be switching back to Firefox now. Firefox got outcompeted by chrome by Google adding a "works better in chrome" button to their home pages.
      • worrycue 3y ago
        Some people do. I switched back and forth. But most people are “low frequency” switchers. Chrome is ahead often enough that most people stick with them.
      • TheCoelacanth 3y ago
        Also by paying a bunch of black-hat marketers to use malware to trick people into installing Chrome unintentionally.
• Figs 3y ago
  I wonder if Google has considered how this technology can be used against themselves? If WEI is deployed, we ought to use it to lock out Googlebot!
  • vasachi 3y ago
    Weeeeeeell, Googlebot can just lie about itself, no?
  • mike_hearn 3y ago
    You can already lock out Googlebot because it respects robots.txt and its IP ranges are documented. It's very hard to "turn the tables" on companies when it comes to remote attestation because companies rarely directly lie to consumers about the true nature of their operations. When they do they tend to end up like Sam Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes. That's why all the big cloud vendors support remote attestation of servers to clients: https://cloud.google.com/confidential-computing https://cloud.google.com/confidential-computing So not only do they want you to demand remote attestations from their servers but they even document how to do it and provide significant infrastructure support to do so. Not many people are using it though, and when they do it's usually to generate trust in non-tech firms running software on top of those clouds. Which is certainly a decent use case, but it's more like defense in depth than something existential for most companies. Whereas the inverse can be existential (multiplayer shooters without anti-cheat will rapidly become unplayable because so many players will lie to get ahead).
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  My conjecture is that Google just pretended to stand for freedom, when they were a smaller company and they needed goodwill to be able to build an empire. Now they don't need that goodwill anymore.
  • nness 3y ago
    The freedom Google stood for was also a trend of the time — tech start-ups were trying to break out in the burgeoning internet against established giants — and naturally the companies ideologies reflected that rebellion against the norm. They a few billion dollars later and you realise that morality and stakeholder profits can never be aligned...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• rapnie 3y ago
  We all let it come this far, because of how we treat the services Google provides: As nice free and helpful tools. Talking about "Chrome this and that" all the time we forget what that really means, namely: Using the strategic tools of the largest Advertising Agency in the world, that allows them to ever grow their dominance. Chrome, GMail and all that jazz all fit into a global-scale ad-tech framework to push shady ads and slurp in your PII for shady business. Google uses monopolies and oligopolies to force itself into your life. In other words.. Google is SHADY BUSINESS. And that should be the framing to spread about. Always repeating that Google is an advertising giant. Not some trustworthy biz. Zero integrity. So how can Chrome relate to integrity then? Is your Bank using Google's integrity foo? Give them a support call. Act like a noob and keep them busy for as long as possible with "It isn't working". Until they explain about Integrity + Chrome. Then comes the angry phase: "WHAT? Are you in bed with a SHADY advertising agency?? I thought you were a trustworthy bank."
  • jkingsman 3y ago
    > Give them a support call. Act like a noob and keep them busy for as long as possible with "It isn't working". I'm all for grassroots change, but I really don't think that doing this to Tier 1 support staff is going to effect any real change. With all love to my helpdesk folks, what matters is ticket closure metrics and call duration -- an emotional outburst isn't going to change a thing.
    • abwizz 3y ago
      seems like an emotional outburst is not the worst way to have a long call with no actionable outcomes. my sympathies for the call staff thou
    • drchaos 3y ago
      "I also have an account with xyz and there I don't have this problem" might be an effective addition.
  • amelius 3y ago
    > We all let it come this far, because of how we treat the services Google provides: As nice free and helpful tools. This is exactly what we need to change. "Free" services are never really free. You pay for them in the end, anyway, and doubly so. First with your data, then with your money. The free internet may be nice for some people, but we all pay the advertising tax in the products we buy. It would be much better if we banned this entire freemium pricing model and started paying for things like in the old days. It would solve a lot of problems.
• nathias 3y ago
  Google always stood for selling adds, there are no surprises in them wanting to cash in on their monopolies.
• timwaagh 3y ago
  Capitalisation of Almost Every Word Makes Me Sound Very Important.
  • jjgreen 3y ago
    It's called title case, rather common for titles, headlines, names of films and so-on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case
• ImHereToVote 3y ago
  The elephant in the room is the increase of interest rates. The free lunch of cheap money is over. Now corps have to make money by squeezing every rock for the last bit of water. My advice to everyone is to watch out, and be carefull. Look over the license changes over the incoming days to see how you might potentially be squeezed.
• moneycantbuy 3y ago
  one “side effect” of this would be enabling Google to effectively block ad-blocking. And, of course, plenty of people will insist that that’s not a side-effect, that’s the end goal.
  • meragrin_ 3y ago
    How would this block ad-blocking?
    • raxxorraxor 3y ago
      Google could stop certifying configurations with an ad-blocker. Of course they are the ones that want to be established as infrastructure to certify your client being "genuine" or not.
    • thefurdrake 3y ago
      Websites could choose to deny access to clients that attest to having adblocking addons installed.
      • meragrin_ 3y ago
        Point me to anything which would give websites access to that information via WEI. There is nothing. I have seen nothing except FUD. Aside from that, this only attests for the device. Ad-blockers can be external. This does nothing for external ad-blockers. Explicit non-goals for WEI: "Enforce or interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions." https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md#non-goals https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
        • thefurdrake 3y ago
          Oh. Hmm. That link needs to be passed around a little bit more. Whoops.
        • roywiggins 3y ago
• palrtyx 3y ago
  I suppose we have to start webrings again and ditch Google. Today they would be more feasible, since you can announce entry points on Twitter etc.
  • smackeyacky 3y ago
    The irony, I can taste it
• pjmlp 3y ago
  Anyone that ever belived into the "Do no evil" motto was only fooling themselves, companies only care about their profitability.
  • rc_mob 3y ago
    I bet $10 you once believed that motto yourself. of course you have long since changed and that is good
    • pjmlp 3y ago
      Great, because I am a grey dog, born in the 1970's, first generation after the Portuguese dictorship, still experienced the leftovers of it, and don't belive in giving human attributes to capitalist corporations. Where can I collect my $10?
• nikos3194 3y ago
  So at the end of the day Google are a full monopoly that can do what they want... Nothing new under the sun.
• cowl 3y ago
  It seems Everyone is taking for granted the claim that this is about DRM. The claim is that websites (not Google) will use this signal to allow or deny access but this is already possible with various means. Google or any other Browser vendor do not have a say on how websites use or misuse features. > There is a tension between utility for anti-fraud use cases requiring deterministic verdicts and high coverage, and the risk of websites using this functionality to exclude specific attesters or non-attestable browsers. This risk is already present and actually happening. What makes this not widespread is not that it is not possible (it is) but that it is unpopular. Websites that you are forced to use (many banks for example) do it every day and they get away it with it because you have no choice. Many articles are just reapeating the "DRM" claim without explaining how is this different, what does Google have to do with how websites choose to treat their users or what solution they would propose. It seems to me just protest for the sake of it because it's trendy to question every Google Initiative. And yes every Google Initiative must be questioned but I don't see any questioning here beside just parroting in article after article what someone identified as a potential misuse without any critical thought going into it. Might as well autogenerate the contents with AI already because the utility of all articles i have seen on this topic is the same, just rearrange words without adding anything to it.
  • choeger 3y ago
    > what does Google have to do with how websites choose to treat their users or what solution they would propose Google owns YouTube. Is it so hard to imagine that some product manager at YouTube counted the losses due to adblockers and asked a team in Chrome to prevent them?
    • cowl 3y ago
      Youtube can and in some measure is already doing it without this new API. If google wanted to be sneaky they can provide whatever data they want to Youtube alone without making it a public standard. you see how all of these fears are contorted reasoning because you want to try to find something wrong with the proposal because all fo your fears do not require this proposals and would be easier and with much less backlash without a public standard API.
• Tozen 3y ago
  > ...as companies become less innovative, rather than creating new useful things, they focus on extracting more value however they can, while simultaneously trying to stymie and hold off innovative upstarts. What makes them "extra" dangerous (or evil), in this this regard, is they have such broad reach and control over the Internet and tools people use in their daily lives that many have no idea to the extent of censorship, manipulation, spying, or damage that is being done. Any perceived rival, threat to their business, or to any of their products can be silenced, censored, or inhibited in ways few will ever know or realize was possible. And to the extent they can keep getting away with it, is likely the extent they will keep pushing their control and corruption.
• skilled 3y ago
  I find it staggering that so few media outlets have picked this story up. TechCrunch spends 80% of its time farming Elon Musk stories but won't lift a hand to promote a good fight. Are these news companies so entangled in the corporate world they can't risk taking a stand because it risks them losing access to real-time news? I don't really understand it so I am kind of guessing, but it is nonetheless strange.
  • pferde 3y ago
    A lot of tech media outlets are not much more than extension of tech companies' PR departments. This has been very obvious especially in videogame "journalism" for a while (refusal to cover negative stories and more importantly follow up on them, or blatantly using article templates provided in advance by the companies), but if you pay attention, it is quite widespread.
  • flyinghamster 3y ago
    > I find it staggering that so few media outlets have picked this story up. The media outlets are pushing for this. Hey, no more adblockers! I'm surprised they aren't running glowing testimonials of the new Google-overlord future.
    • skilled 3y ago
      Now that you put it that way, I guess it does make a lot of sense.
• bob1029 3y ago
  Back when I was working at Samsung, I had a manager who was absolutely convinced that google is an intelligence/CIA operation. At the time, I found it to be a mockable suggestion, and never really thought much beyond it. Seemed like harmless IT/nerd banter back then. About a decade later I started to reflect on what he said and began feel like I might have been working with a time traveler or other inside person. It really does spin in my head quite a bit. If you think about how much human information flows through Google's systems... how many of us have considered some other form of intention and motivation here?
  • m_rpn 3y ago
    It is safe to assume that every big internet/data/telco company from big nation states has some kind of relationship with national intelligence agencies, dating back from the 60s at least, if we just talk about the modern information age. Nothing strange or mind blowing really, for example Crypto AG, a famous swiss crypto vendor was secretly a joint USA-Germany operation from the 70s onward.
    • bob1029 3y ago
      Oh I absolutely agree wrt internet/telecom/utah datacenter panopticon/etc. For me the nuance is in the origins and ongoing leadership and effects on the consumer experience. The "Killed by google" phenomenon paints a darker picture in my mind. I start to read each google product as a folder in a CIA Sharepoint system - Only to be kept around until it is no longer valuable to the agency. Each with some sort of ulterior mission that seems ever-narrower in scope.
      • m_rpn 3y ago
        One thing is sure: Sharepoint is definitely a US government cyber weapon, judging by the damage it's doing worlwide XD.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• rejectfinite 3y ago
  Proton and Bitlocker and that MS SHIT always creeped me out. I work in IT so we have to use it but on an ideological level "Trusted computing" is weird. Feels like they want a console future where it is locked down af
  • pferde 3y ago
    Ding ding ding, that is the correct endgame the governments want. And it would have been achieved a long time ago if the FOSS movement did not appear. Unfortunately, all it did was postpone the inevitable, because most people prefer comfort over freedom.
• drpixie 3y ago
  This is DRM for browsers. Would you buy a computer from John Deer ... ?
• redbell 3y ago
  Is this the same company that, in its childhood, had the tagline: "Don't be evil"? [1] The beginning of the article summarizes why Google is no longer committed to its original motto, and It's sad to see such a dramatic change in the culture of the company. > first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. ______________________ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
• avereveard 3y ago
  google never stood for anything, do no evil was mostly marketing. 2010s https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/08/26/real-canadian-pharmacies-cost-google-500-million-dollars/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/08/26/real-canadian-ph... "we don't collet private data" https://europe.googleblog.com/2010/04/data-collected-by-google-cars.html https://europe.googleblog.com/2010/04/data-collected-by-goog... "ops we do" https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection... google wage fixing, all the way back from 2001 https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-seek-approval-for-324-5-million-wage-fixing-settlement/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-seek-ap... before that it's harder to search data, but you get the idea.
  • veave 3y ago
    Storing data from open networks is like recording people who are yelling.
    • avereveard 3y ago
      If I were to yell my name at the wind and you happened to be near and were to write it down, you'd still be in violation of privacy regulations.
• WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Do no evil may be good and all that, but a $100 is a $100.
• bartimus 3y ago
  "Do the right thing", Google
  • amelius 3y ago
    Do the right thing, Googlers.
• getoffmyyawn 3y ago
  To me it really seems like it is too late. I have the strong impression that the vast majority of people simply do not care and mostly don't even want to know. Most of the people I know are in this group. When they ask why I won't install the latest app they are playing with, they often cut me off before I even finish explaining. They seriously don't care about privacy, lock-in, loss of access to resources, right to repair, etc. Personally, I'm investing as much time as I can in learning the alternatives: Gemini, Fediverse apps, Linux phones, etc. That combined with having a "mainstream" laptop that is used only for banking and similar life critical services that has nothing else installed and otherwise stays turned off.
  • mandmandam 3y ago
    > They seriously don't care about privacy, lock-in, loss of access to resources, right to repair, etc. They care even less about this stuff than they do about plastic pollution, or systemic inequality and racism, or PFAS contaminating the world's water, or pesticides and runoff decimating biospheres. They don't care about corruption at the highest levels of government and justice, black sites and torture, or illegal wars for profit. It's impossible to care about everything that's going on. It's unreasonable to expect people to care or even know about everything, even if politics wasn't a wrestling show and corporate news wasn't enraging entertainment. And, most citizens are two paychecks away from destitution. Lobbyists, on the other hand, have full access to decision makers and a truck or two of cash, determined to make concrete specific changes. This is by design, and Google just take advantage of it the same way every other company does. Blaming 'people' for this is blaming the victim.
    • Aeolun 3y ago
      If I’m marginally informed there is no reason other people shouldn’t be. If they already have the phone all the information in the world is literally at their fingertips.
      • mandmandam 3y ago
        > If I’m marginally informed there is no reason other people shouldn’t be. That's not actually true though. That just shows a lack of empathy on your part. > If they already have the phone all the information in the world is literally at their fingertips. While that's sort of true, there's a mountain of propaganda and bullshit to wade through, with thin seams of truth. The education system doesn't prepare people for this, nor does our media, nor do our politicians or corporations. The wealthy who profit on our ignorance like things this way, and (hire people to) work very hard to keep things that way. So again, blaming the victim is missing the point.
• amelius 3y ago
  Another piece of evidence that consumers should not put blind trust in any company. Looking at Apple users here.
• renegat0x0 3y ago
  It reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine. They wanted to control your computer. Palladium, and other features also is about control. Remote attestation is about control. Embrace extend extinguish was about control and money. Since inception nobody said that IME was for the user. Nobody said that Palladium is for the user. Google arguments are all propaganda. Nicey nicey words for the people. Judging about the amount of recent pressure on open source, and encryption we are already toasted. Cyber resilience act, earn it act, patriot act, restrict act. It is all written using nice words, but I am interested in effect. It is all about crypto wars, and taking possession of your computer. About limiting anonymity and privacy using only arguments against it. Big companies already have monopoly. They can already shadow ban, ban users, decrease reach of comments, track users using fingerprinting, cookies etc. They can decide what is acceptable, what is not, what is a social norm, what is not, what is a conspiracy theory, and not. Why do they need also breaking the encryption, or force signed software? Why they require more control? Because they can. Corporations lobby for more power, they receive more power. Where is the limit? Government also only benefits from corporations accumulating more powah. I do not understand how people may think about how 'good' these things will bring, because on the scales there is something really terrifying - a Government that can spy on you without any problems, where you cannot hide. Through surveillance laundering, where government buys user data. Through censorship where government can moderate anything it wants to through hidden portals for the government [1]. Maybe the problem is that the western world never really experience communism. [1] https://reclaimthenet.org/new-zealand-government-facebook-content-takedown-portal/ https://reclaimthenet.org/new-zealand-government-facebook-co... By the way. I understand the difference between moderation and censorship
  • ftaghn 3y ago
    >They wanted to control your computer. Palladium, and other features also is about control That level of control was already achieved on mobile. Android is the wet dream that Microsoft had with palladium and failed to execute. I can't use my banking app on a degoogled phone. It requires an untempered, manufacturer provided rom, and it will not run on a rooted phone either. The thing is, the banking app is not a side toy for me to just check up my accounts or do bank transfers instead of using the website, it's the only tool the bank provides to allow for online payment validation. You /need/ the app to make online payments with my bank. No app, no using your credit card online at all. Want the app, need to live under google (or iOS, which is even more closed and disgusting). Palladium is real today.
• Aeolun 3y ago
  Pure irony that when you go to look at Tech Dirt, there’s first an intermediate page (maybe by cloudflare, maybe by some other provider) that first verifies your browser is secure.
• flagrant_taco 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion here for sure as I see enty of calls for regulation and antitrust suits, the easiest answer is for people to simply stop using Google products. Sure that's easier said than done given how much we depend on them today, but is it really harder than convincing the federal government to step in and break up companies that pay huge lobbying bills, understand how tech companies work in the first place, design new regulations to prevent this happening again, and sit waiting to scrutinize any acquisitions that may come from the break up? Call me naive, but I think if people really care they have a much better chance to avoid Google than the government has of actually fixing this on our behalf.
  • lxgr 3y ago
    You’re assuming a level of understanding of the market structure and technical details of browsers and web advertising that probably less than 5% of Chrome users possess.
    • flagrant_taco 3y ago
      Yeah for sure, but the solution to an uneducated populous isn't large governments and regulation. That's a bandaid at best, but it's never sustainable.
      • lxgr 3y ago
        If it was possible for everybody to be educated about everything, we'd indeed probably need neither regulators nor politicians. As much as I personally like discussing the economic and political impact of various web specifications – there are a lot of things happening in modern society, and everybody only has so much time and mental resources to care about every single one in detail.
        • flagrant_taco 3y ago
          That's more am argument for simplifying modern society in my opinion. If I think Google's latest antics are dangerous enough for society as whole to warrant government intervention, I first have to assume that the majority of people don't get it but would be opposed if only they better understood. What gives me the right to make that decision on their behalf? And if I don't know they would care, can I really push through my own intervention? Not to mention the assumption we have to make that government regulators actually do understand and can relate in an unbiased way with only consumers best interests in mind.
• meltyness 3y ago
  Hm don't they already do this with like, Widevine? This seems alarmist.
• alberth 3y ago
  Devils Advocate ... It's this about eliminating those annoying, and at times confusing, CAPTCHAs? 29% of all internet traffic is malicious bots [1]. Why is it a bad thing for browser makers to signal to websites that the party interacting with their website is a real human being or not? Why is there so much hate for what Google is doing with WEI, but I don't sense the same hate for Apple Private Access Tokens (PAT)? Isn't WEI just a response to Apple PAT? [1] https://radar.cloudflare.com https://radar.cloudflare.com
  • dogleash 3y ago
    >Devils Advocate ... "Devil's advocate" statements can be useful as a thought experiment in exploring a topic by generating something new that prompts others to make the counterargument explicit. There's a lot of articles and comments here flying around in the last few days trying to reify google's idea and explore the boundaries of the implications. When you raise one of the advertised positives, I don't feel like that's a novel point that prompts exploration of a new angle on the topic. >Why is it a bad thing for [google's pitch] /me gestures widely in the direction ongoing conversations and articles over the last few days If you don't care about everything discussed, you can just say you don't care.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• throw_m239339 3y ago
  Google stands for nothing but their bottomline. Thinking that private companies have "morals" is foolish at best. All the things Google claimed stood for was simply PR in a world where Microsoft used to be the bad guy. Same with all the ESG, DEI and whatever "social initiatives". It's PR. You shouldn't fall for that. Google can achieve horizontal integration since they own youtube, search and lead the Chromium project. They are "the web" and make money with ads so they are going to force you to watch these ads, nothing more.
• renegade-otter 3y ago
  I started skipping the top google matches for my searches since those are gamed to the tilt in some way, and are usually responsible for my computer fan kicking into overdrive because the ad code on the page is crushing the CPU harder than video encoding does.
  • rc_mob 3y ago
    Google should only be your backup search engine at this point. Use Kagi or DDG or anything else as your primary search engine.
• recursive4 3y ago
  You should be as comfortable running the (proposed) attestator on your machine as you are running anti-virus software. In thinking about it relative to anti-virus, I came across an insight: The Web Environment Integrity proposal isn't much different than requiring that, in order to receive an email, the sender both secures their machine with anti-virus and provides proof to you, the receiver, that the message in question is virus-free. Otherwise, without this proof, you won't accept the message. Metal detectors and the requirement to pass through one to enter certain, defined spaces are probably the physical analogy that people are most familiar with.
  • laniakean 3y ago
    In that analogy, who provides the antivirus? Can you only use antivirus from certain vendors? Does the company providing antivirus have motives(eg:-selling ads) other than securing your computer?
  • wzdd 3y ago
    I don't think this is a good analogy. The WEI proposal is different to anti-virus in many ways. The fundamental ones are: 1) WEI doesn't attest that your device isn't running malware, it attests that your device is running a particular set of software -- it is a positive filter, rather than a negative one. This means that you can't run your own software (if it's part of the WEI trust chain), even if you know it's not malware, without changing the attestation (and see the next point for why this isn't viable). 2) Because WEI doesn't have a way to prove that software is malicious or not, it instead requires you to trust the attestor (in a cryptographically secure way). In the usual case, this will mean trusting Google. This means that if I write my own attestor, there is no particular reason that people should trust what it says. On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons to trust what Google says, given that they wrote the software and certified the phone. The attestor model, because it relies on trust, is fundamentally biased towards organisations which you already are obliged to trust to some extent. The same arguments apply to metal detectors. This isn't about detecting metal (negative filter), it's about detecting approved clothing.
    • recursive4 3y ago
• TheCleric 3y ago
  I've been wary of Google for a while now, and this is further proof my wariness is justified. However, one thing I can't seem to kick is using Google search as a fallback. I use DuckDuckGo or Brave search for most of my searches, but half the time I have to add "!g" to the search to switch to Google to get actually useful results. Does anyone have any tips or tricks (or search engines I'm unfamiliar with) so I can break free? I know Bing is technically an option, but I'm under the impression it's not much better than Google (privacy wise) and their AI integration is off-putting.
  • buzzy_hacker 3y ago
    I use DDG and never feel the need to add !g, but if you do, try using !sp instead. Startpage takes Google’s results and proxies them.
    • TheCleric 3y ago
      > try using !sp instead. Startpage takes Google’s results and proxies them Ahh, this is an EXCELLENT tip.
  • monetus 3y ago
    Besides DDG, I find myself using phind.com if you haven't seen that yet.
  • ColinHayhurst 3y ago
    > Does anyone have any tips or tricks (or search engines I'm unfamiliar with) so I can break free? https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
  • unknownsky 3y ago
    I use Kagi and I only find myself switching to Google if I'm looking for local, up-to-the-minute information. Kagi maps is barely useful at all compared to Google Maps, at least at time of writing.
• gmerc 3y ago
  It turns out that when the growth stops, companies show their real face. The reason everyone in the world is praying infinite growth is this dynamic, people, companies are alike. You want to know if someone is truly a nice person - put them into a now growth situation for a while. Before that, it’s all talk.
  • sebastialonso 3y ago
    But is this a practical argument in any sense of the word? Don't have a reason to think you're a bad person, but if I abandon you in an island with weaker people, there's a high chance you'll end up eating them to survive. But you're not a bag person. In other words, there's a limit of what you can do in any context, and those limits are imposed by the context. Maybe it's easier to stop projecting our ideas of what "ought to be" into entities who inhabit a system in which those ideas don't have value, like for-profit businesses, no?
    • gmerc 3y ago
      for profit vs profit above all else, including planetary level destruction.
• sdfghswe 3y ago
  What did google "once stood for"? My understanding is that google tries to make money, everything else is brand marketing.
• lemper 3y ago
  to any Google engineers who read this message. if you have any love for open and free web, you can either get out of Google or change it from within. but let's face it, you are impotent if you want to do the latter.
• sam0x17 3y ago
  Google has evolved to a size and point where they really can't (and shouldn't) be trusted to manage their own vision and direction. Critical infrastructure like this should belong to and be beholding to the people.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  Let's be honest here. Most of what Google does these days goes against everything Google once stood for. The Google of today is a completely different company than the Google of yesterday.
• 2devnull 3y ago
  Just have to laugh at the headline. “What google once stood for” lol
• OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  Lol. I think I was a part of this story. In the early 2000s, I was one of those faceless, nameless government people who were complaining to MSFT that their software was insecure compared to Solaris or even ConvexOS. I KNOW I am not the only one to have done this, but we gave them a copy of the rainbow books at a meeting and asked them to read them. MAC (Mandatory Access Control) isn't the be-all/end-all of computer security in general, but it IS a good model for government computers in the 1990s. Plenty of people understood the Bell-Lapadula model, all our machines were self-managed behind locked doors and we could afford a small army of sysadmins and infosec people. I've talked about interviewing as the Office Security Architect in 2003, but the job that got me talking to MSFT was one in what was going to become NGSCB, bits of which were eventually rolled into Windows Vista. My interview for that team was scuttled when I talked with their senior tech person who asked me... "Oh. I see you have experience in Crypto(graphy), then you clearly know how to tractably factor a 2000 bit number." I admitted that I was still under the impression that it was a difficult problem, but he assured me that all you had to do was print it out in binary and apply a particular regular expression to it. When I pointed out that primality testing and factoring are different things the interview went south. I later found out this was some sort of MIT shibboleth and I was supposed to respond with some comment about the compilers class. In any event... It always seemed odd to me that NGSCB tried to make MAC a mainstream feature, but I wasn't really thinking about DRM. Like I said, if you're a big organization and can properly manage the classification problem, and have info security peeps who are cleared and trusted, MAC (as embodied in any of the C2 Unices from the 90s, NGSCB or SE Linux) can be useful. But yeah, the only reason you would want this on a consumer machine is to prevent the "owner" from doing something with downloaded media the person who produced the media doesn't want you to do (aka DRM.)
• jamesgill 3y ago
  I’m fascinated by this rose-tinted view of Google as once being ‘good’, but somehow being ‘evil’ now. I watched this film lay out with Microsoft over decades, too. But, TL;DR: Google and Microsoft have always been ‘evil’. We’re just arguing about which circle of hell they rule over.
• pino83 3y ago
  I would love to be wrong... But hey, you let Google happen so far, Chrome, YouTube, you let GMail happen, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you let WhatsApp happen, you let Cloud happen, subscription models, Android, iPhones, EME, Discord, ..., ..., ... And anybody here actually thinks that you will be strong enough to stop WEI? One could just laugh, if it wouldn't be so sad.... You will - as always - stop nothing from happening, I guess. And you will again happily call it 'pragmatism' or say 'ohh, but I had to; they forced me'...
• motbus3 3y ago
  We knew it would happen when that guy demanded to remove the "don't be evil" from company policies
• mediumsmart 3y ago
  Google is an advertising agency. Advertising agencies do not stand for anything. Never did and never will. So please cut google some slack. It is their web after all.