5 ms·

Yeah, chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems. There are many browsers, many apps, many everything... you can switch whenever...

Yeah, chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems. There are many browsers, many apps, many everything... you can switch whenever... but the DRM and attestation pushes with browsers (and mobile devices) means, that sure, you can use a different browser, but your bank, your streaming service, your newssite might not work unless you're using chrome with drm and hardware attestation. This is already true with many banking apps, where you cannot even start the app on a rooted phone, a phone with an unlocked bootloader or even just a phone that's "not on the list". So yeah... google is the silent killer of the "free interet" and te world happily follows... sadly.

attah_ 3y ago
Then switch from these services while they are still only a few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are a lost cause outside the legal arena. Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil grayweb nonsense. Go to their direct competitor.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  The banking system does not care. The banks don't need your money.
  - attah_ 3y ago
    That same logic says you should not vote either. If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care.
    - tsss 3y ago
      No, that logic says you can vote or you can not, it makes effectively zero difference.
      - landemva 3y ago
        I always vote the local issues. For the national bozos I can leave it blank, which is "none of the above".
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      You assume there is a “less shit bank”. Not everywhere is like the USA with a wide choice of banks. In some countries the banking landscape has, through mergers, become limited to just a few choices, and they all require SafetyNet attestation for their phone apps.
    - est31 3y ago
      "voting makes no difference" is one of those rules which apply really well to the individual, but if you apply them to a larger group of people, they become wrong.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > That same logic says you should not vote either. Indeed. > If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care. That's an impossible number of people to coordinate on something like this, and even if, I doubt banks would care. There exist no less shit banks, and retail is a rounding error anyway. Banks aren't shit because of incompetence or a not-give-a-damb attitude. They're shit because it makes them more money, both directly and by reducing risks.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      You would be trading one kind of "shit" for a much more real and serious kind of shit - at the new bank, you'd either be more likely to get your account drained in ways that are hard to reverse, or you'd be forced back to using dedicated hardware smartcard readers of the type that were common before mobile apps became widely used (at least were common in Europe). If your bank account gets drained and you'd made a big song and dance about how you selected that bank specifically because it had less security on its mobile app, well, nobody will have any sympathy for you. If your bank is equally secure but uses dedicated hardware devices instead of smartcard readers, then all you did is swap one bit of secured hardware for another, making your life less convenient and in return for what? A bank has to know it's communicating with the real human who owns the account and not a hacker. It's going to achieve that one way or another. You'd be much better off accepting the tech and finding ways to achieve your goals within it, like by setting up a project to maintain whitelists of known good/secure OS builds. You can then make libs that wrap SafetyNet and eliminate the false positives. Even if banks don't start using it anytime soon, other smaller companies might and it's a place to start. Of course the fact that virtually nobody cares about custom operating systems to begin with is the biggest hurdle you'd face, not the tech or business requirements, but that is partly on the OS developers. You can't complain nobody cares about if you're not giving anyone a reason to care.
      - midasuni 3y ago
        You use the word “forced” like it’s a problem? I hated it when my bank got rid of a nice secure card reader (which required my physical card and pin). If my phone breaks or is stolen, I can’t actually buy a replacement phone now, as that requires spending money, which requires 2FA which requires my phone.
        nvm0n2 3y ago
        You don't have a contactless credit card from your bank?
        midasuni 3y ago
        Can’t use it online with 2FA from phone
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  I did, i use firefox for example, but with mobile phones, what's the alternative? Apple and its walled garden? And when filing my taxes only works via chrome, how do i switch countries easily? Move because of a browser limitation and leave everything behind?
  - attah_ 3y ago
    Not that it is for everyone; but i have used Sailfish OS for just about 10 years, and it has been quite fine. Any country that isn't a total sh*tshow will have accessibility regulations around that. Let the accessibility folks fight for you.
    - developer93 3y ago
      Or support them...
- theK 3y ago
  I think the problem with the revenue rhetoric is that these services are consumed by the general consumer and the people that read this discussion generally are only a neglibile size of that market segment. So, even if all HN readers affected and all wired reader, etc changed service due to this discussionit would still be a rounding error on that company's report sheet in the end.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. Some banks are phasing out code cards or SMS verification for 2FA, and the only way to get the second factor for logging into the online banking website on your computer, is to use the bank’s app on your phone.
  - anonym29 3y ago
    > the only way to get the second factor for logging into the online banking website on your computer, is to use the bank’s app on your phone. This is utterly false. Yubikey, TOTP-based solutions, there are options. It is a choice by the businesses to not implement those options.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      Obviously other solutions could be implemented if the bank chose. But if the bank does not choose to implement those other options, and instead requires the use of their app, then that explains for the OP’s sake some of the interest in running the bank’s app instead of solely using the website.
- jasode 3y ago
  >I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. A mobile phone app can let users "deposit paper checks from home" without ever driving to the bank branch by taking a photo of the check with the smartphone camera. Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam. (EDIT: I don't mean technically not possible. I meant that the banks deliberately chose not to have the websites utilize desktop/laptop webcams as an alternative to smartphone apps.) Smartphone bank apps also have "push notifications" to immediately alert you of suspicious activity on your account. But if one never uses the extra features that smartphones bank apps enable, then yes, desktop bank websites can be seen as perfectly equivalent.
  - dTal 3y ago
    > Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam. Why not?
    - djbusby 3y ago
      Management decision.
  - seangrogg 3y ago
    My credit union let me deposit checks via uploaded picture on browsers back around 2008ish. Don't get me wrong, I did this by taking a picture from my phone and emailing it to myself to upload - the smartphone UX simplifies that. But this is a trail long since blazed.
    - couchand 3y ago
      Yes, this is one of those things that banks will sell as an add-on because capitalism. Credit unions will either just not have their act together on it (i.e. they contract with a bad service provider) or will have all kinds of useful stuff like this for free. I really want a general-membership credit union with stellar technology, but I haven't found one yet. Does your credit union by chance offer open membership?
- anonym29 3y ago
  > I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. My bank only allows me to do Zelle (instant p2p money transfer) via app, not that a browser would be incapable.
  - steelframe 3y ago
    Ditto. I must have spent 10 full minutes clicking all through my bank's website before I finally realized their phone app provided the only possible way I could make a Zelle transfer. My HOA started mandating Zelle as the only way they will accept payments. So now it appears that I have no choice but to use a device that supports my bank's app if I want to avoid getting a lien put on my house.
    - tbrownaw 3y ago
      Does it not count as a debt, that they have to accept cash ("legal tender for all debts public and private") for? Or there should be the option of opening another account, at a less tyrannical institution, to use for those payments.
      - steelframe 3y ago
        > Does it not count as a debt, that they have to accept cash ("legal tender for all debts public and private") for? Let me tell you how that tends to go down in the real world. The HOA doesn't have a physical office or anything. It's some random address and random suite. Maybe it's a document processing company or some other third-party processor. There's some non-trivial chance that some $15/hr kid who may or may not have been raised right is opening the envelopes and feeding the contents into a scanner. So I stuff my HOA dues in cash in an envelope and then go down to the post office to stand in line and get it delivered certified with a return receipt. I get the return receipt. Then the HOA puts a lien on my house. I say, "But I made the payment on time!" Then they say, "Naw-uh." Then I say, "Sure I did, I sent it in cash and I have a return receipt." They say, "We have no idea what you're talking about." <sad trombone> > Or there should be the option of opening another account, at a less tyrannical institution, to use for those payments. How can I find out which ones let me use Zelle through their website? I don't trust anyone I can find at a branch or on the phone to give me the correct answer, because chances are they all personally use the phone app and really have no idea. I guess I can start opening up random accounts with random banks until I find one that works. For now. I think we're missing the point entirely by talking about cash and hopping around banks and all that. The point many people are trying to make here is that life is already being made unreasonably difficult for those of us choosing to use Libre computing platforms, and there's a plausible reality in the future where choices go from inconvenient to scant to nonexistent.
- bombolo 3y ago
  My bank's webserver recently decided to drop connections when a firefox user agent is received. No message, no nothing, just close the socket.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    If you're in the US, write to the FTC and complain that this is discriminatory toward the disabled who may need special user agent accessibility features unavailable in Chrome.
    - bombolo 3y ago
      Unfortunately not in USA. I have no idea what the rules are here. But this bank routinely violates EU directives so I'm sure if there's a rule they don't care about it.
EGreg 3y ago
If the ecosystem is based on open source software, the community will fork it like it always does when someone tries to control it. You’ll end up with a fork of Chromium/Blink that doesn’t have WEI. And it will be used to surf web sites. While the official browser from Google would be used to access sites that require WEI attestations. Just like the Bank of America app would. Corporate power in pushing Chrome for everything can be limited if we have open source alternatives. Look at Firefox and what it did to M$IE, which had the full power of Micro$oft behind it. That only happened because Netscape chose to OPEN SOURCE their code base. They couldn’t beat IE on their own, but the open source community could. Well, that and WebKit, which was basically adopted by Apple (Microsoft’s competitor) from another open source browser, Konqueror! And that led to Chrome, Chromium and Blink etc. In short — open source is the best way we can check corporate power on the software side. On the hardware side, it’s far more difficult, and if the vendors choose to ban any “unapproved” apps (eg requiring Safari WebView rendering engine in all apps on non-jailbroken iPhones) then the best tool we have is government antitrust laws. Maybe one day, in that area too, open source hardware will be the people’s best weapon. But not today :-/
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Sure, but if netflix, your bank, your power and water service, and a chat app, where 80% of your contacts are only support chrome, what will you do? Many banks already require hardware attestation from google for mobile apps and mandatory 2FA via that app is a pain on a rooted phone and workarounds are painful. I mean sure, you can just not-use those services and not chat with everyone else, but that's a bad solution.
  - attah_ 3y ago
    And just doing nothing is somehow a better solution?
  - EGreg 3y ago
    You should use them with Chrome And the rest of the web can be accessed using the fork of Chrome What’s the big deal? People have been using Popcorn Time to view movies that they couldn’t access, and so on.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
Not true, there's also Huawei, who is definitely not 'following' anymore. Which means that every service in countries where Huawei has major market share definitely can't require Google anything.
latexr 3y ago
> There are many browsers Not if one doesn’t want to end up supporting Chromium in any way. Which one shouldn’t if they believe “chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems”. On macOS, that leaves essentially Firefox and Safari. Except Firefox has no support for AppleScript so it’s excluded from a ton of useful automations and is thus not suitable as a daily driver for many people. So Safari remains. And Orion, which is also based on WebKit. Both are closed-source. There are indeed many browsers if all you want to do is display webpages. But as soon as you have any hard requirement, be it ideological or technical, the choices drop dramatically. Unless you don’t mind supporting Google, that is.

attah_ 3y ago

Then switch from these services while they are still only a few. Revenue is a language they understand. I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. The browser war can at least still be won or settled; mainstream apps are a lost cause outside the legal arena. Edit: and by switching i don't mean going to some tinfoil grayweb nonsense. Go to their direct competitor.

KirillPanov 3y ago
The banking system does not care. The banks don't need your money.
- attah_ 3y ago
  That same logic says you should not vote either. If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care.
  - tsss 3y ago
    No, that logic says you can vote or you can not, it makes effectively zero difference.
    - landemva 3y ago
      I always vote the local issues. For the national bozos I can leave it blank, which is "none of the above".
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    You assume there is a “less shit bank”. Not everywhere is like the USA with a wide choice of banks. In some countries the banking landscape has, through mergers, become limited to just a few choices, and they all require SafetyNet attestation for their phone apps.
  - est31 3y ago
    "voting makes no difference" is one of those rules which apply really well to the individual, but if you apply them to a larger group of people, they become wrong.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > That same logic says you should not vote either. Indeed. > If even some 10-20% of IT professionals (with salaries to match) up and leave for a less shit bank, trust me, they will care. That's an impossible number of people to coordinate on something like this, and even if, I doubt banks would care. There exist no less shit banks, and retail is a rounding error anyway. Banks aren't shit because of incompetence or a not-give-a-damb attitude. They're shit because it makes them more money, both directly and by reducing risks.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    You would be trading one kind of "shit" for a much more real and serious kind of shit - at the new bank, you'd either be more likely to get your account drained in ways that are hard to reverse, or you'd be forced back to using dedicated hardware smartcard readers of the type that were common before mobile apps became widely used (at least were common in Europe). If your bank account gets drained and you'd made a big song and dance about how you selected that bank specifically because it had less security on its mobile app, well, nobody will have any sympathy for you. If your bank is equally secure but uses dedicated hardware devices instead of smartcard readers, then all you did is swap one bit of secured hardware for another, making your life less convenient and in return for what? A bank has to know it's communicating with the real human who owns the account and not a hacker. It's going to achieve that one way or another. You'd be much better off accepting the tech and finding ways to achieve your goals within it, like by setting up a project to maintain whitelists of known good/secure OS builds. You can then make libs that wrap SafetyNet and eliminate the false positives. Even if banks don't start using it anytime soon, other smaller companies might and it's a place to start. Of course the fact that virtually nobody cares about custom operating systems to begin with is the biggest hurdle you'd face, not the tech or business requirements, but that is partly on the OS developers. You can't complain nobody cares about if you're not giving anyone a reason to care.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      You use the word “forced” like it’s a problem? I hated it when my bank got rid of a nice secure card reader (which required my physical card and pin). If my phone breaks or is stolen, I can’t actually buy a replacement phone now, as that requires spending money, which requires 2FA which requires my phone.
      - nvm0n2 3y ago
        You don't have a contactless credit card from your bank?
        midasuni 3y ago
        Can’t use it online with 2FA from phone
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
I did, i use firefox for example, but with mobile phones, what's the alternative? Apple and its walled garden? And when filing my taxes only works via chrome, how do i switch countries easily? Move because of a browser limitation and leave everything behind?
- attah_ 3y ago
  Not that it is for everyone; but i have used Sailfish OS for just about 10 years, and it has been quite fine. Any country that isn't a total sh*tshow will have accessibility regulations around that. Let the accessibility folks fight for you.
  - developer93 3y ago
    Or support them...
theK 3y ago
I think the problem with the revenue rhetoric is that these services are consumed by the general consumer and the people that read this discussion generally are only a neglibile size of that market segment. So, even if all HN readers affected and all wired reader, etc changed service due to this discussionit would still be a rounding error on that company's report sheet in the end.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. Some banks are phasing out code cards or SMS verification for 2FA, and the only way to get the second factor for logging into the online banking website on your computer, is to use the bank’s app on your phone.
- anonym29 3y ago
  > the only way to get the second factor for logging into the online banking website on your computer, is to use the bank’s app on your phone. This is utterly false. Yubikey, TOTP-based solutions, there are options. It is a choice by the businesses to not implement those options.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Obviously other solutions could be implemented if the bank chose. But if the bank does not choose to implement those other options, and instead requires the use of their app, then that explains for the OP’s sake some of the interest in running the bank’s app instead of solely using the website.
jasode 3y ago
>I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. A mobile phone app can let users "deposit paper checks from home" without ever driving to the bank branch by taking a photo of the check with the smartphone camera. Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam. (EDIT: I don't mean technically not possible. I meant that the banks deliberately chose not to have the websites utilize desktop/laptop webcams as an alternative to smartphone apps.) Smartphone bank apps also have "push notifications" to immediately alert you of suspicious activity on your account. But if one never uses the extra features that smartphones bank apps enable, then yes, desktop bank websites can be seen as perfectly equivalent.
- dTal 3y ago
  > Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam. Why not?
  - djbusby 3y ago
    Management decision.
- seangrogg 3y ago
  My credit union let me deposit checks via uploaded picture on browsers back around 2008ish. Don't get me wrong, I did this by taking a picture from my phone and emailing it to myself to upload - the smartphone UX simplifies that. But this is a trail long since blazed.
  - couchand 3y ago
    Yes, this is one of those things that banks will sell as an add-on because capitalism. Credit unions will either just not have their act together on it (i.e. they contract with a bad service provider) or will have all kinds of useful stuff like this for free. I really want a general-membership credit union with stellar technology, but I haven't found one yet. Does your credit union by chance offer open membership?
anonym29 3y ago
> I never understood why anyone would even want a banking app though; there is nothing int can do that a website can't. My bank only allows me to do Zelle (instant p2p money transfer) via app, not that a browser would be incapable.
- steelframe 3y ago
  Ditto. I must have spent 10 full minutes clicking all through my bank's website before I finally realized their phone app provided the only possible way I could make a Zelle transfer. My HOA started mandating Zelle as the only way they will accept payments. So now it appears that I have no choice but to use a device that supports my bank's app if I want to avoid getting a lien put on my house.
  - tbrownaw 3y ago
    Does it not count as a debt, that they have to accept cash ("legal tender for all debts public and private") for? Or there should be the option of opening another account, at a less tyrannical institution, to use for those payments.
    - steelframe 3y ago
      > Does it not count as a debt, that they have to accept cash ("legal tender for all debts public and private") for? Let me tell you how that tends to go down in the real world. The HOA doesn't have a physical office or anything. It's some random address and random suite. Maybe it's a document processing company or some other third-party processor. There's some non-trivial chance that some $15/hr kid who may or may not have been raised right is opening the envelopes and feeding the contents into a scanner. So I stuff my HOA dues in cash in an envelope and then go down to the post office to stand in line and get it delivered certified with a return receipt. I get the return receipt. Then the HOA puts a lien on my house. I say, "But I made the payment on time!" Then they say, "Naw-uh." Then I say, "Sure I did, I sent it in cash and I have a return receipt." They say, "We have no idea what you're talking about." <sad trombone> > Or there should be the option of opening another account, at a less tyrannical institution, to use for those payments. How can I find out which ones let me use Zelle through their website? I don't trust anyone I can find at a branch or on the phone to give me the correct answer, because chances are they all personally use the phone app and really have no idea. I guess I can start opening up random accounts with random banks until I find one that works. For now. I think we're missing the point entirely by talking about cash and hopping around banks and all that. The point many people are trying to make here is that life is already being made unreasonably difficult for those of us choosing to use Libre computing platforms, and there's a plausible reality in the future where choices go from inconvenient to scant to nonexistent.
bombolo 3y ago
My bank's webserver recently decided to drop connections when a firefox user agent is received. No message, no nothing, just close the socket.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  If you're in the US, write to the FTC and complain that this is discriminatory toward the disabled who may need special user agent accessibility features unavailable in Chrome.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    Unfortunately not in USA. I have no idea what the rules are here. But this bank routinely violates EU directives so I'm sure if there's a rule they don't care about it.

EGreg 3y ago

If the ecosystem is based on open source software, the community will fork it like it always does when someone tries to control it. You’ll end up with a fork of Chromium/Blink that doesn’t have WEI. And it will be used to surf web sites. While the official browser from Google would be used to access sites that require WEI attestations. Just like the Bank of America app would. Corporate power in pushing Chrome for everything can be limited if we have open source alternatives. Look at Firefox and what it did to M$IE, which had the full power of Micro$oft behind it. That only happened because Netscape chose to OPEN SOURCE their code base. They couldn’t beat IE on their own, but the open source community could. Well, that and WebKit, which was basically adopted by Apple (Microsoft’s competitor) from another open source browser, Konqueror! And that led to Chrome, Chromium and Blink etc. In short — open source is the best way we can check corporate power on the software side. On the hardware side, it’s far more difficult, and if the vendors choose to ban any “unapproved” apps (eg requiring Safari WebView rendering engine in all apps on non-jailbroken iPhones) then the best tool we have is government antitrust laws. Maybe one day, in that area too, open source hardware will be the people’s best weapon. But not today :-/

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Sure, but if netflix, your bank, your power and water service, and a chat app, where 80% of your contacts are only support chrome, what will you do? Many banks already require hardware attestation from google for mobile apps and mandatory 2FA via that app is a pain on a rooted phone and workarounds are painful. I mean sure, you can just not-use those services and not chat with everyone else, but that's a bad solution.
- attah_ 3y ago
  And just doing nothing is somehow a better solution?
- EGreg 3y ago
  You should use them with Chrome And the rest of the web can be accessed using the fork of Chrome What’s the big deal? People have been using Popcorn Time to view movies that they couldn’t access, and so on.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

Not true, there's also Huawei, who is definitely not 'following' anymore. Which means that every service in countries where Huawei has major market share definitely can't require Google anything.

latexr 3y ago

> There are many browsers Not if one doesn’t want to end up supporting Chromium in any way. Which one shouldn’t if they believe “chrome and google in general are the first in line to cause problems”. On macOS, that leaves essentially Firefox and Safari. Except Firefox has no support for AppleScript so it’s excluded from a ton of useful automations and is thus not suitable as a daily driver for many people. So Safari remains. And Orion, which is also based on WebKit. Both are closed-source. There are indeed many browsers if all you want to do is display webpages. But as soon as you have any hard requirement, be it ideological or technical, the choices drop dramatically. Unless you don’t mind supporting Google, that is.