What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

This isn't even close to being okay. It's 100% bullshit.

One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.

I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.

Obligatory use Firefox

This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet

Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.

Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)

Congratulations, guys. You are now internet pariahs. Your unrepentantly mercenary lack of engineering ethics is now recorded for all eternity. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.

That's a good way for me to never visit your website again. Honestly, this kinda sounds like the death of the internet if I'm being honest. This would transform it from a free medium into a full blown corporate dystopia. It's really scary to see the digital (corporate) development over the past couple decades. Would be really cool if we don't move further towards some cyberpunk like future where megacorps control everything.

Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds

And they went ahead and blocked comments now - "An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past."

Fucking cowards

EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don't pay the big tech you can't access anything.

This is exactly the kind of thing that demostrates why DRM shouldn't be part of the web standards. It's very existence is abuse and this use even more so.

DRM needs to be illegal.

Oh do fuck off Google.

So soon we’ll need uBlock Origin FitGirl Edition?

How can the smartest people be so dumb?

Please, please, PLEASE.. if you care about a healthy open internet, donate to Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF, at the minimum, if you're able to.

I liked to subscribe to Youtube Premium to support my favourite channels but this kinda stuff turns me off.

Just this week or was it last week, I made a comment on some post that putting privacy aside, we should still be encouraging people to use Firefox instead of any chromium browsers to break control. It is good to see that right now I am just given a very good example why Chromium being a monopoly allows Google to control the spec (even if other companies are on board)

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/pull/124/commits/7cd99782c90bab4104725e821d11b18bc2107218

This PR nails it

I already replaced my search engine, my social media and my Reddit.

Do you want me to replace my email too, Google?

This may honestly be it for me.

I quit playing games because of all the greed and hype, I went back to piracy when streaming started to fracture and greed set in, I left non-federated social media because of the enshittifaction and invasiveness, and I go to fairly extensive lengths to block ads and protect my privacy as much as possible...

And instead of moving to any number of fair, non-exploitive business models, they're just going to force ads down my throat like that episode of black mirror.

If this goes through I'll be sorely tempted to wipe everything I can and start over as best I can. Only interact with the Internet when I need to.

You'll find me paying cash at the local used bookstore, at least until all the major publishers make that illegal.

EDIT: It's honestly depressing, I genuinely enjoy technology and the internet, but when companies like Google are able to force garbage like this it just sucks all the joy out of it for me.

It's like everying is becoming a shitty mobile game. Do the toolsheds that develop Candy Crush clones not think we can understand why in app currencies are sold in bundles of 100 but every thing we purchase with them requires amounts that end with a five? Does Google not think we know the real motivation behind a system that strives to prove ads were delivered to your browser either?

I know a lot of people may not see the real driver here, but I'm tired of being underestimated and infantalized by a bunch of dorks trapped in a corporate echo chamber. I think I'd prefer it if they just straight up said they're going to sacrifice our privacy and user experience for a quick bump in stock value.

All this enshittification lately really inspires me to de-google.

Google is hindrance to open web, like IE7 was with ActiveX.

Only difference is that IE7 wanted developers to develop for IE7, while Google also want to fully control the web and bend it according to its needs

It doesn't seem to be targeting ad-blockers in particular (or other page customizing extensions), although that may result eventually. What it does do is let webpages restrict what web browsers and operating systems you are allowed to use, just like how SafetyNet on Android lets apps restrict you to using an OS signed by Google. That could end up with web pages forcing you to use a web browser and OS the big players like Google, Microsoft and Apple, blocking any less restrictive or less used competors like Firefox and Linux, thus creating a cryptographically enforced oligopoly. And even if they signed e.g. Firefox, it would only be certain builds of it. That would make it impossible to make a truly open-source browser that can access pages using this API. Quite concerning.

They've really strongly adopted their new "Do only evil" mantra

Having thought about it for a bit, it's possible for this proposal to be abused by authoritarian governments.

Suppose a government—say, Wadiya—mandated that all websites allowed on the Wadiyan Internet must ensure that visitors are using a list of verified browsers. This list is provided by the Wadiyan government, and includes: Wadiya On-Line, Wadiya Explorer, and WadiyaScape Navigator. All three of those browsers are developed in cooperation with the Wadiyan government.

Each of those browsers also happen to send a list of visited URLs to a Wadiyan government agency, and routinely scan the hard drive for material deemed "anti-social."

Because the attestations are cryptographically verified, citizens would not be able to fake the browser environment. They couldn't just download Firefox and install an extension to pretend to be Wadiya Explorer; they would actually have to install the spyware browser to be able to browse websites available on the Wadiyan Internet.

This is super fucked up. I use Stylus extensively to customize the UI on so many sites. Not even for adblocking or that kind of thing, but for accessibility. I actually learned to code many years ago specifically so I could write my own userstyles so that popular websites would be more accessible for me. This is not just predatory on an ads and money level but on an accessibility level too.

I reported him on github, for all the good that will do.

I literally swapped to Librewolf before the Rossman video was done. I was on Brave Browser before, but it's based on Chromium. Fuck Chromium and fuck Google. Fuck this shitty amoeba that tries to spread into and control everything.

I will post stupid shit on my federated forum and you will fucking live with it Google. Fuck you. Burn. It's time to break up the internet monopolies and do some trust busting. Someone pull FDR's rotten corpse out of the grave and put it back to work.

I hate the fact that one of the biggest and richest corporations in the world, is just a massive ad spamming dumpster fire. Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do, if 90% of their effort wasn't put into cramming ever more ads into people's eyeballs.

Ads have already been proven to be an extremely ineffective marketing strategy; now Google wants to force them down our throats even more? Fuck off

Google saw the enshitening of the web and went "hold my beer, I'll show you how it's done!".

Big fan of the "how dare you don't use professional language" vibe coming from the folks clinically discussing how to ruin what little remains of the open web.

Can someone give me an easy to understand example of what they are proposing? Assume that I don’t allow them to install any software/tool that helps them track me/my device.

I saw this comment and found it helpful but its still not clear to me

At its core, it establishes software components called "attesters" that decide whether your device and/or browser is "trustworthy" enough - as defined by the website you are trying to visit. Websites can enforce which "attesters" users must accept, simply by denying everybody access who refuses to bow down to this regime; or who uses attesters that are deemed "inappropriate"; or who is on a platform that does not provide any attesters the website finds "acceptable".

In short: it is specifically designed to destroy the open web by denying you the right to use whatever browser you want to use, on whatever operating system. It is next-level "DRM", introduced by affiliates of a company that already has monopolized the browser market. And the creators of this "proposal" absolutely know what they are attempting here.

I hope Louis Rossmann catches wind of this - the more people know about this, the better chance we have at stopping this unnecessary "WEI" spec.

If an company wants a trusted environment for their code to execute in, they should be asking themselves why they're not running that code in an app, or better yet - on their own servers

stop using their services

And they try to demonise Tor and I2P... At this rate, the dark web would soon be the only place to go.