Technology

Smart people coming up with smart ideas to do dumb things. When will we start shaming such people?

The engineers to blame are

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser

https://github.com/yoavweiss

Sometimes it is unbelievable. They want to make the Internet their own, following their model... luckily there will always be people fighting to keep the Internet free, where anyone can decide, in this case, whether to swallow ads or not

Their examples are business issues where they want a tech solution.

These are working on a foundation that the internet today, with all it's venture capital money, "free" websites and services that run at a loss is how the internet should look. So they are building technical solutions to force some "trust" facilitate this internet. If a business or website cannot function or be profitable without this, that company does not deserve to survive. It's putting businesses ahead of users.

It works off the assumption that websites should know who the person visiting their website is (or that it's even a human.)

IMO, we need to return to the assumption that users are anonymous and remind people that you don't know who is on the other side so we should not trust at all.

Similar things are done with TV and streaming unfortunately. You ever notice how commercials/ads have louder volume than whatever content you're watching? It's intentional. If you're someone who doesn't skip them and doesn't mute them, they want you to be able to hear them from another room and then they hope you'll come back to see the ad. It's so dumb.

I don't know that we're watching the internet collapse. I think we are witnessing tech companies respond to growing financial pressure by accelerating their monetization plans, and it's blowing up in their faces. The result will be the reinvention of the web. I don't necessarily know if decentralized apps are going to take off, but I do think the internet will shift towards smaller (possibly open source) sites in retaliation.

It's fun to see capitalism doubling down on itself. 🫠

Google executives want this, NOT the engineers.

Am I the only one thinking these trust tokens are not going to prevent bots from scraping websites?

Eventually, somewhere, someone will just develop the infrastructure to work their way around this, right?

You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain

I really need to ween myself off the Internet so that, once it becomes an unusable hellhole in the next 20 years or so, I'll be able to give it up entirely and move on to better things.

What a cursed timeline this is

Back when Threads got released someone told me on Lemmy that Meta will not pull an EEE on ActivotyPub because something something antitrust Microsoft long ago millions of dollars.

How is Manifestv3 different?

Google engineers need to fuck off.

I can’t imagine anyone who uses the internet thinking the current ad technology is effective, the web is broken because of ads

Related: https://lemmy.world/post/2235459

So, we will be forced to see ads, while they can’t yet control who’s publishing those ads. I wonder why Google (and any other ad company) hasn’t been sued yet for showing and infecting malware into the people who click on their ads. Maybe is not that critical or easy for a domestic user, but corporations or governments?

And it’s not because it’s impossible to verify malware before accepting their ads, it’s because THEY DONT CARE. If they can detect music on videos for copyright claims, they can analyze everything, they can also verify publishers. And if they can’t with an algorithm, they should use humans to manually verify publishers.

Per the article, this is already being integrated into Chromium as we speak, as in days ago: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/6f47a22906b2899412e79a2727355efa9cc8f5bd

In recent news, Google has put forth a proposal known as the "Web Environment Integrity Explainer", authored by four of its engineers.

Imagine someone telling you this is your job and you do it.

Maybe we should create another internet?

this is why I'm switching to firefox

imagine working on shit like this. like wouldn't that make your life worse as well? how fucking malignant

Forced to implement is the wrong term - they were tasked with designing it. They can't just swap one person out for another - losing the lead dev or designer would be delay or kill the effort

They could've pushed back - software ethics is a required course for very good reason - but it's easy to never ask if you should do something and skip straight to how. It gets easier to skip that piece every time, and the company isn't going to respect it - we need outside pressure so they can point to us and say "this will have repercussions"

They don't deserve death threats, but trashing everything they push on GitHub is fair. Measured steady pressure - save the most extreme stuff for upper management and shareholders

For the engineers you have to make them understand they did bad and they should feel bad, they need to feel that their peers have lost respect for them, not that this is the public lashing out