That’s petty as fuck. I’m an ex google eng and it’s not up to us what we work on. We get paid to work on shit and if we don’t do it someone else will. Plenty of resumes in the pool ready to hop in and take someone’s spot. Blame the company not the people doing the grunt work.
More like blaming the chef in a restaurant chain for the menu. Some corporate entity might be the one crafting the menu, but they’re still the ones cooking.
That isn’t to say we should hound the devs, but I thought we could use a better example.
“Just doing my job” is a poor excuse. That’s no different than saying, “I’m just doing it for money”. When you’re a software engineer who could get another job without much trouble. Otherwise, you’re choosing to do what google tells you.
A menu you don’t like at a barista isn’t even remotely the same.
I fail to see how the engineers building the technical side of this are relevant to this case. It’s not their decision to put this into Chromium or not.
Of course they have the choice. But be realistic. There is ALWAYS someone willing to do something for money. Not everyone thinks the same way as you do.
You say that like it’s easy to deal with a sudden loss of income and the potential that their living situation will radically change before they land that new job. I can’t imagine that working at that level leads to particular quick interview and hiring processes.
Oh no you’re right. It’s not an acceptable defence when it’s war crimes. Otherwise it’s totally a-ok. Betting sites and apps ask you to target patients under medication who are far more susceptible to gambling? Not your fault. Big G asks you to turn internet into adridden dystopia? Not your fault.
Lmao yoavweiss seems to have recently broken the 4 year hiatus on his personal blog to make a new post about how the discussions around this retarded proposal are not constructive enough.
The most constructive that can ever be said about this is “fuck right off” dude.
Please don’t blame the people who were forced to implement this. There are engineers to blame behind all shitty tech in the world. They’re just trying to work a job. There aren’t exactly a lot of jobs in the tech industry where you don’t work for some of the evilest motherfuckers alive building unimaginably evil stuff. I’m all for directing as much hate, vitriol, credible threats of violence, etc at the people on top, but let’s leave the poor sap who they forced to do their dirty work alone.
It’s my right to have my personal computer display what I want it to display. It’s my right set my device to reject internet traffic I don’t want to receive. It’s my right to instruct my machine to download the data I want, and refuse to download the data I don’t want. If you make something publicly available online, then the public can consume that or refuse that, in part or in whole, as and when they wish. If a company or a browser wants to try and interfere with that, then they’ve chosen their fate.
Except when it doesn’t. That saying never made sense (far more species have gone extinct than exist today) and it doesn’t apply here.
Piracy will continue, obviously, but what we’re seeing here is the creation of an internet we can’t even fathom yet. This is just where it starts.
Also consider how much more difficult it will be for the average person to participate in piracy. Remember a few months back when Microsoft floated they were basically looking to lock down windows? No unsigned apps, no win32, etc. People will get around that, of course, but fewer people will. Especially if they continue with this trend towards stripping options and de-admin-ing all users unless they pay for an enterprise license.
Then there’s the dangerous trend toward encryption being broken by regulation and possibly even VPNs being rendered useless for anyone but businesses. There goes secure torrenting.
The trends don’t look good, across the board. We can’t just sit here and hope it all works out and the loopholes are found, like it always has before.
I am by no means saying we should passively hope that things will work out. What I am saying is that we have no reason to be defeatist. In the same time that we’ve seen aggressive pushes for a more locked down internet, we’ve seen dozens of open source projects to fight back.
They do. The majority of Mozilla’s funding is from Google. That said, they’re still our best hope. I’m sure Firefox has constant internal conversations about how to handle their relationship with Google, and they probably have standing offers from many others to switch to a different search engine.
Web-browser? I'm using Firefox since the beginning of this year.
Email? I've an account on ProtonMail for serious stuff, and Gmail for garbage, less serious stuff and spam collector.
Cloud storage? Well, unless anyone can gift me a Raspberry Pi, a hub and an ELI5 Nextcloud manual for dummies, I have to keep using Google Drive.
Videos? That depends. I'm watching videos on Youtube, but I'm uploading my own content on Peertube.
Phone? I need another ELI5 custom rom manual for dummies, and it has to be specific for my device. Otherwise, I'll keep using Android, but with most minimum usage of Google apps.
Can't fix everything, but Google drive is easily replaced by proton drive. Google notes/keep or any kind of note taking is easily replaced (and improved) by Obsidian, and on android you can install f-droid as an alternative store.
Downside is that these thinks cost money. But everything has a cost, and at least here the cost is clear, and upfront.
I'm sorry but this sentiment is so utterly detached from the technical capabilities and general engagement of the average layman that it bears a response.
Tech savvy people have this awful habit of calling anyone not in our specific field an idiot when they don't do things our preferred way, and it's not a good look. Those people aren't the weird ones, we are. And if you're the sort of person who thinks you've elevated yourself above the commoners because you don't use Google's stuff ... yeah, that and 5 bucks will get you a latte. There are oceans of professional expertise you're not privvy to, and unless you really think you're doing better than everyone at everything, a little humility, temperance, and grace for others is warranted.
I’m basically “the idiot”. Decently tech savvy, but non-IT. Very capable of learning what I need to know, but I haven’t really had the time or mental capacity to learn how to do a lot of the things I need to to get away from corporate overlords.
I’m working on it, and have been for a while, but in the meantime I do use several google services, because that’s what I’ve been using for many many years and change is really hard. Especially when you have to initiate the change yourself, and especially when you know if you switch to a stop-gap solution you’ll loose all impetus to actually keep making the change (which I will).
The biggest challenge is learning what is worth it to self-host, what hard/software to use for the configuration I want, what’s compatible with devices I own (windows, Linux, iOS and android), etc. I’ve been running Plex for like 10 years now (windows then Linux), but it’s a very basic setup on a host pc I don’t use for much else. Beyond that, I need to learn almost everything from the bottom up, and that’s a lot to learn -just- to avoid an existing company and their existing products that I’ve been using for years. Unlike my Plex content, I would actually care if I lost my other self-host data, so not something to fuck around half-ass with.
I can’t blame people for not wanting to/knowing how to do it. I like learning this shit (because of the end result, not because I have interest in it, sorry not sorry) and I still don’t actually want to do it.
There are hardly any alternatives for people who don’t have the time to self-host and setup everything.
“Oh but Firefox!” the tools that Mozilla provides are indeed good - but there’s no Mozilla Photos, Mozilla Notes, Mozilla Assistant, and so on.
“Oh but Microsoft!” and why would that be better than Google?
“Oh but mix Firefox with Proton and this specific GitHub project for photo management and this FOSS notes apps with a Docker backend for sync and thi-” I wish I had the time to do that, truly, I actually prefer many of the FOSS alternatives I’ve seen lately. I do not have the time nor hardware to do this correctly.
It’s a hard fight between all the time maintaining your own stuff takes and the utter resistance by other users who just won’t learn anything new or use any real security.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm a technical person, I run Linux as my primary OS and use FOSS software. But I also have a full time job and 2 small kids, and frankly I just don't have the time or patience to be a full time sysadmin. Proton has come a long way in providing alternatives to Gmail, GCalendar, GDrive, etc., but like you said if you want to replace ALL of Google you practically have to self host a gazillion Nextcloud instances or whatever.
I kinda agree with you. Before my exams I had lot of time. I used to self host nextcloud, email and invidious etc. But during exam had no time to manage instances or update my packages, one after than another they kept showing error and they went offline.
I stopped my VPS and started using Google Drive(it was already available on my android) to share my notes temporarily with friends, soon I kept using it. I hope protonmail becomes better so I can start using them instead of other products
What I don’t like about Proton is that I can’t combine Mail Plus and Pass Plus. I don’t need a 500 GB Proton Drive or Proton VPN, but I like their Mail and Password Manager. Now I use Mail for free and Password Manager for €12/year. I would like to pay €3.99/month for the Mail offer, but for that I would have to upgrade to the much more extensive Proton Unlimited.
I would pay 7.99 for Proton Unlimited. But I can’t pay alnost 200 Euros for it all at once. I’m not a big fan of the huge cost difference between monthly, 12m and 24m subscriptions.
Fully automated or fully integrated? And how do you know? Not trying to be confrontational, but whenever I think a tool doesn’t exist, it totally does. It just isn’t popular enough.
There isn’t. Closest there is is NextCloud, but you need to self host it, since it isn’t E2EE so using a provider would just put you back in square one. Proton is a close second but its still miles away, they have a lot of products but their devs seem to be spread thin between then.
I just wish Firefox would improve their UI and add a few features without needing to rely on extensions (tab groups, vertical tabs, sharing tabs from mobile to desktop, etc.).
Is it possible to use it without syncing all browser tabs? I tried to read about it on their website since I want to know exactly what they collect and how they store it but couldn’t find anuthing other than instructions on how to set it up.
Which ones? Besides sending a tab from mobile to desktop it doesn’t have tab groups or vertical tabs. Those features rely on extensions and/or custom css.
Hey you have genuine wants and needs from a web browser and I respect that.
I’ll say though that this sort of attitude (well Chrome has this little thing I like so I allow them to take control of what was once the independent internet) is what is going to screw us.
I use FF. But I also use Chromium based browsers out of necessity. I understand where you’re coming from but what’s also going to screw us is Mozilla not keeping up with the latest features which is something they’ve struggled with. At the end of the day they have to give people a reason to switch and use FF as their main browser. Simply saying “better privacy features” isn’t enough for the average user.
IMO there are none. They are all janky. Your best bet, (and what I may start doing), is to make separate folders in your bookmarks bar and add any tabs you want in there as a group. Not ideal but it works.
I switched back from years with Chrome then new Chromium Edge, haven’t noticed an issue. But everything I do is Ctrl+W, middle-click, and typing into search fields. If I’m using a browser’s UI, it’s for the menu or a bookmark folder.
I can’t really fathom what a browser UI is used for beside this and the less there is of one on-screen, the better.
Yes. Because the UI and UX of a tool that you use everyday matters. The average user will hold ease of use over privacy 9 times out of 10. In my case though I wasn’t able to use FF for a while due to the lack of debugger support for a project I was working on. Now it comes down to me having to work on multiple projects at once so tab groups and organization are key. Now don’t get me wrong, once Chrome totally kills adblockers I’ll drop Chromium browsers like a bad habit, but the point still stands though, FF could use some UI improvements.
Id argue on mobile for instance, firefox is easier to use. One of the LARGEST differences between chrome and firefox from a UI standpoint is bottom search/site box over top one, especially for larger phones.
This of course doesnt consider anything related to addons yet.
Well, super bad breath is not your ordinary bad breath. It would possibly melt your lungs faster than the fire. Bacteria that can thrive in superman’s body is not to be messed with.
So, Google, the Overlord of the Internet apperantly, wishes to make his Kingdom an uninhabitable hellscape of constant ad harrassment that anyone who wants to keep their sanity will interact with as little as possible, only going there when necessary.
Ok, then. Good luck with that Business.
Just wondering, will one day Humanity, who has pretty much agreed in perfect unison completely independent from each other, since the golden age of television, that we all hate ads, finally be heard?
Humanity, who has pretty much agreed […] that we all hate ads
Yeah, I thought that too, but there is a lot of people who find those television ads “so funny” and actually like to watch them. Some naive people (there’s a lot of them) will be perfect preys for this DRM & ads crap.
That used to be the case but now Google is giving me like a page worth of AI generated pages as a result that all have a different answer. DDG is absolutely useless for sites in my native language but for everything else it beats Google.
DDG works great for me…? Like one out of fifty searches maybe I go “Hmm, bad results, let me try Google,” but it almost always works as well as Google with less noise.
Even if they do that, some people will just create illegal website mirrors that remove ads.
On reddit, people already copy paste articles when there’s a paywall. I can totally envision that thing to be more common.
I am not fucking kidding, I will stop using websites if I cannot block ads. This is non negotiable. I don’t care about your business model, I have zero money to give you. I tried the official reddit app, and uninstalled within a week.
I said this the other day and had a user suggest there’s no point because Google will win, and it’ll be impossible to avoid this DRM garbage. They didn’t seem to grasp that you can just not use the websites that use that tech.
Same here. Actually I uninstalled the official Reddit app within a day after seeing all these ads. My web experience is almost completely ad-free and if some ad or site comes around with ads ir user tracking, I don’t use it.
I haven’t watched any un-proxied YouTube video for over five years now. Not sure how long this will still be possible in the future but I hope that also in the future people will find ways to circumvene big-tech surveillance.
I absolutely would if I could get it to run decently on my Mac… it just slows to a crawl, especially page scrolling. I’m stuck on Edge for now, but having a look at Orion as an alternative
Aye so people keep telling me, I wish I knew what was causing my issues as would much rather be using it - prefer the UI, the customisation etc but the performance I just had to give up on the end.
I see the Reddit BS of downvoting stuff people disagree with has moved to Lemmy as well… Won’t take long for the morons to ruin open conversations on here as well 🙄🤦🏻♂️
Can someone shed some light for me? I’m a noob and I’m not sure I understand what is being proposed by google here. From what I can tell, they’re proposing a cryptographically signed token that details information about a website user’s ‘environment’, which I take to mean, their device OS and browser information, for the sake of verifying their humanity for website owners and advertisers. Isn’t this sort of information already collected when a user visits a webpage, and doesn’t google (or whomever) already collect and use this data (and more) for fingerprinting? How is this new proposal different, and something to be specifically concerned about?
I know there are anti-fingerprinting browser privacy addons that spoof this information, or prevent its collection. Is the concern that these tools will become inoperable?
For the record I don’t like google or any company collecting any fingerprinting information, but it’s already being done widely and in an unregulated manner, isn’t it?
Using the proposed “Web Environment Integrity” means websites can select on which devices (browsers) they wish to be displayed, and can refuse service to other devices. It binds client side software to a website, creating a silo’d app. Web Environment Integrity on GitHub This penalizes platforms on which the preferred client side software is not available.
The thought here is that, a website could be programmed to, for example, only be accessible to users of chrome (or even an android device), correct? Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers? That could be really transformative for the web, because then you’d have microsoft doing the same thing with edge, apple doing the same thing with safari, other companies like fb or whatever launching their own bespoke ‘browsers’ to access their services. Will users actually put up with the degree of fragmentation that this move might bring? Won’t it just push users to the ‘old internet’ where you can simply go to a website and interact with it?
Sorry, I’m kind of talking out loud here trying to wrap my head around this. I see people grousing about DRM and ads, and I’m struggling to connect all the dots.
Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing
Web devs can be pretty lazy and only want to support Chrome anyway. If Chrome is the only browser offering certain features (“proof” that user is human, potentially getting rid of adblockers altogether, etc), that’s a good excuse to finally just stop supporting Firefox and Safari.
Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers?
Sounds like an open and shut anti-trust case if any governments care to pursue it.
I can’t speak for how other people browse, but when I come across an article with a paywall, I tend to say “eh, it wasn’t that important anyway” and leave. Or if it really is important, I’ll search for the title and try to find the information on a site without a paywall.
If there ends up being a “browser wall”, I’ll certainly do the same thing. No article/web app is so important or unique that it’s worth quitting my preferred browser (Firefox) and switching to something I like less.
But what’s scary to me, as a Firefox user, is that Chrome & Safari are so extremely dominant. If companies are forced to choose between supporting Chrome (60% share), Safari (20% share), or Firefox (3% share), it’s clear that Firefox users will run out of sites to use pretty quickly.
Right, if this sort of browser wall thing happens (which, the doctrine of enshittification seems to dictate that it probably will), and it can’t be spoofed or worked around. Alright, I’m seeing the issues here. Thanks for chiming in with your thoughts. This is a huge deal, if it goes in this sort of direction.
YouTube and other platforms increasing ads Meta being Meta Twitter becoming X Reddit fucking API and the platform itself Now, Google coming up with their policies
Are we entering an era where we are silently being forced into becoming customers to these big monopolies, and being under constant surveillance?
Like what the fuck do they want, they already control every fucking thing, what more they want still? What they try to commodify still?
It’s the entshitification of the internet which if you follow Doctorow you already know about. It seems to be spreading to non-web properties now too like obviously cars are trying to lock things behind subscription services.
I think there is a silver lining here and that is federated tech like this site is finally getting some attention as a real alternative to reddit/twitter/etc. Even better would be some real extreme trustbusting as a reaction from our governments but seeing as that would hurt their investments I’m not holding my breath.
This is me too. I mean I have most browsers installed for various reasons but I use Firefox unless I absolutely must use another browser for something. I suppose if things do fragment in the way that is implied above that’ll become more and more common.
Bc of ads? Ads are mostly fine, the web is broken because of platforms. Like there’s only a handful of sites the entire planet uses and they’re all owned by like 4 tech giants (and Reddit)
Assuming all ads are legit and don’t contain some sketchy script to activate your webcam or scan your cookies (hint: haha, living in lala land if you trust all ads!), have you ever checked what percentage of your bandwidth gets wasted on advertising?
They have not always been a part of the net, I can guarantee you that. Used to have my own totally free site back around 1999/2000 or so. No ads whatsoever, written entirely from Notepad.
Please don’t try telling me the history of the net before you were born.
It’s broken because of platforms working for people, which happens because there’s not too much, but too little fragmentation.
For a couple decades corps and their fans were communicating from every orifice that fragmentation is bad, it’s bad for developers, it’s bad for users, it’s bad for business and so on.
Despite this being not only wrong, but also counterintuitive, as we should all be familiar with how things work in nature, about evolution and competition and diversity.
Sites that won’t load unless I them ad-berserker over my web browser I just don’t visit anymore. Seriously. There are a million bazillion web pages out there. The internet managed just fine with people posting pages of relevant links to other similar or recommended other websites back in the Day when Google didn’t even exist yet (I had one myself) and other curated web search sites like https://curlie.org/en (and I contributed link suggestions to the ones like this back then). The only thing we can’t do today that we could back then is run BBS sites for each other off our home land lines. I’m not so worried.
And when it comes to phones, there are now quite a few alternatives to Stock Android. /eOS uses MicroG instead of google services to allow for almost all apps to run fine while being more private and open source. You can also just use LineageOS and use MicroG as an alternative!
this is what i’m frustrated with. why do all these engineers let themselves be told what to do even if it makes a worse-functioning tool? that’s not real engineering.
“because they’ll get fired”
not if enough of them do the thing that should’ve been what got them interested in engineering in the first place.
maybe we shouldn’t call them engineers, but something else relating to being the one who does the dirty work for institutions that aim to steal people’s attention and decrease their quality of life.
and if they do get fired, then they should join together and make the reasonable company that makes good tools for human use.
That’s called doing your job though. Do you just regularly… tell your boss to fuck off with their requirements?
In an environment where software engineers are being laid off by the thousands, I don’t think anyone’s going to hand in a resignation letter just because the prestigious ad company they’re working for is… making them force ads on people.
Many of them will also have to go back to India if they quit their jobs. What’s that, a 10x difference in income?
A point made by Morten Rand-Hendriksen: We software engineers are not real engineers. Unlike other kind of engineers, we do not have to follow industry code of conudct like meachincal engineers or civil engineers. We are just a bunch dudes that learned to use tensorflow on stackoverflow. That is why our work is dangerous and we can always just “be told” what to do for money.
Airplanes could not be built like that. Calling ourselfs “engineers” is misleading as it suggest we follow some ethics or code of conduct. It will hurt us on the long run.
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