🌄 Coś pozytywnego spotkało mnie dziś z rana. Wysłuchałem debatę, jakich bardzo w Polsce potrzeba: spotkała się lewica z prawicą i dyskutowali bez obrażania się nawzajem i obrażania inteligencji słuchaczy. Tematem była książka pt. "Woke SA" (której nie czytałem, więc nie będę się wypowiadał). Polecam tę dyskusję: 🔗 https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=Jn7BNZWx6wg
O tzw. "kulturze woke" rozmawiali Rafał Ziemkiewicz, Andrzej Zybertowicz, Katarzyna Szumlewicz i Kaya Szulczewska.
⚡ Google gives up on that API that looked more than a bit like DRM for websites
「 "We’ve heard your feedback, and the Web Environment Integrity proposal is no longer being considered by the Chrome team," the biz's Android team said on Thursday.
The Chrome team has thus submitted a commit to revert the project code that had made it to the corporation's browser 」
Cometh the weekend, cometh the #linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, their security is antithetical to your security. That was the case with #WebEnvironmentIntegrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:
But the dream of securing Google against its own users lives on. Youtube has embarked on an aggressive campaign of refusing to show videos to people running #AdBlockers, triggering an arms-race of ad-blocker-blockers and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers:
But not in real life. As predicted, the approach is being resurrected. It's being taken to #Android, because … well, because, #Google.
Placation incoming: "narrowly scoped, and only targets WebViews embedded in apps". Diplomacy is the art of being able to say "nice doggie" until you have time to pick up a rock.
Die neue @datenschleuder habe ich zwar eben erst von ihrem Briefumschlag befreit und bisher nur durchgeblättert, aber ich habe schon das Bedürfnis, mich bei ihren Macher:innen zu bedanken. Zum Beispiel für:
★ Das Titelbild! Sieht aus wie von einer Satirezeitschrift. Das kann ich gut gebrauchen.
Nothing to see here folks, just an #artwork I made of a dove of peace that DEFINITELY won’t be appearing in an upcoming 6,000-beats-per-minute track’s cover #art...
We are currently witnessing the fallout from monopolization in the browser space. Back in 2007, Internet Explorer received much criticism for its phishing protection mechanism which transmitted all visited websites to Microsoft servers. Mozilla paired up with Google and designed a different system which performed most checks locally and preserved users’ privacy. That’s what healthy competition looks like.
Fast forward to 2023. Almost all web browsers in use are either Chrome or based on the Chromium browser engine. With the competition pretty much eliminated, Google is now pushing its “Enhanced Safe Browsing” down everyone’s throats – which is a nice sounding name for “every website you visit is sent to our servers.” The Internet Explorer approach from 2007 all over again, only that now it’s Google getting all this data. And they certainly won’t do anything evil with it. Yeah, sure.
Reminder: Firefox and Safari are the only remaining browsers worth noting which are not using Google’s browser engine.
It is less of a threat because Safari does not have Chromium’s market dominance, but it’s still bad and we should be demanding Apple remove it too. @webkit
I am grateful for Firefox recognizing the threat this proposal is to the open Web and opposing it, but the opposition won’t matter unless people use a different browser.
@juliank If adopted, I imagine Firefox would be forced to support it to continue being relevant, much like it had to find a compromise on Encrypted Media Extensions and H.264 licensing.
Worth noting Chrome’s Web Environment Integrity proposal considered Safari’s Private Access Tokens “to be too private” because its implementation does not share the attestation device data back to the website requesting it. In this balance between your privacy and fraud prevention, Google is valuing your privacy less.
"WEI and similar attestation technologies represent an attempt to impose an alien model, that of a closed system, onto the open system of the Web. " - ekr (Eric Rescorla)
New article "Your computer should say what you tell it to say" by Cory Doctorow and Jacob Hoffman-Andrews. In it, they say "You are the boss of your computer, and you should have the final say over what it tells other people about your computer and its software." We certainly agree with that sentiment. Read the full article, which is about #WEI and the dangers of #DRM in the web: https://u.fsf.org/40d#Enshittification#EndDRM
Just read the term “Proof of Personhood” and it made me retch.
“Proof of Personhood” is how you destroy personhood by tying it to some arbitrary constraint controlled by some asshole; by making it, and therefore by extension, people themselves, a commodity.
So fuck Worldcoin, fuck Sam Altman, fuck scanning people’s eyeballs for profit, fuck cryptobros and their cultists, and fuck Silicon Valley very much.
Google hat mit Web Environment Integrity (#WEI) eine Art #Browserkontrolle vorgeschlagen und sofort in Chrome/Chromium eingebaut. Warum das gefährlich ist?
Ein Wechsel von Google Android zu Apple iOS wäre ein Gang vom Regen in die Traufe. Apple hat sich noch nicht zu #WEI geäußert. Das Tracking ist in Apples Welt genauso umfassend, aber weil es ein geschlossenes System ist, kann man kaum etwas dagegen tun.
Weil das meiste an Android frei und quelloffen ist, konnten Enthusiast:innen googlefreie Android-Varianten bauen. Manche funktionieren hervorragend, z.B. @GrapheneOS und @calyxos. Andere unterstützen eine größere Auswahl an Hardware, aber dafür funktionieren sie nicht auf jedem Gerät gleich gut, z.B. @LineageOS, e/OS/ und #DivestOS.
Ein erster Schritt kann es sein, @mozilla#Firefox als Browser und @MetaGer als Suchmaschine zu verwenden.
I read a pleasantly differentiated spotlight on freedom vs. security in your computer’s hard and software and why tech corps sell the means to control and observe their users as means for the latter.
"- motivated reasoning ripples through all of Silicon Valley's top brass, producing what Anil Dash calls "VC QAnon," the collection of conspiratorial, debunked and absurd beliefs embraced by powerful people who hold the digital lives of billions of us in their quivering grasp..."
Trusted Computing and Remote Attestation are 1984-worthy doublespeak for computing that you can't trust, computing that will rat you out. @pluralistic : "As I wrote last week, giving manufacturers the power to decide how your computer is configured, overriding your own choices, is a bad tradeoff – the worst tradeoff, a greased slide into terminal enshittification"
> Powerful people imprisoned by the cluelessness of their own isolation, locked up with their own motivated reasoning: "It's impossible to get a CEO to understand something when his quarterly earnings call depends on him not understanding it."
> Take Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg insists that anyone who wanted to use a pseudonym online is "two-faced," engaged in dishonest social behavior. The Zuckerberg Doctrine claims that forcing people to use their own names is a way to ensure civility. This is an idea so radioactively wrong, it can be spotted from orbit.