Life finds a way
Yarr
And then the plan to force everyone to abandon Firefox whether they like it or not.
- Implement the misfeatures.
- Movie and music websites will be the first to announce requiring DRM to be able to watch movies or listen to tunes.
- The banks will be next. “For your safety, you must use an Official Approved Browser™ to be allowed access to your money!”
- Then ecommerce sites. “You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything.”
- Then comes the social media sites. For your safety, of course…
At that point, the userbase of anything that’s not Chrome or not DRM’d to death will be so eroded that virtually everyone else will abandon Firefox support, DRM will get enabled by default. Also, comes the lobbyists to Congress demanding changes to the DMCA to throw users in prison who dare to try to crack the DRM to block ads. “Ad-blocking is stealing!”
Google is such a bad company. People should discontinue use of all their software and at the very least stop using chrome or chromium. They’ve got the internet by the balls.
The year is 2023, every single major tech companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No. 1. And the only Hero we have is the EU, will it be able to save the day?
Don’t have too much faith in the EU. Corporations are still heavily influencing politics. They will probably come with half assed laws that have loopholes or workarounds.
Like GDPR?
/s
I don’t get the “/s”.
The #GDPR is absolutely a perfect example of ½-assed laws & loopholes. I have filed reports on dozens of GDPR violations; not a single one of them lead to enforcement. The GDPR is just a prop to make people feel comfortable as the EU destroys the offline infrastructure.
I did as well for the Catholic Church. I don’t want to have my name associated with a gang of child molesters so I invoked the right to be forgotten. The church told me that baptism is sacred and cannot be undone. The Dutch institution for GDPR claims never did anything about it because they’re overloaded with requests.
Oh well, I’m not willing to give it more energy either. It’s mildly annoying but doesn’t affect my day to day life.
Maybe you misunderstand the enforcement part of the GDPR. It’s not made for you to get personal enforcement out of it. It works on the basis of multiple infractions being recorded and then escalating the agencies response level.
I work with many companies as IT consultant and I can assure you, that they all FEAR the GDPR and treat natural person data very well because of that. Enforcement of GDPR does happen and you can review every enforcement on a public website called enforcement tracker. There are almost 1980 enforcement actions in their database.
I have also personally requested information about me and my family through the rights bestowed by the GDPR regulations and have EVERY TIME gotten the information within 30 days.
Maybe you misunderstand the enforcement part of the GDPR. It’s not made for you to get personal enforcement out of it.
You obviously have not read article 77. This article entitles individuals to report GDPR violations to a DPA for enforcement. Article 77 does not distinguish violations against an individual (which I suppose is what you mean by “personal enforcement”) and violations against many. Some of the violations I have reported can only be construed as violations against the general public. E.g. an org fails to designate a DPO.
The problem is there is nothing to enforce article 77 itself. When a DPA neglects to act on an article 77 report, there is no recourse. There is only a provision that allows lawsuits against the GDPR violators. But then when someone did that, and then claimed legal costs, an Italian court decided for everyone in a precedence-setting case that legal costs are not recoverable. Which essentially neuters the court action remedy. So we have an unenforced article 77 and a costly & impractical direct action option.
It works on the basis of multiple infractions being recorded and then escalating the agencies response level.
It’s not even doing that much, in some cases. The report has to get past the front desk secretary and be submitted into the litigation chamber before it’s even considered as something that would indicate a trend. If it doesn’t get past the secretary it does nothing whatsoever. Some of my reports were flippantly rejected by a pre-screening secretary for bogus reasons (e.g. “your complaint is ‘contractual in nature’” when in fact there is no contractual agreement, apart from the fact that the existence of a contract does not nullify the GDPR anyway).
I work with many companies as IT consultant and I can assure you, that they all FEAR the GDPR
So you’re only seeing the commercial response. Gov agencies & NGOs are also subject to the GDPR, which is where you see the most recklessness (likely due to the lack of penalty). On the commercial side banks also don’t give much of a shit about the GDPR because when they violate it there’s a shit ton of banking regs they point to and the DPAs are afraid to act against banks because of the messy entanglement of AML/KYC laws that essentially push #banks to violate the GDPR.
Enforcement of GDPR does happen and you can review every enforcement on a public website called enforcement tracker.
Indeed I’ve browsed through the enforcement tracker. It’s a good prop for making the public believe that the #GDPR is being well enforced. They are cherry-picking cases to enforce to convince the public that something is being done, but people who actually submit reports know better. We see the reports that are clearly going unenforced.
I have also personally requested information about me and my family through the rights bestowed by the GDPR
I have had article 15 access requests denied which I then reported to the DPA, who opened a case but just sat on it. For years, so far.
(edit) By the way, I suggest you leave Lemmy·world for a different instance. If you care about privacy at all, you don’t use Cloudflare nodes. I cannot even see the msg I wrote (which you replied to) because #lemmyWorld blocks me (which I give some detail here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1435972). I had to reply to you based purely on your msg without context.
Forcing this might very well be something EU opposes. While there is a lot of corporate lobbying, Google would be forcing everyone to either use chromium or make compatibility changes into other browser. While not a total monopoly, it still limits the options radically. Therefore there might be hope that EU forbids this type of action. Let’s see…
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It’s bizarre that you think the EU market it small enough to be dispensable. When GDPR came into force, many US sites had to reject EU traffic. But that was only temporary for the most part. They knew it wasn’t smart for business to exclude the EU so they got their compliance issues sorted.
Hope you guys enjoy not being able to search for things.
I would love that actually. But it’s not reality. In reality what happens is the search engines deliver a shit-ton of unusable garbage results that I would rather not see. E.g. sites that block Tor users, CAPTCHAs, giant cookie popups, etc.
If a search engine were to filter out the garbage, it would be a great start to solving the shitty web problem.
The EU has a larger population than the US, that’s not a market you just leave. Also, Europe is not the same as the European Union.
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The EU has a PPP GDP of $24.05 trillion compared to the US’ $25.4 trillion. That is a market of significant size and leaving it will affect Google’s bottom line.
You can compare Alabama and France all you want, that is irrelevant. Or should I perhaps start comparing Mississippi and Luxembourg?
Lastly, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Google isn’t the only search engine in existence. Bing, Qwant et al. will gladly fill the void that Google leaves behind.
Don’t worry there are others than Google on the market also. If they want to make space for competition it’s actually a good thing.
We already can’t due to Google’s pushing of irrelevant promoted sites and failing to take meaningful action against SEO in recent years.
Hope you enjoy being laid off when your company eats itself to keep the growth going for just a little longer to please the capitalist parasites known as “shareholders”. You can’t much money from ads when the economy is utterly, utterly in the shitter like it is right now, not nearly as much as you used to. You really think that the average person has the financial leeway to buy luxury goods or pricier options shown in ads when the budget barely covers food, bills, rent and transport costs, and everything they do buy must be the cheapest thing they can get their hands on? Your company, and all other internet companies supported by ads, made a pact with the devil, and now he has come to collect his due. I will enjoy seeing you all go hard into the red.
You can’t much money from ads when the economy is utterly, utterly in the shitter like it is right now
What economy are you living in? In the US at least inflation is down, real wages are up, GDP and the stock markets are up, employment numbers are stellar…even income inequality is trending the right way. The only thing that’s “bad” is interest rates, and there’s an argument to be made they were too low to begin with before.
One where the average rent has now eclipsed the average mortgage repayment, and where all we export to the rest of the world is raw resources that are less in demand than ever
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I get by fine with Duckduckgo and Ecosia, thank you very much.
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Google’s recruiting standards must’ve dipped because I can’t fathom a Googler would be this ignorant. You know there are competing search engines, right?
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You’re right, Google and Bing are the only two search engines in the world. Trolls gotta troll, I guess. Blocked.
Thinking about it, a lot of these companies created astounding products on a relatively unusual business model of delivering for free (not totally unheard of, tv for example but still not the most traditional way of doing business) and absorbed, cannibalized or destroyed a lot of other services and functions with their ubiquity and unbeatable price.
The way they say it was funded was through advertising, but nonetheless much of the big banner services remained unprofitable for years or even decades. Sometimes the master plan is to get everyone hooked (users and advertisers) and then when they have little choice anymore, start making things cost, a lot more. The trouble with this though is that none of them are the only one’s doing it and even with only a handful of big titans controlling it all, there’s still the risk of one of your tech bros stealing your lunch when your start trying to cash-in and piss of your users and your customers alike so really I guess all of them doing it at once kind of makes sense. Kind of a “I’ll jump when you jump” mentality and at least one has jumped. I somewhat wonder if they all planned to go this route at around the same time together or if they all just concluded that the short term gain in market share by taking advantage of one of them jumping wasn’t worth the risks from the intense competition and just decided to instead cash in at the same time.
Or I’m just rambling and have no business sense or idea what I’m talking about. It just seems that might explain why this all seems to be coming to some kind of a crescendo at about the same time.
We warned you about Chrome. We told you bro.
Google and Chrome really need to be broken up. Maybe people should start writing (physical) letters to the FTC asking to review Google’s recent actions as monopolistic behavior.
It wouldn’t be the first time. But showing the interest is the best way to get the ball rolling that we can do.
“Google engineers want…”
No. Google executives want this to happen. Google’s CEO wants this to happen.
They want to change the internet and remove any little bit of freedom for their own corporate profits.
Fuck “do no evil” Google.
The internet is unusable without adblockers.
I’ve tried internet without adblock and it’s almost unusable.
On banking websites, yes.
You know something is wrong if your bank’s website needs adblocking. No wonder the internet has gone to shit… Is it that bad in other countries? ( i live in a country where bank sites dont have ads )
I live in the US. If I turn on uBlock for banking websites, they often don’t work.
It’s usually some analytics script, which as recent events with tax preparers have shown ought to be blocked as a security risk.
Analytics and my money. Ye no, those dont mix
Use Firefox.
Support Firefox.
Using alternative Chromium based browsers is not it.
Alright, today is oficially the day I switch to Firefox
Come here, I left Firefox when Chrome first released, however after the Firefox Quantum release, I got back to using Firefox again. The container tabs feature is very useful to create a separate container for each project that I’m involved in. It’s like having multiple browsers without needing to install multiple browsers.
Although I still keep Vivaldi and Edge installed to visit some websites that doesn’t work correctly with Firefox.
Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Protonmail is my setup. I am slowy getting away from Google and all massive corps tbh, I’m spending more time on my Linux partition too.
Yay!
We waste intelligent minds on this rubbish when we are facing an existential crisis in climate change.
Why’s everyone blaming the engineers lol, pretty sure they’re just doing what they’re told right?
News headline, October 2078
Google finds users are covering their ears and closing their eyes; releases nanobots to force eyes open and lock hands behind back.
Reminds of the 15 million merits episdoe in black mirror
Man I love using Firefox.
This topic is a bit beyond me so I may have misunderstood but I think it’s not going to matter that you use Firefox if this goes ahead and gets widely adopted because it sounds like websites will request these trust tokens and if your browser isn’t forthcoming with one then they will assume you are a bot (or a user that blocks ads and is therefore one whose traffic does not benefit them). What happens then is unclear, do they not serve up the website? Do you get a degraded experience or different content? Do they just throw a lot of CAPTCHAs at you?
Sounds like they’re going to make life on the web a whole lot less convenient for folks that don’t want to use their new token system. But it’s totally voluntary though, no browser has to implement it.
Yes it will affect you even if you use Firefox. If a lot of us still used Firefox, Google would not be able to do it as websites would not give up on a big chunk of their audience.
I suspect the next step in the ongoing war between people who want to make websites unuseable and people who want to use websites is going to be some kind of spoofing method to keep browsing. Maybe your secure browser of choice runs a regular chrome instance as intended and then scrapes the non-add data from that process and presents it to you in an add free format.
This might sound silly but assuming you are using firefox or even safari how will this proposal affect these browsers. Only thing I can currently think of is banking sites (on android) would force you to use chrome and check play integrity (safteynet) to block acess.
At the end of the day won’t this only affect people using Google chrome? (Forks of chrome, firefox, safari could by pass the issue)?
Sorry if I seem a bit ignorant
Firefox could always spoof the standard to maintain compatibility.
If it could be spoofed easily, wouldn’t that defeat the point?
I mean you can’t just “spoof” a ssl cert or private ssh key, I have to assume this is at least that good.
You’re relying on the device to provide a signal of authenticity with this model. Firefox can simply say it’s authentic. However this will just lead to any signals from Firefox being ignored by any site… So Firefox would actually just need to spoof whatever signals Chrome is using… And thanks to Chromium being open source that shouldn’t be too hard. If it’s a device ID or mac address that’s being used to show uniqueness, that can be randomized and presented to sites…
I haven’t looked at the spec… and from my understanding the Spec isn’t even finalized yet… I could be wrong. But It’s certainly not going to be a case that each webhost has a complete list of ssl certs from every client… That’s never going to happen. It could be that a cert is issued to Apple and Google, and they sub-cert out to individual devices for identities. Not sure what would stop firefox from just pulling a glut of certs and rotating them out regularly.
Yeah, I just don’t get the point of what Google is doing with all of this. The while point is to require attestation because than you know people are viewing ads. So websites can either “trust” certs issued by Firefox, or not and lose out on ad revenue. I guess Google absence doesn’t have to trust firefoz attestation, but then it is going to payout less and people will seek other providers.
SSL certs provide trust because you ultimately trust the issuing authority, which is supposedly garunteednby world governments. Their are known corrupt actors issuing certs, but ultimately you can be pretty sure that the SSL cert matches the domain you are on, and that it was requested by the owner of that domain. But you can still choose to not visit that domain if you don’t trust it. There are a lot of services that will block its already, so I don’t really get what the point of attestation is.
Good point.
Mozilla is working on their own v3, without a lot of the restrictions Google has added. I think you can already try out the relevant mode in Firefox.
On Firefox Nightly looks like they have v3 enabled
Yeah. I saw the announcement in the nightly channel couple of days ago. They’re letting extension makers port their add-ons as well in advance.
Yeah, as far as i understand, the browser needs to support the API. But firefox will implement it nonetheless after some protest, or no money from Google anymore.
Pair it up with DDG + Protonmail and world will smile to you! 😄
I prefer startpage or Qwant. Protonmail is great though!
Would love to use Firefox if it wasn’t so slow
Hope more developers give special support to the gecko engine
Firefox really isn’t slow.
Especially when its blocking all the ad bloat that chrome runs on… What in the fuck are these people smoking?
I’m not sure how recently you’ve used it but I actually find chrome to be much more resource hungry. Maybe it’s worth a try again if you haven’t?
lol Firefox + adblock beat Chrome any day.
Have you seen the recent benchmarks where Firefox surpassed Chrome? Sure, they may not reflect actual use cases, but it shows that there isn’t much of a speed difference.
Firefox isn’t slow, you just want an excuse.
