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Google is already pushing Web Environment Integrity into Chromium (github.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[–] 29 points 3 years ago (24 children)

Pardon my ignorance but Can someone explain what google is trying to do?

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  • [–] 81 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)

    Pardon formatting, on mobile. Its a form of device authentication. Apple does this with safari already BTW, and it can reduce things like captcha because the authentication is done on the backend when a request hits a server. While still an issue in concept with Apple doing it, chromium browsers are a much larger market share. In layman's terms this is basically the company saying, hey you are attempting to visit this site, we need to verify the device (or browser, or add on configuration, or no ad blocker, etc) is 'authentic'. Which of course is nebulous. It can be whatever the entity in charge of attestation wants it to be.

    This sets the precedent that whomever is controlling verification, can deny whomever they see fit. I'm running GrapheneOS on my phone currently, they could deny for that. Or, if you are blocking ads. Maybe you're not sharing specific information about your device, and they want to harvest that. Too bad, comply or you're 'not allowed to do x or y'.

    This is the gist. The web should be able to be accessed by anybody. It isn't for companies to own nor should it be built that way. Web2 is a corporate hellscape.

    Edit wrt Safari: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/

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  • [–] 29 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    I suspect "authentic" will mean "pays a license fee to Google." In this respect it will work like other forms of DRM, and it will have the same effect of excluding new and smaller players from the market. Except in this case the market is the whole of the web.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    No, there are no fees at all. Authentic just means approved device state, which will be defined by the website you go to I believe. So youtube might required many different things in order to be "authentic" like no ad blockers, genuine browser, non-rooted phone, etc., whereas bank-xyz may just check for one thing, like a genuine browser. Also, websites have to enable this on their side, so its not going to be used by default on all websites. The whole thing is crap though, even if only a few websites enable this, it could have huge impacts.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Not necessarily. With some forms od tracking being curbed, just being sent the who accesses which webpage on what device when (the bare minimum for attestation) has lots of value. And google won't stop at the bare minimum of data grabbing, of course.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 years ago (16 children)

    From my limited understanding as a common pleb, they are inserting DRM into Chromium browsers to prevent ad-blockers.

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  • [–] 25 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    Internet with no ad-blockers is like a nightmare

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago* (10 children)

    Yes, it is a nightmare. The insane volume of ads and clickbait injected into web pages is killing the internet as an information source. Most of the searchable stuff is unusable. Which explains why ChatGPT was so enthusiastically embraced - it's really just synthesizing content into a readable form that doesn't require navigating around a jungle of animated gifs and flashing ads. That's also I think why Lemmy and Mastodon are so refreshing to use, and hopefully will stay that way - although money seems to find a way to ruin everything. Lemmy right now feels a lot like the internet used to be before the big money came along and ruined it with advertising and platform lock-ins.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    @fuser @Lem0n, the only AI I most use and which is really useful for me is Andisearch.
    https://andisearch.com

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    https://andisearch.com looks like it might be a better option - thank you so much for posting. I'm mostly using duck-duck-go which is tolerable but by this point we should have come up with a more useful way to index relevant information. Google would rather we see ads than any relevant content, which wasn't the case when they first launched google in the late 1990s. Google was refreshing at the time because of its cleaner interface than yahoo and uncluttered results, amusingly enough - it's a far cry from what it once was.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    @fuser, Andi certainly is a fresh wind, it was the first search engine with AI which appears, before Google, Bing and the others. Great work of two very nice and friendly devs, Angie Hoover and Jed White, with an open ear to the user in their Discord channel for suggestions, feature request, bug report (well, it's still in developement) or simple chat.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Well, thanks again for the info - I'm trying it now and the results seem excellent, it took me to wikiwand, which I'd never used but it's a front end for wikipedia - it's quite nice. I've learned so much about alternative FOSS and great ad-free content by reading and posting here. I was never a great fan of reddit - liked to scroll but hardly ever posted there - I thought RPAN was the coolest thing they did - but Lemmy is great for conversation, despite the relatively small user base - I'm grateful that reddit's nonsense drove so many helpful people here.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    @fuser, the fediverse has nothing to do with monolithic social networks, controlled by large multinationals. It doesn't matter if you use an instance of Lemmy, Friendica, Diaspora, or Mastodon. etc., are really of the people and independent of large corporations and linkable with each other. Here in Mastodon I see posts of all these in my Timeline and I suppose you too, like the one where I am.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I didn't notice that you were posting from Mastodon as I'm on Lemmy and your posts appear here just like any other Lemmy user - but the @fuser at the start of your messages is probably the tell, I think Mastodon defaults the username you're replying to, whereas Lemmy doesn't. It's great that we can use different applications without some corporate gatekeeper capturing everybody's personal info at the integration point to hawk to an advertising company.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    @fuser @Lem0n Regarding articles, I just save them to a read-later app that strips them of all the crap. If the site won't let me, I'll find another source reporting the same information, and save it to read later. If this process ultimately fails without a saved page, I won't read the article.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    Right - that's a good approach, however if you're looking for a quick answer to an immediate question by searching using a common search engine, the garbage SEO pages are the most irritating, even with adblocking.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    To be fair, it is useful for other purposes, but the cost to users is likely to be huge, with ad blocking being one of them. It probably also prevents other things even outside your browser because there's no point in securing a browser running in an untrusted environment. IIRC there is/was an issue running Netflix on certain Android devices and rooted devices after a similar feature was added to Android.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    My S7 was running a custom rom, I had to manually download and install the Netflix apk, as the play store wouldn't let me do it. WhatsApp was weird too, it would let you install, but there were a bunch of aggravating bugs, like if your device was on it showed you as "online". Got in trouble at work because my boss thought I was on my phone all day.

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