https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity
https://youtu.be/fAFlI4jZ4uc
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/chrome-delays-plan-to-limit-ad-blockers-new-timeline-coming-in-march/
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There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.
There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.
Drm- Digital “rights” management, more like digital restrictions management is a thing that tries to make sure the things you own are restricted by someone else.
It s the reason some singleplayer games dont work offline, some apps wont let you record them or Blu Ray discs try to stop you from copying them. things that you own. Thwy are controlled by corporations that can say who can use the media. Even if a device is perfectly able to play a movie, Google can not allow it so Neflix would not trust the device.
Examples are Denuvo and Widevine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
Honest comment with a bit of a question buried in here this novella… I use Google devices; Pixel Pro’s, Pixel watches, Nest hubs, Nest thermostats, etc. This is a understood agreement (not symbiotic) between me and the behemoth that is Alphabet: I pay them for hardware, and use their “free services” that are heavily subsidized by pillaging my data. I know the hardware does it too, and I’m paying.
I’ve switched most of my networking and cameras to UniFi, my browsers are all Firefox… The question is what’s next? I dislike Apple iPhones but like my wife’s MacBook, but I’m a nerd. All of my devices need to “play nice” in their respective ecosystem. I’m tired of having the inbox app, hangouts, etc only to find Google has grown tired or doesn’t care and scraps them.
When the iPhone 15 comes out, I was getting the wife that and myself the Pixel 8P. Now I struggle. The “ultra” premium phones (we both care most about camera) are few and defined. I don’t want to jump to Apple, it’s the same thing, just packaged differently. Ugh.
Or CalyxOS. Both are totally reliable as daily drivers on pixels. Installation is super easy via web installer and you can still use the original Google cam app that makes your images look as nice as you are used too. Join their respective Matrix chats to get things going and ask the noon questions.
Sigh. Whoever they have working in their DRM department has been an asshole for a long time now.
This is what the third or fourth - minimum - thing like this they’ve tried to pass in a few years? I actually like Google as a product family but every time they do this it hits me right in the “maybe I should reconsider” department. Its also usually met with a hard resounding no from everyone. Maybe its that they have a task force that is paid well to protect their ad interests and recover some sort of deficit they see in their ad product.
I donate to the EFF to fight things like this at a professional level…also good to point out though that its not just google’s fault. If they build a moat for businesses and everyone installs one, that is everyone’s fault.
It’s time for Firefox and others to sue Google for antitrust. When you’re using your monopoly to force web “standards” (instead of having an independent third party set standards) that cause developers to stop supporting your rival browser is clearly illegal monopoly actions.
Wouldn’t need to take their money if donations were to get high enough (though it might be easier to have a collective org that all kinds of open internet groups could join and donate to). At the moment FF is the only browser that isn’t relying on Google’s Chromium while also being a real player that isn’t OS specific like Safari is. All the FF alts may have their own very good points for making their forks, but they aren’t building anything from the ground up. Which puts them in the same spot as all the Chromium based forks with regards to relying on base code needing to stay current. It is of course possible for the Chromium forks to join with FF (and any of its forks that can put their issues with Mozilla aside on this issue) to call for protections.
IE/Microsoft was pulling the same kinds of shit before Chrome, Firefox, and Safari were able to show what could be possible with both actual demands for standards to be followed and that the internet should be open. The open standards are what allowed so many devs of all classes/nationalities/ages/etc to create so many cool things when barriers like money and copyright are removed. Now Google is the Microsoft of the internet and they only respect the rights of corps and rich fucks that don’t create anything. Just digital rights versions of landlords. We wouldn’t have the options we have now if we waited for those copyrights holders to stop us from just doing shit with technology.
The sad part is that you can’t donate to Firefox directly. Only to the Mozilla Foundation, which, I think misguidedly, is trying to become a political advocacy entity. They want to talk about “hate speech” online. They want to make their own AI thing… ugh. I would never deny that society and the internet has big problems. But it seems the organization has been overtaken by people who want to play political games rather than just making free software.
If they focused solely on making a killer browser they might actually be able to dethrown Chromium or at least become more than a niche player.
P.S. I thought I made my reply to your commment in another thread that I made instead of both yours and my comment being in this one. The post you were replying to inspired me to look up how to file an antitrust complaint with the US government.
Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it’s always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.
But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you’re right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.
Servo Folk. It’s one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That’s where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn’t be Mozilla’s problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla’s market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.
Have you heard of Electron? It’s the use of Chromium’s Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn’t there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko’s way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It’s a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink’s based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.
I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people’s GPUs more).
And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-browser-reigns-supreme-3294340/
And there’s just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that’s janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.
From what you’ve said though there seem to be benefits from cleaning up Gecko in order to make it feasible to turn it into something similar to Electron.
I don’t use Youtube; Chrome; or Google Search. I use Abrowser which doesn’t play with DRM so I don’t visit those sites. I use Ublock origin; Jshelter; Privacy Badger; and LibReDirect. I did this for years before even coming to this thread. It’s as simple as making choices which support your values. Google and the like will never change to support your values. Just ditch them and change your behavior.
You obviously know your way around technology, but you should be worried about the amount of people who are not tech-savvy and can only rely on what they’re offered. This is especially crucial now since a lot of citizen rights can be exercises over the internet, and sometimes that’s the only way to actually exercise them (Italy has several internet-only public services). So we shouldn’t be talking to a community of tech experts, we should promote easier ways to leave the monopoly and proselytize the layman about them.
Google is working toward implementing a new protocol in Google Chrome, “Manifest v3”, that will be intrusive and help enforce Digital Rights Management, as well as stopping ad blockers.
Under the guise of this being safe, secure, and to curb bots, Mv3 will require users to become Trusted by using the Chrome browser.
Since the majority of users are using Google Chrome, this will heavily influence corporations to adopt this protocol in their service.
A Trusted user can access Netflix in the browser. If you’re using Firefox or are an untrusted user, you will not be able to access Netflix in your browser.
This protocol will appear one day in some form, and it will greatly shift the internet and force more users into Google’s ecosystem.
This will spread to all areas of the internet - Banking web sites, government web sites, healthcare, entertainment, education, etc.
The internet will become less “free” over time. More censorship, less rights.
Lots of ads can contain malware. Considering that Google allows phishing sites to pay for an ad to appear directly in Google search results, there is no confidence that Mv3 will be safe or secure.
See my other comments in this Post for more details.
Absolutely. But there’s the catch - if Google passes this (and they will, because they don’t like ad blockers since it hurts their revenue), others will implement it.
Other Chromium browsers will be forced to adopt Mv3 too. If they don’t adopt it, the users that continue to use those browsers will find that certain web sites or services won’t work, and they’ll uninstall them and leave the service. “Why can’t Opera/Brave load my stupid bank? This is so stupid. I just want to check my balance. Whoa! It works in Chrome! That’s awesome! Why are these idiots at Brave even developers if they can’t fix the simplest shit? They should learn from Google, I’m switching to Chrome.”
And thus, Google Chrome isn’t necessarily “a monopoly”, because other Chromium browsers will adopt it if they want to stay in business. Opera belongs to China, Brave feeds their advertisements and has Basic Attention Token (BAT) cryptocurrency, Microsoft Edge is everything Google is but with a heaping pile of Microsoft privacy invasions. They’ll adopt it, they don’t have a choice.
Other Chromium browsers like Ungoogled Chromium, which is made by voluntary developers in their free time, will not adopt it. But because they’re unpaid, how long can they fight Mv3? Eventually, Ungoogled Chromium will disappear.
Firefox and its forks (Librewolf, Waterfox, etc.) are safe for now. In 10 years when Web sites don’t work, if they don’t adopt Mv3, they too will disappear. Firefox is a corporation that has salaries and a bottom line - they’ll have no choice but to comply or they will perish.
The only way this can somehow get turned around is if Google is upended and a new competitor emerges that the majority of users flocks to. The largest competitor is Firefox, which is not Chromium. Web developers and corporations design their services for the majority of users, so maximum compatibility is for Chromium. I don’t see that happening ever. Hopefully Brave and Microsoft have enough power and decide they don’t want to use Mv3. That’s our only chance.
I don’t know anything else, but I have been using firefox for a while, and I can’t think of any times where a website didn’t work. Seems like a almost perfect drop in replacement for chromium currently, just needs people to do it.
There are some extensions that are only available for Chrome, but beside that this compatibility issue mostly happens with government sites and stuff like that. Since in their case it’s you who want something from them and not the other way around, they’re free to only check compatibility with something and say that anything else might not work.
Most of the time I stumbled upon such sites requiring IE, but that era seems to be over by now, fortunately.
I’m sure there’s a few sites that don’t work on Firefox, but I’ve definitely never ran into one, so its gotta be a very very small issue.
Regarding extensions, that is an issue I’ve had, but it turns out that some extensions can be ported to Firefox relatively easily. I don’t have a clue how to write browser extension’s, but all I had to do was make a mozilla developer account and you can convert automatically them there. There are certainly some (or most, not sure) that would require someone to manually port to Firefox though.
All in all, its almost a perfect drop in replacement.
I shared my mp3s d/l’d from Gmusic on Drive. about 1500 or so. public link. haven’t looked lately if it still works. if it took off the bandwidth would likely get their attention. I’m sure they at least keep file checksums to use DRM filters on. u/l’d a DVD rip to Ytube and they blocked sharing from there re: copyright. they don’t pay artists much from what I’ve read. can’t easily d/l mp3s from youtube music like the old Gmusic. cds/dvds only last a few years so free backups kept on G servers seems a good use of my free 17Gig
Getting more people to start using Firefox instead of Chrome would be the best way to “vote with our wallets” in this case. Though some of the Chromium forks do make easier sells, but they are much much more likely to just go with whatever Google does by using the same base. So if Google forces something into Chromium in order to keep being able to functioning and being compatible (in web standards, security updates, and the massive extension library). It will just force the use of whatever Google wants, and make Google the de facto boss of how we are “allowed” to use the internet.
It’s a long video with many points and better if you watch it. However, here’s a break down of key points, made to be as simple as possible - there’s a lot more technical stuff, but I’ll try to keep it concise and less technical.
This is probably about a 10 minute read if these concepts are not familiar to you:
Google owns Chrome (not Chromium), and they dominate the market ever since they won the internet browser wars.
As an amoral corporation (not evil, simply lacking morals), their business runs on advertisements.
They’re revealing a new feature called Manifest v3 which is a locked down version of the browser that’s built around what they feel is security and trust.
Under their proposal for Manivest v3, your browser will have to be “verified” in an attempt to keep you “safe”. Are you a human or a bot? They’re making a more trusted internet with trusted software.
Companies like Netflix, news web sites, etc. will eat this up and implement the proper protocols to use Manifest v3. To visit your bank’s web site which has this protocol, you’ll need to use Chrome’s browser.
Using Chrome’s browser, you’ll need to authenticate yourself and become a “trusted” user. With this enabled, you can then visit your bank’s web site.
If you use an alternative browser that isn’t approved, you won’t be able to use that web site.
Eventually other corporations will implement these protocols, too, and you’ll be locked out from participating in the internet.
Google, an ad company, gets to control advertisements better, gets to learn more about their users, and now gets to mark them as “trusted”. In other words, you get the North Korean version of the internet, “Mommy and Daddy’s Safe and Approved Internet”. Meanwhile, North Korea and Mom/Dad get to spy on you, see what you’re up to, monitor you, control you, and shape you. The benefit is they also make money off you by selling the information they learn about you.
Why is this bad:
It’s censorship. It’s like your mom and dad grabbing your phone, computer, enabling severe parental controls, giving it back to you, and they get to see and approve what you’re allowed to do and say at any time. Apply that same protocol to your money, too. Want to send money through the internet using PayPal? Even more censorship. Want to watch Netflix? Your parents lock it down so only certain things can be watched, at certain times, and certainly under their permission.
It buries competition and makes Google even more of a monopoly. We already know Google Search is bad (advertisements, phishing web sites, auto-generated content web sites are always the first results in Google.
Digital Rights Management. Just a bit north of 20 years ago, when you purchased a digital product, you could own it. Streaming didn’t exist. In an age where “buying” no longer means “owning”, this new protocol will further enforce DRM. Pay for Netflix and want to watch it? You’ll have to be a Trusted User that uses Chrome. Bought a new video game you’re excited to play on Steam? You’ll need to be a Trusted User. Don’t want to stream music through Spotify and instead use something like Bandcamp? To make a purchase at Bandcamp, you’ll need to be a Trusted User. Don’t want to buy something through Bandcamp and instead just download what you already paid for? You guessed right - you’ll need to be a trusted user to even login and reach your downloads. Don’t forget your downloads are hosted on servers that are run by Google and Amazon - you’ll have to be a trusted user in order to download from that server.
Can I use Firefox and stop using any Chromium browser
Most browsers are Chromium: Chrome, Brave, Ungoogled Chromium to name a few. They will all eventually implement Manifest v3, and if they don’t, they will disappear.
Firefox is not Chromium, but think about how many users use Firefox now. Google Chrome has the overwhelming market share and has captured users into their platform.
Because the majority of users use Chrome, corporations have to evolve to adopt Manifest v3: banking web sites, governments, job applications, benefits, healthcare, personal emergency, etc. All of these will be forced to adopt it because that’s where the users are, and Google will force corporations to participate. After all, banking web sites will face less downtime through Manifest v3, because bots won’t be able to spam them and try to get in. Netflix will have to spend less money on security, because only trusted users will be able to even reach Netflix. Your “free” email service through Gmail now stops all spam because it only accepts incoming messages from trusted users. Of course everyone will adopt it - Google is safe, secure, and trusted. And best of all it’s “free”!
If you use Firefox now and continue to use it, you’ll be safe for several years. For now.
What can we do?
Right now, you can opt out of using Chrome by using Firefox and other decentralized tools.
In the not too distant future, there’s not much that you can do. Educating users to switch from Chrome, use Linux, use stock Android (e.g., Graphene OS), will not help.
Eventually, the users that use Firefox, Linux, stock de-googled Android will get locked out. An average user isn’t going to invest their time to learn these platforms. They’ll stick with what works: “I can login to Chrome and watch my Netflix and pay my bills. You’re telling me that this Linux thing doesn’t let me do that? Screw that, I’ll use Chrome OS - at least my shit works! What’s wrong with these Linux developers, they can’t get anything right! They should take a lesson from Google and fix their shit.”
Write your politicians and hope that some governments will help restrict this rollout. Keep in mind though that some version of this will get passed and approved. Also don’t forget that corrupt regulators and politicians are captured and owned by corporations. This will get passed, there’s no doubt about it.
What will happen 20 years from now?
Humans have tenacity. You can only frustrate humans so much before they break. Take away too many of their freedoms, impose many restrictions, and eventually they will break.
The trick for all of time, seen throughout history by all our overlords, kings, emperors, etc. is to find a careful balance. Take away “just enough” freedoms. Give them “just enough”. Work them until they’re tired, but don’t let them break. And of course, give them a few handouts here and there, but not enough to make their lives easy.
Manifest v3 (or its derivative) will be implemented. There’s no doubt about that at all.
The 99% of the population will continue to use these services because they want to be able to participate: They have to pay bills, access money, access healthcare, use government systems, do education, have entertainment, etc.
The 99% will continue to use this because they won’t care. So long as they can be happy enough, they will persist.
Eventually, an infinitesimally small minority will be affected by something. Something will break and cause them to snap, and they will do the only thing that an individual human can do: opt out.
That small minority will leave, opt out, and refuse to participate in the system. Those clusters will grow at an extremely small rate because they’re able to recognize the whole picture and see that personal freedoms are so restricted. They’ll remember their history and learn from it.
Enter decentralization - the removal of power from centralized authority.
Those who recognize decentralization will build new platforms, and others will eventually follow. This is why the Fediverse and Bitcoin exist. They recognize the problem of centralization and are full of users who decided to opt out. The Fediverse adoption exploded with the 2023 Reddit API problem, and the constant Twitter issues under Elon Musk. Bitcoin happened in 2009 out of anger from the 2008 global financial crisis when “Satoshi Nakomoto” gave, as a gift to the world, a permissionless peer-to-peer decentralized economy of money that had “rules, but without rulers”.
What happens 20+ years from now?
In 30 years when more of the population realizes their freedoms are under attack, they’ll consult the ones who left 10 years previously.
In 40 years, you might have choice. There may be a “new Firefox” that pops up after the old Firefox was wiped out 10 years ago, and let’s you use the internet, your IP, and your content in a different way.
The trick is to train yourself to see the big picture. You’ll never defeat your overlords - they’re behind tall walls and they control the money. However, you can opt out. You can refuse to participate. But by doing so, remember that you will be locked out. That’s not an easy choice to make.
But those users that do opt out, they will be the ones that were pushed too far. This is why refugees leave their homes - they just want to be safe, they want to be alright, they want their freedom from their opressors.
We will have “Google Internet” (Manifest v3) refugees one day.
“We no longer have choice. We no longer have voice. And what is left when you have no choice and no voice? Exit.” - Andreas Antonopoulos
Why shun them? Shouldn’t we welcome them when they decide to join us?
No one likes an evangelist, so I think it’s best to not try to recruit people; Rather, we can make others aware of this problem by making announcements that state facts about what’s going on. Then we leave the 99% to figure it out and decide for themselves.
I never heard of Lemmy, but I’ve been disenfranchised by other social medias and simply walked away. After the Reddit API scandal, I discovered the Fediverse (after hearing vaguely about Mastodon years ago). Let them come on their own. We should welcome all refugees.
If they want to join it’s ok, but if they leave or they don’t want to join we shun them, because making average people aware doesn’t work, they simply don’t care
So basically, we’re going to have to build a separate internet that rejects this new protocol and allows for alternate browsers. That tactic, combined with piracy and offering everything the big guys charge money for for free, might be enough to draw at least a chunk of the people away from it.
You’ve got it right. the thing is that corporations will have to adopt to these standards, but that doesn’t stop us from opting out via decentralized methods and, if you favor it, piracy.
You can spin up your own media server like Jellyfin and serve content to users in your own enclave. Open it to the public and it’s ripe for DMCA takedown.
We can spin up our own social media places and collaborate together. There’s lots of options out there to meet every need. Maybe over time as storage gets cheaper, we’ll figure out how to decentralize large media like movies and tv shows over some kind of distributed service like an open blockchain, and then we can say goodbye to YouTube. Or the YouTube alternatives (not the front ends) will become easier with less friction, and user-supported server costs.
The one thing we couldn’t spin up though are core services that I mentioned - banking, healthcare, government sites, etc.
The one thing we couldn’t spin up though are core services that I mentioned - banking, healthcare, government sites, etc.
🤔 Actually, if we banded together and had enough people with the know-how and willpower, we could in principle open up our own credit union. Credit unions are alternatives to banks and are specifically designed for shit like this. Just as there are teachers’ and firefighters’ credit unions, so too could there be one for, say, us Lemmonades.
You wrote all this but you failed to mention that Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors. The competitors need to sue.
Those complaint websites are tailored to the customers who suffer from the decline in competition. We are suffering from Google using its market position to kill our user experience and options. As I understand, it’s classic monopoly abuse.
In the 20th century, the US broke up the Hollywood model where companies owned both the studios and the theaters (how you have 20th century Fox (or just 20th century now) and Fox theaters). Google owning 75% online advertising and 75% of web browser share is a clear conflict of interest and you can see it from how they’re pushing things like Manifest V3 via their browser (especially when you consider how Chrome is the default browser on their phones), now that it’s the only browser that developers are increasingly starting to support.
If you follow that model, one thing that’s going to have to be done is to have Chrome/Chromium browser development be broken away from Google proper. Google can’t fund the developers any longer.
This is a depressing reality but I think it’s likely this will happen. It makes me so mad Google got as big as they did. Someone needs to tear the fuckers down.
We won’t be able to tear them down. We don’t have the resources to break apart these large corporations. They climbed to the top via the best strategy: find a pipe of money or flow of money in the economy, straddle it and start extracting bits of it like a parasite. In other words, “rent-seeking behavior”. Eventually you get enough money that you buy all the corporations and competitors around and above you so you get bigger. Then you buy the congressman at the top that oversees the laws and regulations, and you use them to make laws in your favor that make it difficult for your competitors to compete with you or keep up with regulation. The end result is that your competition gets buried, and you balloon to the top. Then it’s your goal to get as much money as possible.
Since we can’t tear down large corporations because they captured the regulators (or are financed by governments), the only thing we can do is opt out. You, reader, have already started opting out by using the Fediverse.
The danger of centralization becomes more apparent over time. Continue to use decentralized solutions. Don’t be an evangelist and try to convert people.
Instead, when people get burned (and they will), they will find us. The grassroots people, the anarchists, the ones that just want their freedom from their oppressors.
Give it time. Write your politicians, vote like a good citizen, and when your rights get taken away from you, don’t make letter bombs or rage against your fellows in the working class. Instead, opt out. Take back control by using decentralized systems that can’t be controlled.
Happy to help. As I sat here and reflected on my post I figured out a good way I can satisfy the “Explain Like I’m Five” better. So I’ll share this for posterity:
Google and Chrome is like mom and dad. You live in your house in a nice neighborhood. You use the internet, watch tv, and go to your friends’ houses to play with them.
One day mom and dad want to make sure that you’re safe since they don’t know what you’re up to. So they now request you to ask them for permission before you can go to your friends. You also now have to let them know what you’re doing. It goes well, your mom and dad are happy.
Other moms and dads notice how nice and respectful you are, and they decide they’ll be like your parents since they can trust them.
Over time, other parents also enable these same rules so they can keep the kids safe while knowing what they’re up to.
Moms and dads monitor your sleepovers. They press their ears against your closed door while you hang out with your friends.
They didn’t like that show you were laughing at, so they decided you shouldn’t watch it any more and stopped it. Now, you have to ask permission for some things you want to watch, and some shows you really loved because they were more adult and had bad language are… not there anymore. I guess mom and dad hid them from you. Oh well.
Eventually your mom and dad decide you don’t need your computer and phone, and they give you new ones that are so much easier to use but require their permission to use. You can still visit your friends and message them, but you have to do it on that computer or phone, else you won’t be able to talk to them.
Other moms and dads do the same, seeing that they can now trust everyone.
The neighborhood is now safer. All the parents know what the kids are up to.
You on the other hand, miss what it was like before. It makes you a little sad that you have to get all this permission and you feel like you’re being watched. But, you guess it’s okay. At least you can see your friends. But it just feels different for some reason and you can’t really explain why.
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On my desktop/laptop I use Abrowser. On mobile I use Mull. You could say I have been doing my part for years but thanks for joining me.
There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.
There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.
People have been very vocal about this in the issues for that repo. https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues?q=is%3Aissue
ELI5: what is DRM?
Drm- Digital “rights” management, more like digital restrictions management is a thing that tries to make sure the things you own are restricted by someone else. It s the reason some singleplayer games dont work offline, some apps wont let you record them or Blu Ray discs try to stop you from copying them. things that you own. Thwy are controlled by corporations that can say who can use the media. Even if a device is perfectly able to play a movie, Google can not allow it so Neflix would not trust the device. Examples are Denuvo and Widevine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
Honest comment with a bit of a question buried in here this novella… I use Google devices; Pixel Pro’s, Pixel watches, Nest hubs, Nest thermostats, etc. This is a understood agreement (not symbiotic) between me and the behemoth that is Alphabet: I pay them for hardware, and use their “free services” that are heavily subsidized by pillaging my data. I know the hardware does it too, and I’m paying.
I’ve switched most of my networking and cameras to UniFi, my browsers are all Firefox… The question is what’s next? I dislike Apple iPhones but like my wife’s MacBook, but I’m a nerd. All of my devices need to “play nice” in their respective ecosystem. I’m tired of having the inbox app, hangouts, etc only to find Google has grown tired or doesn’t care and scraps them.
When the iPhone 15 comes out, I was getting the wife that and myself the Pixel 8P. Now I struggle. The “ultra” premium phones (we both care most about camera) are few and defined. I don’t want to jump to Apple, it’s the same thing, just packaged differently. Ugh.
I’d consider installing graphene OS…
Or CalyxOS. Both are totally reliable as daily drivers on pixels. Installation is super easy via web installer and you can still use the original Google cam app that makes your images look as nice as you are used too. Join their respective Matrix chats to get things going and ask the noon questions.
I end up switching more and more of my stuff away from Google every time something like this comes out.
Sigh. Whoever they have working in their DRM department has been an asshole for a long time now.
This is what the third or fourth - minimum - thing like this they’ve tried to pass in a few years? I actually like Google as a product family but every time they do this it hits me right in the “maybe I should reconsider” department. Its also usually met with a hard resounding no from everyone. Maybe its that they have a task force that is paid well to protect their ad interests and recover some sort of deficit they see in their ad product.
I donate to the EFF to fight things like this at a professional level…also good to point out though that its not just google’s fault. If they build a moat for businesses and everyone installs one, that is everyone’s fault.
It’s time for Firefox and others to sue Google for antitrust. When you’re using your monopoly to force web “standards” (instead of having an independent third party set standards) that cause developers to stop supporting your rival browser is clearly illegal monopoly actions.
Puh. Mozilla is Google’s pet that keeps them out of anti-trust court.
Wouldn’t need to take their money if donations were to get high enough (though it might be easier to have a collective org that all kinds of open internet groups could join and donate to). At the moment FF is the only browser that isn’t relying on Google’s Chromium while also being a real player that isn’t OS specific like Safari is. All the FF alts may have their own very good points for making their forks, but they aren’t building anything from the ground up. Which puts them in the same spot as all the Chromium based forks with regards to relying on base code needing to stay current. It is of course possible for the Chromium forks to join with FF (and any of its forks that can put their issues with Mozilla aside on this issue) to call for protections.
IE/Microsoft was pulling the same kinds of shit before Chrome, Firefox, and Safari were able to show what could be possible with both actual demands for standards to be followed and that the internet should be open. The open standards are what allowed so many devs of all classes/nationalities/ages/etc to create so many cool things when barriers like money and copyright are removed. Now Google is the Microsoft of the internet and they only respect the rights of corps and rich fucks that don’t create anything. Just digital rights versions of landlords. We wouldn’t have the options we have now if we waited for those copyrights holders to stop us from just doing shit with technology.
You can’t even donate to Firefox directly. Donation money goes to the corp., which means it goes to CEO pay raises.
The sad part is that you can’t donate to Firefox directly. Only to the Mozilla Foundation, which, I think misguidedly, is trying to become a political advocacy entity. They want to talk about “hate speech” online. They want to make their own AI thing… ugh. I would never deny that society and the internet has big problems. But it seems the organization has been overtaken by people who want to play political games rather than just making free software.
If they focused solely on making a killer browser they might actually be able to dethrown Chromium or at least become more than a niche player.
Let’s just make our own open-source browser then
P.S. I thought I made my reply to your commment in another thread that I made instead of both yours and my comment being in this one. The post you were replying to inspired me to look up how to file an antitrust complaint with the US government.
Here’s what I was referring to:
https://lemmy.world/post/2060683
Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it’s always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.
But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you’re right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.
The Servo fork? Oh I’ve never heard of that. I’ll have to look into it.
Servo Folk. It’s one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That’s where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn’t be Mozilla’s problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla’s market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.
Have you heard of Electron? It’s the use of Chromium’s Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn’t there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko’s way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It’s a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink’s based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.
https://servo.org/
Oh wow. Thanks for that explanation. It only has made me angrier at Mozilla. They have completely lost their way and forgotten their original mission.
I wonder why Mozilla didn’t want their own rendering engine to compete with Blink…
I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people’s GPUs more).
And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-browser-reigns-supreme-3294340/
And there’s just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that’s janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.
From what you’ve said though there seem to be benefits from cleaning up Gecko in order to make it feasible to turn it into something similar to Electron.
deleted by creator
God damn it. *crumbles in embarrassment.
I don’t use Youtube; Chrome; or Google Search. I use Abrowser which doesn’t play with DRM so I don’t visit those sites. I use Ublock origin; Jshelter; Privacy Badger; and LibReDirect. I did this for years before even coming to this thread. It’s as simple as making choices which support your values. Google and the like will never change to support your values. Just ditch them and change your behavior.
You obviously know your way around technology, but you should be worried about the amount of people who are not tech-savvy and can only rely on what they’re offered. This is especially crucial now since a lot of citizen rights can be exercises over the internet, and sometimes that’s the only way to actually exercise them (Italy has several internet-only public services). So we shouldn’t be talking to a community of tech experts, we should promote easier ways to leave the monopoly and proselytize the layman about them.
What about a small TL;DR?
A quick, non-technical explanation:
See my other comments in this Post for more details.
WTF?!!! Monopoly is always a bad thing, we must remember it!
Absolutely. But there’s the catch - if Google passes this (and they will, because they don’t like ad blockers since it hurts their revenue), others will implement it.
Other Chromium browsers will be forced to adopt Mv3 too. If they don’t adopt it, the users that continue to use those browsers will find that certain web sites or services won’t work, and they’ll uninstall them and leave the service. “Why can’t Opera/Brave load my stupid bank? This is so stupid. I just want to check my balance. Whoa! It works in Chrome! That’s awesome! Why are these idiots at Brave even developers if they can’t fix the simplest shit? They should learn from Google, I’m switching to Chrome.”
And thus, Google Chrome isn’t necessarily “a monopoly”, because other Chromium browsers will adopt it if they want to stay in business. Opera belongs to China, Brave feeds their advertisements and has Basic Attention Token (BAT) cryptocurrency, Microsoft Edge is everything Google is but with a heaping pile of Microsoft privacy invasions. They’ll adopt it, they don’t have a choice.
Other Chromium browsers like Ungoogled Chromium, which is made by voluntary developers in their free time, will not adopt it. But because they’re unpaid, how long can they fight Mv3? Eventually, Ungoogled Chromium will disappear.
Firefox and its forks (Librewolf, Waterfox, etc.) are safe for now. In 10 years when Web sites don’t work, if they don’t adopt Mv3, they too will disappear. Firefox is a corporation that has salaries and a bottom line - they’ll have no choice but to comply or they will perish.
The only way this can somehow get turned around is if Google is upended and a new competitor emerges that the majority of users flocks to. The largest competitor is Firefox, which is not Chromium. Web developers and corporations design their services for the majority of users, so maximum compatibility is for Chromium. I don’t see that happening ever. Hopefully Brave and Microsoft have enough power and decide they don’t want to use Mv3. That’s our only chance.
I don’t know anything else, but I have been using firefox for a while, and I can’t think of any times where a website didn’t work. Seems like a almost perfect drop in replacement for chromium currently, just needs people to do it.
Exactly!
There are some extensions that are only available for Chrome, but beside that this compatibility issue mostly happens with government sites and stuff like that. Since in their case it’s you who want something from them and not the other way around, they’re free to only check compatibility with something and say that anything else might not work.
Most of the time I stumbled upon such sites requiring IE, but that era seems to be over by now, fortunately.
I’m sure there’s a few sites that don’t work on Firefox, but I’ve definitely never ran into one, so its gotta be a very very small issue.
Regarding extensions, that is an issue I’ve had, but it turns out that some extensions can be ported to Firefox relatively easily. I don’t have a clue how to write browser extension’s, but all I had to do was make a mozilla developer account and you can convert automatically them there. There are certainly some (or most, not sure) that would require someone to manually port to Firefox though.
All in all, its almost a perfect drop in replacement.
I shared my mp3s d/l’d from Gmusic on Drive. about 1500 or so. public link. haven’t looked lately if it still works. if it took off the bandwidth would likely get their attention. I’m sure they at least keep file checksums to use DRM filters on. u/l’d a DVD rip to Ytube and they blocked sharing from there re: copyright. they don’t pay artists much from what I’ve read. can’t easily d/l mp3s from youtube music like the old Gmusic. cds/dvds only last a few years so free backups kept on G servers seems a good use of my free 17Gig
You should be able to avoid getting flagged if you encrypt your files with something like cryptomator.
You can with yt-dlp and any of the GUI frontends based on it. I suggest these:
(Anyone who knows any, feel free to suggest more)
ELI5 please?
Will using Firefox fix it?
What can we do to make them fail?
Getting more people to start using Firefox instead of Chrome would be the best way to “vote with our wallets” in this case. Though some of the Chromium forks do make easier sells, but they are much much more likely to just go with whatever Google does by using the same base. So if Google forces something into Chromium in order to keep being able to functioning and being compatible (in web standards, security updates, and the massive extension library). It will just force the use of whatever Google wants, and make Google the de facto boss of how we are “allowed” to use the internet.
It’s a long video with many points and better if you watch it. However, here’s a break down of key points, made to be as simple as possible - there’s a lot more technical stuff, but I’ll try to keep it concise and less technical.
This is probably about a 10 minute read if these concepts are not familiar to you:
Why is this bad:
Can I use Firefox and stop using any Chromium browser
What can we do?
What will happen 20 years from now?
What happens 20+ years from now?
We can create a community of people that care about those things & shun people that don’t care
Why shun them? Shouldn’t we welcome them when they decide to join us?
No one likes an evangelist, so I think it’s best to not try to recruit people; Rather, we can make others aware of this problem by making announcements that state facts about what’s going on. Then we leave the 99% to figure it out and decide for themselves.
I never heard of Lemmy, but I’ve been disenfranchised by other social medias and simply walked away. After the Reddit API scandal, I discovered the Fediverse (after hearing vaguely about Mastodon years ago). Let them come on their own. We should welcome all refugees.
If they want to join it’s ok, but if they leave or they don’t want to join we shun them, because making average people aware doesn’t work, they simply don’t care
I thought Brave doesn’t have to implement manifest v3 because they’re a fork. They can just rip it out.
So basically, we’re going to have to build a separate internet that rejects this new protocol and allows for alternate browsers. That tactic, combined with piracy and offering everything the big guys charge money for for free, might be enough to draw at least a chunk of the people away from it.
You’ve got it right. the thing is that corporations will have to adopt to these standards, but that doesn’t stop us from opting out via decentralized methods and, if you favor it, piracy.
You can spin up your own media server like Jellyfin and serve content to users in your own enclave. Open it to the public and it’s ripe for DMCA takedown.
We can spin up our own social media places and collaborate together. There’s lots of options out there to meet every need. Maybe over time as storage gets cheaper, we’ll figure out how to decentralize large media like movies and tv shows over some kind of distributed service like an open blockchain, and then we can say goodbye to YouTube. Or the YouTube alternatives (not the front ends) will become easier with less friction, and user-supported server costs.
The one thing we couldn’t spin up though are core services that I mentioned - banking, healthcare, government sites, etc.
🤔 Actually, if we banded together and had enough people with the know-how and willpower, we could in principle open up our own credit union. Credit unions are alternatives to banks and are specifically designed for shit like this. Just as there are teachers’ and firefighters’ credit unions, so too could there be one for, say, us Lemmonades.
You wrote all this but you failed to mention that Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors. The competitors need to sue.
Fair point you raise. Competitors can certainly sue where warranted.
And we can certainly start public outcry. It will be a difficult, uphill battle for those that understand the implications of this motive.
Sorry. I keep failing at tracking where each conversation’s happening. Here are the complaint websites
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation (Lina Khan’s the most vigorous fighter I’ve seen on these grounds in my lifetime).
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/complaints_en
We’re having a discussion about it here: https://old.lemmy.world/post/2060683
Those complaint websites are tailored to the customers who suffer from the decline in competition. We are suffering from Google using its market position to kill our user experience and options. As I understand, it’s classic monopoly abuse.
In the 20th century, the US broke up the Hollywood model where companies owned both the studios and the theaters (how you have 20th century Fox (or just 20th century now) and Fox theaters). Google owning 75% online advertising and 75% of web browser share is a clear conflict of interest and you can see it from how they’re pushing things like Manifest V3 via their browser (especially when you consider how Chrome is the default browser on their phones), now that it’s the only browser that developers are increasingly starting to support.
If you follow that model, one thing that’s going to have to be done is to have Chrome/Chromium browser development be broken away from Google proper. Google can’t fund the developers any longer.
If I could save up my votes to upvote this 5 or 6 times, I would. Great write-up! I’m “stealing” it (with attribution).
This is a depressing reality but I think it’s likely this will happen. It makes me so mad Google got as big as they did. Someone needs to tear the fuckers down.
We won’t be able to tear them down. We don’t have the resources to break apart these large corporations. They climbed to the top via the best strategy: find a pipe of money or flow of money in the economy, straddle it and start extracting bits of it like a parasite. In other words, “rent-seeking behavior”. Eventually you get enough money that you buy all the corporations and competitors around and above you so you get bigger. Then you buy the congressman at the top that oversees the laws and regulations, and you use them to make laws in your favor that make it difficult for your competitors to compete with you or keep up with regulation. The end result is that your competition gets buried, and you balloon to the top. Then it’s your goal to get as much money as possible.
Since we can’t tear down large corporations because they captured the regulators (or are financed by governments), the only thing we can do is opt out. You, reader, have already started opting out by using the Fediverse.
The danger of centralization becomes more apparent over time. Continue to use decentralized solutions. Don’t be an evangelist and try to convert people.
Instead, when people get burned (and they will), they will find us. The grassroots people, the anarchists, the ones that just want their freedom from their oppressors.
Give it time. Write your politicians, vote like a good citizen, and when your rights get taken away from you, don’t make letter bombs or rage against your fellows in the working class. Instead, opt out. Take back control by using decentralized systems that can’t be controlled.
Thank you for the informative comment
Happy to help. As I sat here and reflected on my post I figured out a good way I can satisfy the “Explain Like I’m Five” better. So I’ll share this for posterity:
Wow, awesome ELI5 thanks!
As Zoanoids* said in Michigan**:
“We’re fucked.”
*An indie rock band
**A song on their self-titled album
If the last 5 years are any indication, they’ll shelve it on their own within a month.