The real two internets is happening
It may be the last few years of the free web because of Google. Their goals are clear.
Please switch to Firefox, another search engine and another email provider…
I do use the better options but lets be real, the battle was lost many years ago
I’ve long been trying to de-googlify myself, but it’s certainly ramped up this year.
Been trying out Kagi and just set up proton mail account. Not sure what I’ll land on in the end but it’s nice trying out newer services.
It is hard when you have a business. You really have to actively try to stay away from them. They control so much business infrastructure.
I know my business partner (god bless him, great friend but…) is super into big tech and every new product they offer. So it’s a bit of an uphill battle.
And I’m lucky. I own my own firm. Most people don’t have such a luxury.
Google server infrastructure products are almost universally worse than Amazon’s. The interfaces, APIs, and documentation look like they were designed by people who don’t understand humanity.
At least they’re not as bad as Microsoft. Azure is a goddamn dog with fleas.
I am fortunate enough to have never had MS servers forced upon me.
Most importantly, they are designed by people that don’t use them. Amazon uses AWS themselves, Google doesn’t use GCP.
Good to know.
I found out about Kagi from another Lemmy user and I’ve been really impressed. I feel like I’m getting better results than Google. I’m using their Personalized Results feature and it helps a ton!
It’s not too hard. The most important things are web search and email. I still use Google Maps. But I don’t want my private emails and searches at a company who is user hostile and preditory.
I quite disagree, it is very hard. Sure, switching search engine takes all of two seconds, and email can be had from many vendors free and commercial.
But calendaring! A calendar that is at least somewhat integrated with am email client, supports more than one actual calendar, and has real-world capability to share them with others - “if you succeed in this, two me how.”
CalDav? Integrated in nextcloud. Or Mailcow. Why does it needs to be integrated with e-mail? Thunderbird is able to add all invitations or reminders into my CalDav Account.
The Fastmail calendar is pretty good. Just a random page about them: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/shared-calendars/
Fastmail
Ohh, this does indeed look quite fantastic. I am certainly going to look more into this. Thank you!
_Edit: Ah, but $50/user/year. For the whole family that adds up real fast. Still, nice tip.
My calendaring needs might be less restrictive than yours, but Proton offers a nice calendar that from what I understand offers at least some integration with their e-mail client. Have you checked it out?
I use Nextcloud self-maintained on a VPS myself for all my calendaring needs, which is basically keeping track of appointments, syncing via CalDAV to my phone, as well as sharing some sub-calendars with other people. Setting up a Nextcloud-server is admittedly a bit more hassle than just signing up for a service, but also here there are options of making it a bit easier than hosting yourself.
I find Google Maps by far the hardest service to rid myself off, followed by Gmail (the time it takes!!! Been using Proton for two years, still not completely rid of my Gmail-account). I’m slowly getting used to using OSM-based map services more and more.
Any recommendations for free email providers?
Register your own domain name with Gandi and they gift you free email with a choice of two webmail interfaces. It’s really good, and owning the domain name enables moving to a different provider later if you wish.
Any recommendations for free email providers?
I’m using proton. I like it a lot.
Nothing is free. How would they make money as a company to pay employees and pay hosting bills?
All these big tech companies are free exactly because they are preditory on users.
Pay for good email like Fastmail or Proton.
I mean, Proton, which you just mentioned, also has a free tier, which is just as usable as Gmail is for 90% of people, myself included.
Proton’s free tier is a step to right direction, and at least they don’t run a huge advertisement company that could benefit from the free tier users’ data. And if you pay for Proton Unlimited, you also get access to SimpleLogin’s Premium tier which is nice. I just found this out when I finally bit the bullet and changed away from Gmail over to Proton. Now I don’t have to expose my real email address to some random never-to-be-seen-again websites or campaigns if I don’t want to.
If one has enough motivation, time and interest in purchasing their own domain, you can get one step forward with changing away from Gmail. Then you can pay something like 5€/month for Proton Mail Plus, use your own domain as your email address and if one day you find a better email provider, you could just change the MX records for that service and wouldn’t have to go through all your accounts and update the new address to all the places.
I had pondered moving away from Gmail years and years ever since I found out Google doesn’t have any real customer support and HN had stories where people had suddenly been locked out of their Google accounts because of some silly reason and couldn’t get their accounts back without some inside connections. At one point most of my digital life was at the mercy of Google and losing access to my Gmail or Google Calendar or G Drive would have been a disaster. Reading all these web-DRM news reminded me that I should continue de-googlefying my life and finally made the change. Firefox has been my primary browser for years and I moved over to iPhone with my phone.
Nah then gmail is good enough.
I understand the sentiment, but email is a necessary part of modern life and not everyone has the luxury of paying for it.
A lot of things are necessary parts of modern live and you also have to pay for it, a mobile plan for your smartphone for example.
I had a smartphone but not a mobile plan for years. People can get very creative when times are tough.
Don’t get me wrong, I think everybody should have the guarantee for social participation, I’m just saying that Email is no exception. If you did not have a mobile plan for whatever reason, you were just not participating.
Not really; I could do everything everyone else was doing; just not make phone calls or send sms texts. I used wifi to connect to the net and I could still make emergency calls. Im actually considering going back to that to save money, lol.
Don’tbe evil.Be Evil, Do Ads
Can you explain this to a layman what this does?
Imagine you’re a builder and you build a store (website). People can come into your store through the door or window. WEI will make sure you come through the door just as the builder intended.
At face value, that sounds fine, but now imagine that builder puts a maze (all of the ads littered on a webpage) on the other side of the door. It’s a pain in the ass to get through and someone (adblock) has told you about the window that lets you skip the maze. You can get what you want and the store gets to sell a thing. Everyone’s happy except the maze builder (Google), so they’re trying to force the entire world to go through the maze.
Wait Google can place ads on my website without my permission?
You’re the builder, and thus the one who can choose to put a maze there or not.
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If this becomes heavily used, I will probably go back to reading books for entertainment instead of browsing the web.
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My books aren’t digital at all. How can they have DRM?
Sad but true 😢
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So basically, anyone consuming the internet in any shape or form other than the intended by corporate owners is automatically dead in the water.
Man, I can’t go back to ad-full, sponsor-skipless youtube… It’s too awful.
edge users
Edge is Chromium
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It’s DRM, but for the whole web.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
So is the only way around it to not use Chromium-based browsers? Or does it pollute everything??
No. The only way “around it” is to give up and use Chrome.
Everything else will have to dance to Google’s tune to access any website that implements this, and that will at very least include Google’s own websites.
Okay then, then I don’t use it, stick to Safari and phone call anyone who requires me using their site with Chrome. Or I’ll go elsewhere. I’ve been down this road with IE before…
The idea is that service providers would only trust chromium browsers
That will work until websites start requiring it. At that point browsers like Firefox have to either capitulate and implement Google’s DRM or become unusable for the majority of websites.
And then we’ll have a web where the corporations have complete control over what you can view and how. Ad blocking and anti-tracking will be things of the past, and corporate websites will have a unique key from your browser to help them track you around the web. And no more hiding your identity behind anonymous browsers over Tor or VPNs.
So we found out about this about 4 days ago, and when people objected they shut down people’s ability to log issues or comment on the GitHub repo. And now they’re already cramming it into their browser. This is strong evidence that Google knows it’s unpopular and tried to keep it under wraps as long as possible so they could get it into the browser before people had time to react.
Let them require it. Search engines like DDG should really begin maintaining their own index, and they should exclude sites that use the tech from the index.
I can also see Apple taking a stand against this. They have a competing (and much more reasonable) implementation that respects user privacy.
Search engines like DDG should really begin maintaining their own index, and they should exclude sites that use the tech from the index.
If this gets implemented, it would ruin the ability for competitor search engines (such as DDG) to exist. If Google convinces site operators to require attestation, then suddenly automated crawlers and indexers will not function. Google could say to site operators that if they wish to run ads via Google’s ad network they must require attestation; then, any third-party search indexer or crawler would be blocked from those sites. Google’s ad network is used on about 98.8% of all sites which have advertising, and about 49.5% of all websites.
Even if the effects didn’t go this far (which I agree they quite probably will), it wouldn’t be feasible for other search engines to just exclude sites that implemented Google’s DRM. If Google makes it attractive enough to the owners of major sites to implement this (and it will be attractive if it ensures they get ad views), then no one will use a search engine that omits all the most popular websites. The same goes for non-Google browsers. This is really a shocking attempt by Google to use its own browser’s popularity to seize an effective monopoly of the web.
Web dev here. It enforces the original markup and code from a server to be the markup and code that the browser interprets and executes, preventing any post-loading modifications.
That sounds a bit dry, but the implications are huge. It means:
- ad blockers won’t work (the main reason for Google’s ploy)
- many, if not most, other browser extensions won’t work (eg.: accessibility, theming, anti-malware)
- people are going to start running into a lot of scam ads that ad blockers would otherwise prevent
- malicious websites will be able to operate with impunity since you cannot run security extensions to prevent them
- web developers are going to be crippled for lack of debugging ability
These are just a few things off the top of my head. There are endless and very dangerous implications to WEI. This is very, very bad for the web and antithesis of how it’s supposed to be.
TBL is probably experiencing a sudden disturbance in the force.
Would this impact web proxies at all? If so, that would entail a pretty huge security change for a lot of corporations.
If it’s something like a proxy server that pre-modifies the markup/code, then yes, I can see WEI interfering with that.
Wouldn’t it be possible to create some kind of “post-browser” that takes input from the web browser and displays it after passing it through ad blockers and whatever else?
Perhaps, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.
Most of the Web requires js to work. I don’t think the js will work without the DRM.
So the proxy would need to be running the js, and emulate your clicks and so on.
Such an abstraction, while unnecessary, should be possible, providing that Google doesn’t forcibly prevent access to the final markup that coalesces (ie.: view source and web dev tools)
The only acceptable browser would obviously be ones that restrict that access, how else are they going to force people to see all their ads?
It’s a way to disable ad blockers.
Presently web servers send data to your browser, which can arrange the content however you wish, because it’s your browser on your device. Excluding content you don’t like is fairly trivial.
This drm stuff will basically make the browser refuse to display anything unless the whole page is unaltered.
Does unaltered include things like colorblind extension that change colors to more easily differentiate between some red/green for example? Or stuff like reddit enhancement suite? Sounds like a good way to kill other possible useful extensions.
That’s exactly what it will do. Don’t believe the bullshit in their “non-goals” section, they don’t give a fuck. If accessibility extensions happen to continue working (at least temporarily), it will be by accident, because they for damn sure aren’t going to spend even a second on compatibility.
Shit man, this would ruin even the small internet. I won’t even be able to cheat on dragcave. And most of what I was doing was keeping a tally of my collection since the site doesn’t do that. But there’s no way page modifications wouldn’t be caught and punished no matter what they actually do.
Yes.
There might have be a time when Google tried not to be evil, but they’ve been Satin himself for a good number of years now. It just took them a while to realize the irony of their mission statement. It’s funny I used to get mad at Microsoft for being evil, but they’ve got nothing on Google.
They removed ‘don’t be evil’ from their code of conduct 5 years ago.
Ew
I wonder how many people will be ok with this, considering that there’s a large portion of folks who does not know what’s AdBlock
Yup. The vast majority of internet users NEVER:
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Customizes their web experience
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Uses apps almost exclusively
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Navigates beyond the first page/screen
How will they react to this?
“Shut the hell up, fucking nerd and your fucking idiotic, stupid ass ‘privacy’ bullshit. God WHO THE FUCK CARES!? I was literally - LITERALLY - never inconvenienced by any of that stuff, so SHUT UP!”
That’s how.
We’re doomed. We were always doomed.
Would be kinda cool to go back to irc or usenet, because the average internet user does not and will not give a shit about privacy, and definitely won’t get a complicated chat thing setup.
We’re doomed. We were always doomed.
I’m afraid that’s always been the case because the mass majority just don’t a give a shit. They’ll happily conform to whatever the monopolies tell them to.
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this is a userbase killer right here
If manifest 3 didn’t change egoogke chrome share I doubt this will.
Manifest 3 didn’t create noticable chnages for the average user. Not yet anyway.
The idea is these changes are never a full at first. The internet will not break tomorrow because of integrity checking.
But it will in a few years. And people will be upset then. When it’s far too late.
Chrome is a bag of shit anyway, easy jump
Chromium, not chrome. Which means also Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and a lot more. Basically only Firefox and Safari are left as the big non-chromium ones.
But that’s not the worst of it. Even if you tear out this code, more and more websites will be built that rely on it. Which means Firefox etc also need to include it to keep functioning.
If WebKit and Mozilla put up enough fight. It will not be the standard.
Well, that’s the worst case scenario. I hope that Brave will fork Chromium and leave the WEI out. Brave prides itself on being the no nonsense browser …
Brave is a PoS. They are not looking out for you
Sorry, what is PoS? I’m using Brave just shortly but it appears to be concerned with privacy and ad-blocking - more than what Firefox does.
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Not saying you don’t realize, but Safari already has this tech. They call it Personal Access Tokens.
Isn‘t Safari‘s WebKit the origin of Chromium‘s Blink 😉
Well, you can’t say not chrome because it does include chrome, yes, it extends to other browsers using the same codebase, I understand I’m well versed. Either which way, fuck google
Feels so good to see Google getting called out for this in the GitHub comments
Does it? It’s making me depressed.
Because every last single thing said in those comments will be ignored. I sincerely doubt they’re even reading them.
They know what they’re doing. They know what people will say. They’re going to do it anyway.
i’ve been using a samsung chromebook plus since it launched until now… and it’s end-of-support next month. being a typical human with low funds for new gear, i WAS considering a new chromebook of some kind. The chrome drm bullshit doesn’t effect me too much as I use this mostly within the linux container, or firefox android version… however, I realize i need to take a stand and not financially support these tyrants.
so, what are my options? a pinebook running debian? are there any good netbooks out there? I don’t use this thing for games or streaming media at all - mostly ssh, some browsing, etc. it’s about time I take the final steps to de-goog my life.
Used thinkpads (like the T480) are a great choice.
I use Manjaro Cinnamon on mine.
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Install Linux on your current chromebook. If the hardware is still good that’s a no-brainer in my book.
i’m in the middle of this process now, and just frustrating myself. i’ve forgotten too much of the inner workings of the kernel - that is, my old knowledge doesn’t apply anymore. I’ve got a dualboot working, but can’t for the life of me get the wifi module to load. not relevant to this thread, so i won’t dirty it up. but, thank you for getting my head in the right space!
i will, somehow, get some flavor working
Get a used Thinkpad. They run Debian well!
So…I don’t use chrome anymore, but I use Vivaldi. Guess this’ll fuck that up too or will they remove it?
Edit: looks like they’re concerned about it but also are worried stripping it out will f up theye browser being accepted
Hey, fellow Vivaldi user👋 . Yep, one of the Vivaldi devs already said if it was added upstream, they’d strip it out of the Chromium code, but they acknowledge that this would cause problems if WEI became standard. Websites would start to expect it, and not having that functionality would be a death-sentence for any browser (Chromium or otherwise).
That’s great to hear. I like it and would like to continue
There’s a “we told you this would happen” going on here.
If chromium didn’t have a monopoly amongst browsers, they would have a much harder time pushing this through.
Imagine everyone using a browser built by an advertising company.
I moved to FF the same time I found out about the DRM shit. It takes literally 10 minutes and the only thing FF lacks is tab groups. Not a big loss compared to a stupid bigtech telling me what I can use.
The problem is that Mozilla dropped the ball so hard, by focusing on making their C-staff into millionaires instead of making a good product, that it no longer matters. Their market share is so small that Firefox compatibility no longer matters.
Soon websites will require that DRM and either Firefox will implement it or it will be unable to render those websites.
Firefox is awesome and I never switched to chrome because Google is the devil
The only use chrome gets on a fresh phone before deactivation is installing Firefox. Same for IE
I’ve used Firefox since it was Netscape and it’s been a fun ride
FF has tab containers which, while I haven’t used much myself, seem pretty similar to tab groups from a quick search. Edit: Also looks like there’s “Simple tab groups” extension which maybe even more similar to what you may want
Containers have nothing to do with tab groups. One is an organisation tool and the other is a privacy tool.
That’s not even the biggest level of “we told you this would happen.”
They pulled this shit previously with other standards (WebHID). Where they proposed a terrible standard, and then implemented it ignoring all feedback. Only last time it played out over months, and this time… weeks?
Sweet jesus.
Fuck this is trash. DRM for the web. I wish people would understand websites like kbin are not free and that if you use a website you need to pay to keep it alive. But no one wants to pay for anything on the internet, and so we have ads. Ads will for sure kill the internet.
The fact that people feel entitled to free content online really activates my almonds. They’ll whine and moan about enshittification and how eg. news is just clickbait now, and then promptly shit their pants when someone suggests they actually pay for things since they clearly don’t want ads either
Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they’re barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.
The problem starts with corporate greed, hoarding revenue by keeping employee’s salaries to the minimum acceptable, providing as little functionality as possible to reduce overheads, double dipping by selling a product/subscription and then selling their customer’s data, and then complaining they aren’t getting more money for what little they are doing.
Then inevitably a little guy like Kbin comes along and suffers because the internet is filled with soulless, ultra-capitalist corpo scumbags.
Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they’re barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.
Those are separate issues
They are absolutely not separate issues. How can I be expected to shell out $15 per month for 10 different content subscriptions if I can only just afford to put food on my table?
Doesn’t mean that content producers and the people running services don’t need to eat too. Sure, many if not all big corporations are terrible, but not all online content is provided by them.
But a massive amount of them are. Small and solo creators on Youtube or Twitch need to conform to the rules of Google and Amazon, and even medium size creators are influenced and coerced by the precedents and market trends set by the much larger corporations.
And it doesn’t matter if not all content is provided by large corporations, those large corporations employ the most people, and dictate in a lot of ways, the rules of the employment market. It’s due to their habits and practices that wages are artificially low and expenses are inflated for record profits.
Until corporate greed is managed properly, consumers will always struggle to have enough expendable income to pay content creators, and therefore will always be searching for free content.
Oh yeah, no disagreement there; the source of all these problems is ultimately an economic system designed by and for sociopaths. But, be that as it may, the fact that even the people who could afford to pay for services simply don’t, and many run adblockers too and rarely turn them off for eg. news sites even if the ads they run aren’t extremely distracting. For example when ABP introduced a whitelist for “non-annoying” ads, it didn’t exactly go down well and people said they had “sold out.”
Big corporations can get fucked for all I care, but as I said, the ones not working for them and running services or news media or whatever also need to eat, and peoples’ reticience to pay for things in one way or another has directly led to those big companies taking over more and more of the field and WEI is an outgrowth of that.
What does this mean?
The Internet in the last five or so years has just been less fun and interesting to use in general. Except for anywhere I can interact with friends, I just don’t really care for using corporate social media sites anymore. I’ve pretty much removed Google from my life except for YouTube and rarely Google Maps, and if Google tries to use this to force ads into YouTube (which I’m sure is going to be one of its uses) then I will just stop using YouTube. I will just stop patronizing any site or business that tries to implement this as a feature to stop my browser choice, OS choice, or my extension choice (which included adblock extensions). I miss the days when the Internet was less corporately controlled than it is now, and I think we need a renaissance of those days.
I just don’t understand why they’re trying to solve this issue on the client side. It seems like a losing battle to me.
Instead, focus on the server side. If you want to push ads, then host on (or tunnel from) the content server. Get rid of all the <div\>s and tags and scripts and adserver links that the adblockers are using to identify ads. Just assemble the page on the host so that it looks indistinguisable from the content the user is looking for and push it out. EAT BACHELOR CHOW! NOW WITH FLAVOR! Google could even start an ad-friendly hosting service that does this - some sitebuilder tools, identify where you want Google Adsense, and host the damn thing.
Unless everybody fully customises the display and styling of the adverts for their own website, there’s going to be some sort of targetable, recognisable pattern in the way AdSense content looks. Most developers just want an easy drop-in solution.
Furthermore, Google don’t necessarily want to give you that level of control over the adverts, because that makes it easier to game the ads system with malicious, fake and misleading clicks or invisible adverts. They need their tracking tech attached to it.
So render to image? That sounds terribly inefficient. That means you’re drastically increasing the load on the server and sending way more data over the wire. And then on the client side, your page no longer changes to fit the huge variety of viewport sizes. And say goodbye to being able to copy-paste. Or any kind of user interaction. And anyone with visual disabilities can go fuck themselves, I guess.
No, they didn’t mean to render it all as an image, but that everything comes from the content server you’re getting the content you want from and thus the ads should be indistinguishable from content. I don’t understand how you could misunderstand it to such a degree as to think they meant to render it all as an image.
Because even if you host the ad content on the same server, it’s still possible to distinguish it, such as by URL or element xpath. To assemble the page to avoid this, you’d need to completely render the page.
so… PDF then?
/sThanks, BTW. It never occurred to me that someone could interpret my comment as “render-as-an-image”.
You explicitly state “render to image”.
