And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.

The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.

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    What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

    Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

    This isn’t even close to being okay. It’s 100% bullshit.

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      Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.

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        A lot of them never had to make a profit before.

        Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it’s like buying a lotto scratcher.

        The underlying issue is wealth imbalance.

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          That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.

          If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.

          But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.

          Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.

          Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.

          The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.

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          And one of the primary reasons they never had to make a profit was that, so long as interest rates were functionally zero, it didn’t really cost the investor class much of anything to park money in a money losing operation while waiting for it to become sellable.

          With interest rates back to pre-2008 levels, though, there’s a price to money again. And a real opportunity cost. So, compete with bonds or watch your investors walk.

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        It’s like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don’t need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately

        • hellishharlot@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Honestly, this second half of 2023 for me has been about finding FOSS options for literally everything. And eventually I’ll have a home server I can use for the things I can’t use on the cloud

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      The enshittification of the internet shall continue.

      We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.

          • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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            Then i’ll scrape the songs i currently watch on youtube with jdownload and stop using the page otherwise.

            All they do is make the internet less attractive. Now that works to increase profits for a while, but eventually the content creators withdraw, the platforms become worse and eventually uncool and people stop using it, or use it less. Facebook is on a decline in western countries. We went through multiple video snippet apps already and tiktok and instagram too will be declining eventually.

            We dont have to win the war because the war will never end. We just gotta make the best out of the battlefields we win.

              • Stelus42@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                That is super awesome, but yeah, sounds like the kinda thing you should keep underground. Too many cool projects have been killed because they went public.

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        But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌

        I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… That’s how they’ve been brainwashing us till now.

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      I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.

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        I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.

        • Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
        • Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
        • Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
        • TheHighRoad@lemmy.world
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          I 100% would have signed up for Reddit Premium and payed monthly for Sync access if they had allowed me to hand them the money. Oh well ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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            Right? I had a subscription for Apollo and am now supporting kbin on Patreon (btw, guys, here’s the link if someone wants to help out).

            It wasn’t that hard to offer a product that people would be fine paying for.

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          That’s a good write up, thanks. I don’t claim it’s coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.

          Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven’t heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can’t not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it’s not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it’s a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I’m kinda curious now

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          Duckduckgo is a wrapper for bing? No wonder it sucks… I want to like it, but the results are usually pretty bad in comparison to Google. Takes me much longer to find what I’m looking for with DDG. :/

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            I’m using an anonymous browser and for me often DDG has better results than Google now. My Google-fu used to be on point but recently I can’t seem to find sites that aren’t SEO traps.

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            I have exactly the opposite experience. Google has gone to shit, and duckduckgo gets me there faster 90% of the time. Plus the results are short and concise, or immediately helpful.

            The SEO of the internet has really fucked googles algorithm. At least with duckduckgo I can end the search with !g to switch to google if I need a second go, but you cannot !d in google.

          • C_Spinoff@kbin.social
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            Startpage might be something for you, mixed bag though but I got nothing of substance to say against it.

        • deejay4am@lemmy.world
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          Elon Musk wanted to drive Twitter into the dirt once he was forced to buy it. Criticism, jet tracking, rejection of fascist-adjacent opinions that are “logical” but only if you’re a heartless engineering robot.

          His hubris forced him into buying it, but once he had to, he might as well destroy it. How else do you think he got the Saudis in on it for another billion?

          I laughed about this theory at first, just memeing it like “ha could you even imagine?” But every single day it seems more and more like he does the worst thing possible to “monetize” and then gripes about it like the only reason his brilliance isn’t working is because big mean liberal woke mind virus society is trying to do cancel culture because they’re just jealous he’s rich.

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          DuckDuckGo seems, for me anyway, be crappier and crappier by the month. Am I the only one? Are there alternatives?

          • I used them for a long time before getting tired of appending !g after every search because DDG’s results were SEO garbage. I’m trying them again and they seem to be slightly better, but I’m not quite sure. Also it appears that the minus operator doesn’t work on DDG, and when I have to use it, I just do !s to search Google with Startpage (which I don’t use because it’s owned by an ad company and because its website is a little bit slower than DDG).

        • halfempty@kbin.social
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          DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it’s own crawler.

      • mounderfod@lemmy.sdf.org
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        It can be a combo of several objectives:

        • make a shitload of money
        • stop people from realising we’re making a shitload of money off of their backs
        • keep people poor so that even if they do realise there’s nothing they can do about it
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      Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding “reddit” at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.

      And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.

      So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.

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      Nothing about this is recent, those who pay attention to the standards process have been screaming for ages about the Google problem. It’s just that now between interest rates being what they are and them having a monopoly on the browser market that they’re cashing in on their investment.

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      Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it’s usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there’s really very little that can be done.

      • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
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        The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.

        Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?

        Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.

    • sijt@lemmy.world
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      and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

      Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

      They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

      Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

    • UnculturedSwine@lemmy.world
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      The tech sector just hit a major correction recently. Wall Street found companies like Google to be overvalued and as such their stocks suffered. This is Google trying to claw back some of that value. See step 3 in the enshittification process. This isn’t just Google. It’s the entire tech sector.

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      Luckly we still have free platforms like lemmy, browsers like Firefox, networks like tor or i2p, torrents, monetary system like bitcoin.

      We can step out of the world of and we are the ones who have the most intruments to do so.

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        Yes, which works for the few, but they know that the majority are completely oblivious and will just consume whatever they are given.

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      I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.

      Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.

      For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.

      Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.

      So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.

      I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        Sounds you might enjoy the Enshittification of TikTok article floating around. It explains quite well the mechanism why a site have to becoming worse and worse over time.

    • Fangslash@lemmy.world
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      Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.

      Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.

      Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money

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      What do you mean, Google of all companies… It’s a company that makes 90% of its money from ads and all of its products are made with the express purpose of enabling them to spy on you or creating technical dependencies so you can’t quit their services.

      Plus they’ve already tried to lock the web into proprietary formats (AMP, PWA etc.) and have maneuvered so they have 90% of the browser market and the smartphone market but can’t be actioned for it.

    • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
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      Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that’s fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.

      The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.

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      This happens when something, in this case the Internet, is a monopoly or oligopoly.

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      Their fake advert viewing numbers and YouTube’s inability to monetise without ruining itself are forcing them to think of new ways to encrapsulate user’s and drain their wallets.

      Instead of, you know, providing a service people want and would pay for.

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      AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.

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      A race to the bottom with who can come up with the next dogshit idea on how to ruin the internet and make things actively worse for the people who use it

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      What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

      Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.

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    One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.

    I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.

    Obligatory use Firefox

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    This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet

    • BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.comOP
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      Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this “Web DRM”.

      My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).

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        It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.

        • Dojan@lemmy.world
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          It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.

          I’ve always been a proponent of unifying the internet under a single platform, be it Blink or Gecko I don’t really care. Chromium itself was built on FOSS technology, and has its roots in KHTML, which Apple later adopted as WebKit, and Google used and made Blink.

          The problem I see is when a single company has such a large monopoly. Chromium should be community-owned, and Google shouldn’t get the final say.

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            As far as I’m concerned, the web should be developed through universal standards (the World Wide Web Consortium takes care of that), while the job of rendering engines should be reduced to following these standards the best they can.

            • Dojan@lemmy.world
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              following these standards as best they can

              This is precisely why I want a unified web. I hate adding flags for support and testing across different systems. It’s a massive bother, and ultimately means you’ll test one platform and just hope for the best on the rest because that’s what you have time for.

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            The problem I see is when a single company has such a large monopoly. Chromium should be community-owned, and Google shouldn’t get the final say.

            EU investigation is already underway for their ad business. Not sure that would apply to Chromium but owning the ad delivery, the website, AND the software that renders it should be considered.

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          It’s such a potent example of why we need antitrust laws to actually be applied to tech companies.

          But our government here in the US is both run by geriatric idiots who don’t even know how to use a computer let alone regulate one and also is bought out by these companies.

          This is a blatant, out in the open anti-competitive action that is suggested in this article and it shouldn’t legally be allowed to stand, but our politicians understand so little about how technology works that they’ll blindly accept Google telling them that it isn’t monopolistic rather than actually try to understand it.

        • Zink@lemmy.world
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          For what it’s worth, this comment just inspired me to switch my work PC from edge to Firefox. Was already using it in Linux, and will switch my home PC tonight.

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        All they need is a few major sites and tools requiring it to domino everything on the internet. Suddenly it’s standard.

        Most businesses all use either chrome or Microsoft. And they’re both Chromium.

        • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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          Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don’t really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.

          Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet’s favorite content hub

        • nitefox@lemmy.world
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          Ironically I don’t think it would take foot. Many average users I know of use adBlockers - albeit shitty ones - and I don’t think companies would be willing to risk it

          • BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.comOP
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            I don’t know: people I know don’t always use ad-blockers and if they do they have no idea that they are less effective on Chrome than on Firefox.

            Also they all have been brainwashed to use Chrome because it was marketed as “faster, better and safer” all those years ago and wouldn’t even think of switching browsers (or it would be for another Chromium-based one)

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            People at home aren’t what matters. Companies will absolutely use it when it’s the next upgrade and deemed secure by whoever it is that keeps telling them to only use chrome and IE/Edge.

      • nivenkos@lemmy.world
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        Reminds me of Microsoft with the ActivePlatform / Blackbird stuff in the 90s.

        Awful to see Google turn into that.

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        Google will just say that pages with DRM will rank higher in their search and it’s all done.

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          1 year ago

          It’s time to fork the community internet off the corporate one. Set up our own DRM-free sites and our own search engines, run by open source software. With blackjack and hookers.

          • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            We kinda have the small web (Gemini & Gopher), but it is a different, much simpler format than html (Gopher is literally plaintext)

            • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              I remember gopher but I haven’t used it for about 30 years. Does anyone still use that?

      • Spedwell@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Sites that rely on ad revenue would have every business reason to switch to WebDRM-only.

        • dust_accelerator@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Everyone talks about this like it wouldn’t open a massive attack surface for the mother of DDOS.

          Make the attestor slow or take it out, you take down large parts of their business. I don’t know, i wouldn’t put too much stake in a platform/website that could be taken out so completely.

          • CallumWells@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Hmmm, that’s a good point. It would probably be using some of the DDOS protection services. But make it cost enough and it may not be worth it for the corporations to continue that shit.

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      1 year ago

      I have exceeding low expectations, but I would hope that would be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit against Google as Chromium browsers account for roughly 70% of all users (based on numbers I pulled from Wikipedia)

      • whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Antitrust lawsuit? What’s that?

        When is the last time any of the big tech companies got hit with antitrust? Microsoft is brazenly doing shit on windows they wouldn’t even dream of in early 2000s. Resetting user defaults to their products. Constantly advertising their products when user launches a competitors software.

        They don’t give a fuck and neither do the governments.

    • fearout@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Subscription-based, restricted to verified accounts Chromium, that shares your personally identifiable public key with each website you visit.
      Shudders

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        It makes such complete sense for Google and Microsoft that it’s a wonder we didn’t see it coming sooner.

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    1 year ago

    Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)

    Congratulations, guys. You are now internet pariahs. Your unrepentantly mercenary lack of engineering ethics is now recorded for all eternity. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.

  • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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    That’s a good way for me to never visit your website again. Honestly, this kinda sounds like the death of the internet if I’m being honest. This would transform it from a free medium into a full blown corporate dystopia. It’s really scary to see the digital (corporate) development over the past couple decades. Would be really cool if we don’t move further towards some cyberpunk like future where megacorps control everything.

  • HurlingDurling@lemm.ee
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    Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds

    And they went ahead and blocked comments now - “An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past.”

    Fucking cowards

    EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don’t pay the big tech you can’t access anything.

  • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    This is exactly the kind of thing that demostrates why DRM shouldn’t be part of the web standards. It’s very existence is abuse and this use even more so.

    DRM needs to be illegal.

        • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          Democracy is an illusion, especially in places like the US. There are so many abstraction layers that even if you “win” you are really poorly represented.

          • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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            1 year ago

            “Democ­ra­cy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment, except for all the oth­ers.”

            • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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              1 year ago

              That’s if you have a democracy that even remotely works. Which in the US does not. Hell, it’s fragile even in most EU countries.

              • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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                1 year ago

                FPTP is inherently less stable that other voting systems. The more parties involved having to compromise, the more stable. Two parties ends up with red vs blue. Literally. And it’s terrible.

                I think we in the UK will escape it before the US.

    • jjdelc@lemmy.ml
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      I feel that rather than DRM being illegal, Google and Chromium browsers having monopoly on the web is what allows these crazy ideas to have any room.

      If the browser market was more evenly spread and there were more parties involved, these ideas woldn’t fly so easily.

      • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        The push/money/dark-force behind this was more Disney and co. Tech only really cared about killing Flash and all the other extensions used to do DRM. If DRM wasn’t allowed in the first place, none of would have existed.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    How can the smartest people be so dumb?

    Please, please, PLEASE… if you care about a healthy open internet, donate to Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF, at the minimum, if you’re able to.

    I liked to subscribe to Youtube Premium to support my favourite channels but this kinda stuff turns me off.

  • ComeHereOrIHookYou@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Just this week or was it last week, I made a comment on some post that putting privacy aside, we should still be encouraging people to use Firefox instead of any chromium browsers to break control. It is good to see that right now I am just given a very good example why Chromium being a monopoly allows Google to control the spec (even if other companies are on board)

    https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/pull/124/commits/7cd99782c90bab4104725e821d11b18bc2107218

    This PR nails it

    • bradmont@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, this is Google finally revealing their “open source browser” strategy endgame…

    • Lemmy Reddit That@lemmy.world
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      I didn’t start using Firefox again because of privacy, but because extensions doesn’t exist on chrome on Android. So I switched to Firefox on both Android and PC. Later it starts with forcing this Manifest v3 or something like that for extensions, and I was really happy I already switched to Firefox. And now even this stupid thing. I am pretty sure I will not look back at chrome again. The only downside is that Firefox on desktop doesn’t support PWA out of the box (especially when I am developing PWA app on my own), but there is an extension and an app that adds support for PWA even on the desktop. And also, PWA is supported on firefox on Android, but I don’t get notifications on my own PWA app, while on Chrome I am getting it every time. Notifications are on for Firefox.

      • ComeHereOrIHookYou@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The only thing I find Firefox inferior over Chrome is Webgl support. Specifically browser-based games.

        Although they are playable on Firefox, they play much more smoother on Webkit and it’s sister, Chromium.

        Like let us say you get 90fps on Webkit or Chromium, in Firefox you get around 50-60fps. That kind of difference which to gamers, may find off putting.

      • ComeHereOrIHookYou@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Well what do you expect when all of a sudden they started making their own browser over contributing to Firefox.

        The entire reason why Chrome was created was for Google to push the web forward at their own pace. Away from the previous iteration that heavily relied on browser helper objects (plugins).

        Here we are though, Google having a huge influence over the spec. Mainly because the competition weeded out to only Firefox remaining.

        Sure, Edge might be considered competition for Google, but at the end of the day, Edge, Opera (unfortunately), Vivaldi, Brave, and similar browsers are essentially Chrome reskins.

        PS: I am considering Edge as a competition for Google as Microsoft is well known for being EEE (Extend, embrace, extinguish). But more importantly, they have the man power to maintain their own fork if things do get out of hand.

  • BranBucket@lemmy.world
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    This may honestly be it for me.

    I quit playing games because of all the greed and hype, I went back to piracy when streaming started to fracture and greed set in, I left non-federated social media because of the enshittifaction and invasiveness, and I go to fairly extensive lengths to block ads and protect my privacy as much as possible…

    And instead of moving to any number of fair, non-exploitive business models, they’re just going to force ads down my throat like that episode of black mirror.

    If this goes through I’ll be sorely tempted to wipe everything I can and start over as best I can. Only interact with the Internet when I need to.

    You’ll find me paying cash at the local used bookstore, at least until all the major publishers make that illegal.

    EDIT: It’s honestly depressing, I genuinely enjoy technology and the internet, but when companies like Google are able to force garbage like this it just sucks all the joy out of it for me.

    It’s like everying is becoming a shitty mobile game. Do the toolsheds that develop Candy Crush clones not think we can understand why in app currencies are sold in bundles of 100 but every thing we purchase with them requires amounts that end with a five? Does Google not think we know the real motivation behind a system that strives to prove ads were delivered to your browser either?

    I know a lot of people may not see the real driver here, but I’m tired of being underestimated and infantalized by a bunch of dorks trapped in a corporate echo chamber. I think I’d prefer it if they just straight up said they’re going to sacrifice our privacy and user experience for a quick bump in stock value.