Comment by matheusmoreira

3 years ago

Well, your mindset ensures the computing freedom we enjoy today will be destroyed. Google is on the verge of introducing remote attestation in browsers so that servers can cryptographically verify any number of things about your client. It's essentially guaranteed that none of those things being verified will be in our best interests.

I'd rather have a static web where I have the power to choose my own browser, inspect source, block ads or even just use curl or Python to scrape something.

23 comments

matheusmoreira

Reply
marginalia_nu  3 years ago

What mindset is that, actually trying to build alternatives to FAANG?

I honestly think remote attestation is a smaller problem. At least then we can still build alternative services. I'd rather have a free web and a locked down browser than a free browser and nothing but an endless digital mall to browse. Remote attestation will only lock you out of that endless mall to begin with. It will find ways of sucking regardless of what Google does.

  • matheusmoreira  3 years ago

    The mindset of sacrificing computing freedom for user convenience and corporation profitability. We should be absolutely uncompromising on this one value. The alternative is the destruction of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.

    > nothing but an endless digital mall to browse

    Funny, that's essentially what the web feels like to me in 2023. Escaping it is the number one reason why I visit HN nearly every day. It's like the only sane website left. I don't even open the links posted here anymore, websites are just unbearable these days even with uBlock Origin turned up to the max. I just assume whatever's important enough will be directly quoted in the comments.

    The "static web" you and the commenter below mentioned? I actually kind of want it.

    • marginalia_nu  3 years ago

      Dude, my struggle is to be able to operate a non-profit service free of charge with no ads, and the aim is to help users find a way out of exactly the aforementioned digital mall and onto the free and independent, mostly static web.

      This is harder every day dude to all the bot traffic helping themselves to disproportionate usage of my service via a botnet that is all but indistinguishable from human traffic.

      But yeah, must be the corporate profits I'm hoarding...?

      20 replies →