Comment by 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.
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.
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...?
Why is it relevant whether the traffic is human or automated? The whole point of the internet is you can put a server out there and anyone anywhere can connect to it with any HTTP client.
To me it seems like the only people who care about that are those who want to sell our attention to the highest bidder via advertising. Wouldn't you be having the same difficulties if there were just as much traffic coming from humans?
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