Comment by Havoc
21 hours ago
Whether it's AMP or manifest 3 or android source shenanigan or attempts to replace cookies with their FLOC nonsense or this...Google is rapidly turning into a malicious force when it comes to the open internet
21 hours ago
Whether it's AMP or manifest 3 or android source shenanigan or attempts to replace cookies with their FLOC nonsense or this...Google is rapidly turning into a malicious force when it comes to the open internet
Turns out RMS has always been right. How surprising.
Turns out that identifying a problem doesn't help without a workable solution/alternative.
The first step in solving a problem is identifying it.
The whole "don't point out a problem unless you have a solution" trope is bullshit.
I hate this trite and the managers that say "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" nonsense. I'm not the person to be able to fix it so the solution is make the problem known so others responsible can fix it. If I could fix it, I wouldn't be telling you about the problem. If anything, I would tell you how I fixed an issue in some stand up or other of the many meetings scheduled keeping me from working.
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nonsense on all levels.
RMS has offered broadly solutions/alternatives since the beginning, along with reporting early on trends that other people ignore.
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What is RMS’ solution to this problem?
Uncompromisingly insist on only using things you have ultimate ownership and control over, even when that means dramatic and life-altering inconvenience, and where those things don't exist, build them yourself.
Unfortunately, "build it yourself" is relatively easy when it comes to software, and almost impossible when it comes to the hardware running that software. It doesn't matter if you have full ownership of a complete open-source stack if no hardware manufacturer will permit you to run unsigned arbitrary code. The lack of open hardware--chips that you could build in your garage using materials nobody could reasonably prevent you from acquiring--is the lynchpin upon which open source software will wither and die.
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In Eve online you used to be able to have people (outside your contacts list) pay some cash in escrow to send you a message.
I know what his solution is not. It's not a mechanism that conveniently enables the fine-grained surveillance of people that just so happens to be google's business model.
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Root mean square?
richard stallman
Indeed, occasionally hammers do find nails to hit.
Strange analogy considering that RMS got to where he is precisely by finding nails to hit much, much more than occasionally, and much, much more than most hammers.
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If RMS said not to trust Google's self-proclaimed altruism and relationship with open source, yeah. I always assumed that was a backstab waiting to happen. But that only meant I used an iPhone and didn't care that it was more closed than Android, not that I got an Arch Linux phone or something. (And a Mac more importantly, but there's not really a Google counterpart to that.)
> AMP
My god AMP was such an annoying thing ~4-5 years ago when I was working in a marketing-forward web dev shop.
"Google really likes when you pipe your words into their shitty UI because it saves some time for the user"
We were all like, cool so on one hand we're being given complex designs for sites to differentiate them, and on the other hand we're bowing to a megacorp who actually wants to skip the whole web design part entirely and pipe our content through their pre-defined UI.
So glad it died. Should have known it would die in a matter of a couple of years with that being the track record for Google in general.
> skip the whole web design part entirely and pipe our content through their pre-defined UI
It's a shame this part didn't stick. I use reading mode every chance I get be cause the more design a page has, the worse it is. For some reason orgs agreed that it is ok to let medium or substack own their content, but hated Google's high speed CDN.
Last time this happened we got a bunch of Google employees downplaying the impact of WEI and calling it a nothingburger, that people were being hysterical. I just checked, and everyone I saw defending it has since left the company. I'm sure another wave of Google managers, keen to appeal to the higher-ups, will be here to defend this new initiative any minute now.
This makes me curious, where did they go?
at least one went to Shopify, I'm not sure about the rest
Don't you see it closing all around you?
It's not just Google. It's governments, corporations, all around the world, simultaneously. The noose is being tightened gradually, then all at once. And it's coming for all of us:
https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
The threats above interlock by design or convergence: Identity layer (1-5) creates the prerequisite for the others. Once identity is established at SIM/account/device level, the carve-outs that make surveillance politically viable become possible (powerful users get exemptions; ordinary users get watched).
Device layer (10-12, 16-19) creates the surveillance endpoint. Once content is scanned on the device before encryption, the cryptographic protections at the communications layer become irrelevant.
Communications layer (6-9) is the most-defended. Mass scanning has been defeated repeatedly. This is the layer where the resistance has the best track record.
Reporting layer (13-15) is nascent. Direct OS-to-government reporting hooks haven't been built yet at scale. The UK's December 2025 proposal is the leading edge.
Platform control (20-24) determines whether alternatives can exist. Browser diversity, app distribution diversity, and engine diversity are the structural protections. All three are narrowing.
A society with all five layers complete has the technical infrastructure for total surveillance with elite carve-outs. We are roughly 40% of the way there. Whether that infrastructure becomes a dystopia depends on political choices, not technical ones.
HN as a whole is surprisingly oblivious to the noose tightening, because many here are super against decentralized distributed things, if they involve any sort of token. You can complain all you want, but downvoting and burying the decentralized alternatives just for groupthink makes you somewhat complicit in the erosion of our privacy and liberties. Even if you might disagree with a project, all the work that goes into it might be a good reason to upvote it instead, considering that without this work, we're basically doomed.
Hell, even using cash feels like a minor form of dissent. And of course even if you leave your phone at home, your car will be scanned with ANPR wherever it goes. And if that fails, there's still your face to be tracked.
The cars themselves phone home all the time. You have to physically remove the transceiver to prevent it or run a jammer nonstop at the risk of a felony.
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I said 16 years ago that when IPV6 was coming into use was the only reason for a 128 bit address space was so they could tie every packet on the internet back to you as a person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464940
No, the main reason is because NAT is terrible and restoring the end to end principle is important if we want the internet to stay not separated into server networks and eyeball networks. If we want to decentralize the internet it's necessary that eyeball machines can talk with each other, not only with servers. This ability reduces the possibility of surveillance.
When IPv6 was designed it was normal for each IPv4 address to be traceable to someone's desk. Fortunately, as that changed with IPv4 so did it with IPv6, so we got IPv6 privacy extensions.
It doesn't help that your first sentence makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist riding his hobby horse. I read on despite that, but others may not.
[flagged]
I refer you to all my own comments about decentralized solutions, which you can see in my history. And the posts that have been flagged after amassing too many upvotes. I think that's sufficient.
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> rapidly becoming
Always has been.
Google was creating cartels like the "Open Handset Alliance" literally decades ago.
Via their control of Chrome and Search which are both monopolies, Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.
Huge fan of Kagi so far - especially SmallWeb if you do want to find websites that probably would not hit the top of Google search results
I am a Kagi early adopter. ;) But the reality is what can be on the web is dictated by Google Search, because nothing survives if you can't find it on Google.
> Chrome and Search which are both monopolies
I'm on Firefox and use DuckDuckGo.
You'd be better off mentioning Safari (17% of users vs. Chrome's 68% and Firefox's 2.2%) and Bing (10% vs Google's 85% and DDG's 1.7%). But nice to know there are two of us!
It cracks me up when people say Chrome is a monopoly, because a massive amount of computing devices do not even ship with Chrome. Windows computers, Macbooks, and iPhones require users go search out and install Chrome on their own out of their own volition, shipping with entirely functional and decent browsers out of the box that they have lots of patterns to push. Even many Android phones ship with browsers other than Chrome as a default still from what I understand.
How is Chrome, of all things, a monopoly? Have words just entirely lost all meaning and now monopoly just means "things which are popular that I dislike"?
Chrome is a monopoly by extending the internet in ways that force users into chrome. Due to market share and Google's prevalence, they have the sway to introduce things that cannot meaningfully be avoided without extreme siloing.
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Why do you keep talking about who installs the app? That has nothing to do with whether something is a monopoly, which is primarily about market share.
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I’m constantly badgered by google apps on my iPhone to use Chrome. In fact I’m not able to just click a link and open my default browser, I have to see the big chrome logo and a smaller link to choose my default browser.
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What's the point of this pedantry? Replace "monopoly" with "dominant market player" and their point still stands. A company doesn't need to be a literal monopoly to engage in anti-competitive behavior. The EU would call this "abuse of dominance". [1]
>> Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.
This is still 100% correct. Google owns the dominant browser and the dominant search engine, this means that they get to dictate how websites function and pick winners and losers through their search algorithm. If you're a publisher (i.e. anyone who hosts a website) you're forced to fall in line or go out of business.
[1] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-05...
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and even the iPhone Chrome doesn't use the Chromium engine, it's Safari under the hood
> Windows computers
Ship with a chromium fork called Edge
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They lost their search monopoly when LLMs came.
Lost? No, they shoveled search into the furnace day after day as they prioritized sewage like paid results, link farms, and blog spam while burying the actual result far below, if returned at all. LLM showed up and gave you the direct answer you wanted in <1s; you don't even have to read the shitty troll result page.
I'm amused at how thoroughly Google adopted Microsoft's playbook. Chrome supplanted Internet Explorer by embracing the open web. But then Google immediately started on extensions, and now they're trying to extinguish the open web with nonsense like Cloud Fraud Defense. All very smoothly done. I mean, people are actually _asking_ for this junk. I'm impressed.
No they didn't. Firefox unseated Internet Explorer. Chrome then got big by putting its installer right on the Google homepage and harassing users to install it. And they had it bundled with other software, and would install as a user so that locked down computers could still run it. They absolutely did not win by embracing open standards.
Chrome has gone off doing their own standards to some extent, but you're forgetting what it was like when Internet Explorer dominated. You basically couldn't use the web without IE because they broke so many standards and implemented them in closed source. Then there was ActiveX on top, straight up Windows binaries in web. And besides there being a dominant engine, only one browser could use that engine. Trading that for Chrome dominance was at least a step up.
I use Firefox right now. Occasionally I need to open a site in Chrome instead, but it's rare.
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Chrome and v8 was just stupidly faster than any other browser and JS stack at the time when I first adoped it. It was a lot buggier in many other ways and many sites just didn't work quite right at the time, but the tradeoff on performance in the early days was very much worth it.
People forget that Sundar Pichai's entire claim to success at Google was injecting the Google Toolbar into the Adobe Reader installer which would hijack your search and browsing data on IE, and the launch of Chrome, which was then also injected into the Adobe Reader installer, occurred because Google was concerned IE might block or limit their toolbar.
People absolutely did like Google at the time, but the majority of its growth is actually shoveling hijackers into other software installs just like BonzaiBuddy.
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I recall Chrome being a superior browser in the early days, prompting many to switch and evangelizing it.
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Lots of supposedly technically advanced users switched to Chrome en masse and promoted it on every occasion they could, because it was so much faster, simpler, safer, etc etc. Don't excuse useful idiots from their share of the blame. People warned about dangers of Chrome's growing domination for about as long as I can remember, back to at least 2012, only to be dismissed as paranoid.
If I may tie this into other things going on, The California wealth tax as written would force Larry and Sergei, if they didn't move out of California, to basically sell almost their entire stake in Google, and it would probably wind up owned by State Street and Vanguard who outsource their proxy votes to ESG consultants, who will probably vote for more surveillance.
what alternative to WEI do you propose? it solves a bajillion Internet-existential problems. it is definitely a crisis. the bot problem is at least as serious as facebook, gmail serving without https.
the fact that this kind of comment gets downvoted proves my point. so what if you personally don't like WEI? it doesn't mean the problems aren't real...
that aside, i don't know how people say stuff like "malicious force" and then you go and use a bajillion Google-authored, completely free as in beer and often free as in freedom technologies that nobody obligates you to use at all. It's not like Apple, where their software is so shitty (Messages, Apple Photos, etc.) that the only reason people use it is because it is locked down and forced upon you. it's interesting to me that @dang worries about the tenor of conversation changing - he longs for that 2009 world of university-level math people hanging out and writing comments about LISP or whatever - when the real deficit is not intelligence about math but, at the very least, seeing that things are nuanced, to see more sides to a problem besides the most emotionally powerful and the most mathematically neutral ones.
Bombing every AI data center on Earth would also solve the Internet-existential problems we're facing. But that solution is beyond the pale of course, instead it's incumbent on me to prove to you that panopticon surveillance of every living human being from now until the Sun consumes us is not a reasonable solution to "bots use the Internet".
Ok so what's your solution to the bot problem? I don't have one, unless you count the option of websites not being free-as-in-beer anymore.
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People use iMessage because it has worked for a long time, during which all the leading alternatives were terrible. Maybe they still are cause I'm still not convinced that RCS even works reliably, seeing how Android users go on WhatsApp instead.