Why’s everyone blaming the engineers lol, pretty sure they’re just doing what they’re told right?
Just following orders is not the ironclad excuse some of you seem to think it is.
They’re still bad people, but this kind of blame has to run uphill. The devs only have the option of quitting, not necessarily of not doing what they’re told.
That being said, I bet there are some Very Good Boys who enthusiastically and proactively suggest some evil shit to the execs.
Look dude, I hate advertising as much as anyone. I don’t want any TV and most streaming services have wedged in some form of advertising nowadays and I avoid all that.
But equating engineers trying to solve a problem like engineers figuring out how to block ads isn’t really equivalent to murder.
Software engineers have ethics classes, I’d imagine this would fall highly under unethical, just under building software for the military which google employees have protested in the past.
Losing your ad blocker on chrome is “just under” software designed to kill people? Lol really? Oh the oppression
Sure it won’t kill people like programming drones, but it is still unethical and would affect ~5 billion people negatively.
It was required for my degree, I’m sure it is required at more than just my university lol
Because it is still unclear if this is an official project requested by Google or just some engineers working alone until Google adopts the project.
The chances that a swashbuckling crew of rogue engineers organized a secret skunkworks project to implement their heartfelt, idealistic vision of an adblocker free web are… low.
Exactly, headline should be more like “Google executives want Google engineers to make ad-blocking (near) impossible”
Isn’t Google famous for giving a large amount of creative freedom to their engineers (and having a lot of dead published products as a result)? Also, Google engineers are not exactly stuck at their job with little hope of finding anything else to survive.
For a tech community there are a lot of uninformed and fear mongering posts in here. From the article:
What About Browser Modifications and Extensions?
Google’s proposal remains ambiguous about its impact on browser modifications and extensions. It attests to the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack without restricting the application’s functionality. However, how this plays out with browsers that allow extensions or are modified remains a grey area. As the proposal vaguely mentions, “Web Environment Integrity attests the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack, it does not restrict the indicated application’s functionality.”
Basically it can be summed up as “nothing in the new thing actually says it will make blocking ads impossible or even harder, but who knows right? So just trust that it will based on nothing other than fear mongering”
Sites have been detecting ad blockers and refusing to show you content unless you disable them for years. Sites already have paywalls as drm to restrict what you can see. This really isn’t bringing the ability do any of these DRM things since those already exist.
Having said all that - is there much of a reason for this new thing to exist? Debatable at this stage. The only benefit I can see to users is it could eliminate captchas and other “are you human?” checks, as well as maybe reduce cheaters in browser based games (which tbh I don’t even know if that’s a thing).
The only benefit I can see to users is it could eliminate captchas
#CAPTCHA elimination is not a benefit. The CAPTCHA motive of separating humans from bots is responsible for killing beneficial bots. The only good thing about it is humans get fed-up with CAPTCHAs and the captcha-pushers lose human traffic. That backlash is a good thing™. Remove that backlash and beneficial bots are defeated on a much larger scale.
In other posts, I’ve tried to point out how some of the articles and comments around WEI are more speculative than factual and received downvotes and accusations of boot-licking for it. Welcome to the club, I guess.
The speculation isn’t baseless, but I’m concerned about the lack of accurate information about WEI in its current form. If the majority of people believe WEI is immediately capable of enforcing web page integrity, share that incorrect fact around, and incite others, it’s going to create a very good excuse for dismissing all dissenting feedback of WEI as FUD. The first post linking to the GitHub repository brought in so many pissed off/uninformed people that the authors of the proposal actually locked the repo issues, preventing anyone else from voicing their concerns or providing examples of how implementing the specification could have unintended or negative consequences.
Furthermore, by highlighting the DRM and anti-adblock aspect of WEI, it’s failing to give proper attention to many of the other valid concerns like:
- Discrimination against older hardware/software that doesn’t support system-level environment integrity enforcement (i.e. Secure Boot)
- The ability for WEI to be used to discriminate between browsers and provide poor (or no) service to browsers not created by specific corporations.
- The possibility of WEI being used in a way to force usage of browsers provided by hostile vendors
- The ability for it to be used to lock out self-built browsers or forked browsers.
- The potential for a lack in diversity of attesters allowing for a cartel of attesters to refuse validation for browsers they dislike.
I very well could be wrong, but I think our (the public) opinions would have had much more weight if they were presented in a rational, informed, and objective manner. Talking to software engineers as people generally goes down better than treating them like a cog in the corporate machine, you know?
I think the issue is that Google has both A) a track record of backdooring restrictions on adblocking, and B) an overwhelming motivation to do so seeing as how they generate their revenue from online advertising. They’ve forfeited the benefit of the doubt, especially when they’ve already disclosed that the whole point of the change is to enhance the profitability of online advertising:
Google’s engineers elaborate, “Websites funded by ads require proof that their users are human and not bots…Social websites need to differentiate between real user engagement and fake engagement”
So given that once implemented, this hop and this skip would just require a teensy jump in order to further restrict adblocking, it is reasonable to assume that’s within their desired goals.
Google has a track record of attack articles written against them, all talking up their intentions to tank adblocking, including this attack article. And yet, my adblocker still works and my ads are still blocked. Strange that we just assume this is what they intend to do, when there’s no evidence they’ve pulled it off, we treat it as if they have.
- YouTube test threatens to block viewers if they continue using ad blockers
- How well is uBlock Origin working for you in Chrome Mobile?
- Read up on Manifest V3. They were forced to delay Jan 2023 implementation due to outcry, but it’s still very much on their roadmap.
Are you really certain that Google is trying to eliminate adblocking is just an alarmist assumption?
I fail to see how the engineers building the technical side of this are relevant to this case. It’s not their decision to put this into Chromium or not.
Dude they’re not murdering people they implemented tech use a new browser
True, it was not their decision, but they had the choice to show google the middle finger.
You always have a decision. Especially when you’re a highly qualified engineer that could choose to work somewhere else easily.
That’s petty as fuck. I’m an ex google eng and it’s not up to us what we work on. We get paid to work on shit and if we don’t do it someone else will. Plenty of resumes in the pool ready to hop in and take someone’s spot. Blame the company not the people doing the grunt work.
It’s like blaming the barista for the menu.
Please don’t blame the people who were forced to implement this. There are engineers to blame behind all shitty tech in the world. They’re just trying to work a job. There aren’t exactly a lot of jobs in the tech industry where you don’t work for some of the evilest motherfuckers alive building unimaginably evil stuff. I’m all for directing as much hate, vitriol, credible threats of violence, etc at the people on top, but let’s leave the poor sap who they forced to do their dirty work alone.
Lmao yoavweiss seems to have recently broken the 4 year hiatus on his personal blog to make a new post about how the discussions around this retarded proposal are not constructive enough.
The most constructive that can ever be said about this is “fuck right off” dude.
Google executives want this, NOT the engineers.
Their engineers are super fucking shady too. For example, the issies with the WebHID “browser” APIs
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain
