Attacks and doxing make me personally MORE likely to support stronger safety features in chromium, as such acts increase my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don’t give in to criminals or bullies
Kick a puppy
Get attacked for kicking a puppy
“These attacks make me MORE likely to keep kicking puppies, as I don’t give in to intimidation from criminals and bullies that want healthy puppies for their nefarious ends.”
They’re literally burning bridges after crossing them huh. Web scraping is illegal? Their fucking search engine was powered by a web scraper.
WEI is plain anti-competition to me now. Most, if not all, of their stated reasons are now just facade to me.
Fuck Google. I know this isn’t constructive or helpful, but fuck em.
Google gained control of the web by populating the world with Chrome/Chromium and wants to strong arm the web as a whole through it. Climbing the ladder and pulling it up from underneath them, with their fisted approach to Manifest V3 the beginning salvo.
For Google it’s just another day in the office.
The standard “but it’s different when we do it” principle. It’s a powerful tool.
Quick correction: website scraping and ad blocking is not unlawful. It both is a means to make the web more accessible and the latter also reduces CO2 emission through reducing electricity usage from irrelevant ads. The same case could be made for web scraping as a user can make their own feed of news without having to sift through hundreds of pages. This as well can be done in a way that does not disrupt the pages‘ normal function.
That is where the two larger issues come in:
- people can argue that you need to pay for viewing a page/getting information through apps And
- branding powerusers as criminals („unlawful“) is unfair and false
The „pay for information“ is largely a phylosophical problem. It is no problem to pay for someones book or online course but the blanket statement that one has to pay for it is false. As an open source developer I give my work freely to others and in turn receive theirs freely as well (if they use the appropriate license of course).
We really have two sides forming. The „open internet“ crowd that works together for free or maybe accepts donations and the proprietary crowd which is having a huge influence right now.
Google putting in web DRM will cement that situation and make it possible that you can only use vanilla stuff on your browser and ultimately even shutting down any access to open source things completely by making it impossible to run on ubuntu since google will only accept windows clients (this is a possible outcome, not a guaranteed one).
All in all, we are unable to perfectly anticipate the outcome of this but if we see great harming potential, it is fair to weigh it agains the potential benefits (which is the lofty goal of weeding out bots and scammers). I think the cost benefit relation is heavily tilted here.
TL;DR: Tinkering with your browser is not illegal and should be allowed to continue. The cost of (potentially) weeding out bots and scammers is not worth potentially ruining the open source community.
I work with cultural heritage and have the strong believe, that information should be open and easy accessible. Citizen have a right to access to knowledge and to educate themselves unter their circumstanses. But of course the Infrastructur cost money and this should always be a discurse between all parties. And not been dictated by major companies.
It is a really hard fight for museums, archives and libaries lately. What do you do when your electricity bill jumps up to 5 million during the war in the ukrain?
We need to unite and search for ways to keep the Internet accessible.
I can relate. People like you are the structural pillars of our society.
I‘m not familiar to the laws concerning cultural heritage but some of the museums should be partially tax funded, no?
Thanks 😊
Mostly you are right, of course it depence on the country. a lot of institutes are tax funded, but the cost can’t be covered just with that. Rent, wages, special rooms for the heritage… the new competitor is everything digital: a homepage, a database, social media. Museums need all of that to stay relevant. but the budget stays the same.
(And of course we depent on open data, to reduce thr dependence on big tech companies)
The war has shown how fragile this is. Cost of electricity had boomt, but there is no room to reduce it. Paintings, glas, it all needs their own temperature. But explain that to someone who is just Management. We scientist/ academics have a weak basis for negotiation, when the administration wants to save money. In my country cultural heritage is clearly not a priority, that leads to institutes having no money and losing relevance. Which is dangerous for the variety of knowledge.
Thanks for giving me the space to shortly explain this. I think we all need to work together to make the web, the heritage accessible! 😤
Plus adblocking should be basic security posture these days. Does no one remember pop up ads delivering spy/malware? Still happening today, why should I allow a site to display ads that are intended to cause harm to my person and property. Does the ad service or site using it have no responsibility to safeguard their users against these threats when removing their ability to defend themselves?
Yes, I remember the malicious popups from the past. In fact, some installers put non hazardous but still unwanted software of your pc while concealing it as just another page of things to accept (like avira for example). It’s all just harvesting that sacred attention and precious data. This is why it needs to stop. We don’t need to accept this. We can actually work together (open source) to advance and improve instead of letting someone use us for their gain while holding a carrot on a stick in our face.
Doesn’t Google scrape websites? Isn’t that the entire purpose of google.com? If that were illegal, then Google would be the biggest offender. The author should probably look where he’s pointing his gun before firing it.
Is it just me or are Twitter, Reddit, and now Google, scrambling to lock their doors to any entities trying to scrape the web for new AI datasets?
All these hugely unpopular decisions, taken on short notice, that may be fatal to their platforms, seem to be more like knee jerk reactions to protect their treasure hoards of possible AI input data.
Opinions?
scrambling to lock their doors
From a consumer perspective, it seems like all the FANG conglomerates are trying to shut the stable door after the AI horse has bolted, but perhaps from an industry perspective, their just trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves to curb competition, or stall any emerging upstarts, just like most FANGs where themselves only decades ago.
FANG isn’t really an accurate word anymore.
It’s MAAA: Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon.
You do know that FAANG is an acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, not a type of company. Saying “…like most FANGs [sic] where themselves only decades ago” makes no sense as far as I can read it.
My phone keyboard spelling aside, when the acronym was first coined, correct, but it seems to have sence devolved into more of a colloquialism for large scale tech related corporations, outliving the precise corporate restructuring that once comprised the old acronym. At least that’s what I’ve experienced in my workplaces, as well as the comments here:
Was there a equivalent house hold colloquialism for IBM, HP, Xerox, Bell System, etc. back in the day?
I my experience the people running large companies are idiots who got their position by brown nosing the right people so it doesn’t really surprise me. Google is pretty well known too for coming up with stupid ideas they scrap in a few years
The proposal is bad enough as it is, but it’s the duplicitous gaslighting BS that really pisses people off.
If they came out and said “We came up with this thing to prevent loss of revenue on ads and prevent LLMs from capturing data” then people would still be against it, but at least it would feel like an honest discussion.
Instead it’s just another page out of Google’s playbook we’ve seen many times already.
- Make up some thinly veiled use cases that supposedly highlight how this would benefit users, while significantly stretching the definition of “users”
- Gaslight every one by pretending that people simply misunderstand what you’re proposing and what you’re trying to achieve
- Pretend that nobody provides reasonable feedback because everyone is telling you not to commit murder in the first place instead of giving you tips on how to hide the body
- Latch onto the few, inevitable, cases of people going too far to paint everyone opposing it in a negative light
- Use that premise to explain why you had to unilaterally shut down any and all avenues for people to provide comment
- Make the announcement that you hear people and that you’re working on it and that all will be well
- Just do what you want anyways with minimal concessions if any and rinse repeat
For what it’s worth I blame W3C as well.
Their relatively young “Anti-Fraud Community Group” has essentially green lit this thing during meetings as can be seen here:
https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/05-26.md
https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/07-07-wei-side-meeting.md
“WEI can potentially be used to impose restrictions on unlawful activities on the internet, such as downloading YouTube videos and other content, ad blocking, web scraping, etc.”
WTF. Most of these activities are actual lawful in the country I life in. (Especially with adblockers, the content mafia tried to outlaw it and failed in court, several times.)
