The Chrome team says theyâre not going to pursue Web Integrity butâŚ
it is piloting a new Android WebView Media Integrity API thatâs ânarrowly scoped, and only targets WebViews embedded in apps.â
They say its because the team âheard your feedback.â Iâm sure thatâs true, and I can wildly speculate that all the current anti-trust attention was a factor too.
Unpopular opinion here: I kind of hoped theyâd go through with it, as that would completely kill Chrome and Chromium and would lead to a repeat of IE vs Firefox, except Chrome would be the new IE. The fact that they backtracked means that they too saw that people would be massively flocking to Firefox.
It wouldnât. If Google only owned Chrome, then maybe. But combined with services like AdSense, Google can easily leverage people and site operators to keep using Chrome.
Firefox is losing users year over year. I think itâs beyond saving.
Most Chrome users donât even know what a web browser is. They would have remained on Chrome and the web would have suffered for it.
To be fair, most IE 5 and 6 users didnât know what a web browser was either and here we are.
I am not asking for much. Just break up Google and throw both the big shareholders as well as the executives in jail for the rest of their lifes. If you go as far and decide to take all their money and spend it on social services, healthcare and education for the general public, I wouldnât be mad.
âAll Iâm asking for, is giving some people life imprisonment for an action that currently is completely legal.â
Listen, Iâm completely for seizing the means of production and stuff. Google is evil. They can go fuck themselves. However, saying something so incredibly stupid (like you suggested above) voids any credibility that you have.
You are getting mad at an internet post by a random person who has exactly zero credibility to begin with. I sourced nothing, I claimed nothing, I didnât even pretend that any opinion I hold is of value. As much as I am for calling out shit and as much as I applaud you doing that if for no other reason than out of principle, why? Why donât you use your brain against someone actually doing harm and argue with a shitpost done by a shitposter on a platform that is mostly about shitposting instead?
All of that pointless stuff aside: Legal â Right I hope you will agree with me on that. Weâd like to pretend the rules we make up are just. Weâd especially like to believe that if they are democratically legitimated someway or another, they must be morally okay. That is not the case. It never was and never will be. If you base your whole stance on something being legal, then thatâs a huge issue in and of itself.
At this point in history money is power is law. If you are rich enough, you have to be the utmost incompetent idiot around to do something blatantly illegal and get in trouble for it. I for one donât think this is the way. So maybe a bit more anarchy from time to time would serve us all well to balance out rich peopleâs crap.
Also: Itâs a shitpost. A freaking shitpost. Vote it down and move on. Iâd do the same if I didnât think it would be worth engaging with you.
You are getting mad at an internet post by a random person who has exactly zero credibility to begin with. I sourced nothing, I claimed nothing, I didnât even pretend that any opinion I hold is of value.
Listen⌠Humans find patterns everywhere they go. Thatâs just how humans work. Your idea is clearly a left wing idea (anti-corporation, breaking monopolies, etc.). I get it. I support this ideology. However, when you call for imprisoning people for life right beside the presentation of this idea, you unknowingly draw up a terrible association to it. Unfortunately, the first thing that people think about when they hear âcommunismâ, is âgulagsâ. You unknowingly reinforce peopleâs beliefs regarding this.
All of that pointless stuff aside: Legal â Right I hope you will agree with me on that.
Agreed completely. However, I donât think that the solution for this is undermining law and order. Vigilantism helps nobody. Except for non-democratic systems, violence always leads to your idea being dismissed immediately. Hence, it should be avoided as much as possible (except in cases where you are in immediate danger).
Also: Itâs a shitpost. A freaking shitpost. Vote it down and move on. Iâd do the same if I didnât think it would be worth engaging with you.
Words have meanings. Not all people have an advanced sense of humor like you. At least I donât. Sure, if you meant the above as a joke, you should probably have put an â/sâ in front of it. This is exactly how the far right does its dog whistling.
A: âBlack people something something racistâŚâ
B: âYou canât say that bro⌠Thatâs racistâ
A: âItâs a shitpost bro! Move on⌠People canât take a joke these daysâŚâ
I wish they did, so chrome could loose some market share
Problem is big sites youâre forced to use (banking sites, work HR systems, etc) wouldâve made shitty decisions and required it to use their site. It would be like the old âyou have to use IE 6â era
Various state and federal accessibility laws wouldâve made that a very questionable decision for a lot of industries. Given that it would cost money simply to get programmers to implement and might lead to more costs from legal challenges I suspect a lot of sites like banks and the like wouldâve avoided it.
Now when it comes to basically any news site, entertainment service, social media, online store, or anything else that makes extra money on ads and harvesting user data? Oh yeah, theyâd implement it in a heartbeat.
Banking site: Weâve implemented the Web Integrity API because security is important to us.
Also the banking site: Your password can only be six characters.
Moving it to WebView just makes it a Trojan horse for the rest of the web.
Isnât Webview just a proprietary Android thingy? I still donât like it, but that sounds pretty isolated to me.
K, Iâm still not using Google search engine anymore. And once I find a replacement for any other Google services and devices I have, itâs out with those as well.
https://ecosia.org as a search engine :) Uses bing in the background (and newly also google), but your data isnât sold (AFAIK).
If you want opensource thereâs YaCy
I used Ecosia for a long time (almost 5 years) but the search results are pretty bad. Often I had to use another search engine to actually find what I was looking for. DuckDuckGo is pretty good, Brave Search is OK as well but SearXNG is my personal favorite.
Iâm on Kagi but I did the one time payment and am unsure about whether Iâll extend. Results are good but 10 dollars a month isnât insignificant (cheap plan is orders of magnitude less than what I need in searches)
I tried kagi and wasnât impressed. For all but one or two queries the results were exactly the same as ddg. Not to mention they had that stupid metric stating 78%+ unique kagi results for every search, even though that was blatantly untrue. They seem pretty dishonest as a company.
Honestly. Off the back of this debacle I switched to Firefox and duckduckgo. Previously I used to use the shit out of incognito because I hated that when I searched for something once that I then get that thing popping up everywhere else in ads etc. Since the switch I no longer get the feeling of being stalked.
NoScript helps a lot, too. I suppose other extensions also. Itâs horrifying how many sites embed Google and Facebook tracking, including ones that really shouldnât like medical sites and banks.
My concern is saving my email and photos before my account is randomly banned one day with no customer service and no recourse. God only knows what data they already harvested from when I used to back up my photos with their service.
Just grab a copy using Google Takeout, then after that use Syncrify, FolderSync, Resilio Sync or something else to automatically copy your phone media to your computer.
I replaced gmail with protonmail and everything else with nextcloud. Couldnât go back.
After a lot of privacy switching I finally did try NextCloud, but I couldnât get port forwarding to work on my Internet and gave up⌠For now
You are probably behind a nat. I contacted my isp and they disabled it, since it works perfectly!
Yes, they even have a walk through on how to do it.
Their docker stack is pretty simple to setup
This is something I wrote in another thread earlier but itâs relevant here too
A security guy popular in the internet, Ollam, recently left Deltaâs program because they are changing it to be more pay to play vs miles traveled or something. Delta walked it back but heâs sticking to his guns. In his rant, he said something poignant. Something to the effect of âif your significant other raises their hand like theyâre gonna hit you, but they donât? The time to leave is now.â (Video)
(Quote)
I adjusted my entire digital life so I can do everything without ever connecting to Google services. I block them in my self-hosted Pi-Hole, on NextDNS and in my OPNsense Firewall.
On the topic of this, what is the best alternative out there? A few years ago Iâve tried a couple options, out of curiosity, but the search quality was super poor for anything thatâs not in English, and the accuracy of found content wasnât always there
Both leaving reddit and leaving google s.e. were two things that I thought would be harder than they were.
Just need to install Linux as your primary OS and your transition to software freedom will be complete.
I use it for work but at home with gaming and stuff itâs just not sustainable
Doing so on the desktop is easy enough. Getting rid of Android appears to be a much harder challenge, though.
I still worry that leaving Reddit is going to make it tilt to the right. I spent a decade posting there in the hopes that it would nudge people towards sanity.
The right use it and all other social media sites for coordinated disinformation. No matter how much you try to combat it youâre going up against people/ideas with deep pockets and a lot of resources meaning your voice is just a drop in the bucket.
Leaving google isnât hard.
Leaving YouTube specifically, however⌠Well, itâs been getting easier as content seems to be less and less frequent or quality.
Leaving YouTube specifically,
Iâve been using it. Itâs actually pretty great.
This is true, I still use youtube and I donât see it changing soon since there are no viable alternatives.
Maps is the last one to replace. There are so many ads now that Iâll tolerate a lower quality alternative.
The hard part is the cost difference (I havenât looked terribly deeply yet) Family Proton (3TB) is 395 AUD (when you sign up for 2 years)
2 TB, 125 AUD per year for google drive, and itâs per year.
Pro-rata thatâs literally twice as expensive, and you have to sign up for 2 years to get that rate, which makes moving my stuff a hard pill to swallow :(
Is there a plug and play service thatâs as good as proton without the hefty premium?
(The single plans are even more steep, 24 months, 158 AUD per year for only 500 GBâŚ)
