I hope **chrome **fails terribly. Just like Internet Explorer(IE). Firefox all the way

Except when it doesn't. That saying never made sense (far more species have gone extinct than exist today) and it doesn't apply here.

Piracy will continue, obviously, but what we're seeing here is the creation of an internet we can't even fathom yet. This is just where it starts.

Also consider how much more difficult it will be for the average person to participate in piracy. Remember a few months back when Microsoft floated they were basically looking to lock down windows? No unsigned apps, no win32, etc. People will get around that, of course, but fewer people will. Especially if they continue with this trend towards stripping options and de-admin-ing all users unless they pay for an enterprise license.

Then there's the dangerous trend toward encryption being broken by regulation and possibly even VPNs being rendered useless for anyone but businesses. There goes secure torrenting.

The trends don't look good, across the board. We can't just sit here and hope it all works out and the loopholes are found, like it always has before.

It's my right to have my personal computer display what I want it to display. It's my right set my device to reject internet traffic I don't want to receive. It's my right to instruct my machine to download the data I want, and refuse to download the data I don't want. If you make something publicly available online, then the public can consume that or refuse that, in part or in whole, as and when they wish. If a company or a browser wants to try and interfere with that, then they've chosen their fate.

Monzo? Hmm

Just means I'll have the shittiest Chromebook I can buy used, for access to the sites you just listed, and my Linux laptop for everything else. If their non-financial, non-commerce site won't let me in with my adblocking Linux machine, I just won't go there. There will be lots of site still, run by us, that don't do this shit, and they'll get my traffic.

This right here is what has always scared me. The internet is getting more and more controlled and locked down as the years go on. The general population will not take up for, Linux, Firefox, etc. Neither will the services we now rely upon like banking etc. So we will be forced.

I don't think any of this would stop me from using FF for day to day browsing.

2 - At this point I'd just pirate it. I don't care. If you're going to be hostile to paying customers, I'm going to be a non-paying customer again.

3 - Separate banking app. Not bothered about desktop banking

4 - Fine I'll support local businesses where possible, and use dedicated apps or if necessary Chrome (preferably sandboxed) specifically for shopping where not.

5 - Social media was a mistake anyway, already deleted Twitter, I need very little excuse to get rid of Facebook as well.

Honestly I think this is just the end phase of "Web 2.0" as I remember all this shit being labelled at the time. We managed fine with independent forums etc before and will manage again.

Edit: I love the irony that people are killing off Reddit due to API access but the only way I've been able to post on lemmy.world is via the website. Connect app? Nope!

Hi. I finally have the balls to ask, what is DRM? I am kind of a neophyte in all tech matters. But I managed to get out of Reddit because it was full of baits and ridden with apple ads. And so I like this new platform, reminds me of the good old gamefaqs forums days. Hope all this slicker simpler UI from and for users never die…

Then ecommerce sites. “You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything.”

I'm actually not sure about this one. Money is money. If I'm a vendor, and a bunch of bots want to give me money, I say bring it on. Why would any ecommerce vendor add that layer of friction, which could actually prevent a user from buying something from them? What's in it for the vendor?

Seems to me the more likely anti-consumer hell is a points dystopia leveraged by monopolistic companies. Like apple, microsoft, or disney moving to some sort of loyalty points system where you can only buy their products using a currency and credit system that they control. Like, 'stream this movie using your disney points card'. We're not far off from that really.

To all of mentioned above from the bottom of my heart

I still remember old days, when most coders used to praise google. Their services were amazing and I think one of their old principle was >"Develop good products first, think about monetisation later"

Don't have too much faith in the EU. Corporations are still heavily influencing politics. They will probably come with half assed laws that have loopholes or workarounds.

Forcing this might very well be something EU opposes. While there is a lot of corporate lobbying, Google would be forcing everyone to either use chromium or make compatibility changes into other browser. While not a total monopoly, it still limits the options radically. Therefore there might be hope that EU forbids this type of action. Let's see...

Thinking about it, a lot of these companies created astounding products on a relatively unusual business model of delivering for free (not totally unheard of, tv for example but still not the most traditional way of doing business) and absorbed, cannibalized or destroyed a lot of other services and functions with their ubiquity and unbeatable price.

The way they say it was funded was through advertising, but nonetheless much of the big banner services remained unprofitable for years or even decades. Sometimes the master plan is to get everyone hooked (users and advertisers) and then when they have little choice anymore, start making things cost, a lot more. The trouble with this though is that none of them are the only one's doing it and even with only a handful of big titans controlling it all, there's still the risk of one of your tech bros stealing your lunch when your start trying to cash-in and piss of your users and your customers alike so really I guess all of them doing it at once kind of makes sense. Kind of a "I'll jump when you jump" mentality and at least one has jumped. I somewhat wonder if they all planned to go this route at around the same time together or if they all just concluded that the short term gain in market share by taking advantage of one of them jumping wasn't worth the risks from the intense competition and just decided to instead cash in at the same time.

Or I'm just rambling and have no business sense or idea what I'm talking about. It just seems that might explain why this all seems to be coming to some kind of a crescendo at about the same time.

Honest curiosity on your answer to this.

Google is the developer of Chromium and the Chrome browser which uses Chromium. Chromium is free and open source (though owned by Google).

I’m not sure how you break up Chrome and Google. That’s literally their product. Who are we giving this to? There are browsers that do not use Chromium (e.g., Firefox and Safari being the big ones).

On banking websites, yes.

A few decades ago I gave a manager 2 options to solve a problem for the company.

1st was to take a simple engineered approach with a dash of automation to keep our lives simple but I would have to push out previously set deadlines

2nd was to just ignore it until it gets so bad that his managers finally give in to hire someone else to do it and hope that it gets done right after I leave the project

He chose the 2nd. It never got solved. They ended up hiring a vendor who screwed it up and it took a volunteer using unpaid hours on threat of being fired to resolve it.

It was only a few years later he became CIO for a major tech company and I lost all hope in humanity.

Because our economic system is broken. It simply does not allow us to do what is best for humanity in the long run. It's completely absurd the more you think about it.

Just when I thought the idea of DRM internet couldn't be any more depressing...

Climate change is not an existential crisis. Not to the entire humanity atleast. This kind of extremist thinking and extraggerating just makes me want to check out completely because it feels like there's no one reasonable in the room.

Come here, I left Firefox when Chrome first released, however after the Firefox Quantum release, I got back to using Firefox again. The container tabs feature is very useful to create a separate container for each project that I'm involved in. It's like having multiple browsers without needing to install multiple browsers.

Although I still keep Vivaldi and Edge installed to visit some websites that doesn't work correctly with Firefox.

Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Protonmail is my setup. I am slowy getting away from Google and all massive corps tbh, I'm spending more time on my Linux partition too.

Yay!

Exactly, headline should be more like "Google executives want Google engineers to make ad-blocking (near) impossible"

Just following orders is not the ironclad excuse some of you seem to think it is.

Doing what you're told does not relieve you of responsibility for the results of your actions

The engineers are not blame free, and can do super shady shit too. For example, the issues with the WebHID "broswer" APIs.

Ah yes, because "just following orders" has worked out so well in the past.

That's right, I just godwin'd this bitch.

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.

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.

Then don't let Chrome be a super majority of users.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

The silver lining here might also be that the internet that we knew and loved 25 years ago might actually reappear. The 'other' stuff would just become background noise to the ones 'in the know'.

Reminds of the 15 million merits episdoe in black mirror

This topic is a bit beyond me so I may have misunderstood but I think it's not going to matter that you use Firefox if this goes ahead and gets widely adopted because it sounds like websites will request these trust tokens and if your browser isn't forthcoming with one then they will assume you are a bot (or a user that blocks ads and is therefore one whose traffic does not benefit them). What happens then is unclear, do they not serve up the website? Do you get a degraded experience or different content? Do they just throw a lot of CAPTCHAs at you?

Sounds like they're going to make life on the web a whole lot less convenient for folks that don't want to use their new token system. But it's totally voluntary though, no browser has to implement it.

This might sound silly but assuming you are using firefox or even safari how will this proposal affect these browsers. Only thing I can currently think of is banking sites (on android) would force you to use chrome and check play integrity (safteynet) to block acess.

At the end of the day won't this only affect people using Google chrome? (Forks of chrome, firefox, safari could by pass the issue)?

Sorry if I seem a bit ignorant

Pair it up with DDG + Protonmail and world will smile to you! 😄

Would love to use Firefox if it wasn't so slow

Hope more developers give special support to the gecko engine

It's not just that there are people thinking about it, it's that this is what our brightest minds in our society are incentivized to think about.

There is a joke in tech circles - if you are smart enough you eventually end up in ad tech. It's really unhealthy for our society.

A lot of ads should be banned for environmental reasons alone. From junk mail, lit up signs, eyesore billboards, and all the power wasted in digital ads.

The big reasons I'm against this is all the side effects. Yes, there will be more ads, but there will also be:

1. More autoplaying videos on article websites
2. Increased risk of malware from ads
3. Decreased competition in the browser space
4. Decreased competition in the OS space
5. More tracking and data harvesting

I hate shitty ads as much as the next person, but you're ignoring how much of the internet runs on advertising money. Think of all the websites, services, apps, etc that you use that are "free" (read: ad-supported) — without ad revenue, a large percentage of them would be too expensive to run.

I'm not saying ad-tech companies/people are always good, many of them clearly do unethical shit, but the idea that you're being forced to see ads is kind of crazy. You always have the option to not use ad-supported stuff, it's just a lot more limiting and expensive.

You’re describing the inherent limitations of capitalism. Our entire economy is predicated on infinite growth, which doesn’t exist and isn’t possible. What you describe is the eventual collapse of not just organizations, but of the US as a whole.

so forcing us to watch them feels like a huge overstep.

We live in a fascist society so I wouldn't be suprised of their audacity..

If it's affecting your mental health, I highly recommend avoiding this side of social media and focusing on your needs. Don't let the world drag you down with it.

I'm glad you don't live in turkey where news and half of people are more cancer than this 💀💀

If google really does away with adblockers I expect many more will follow. I'm not even against unobtrusive ads but the few times I've been away from my own pihole / ublock browser setup and rawdogged the internet those ads were next level obnoxious. I can't live like that.

While nice to do, it's not going to solve the problem when the likes of Cloudflare are already on board with this. Apple has already implemented a similar system in Safari as well. Feels like the horse has already left the barn.

Philosophically I want to agree with you, but when sites like banks and employment finders are going to require this it's really going to create a horrible world of the haves and have-nots.

I'm in the same boat as you. But considering there's this thing called the "ad industry", there's bound to be a considerable portion of people that are influenced enough by ads, even just at a subconcious level, that investing money into ads is a worthwhile thing to do for businesses selling products and businesses offering ad platforms.

Ad companies figured out that sales are much better with whatever publicity they can get, even bad publicity. It doesn't work with some people, like you, but they haven statistically proven that just getting their name out in any capacity will increase sales.

When companies stop paying them so much for making them more money.

Yeah and as it's illegal to bump up the volume (where I live) they bump up loudness instead, making the sound crappy but it's perceived as higher volume. God I hate that crap

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.

You think they acted alone?

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.

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.