Technology

I expect we'll lose about 90% of the web within five years as this becomes normalized.

It will primarily be the seo driven AI crap driven ripoff regurgitated shitfest that's arisen in the last 5 years tho.

I'll be waiting for a search engine to arise that only shows user controllable presentation and will use that.

A way to filter out the corporate trash will make the human web better, not worse.

You might want to recommend forks of Firefox too. Part of the reason Chrome/Chromium is dominant is because of its forks, and a fork of Firefox might appeal to someone more than the main browser. I use Pulse, but Waterfox is also solid from what I've heard.

I mean that’s all I can really do.

Unfortunately when my bank or other critical institution rejects Firefox for failure to use attestation, I can't even do that. I'll be forced to use Chrome. Firefox would have to adopt WEI to remain compatible. In that case I can use Firefox, but it would be the same as using Chrome.

I'd say the monopoly Google has with Chrome is way more threatening than in the early 2000's with MS and IE. That threat resulted in an anti-trust lawsuit, but not a peep from any government about the destruction Google is doing.

I've long been trying to de-googlify myself, but it's certainly ramped up this year.

Been trying out Kagi and just set up proton mail account. Not sure what I'll land on in the end but it's nice trying out newer services.

Be Evil, Do Ads

Can you explain this to a layman what this does?

The problems start to happen when buisnesses adopt this en masse. Expect all banks to implement this for example. You can use Firefox all you want, but then you won't be able to do online banking.

Standards are really fucking important to help people stay functional in a society. This is one area that the ANCAP mindset just gets it totally wrong, unless you like the idea of being a hermit.

Anyway, we are already seeing some websites basically reject browsers like Firefox because they basically give the consumer too much protection and freedom. Arguably we've seen this before, but this may be a new tier of corporate lockout of open standards as consumer protection gets thrown in the trash. Thanks America.

The issue isn't that we have no alternative, it's that this feature will basically eliminate those alternatives sadly. You can read more about it here if you haven't, but it's bad.

When websites start blocking clients that don't implement the wei handshake, you'll be forced to use one that does if you want to visit those sites. Firefox will either adopt it or become a second rate browser.

It's a shame that no matter the amount of outrage, no matter what the pitfalls of this change may be, it's going to happen no matter what because money.

Or make the internet a public resource. Let the USPS be the ISP

Pardon formatting, on mobile. Its a form of device authentication. Apple does this with safari already BTW, and it can reduce things like captcha because the authentication is done on the backend when a request hits a server. While still an issue in concept with Apple doing it, chromium browsers are a much larger market share. In layman's terms this is basically the company saying, hey you are attempting to visit this site, we need to verify the device (or browser, or add on configuration, or no ad blocker, etc) is 'authentic'. Which of course is nebulous. It can be whatever the entity in charge of attestation wants it to be.

This sets the precedent that whomever is controlling verification, can deny whomever they see fit. I'm running GrapheneOS on my phone currently, they could deny for that. Or, if you are blocking ads. Maybe you're not sharing specific information about your device, and they want to harvest that. Too bad, comply or you're 'not allowed to do x or y'.

This is the gist. The web should be able to be accessed by anybody. It isn't for companies to own nor should it be built that way. Web2 is a corporate hellscape.

Edit wrt Safari: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/

From my limited understanding as a common pleb, they are inserting DRM into Chromium browsers to prevent ad-blockers.

EME for the rest of the internet, not just video. Basically doing what hulu does to stop screen recording/as blocking but across every webpage

The biggest problem is if Google can influence all the major websites (banks, e-commerce, news sites, streaming services, social media, etc) to adopt this standard.

They've done it before with AMP.

Not really, since Google develops Chromium.

FireFox receives most of their funding from Google, even though they've come out as opposing this plan. They have next to no market share.

The only other browser engine that can seriously compete with Chromium is Safari.

google want websites to be able to check whether you're running an approved browser. And they also want to be the ones to have the authority to decide what an "approved browser" is.

Given that google is an advertising company that owns a browser, constantly tries to cripple ad blockers they will probably simply start saying that any browser that doesn't implement the stuff they want (crippled ad blockers) is "untrustworthy"