My favorite part is when they ask you to give them the benefit of the doubt, but also anyone who disagrees with them in a way that doesn't fit their expectations is "noise."

Wow, that blog post is truly nauseating and infuriating to read, knowing the context.

Fuck Google. They're the Nestlé of tech.

I started looking at Mac's for my next computer. Due to this amazing project. https://asahilinux.org/

you need a Microsoft signed stub to boot anything other than Windows on a PC

Can you expand on this? Maybe I'm just misunderstanding you, but a "pc" is not a Windows made machine. It is a collection of disparate computer parts made by different companies with no requirement to run Windows as the exclusive OS once put together.

Even on a Windows OS, I can run any program I want (that's made to operate with Windows). I may get a warning if it's not a "known" developer, but I can still run it. Did I miss a big update to how 11 works with unknown software or something?

Please drink verification can

Or they just ban you without recourse and poof all your data and accounts are dead.

Edit: consider using Google Takeout to download your data periodically as a hedge against trouble with your account. This will help prevent data loss in the event your account suddenly goes poof. It won't help you with the apps you bought though.

Thanks for this. I skimmed the proposal doc itself and didn't quite understand the concern people have with it – most of the concerns that came to my own mind are already listed as non-goals. The first few lines of this comment express a realistic danger that's innate to what's actually being proposed.

Glory to ~~Arstotzka~~ ... I mean Alphabet.

Thank you for choosing Google!

!degoogle@lemmy.ml

For me the most annoying part was switching off gmail (I went to fastmail) and the hardest habbit to break was Google search (I mostly use DDG).

That is the only solution to all this!

To everyone: Please remove at least as much Google products/services as you can from your life. Start with the easiest ones. Have a plan and gradually find alternatives for all other products/services of them. Remove them from your life. It will help even if you do this partly. This is for the benefit of us all.

Also, let's do the same to Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Reddit etc. Let's not let our lives depend on them. They are corporations. They are programmed to maximize profit.

I know there's currently not a lot of good alternatives out there, but if enough of us ditch these ass-companies, more and more open-source, decentralized, not-for-benefit services will pop up, and the existing ones will improve greatly. These are not for-profit projects that can be bought by corporations later and used to their benefit. They will only benefit their users.

Let's do this!

Fuck megacorporations!

The only thing I have left is YouTube. Apparently Piped allows registering and then storing subscriptions, maybe I'll move mine there.

Gotta say, deleting my google account would be very awesome to do

Yeah, as if github aka Microsoft is going to do anything about it ... but hey, anything to keep the pressure up and not letting this go through.

Gonna play devil's advocate here.. I think most Mozilla money comes from Google and i think the reason Google keeps the money flowing to Mozilla is for Chrome to have a real competitor, Firefox to date is the only popular web browser with different engine and all that. Maybe it's fair for me to say that it resembles a tiny tiny fraction of why Intel keeps AMD alive back then.

As for EFF, i viewed them as just another NGO. For me most NGOs will have a non achievable goals, because it will be the dead of an NGO if they ever achive their goals. (No more money for them).

I'm not against people donating to Mozilla or EFF or Thunderbird Foundation. I think it will be better (yet longer process) if government can regulate big tech, much like what the European Union did with GDPR.

There is no technical solution to trust.

Google knows this. Trust isn't really the problem they're trying to solve.

My ELI5 version:

Basically, the 'Web Environment Integrity' proposal is a new technique that verifies whether a visitor of a website is actually a human or a bot.

Currently, there are captchas where you need to select all the crosswalks, cars, bicycles, etc. which checks whether you're a bot, but this can sometimes be bypassed by the bots themselves.

This new 'Web Environment Integrity' thing goes as follows:

1. You visit a website
2. Website wants to know whether you're a human or a bot.
3. Your browser (or the 'client') will send request an 'environment attestation' from an 'attester'. This means that your browser (such as Firefox or Chrome) will request approval from some third-party (like Google or something) and the third-party (which is referred to as 'attester') will send your browser a message, which basically says 'This user is a bot' or 'This user is a human being'.
4. Your browser receives this message and will then send it to the website, together with the 'attester public key'. The 'attester public key' can be used by the website to verify whether the attester (a.k.a. the third-party checking whether you're a human or not) is trustworthy and will then check whether the attester says that you're a human or not.

I hope this clears things up and if I misinterpreted the GitHub explainer, please correct me.

The reason people (rightfully) worry about this, is because it gives attesters A LOT of power. If Google decides they don't like you, they won't tell the website that you're a human. Or maybe, if Google doesn't like the website you're trying to visit, they won't even cooperate with attesting. Lots of things can go wrong here.

So, a lot of the replies are highlighting how this is "nightmare fuel".
I'll try to provide insight into the "not nightmare" parts.

The proposal is for how to share this information between parties, and they call out that they're specifically envisioning it being between the operating system and the website. This makes it browser agnostic in principle.

Most security exploits happen either because the users computer is compromised, or a sensitive resource, like a bank, can't tell if they're actually talking to the user.
This provides a mechanism where the website can tell that the computer it's talking to is actually the one running the website, and not just some intermediate, and it can also tell if the end computer is compromised without having access to the computer directly.

The people who are claiming that this provides a mechanism for user tracking or leaks your browsing history to arrestors are perhaps overreacting a bit.

I work in the software security sector, specifically with device management systems that are intended to ensure that websites are only accessed by machines managed by the company, and that they meet the configuration guidelines of the company for a computer accessing their secure resources.

This is basically a generalization of already existing functionality built into Mac, windows, Android and iPhones.

Could this be used for no good? Sure. Probably will be.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate uses for something like this and the authors are openly evil.
This is a draft of a proposal, under discussion before preliminary conversations happen with the browser community.

Years ago i would have agreed with you, but on this era of heavy capitalist surveillance you don't want to give them the chance, they'll get every bit of data they can get about you. That and ads are strong dissemination vectors for malware. If i want to support something i'd rather do it directly, ads have proven to be noxious.