What can we do to keep the web open?
Stop supporting those who intend to close it.
I just want remind everyone that Windows 11 requires your computer to ship with TPM2.0 enabled. This will complete the circuit meaning remote streaming websites can ensure you don’t have DRM on your machine.
TPM is a security token loaded into the firmware of the BIOS put in by the manufacturer to ensure you haven’t tampered with the operating system as shipped and controlled by them.
That will be nice for those websites.
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Conspiratorial but has a string of possibility.
User: What are you doing?
Microsoft and Motherboard manufacturers: Putting DRM chips on the motherboard.
User: Why?
Microsoft: No reason.
User: Most businesses would switch to a cheaper toilet paper to save $5, why are you shipping chips and developing software and technology to use these chips.
Microsoft: Oh we’re not going to force anyone to do anything, we just want the ability to. Look at this workaround that we expect 0.015 of our billions of Windows users to use.
Just use Firefox
Shout-out to Librewolf as well (basically Firefox with better privacy focused configs).
People don’t care enough about using browsers that reduce Google’s influence on web standards (i.e. non chrome-based browsers)
And an alternate email service like ProtonMail.
They also have ProtonDrive as an alternative to Google Drive. Apple’s iCloud is also end-to-end encrypted now. pCloud is another popular option. There are a number of choices for secure cloud storage these days.
Web search is a bit more difficult. DuckDuckGo is heavily integrated with Bing. Brave Search is hit-or-miss. Yahoo is just a front-end for Bing.
If you need live document collaboration, you’re probably already in a setting where either Sharepoint or GSuite are mandated. If you’re not, BitAI may be worth looking into.
All great advice, but I personally cannot urge people towards pCloud. I have one of the permanent tiers, but I found the service frustratingly buggy and, when contacted, support was rude and unhelpful. There are so many little odd limitations on the pCloud file system it was frustrating. I also worry that their buy-once business model is not sustainable.
Sync.com provides an even more secure service (zero-knowledge across the board) with similar (better than US anyway) privacy protections in the host country (Canada) that has been, so far for 2 years of use, rock solid (I couldn’t go a week without pCloud farting out some error). The subscription model is affordable and generous and the customer-facing pages for sharing files are very professional looking (important to me, because I professionally share files and pCloud looked like a hobbyist page in this regard AND leaked private information).
EDIT: Regarding iCloud. Not only is iCloud end-to-end, but you may turn on zero-knowledge encryption now, as well (Advanced Data Protection I think is what they call it) so that Apple doesn’t even have the keys to decrypt your data, making it quite similar to sync.com now.
🤔 Who runs ProtonMail?
For web search, I always first try SearXNG, but if I dont find what I need, I use startpage.com (private frontend for google.com)
Kagi is also really nice. But it’s not free…
I am confused by why everyone thinks this is a big threat?
What stops the FOSS community from just continuing to allow ad blockers and other webpage editing features?
It’s a big threat because once it’s easy to block unapproved browsers, lots of people will do it. Yeah, there will always be a few weirdos like us that don’t enable it, but just imagine when it’s your bank, your insurance company, your government, and most every linked-to page on Lemmy. You’ll be forced to use Chrome to interact with large parts of the internet then.
If the web is DRM’d in a way that requires chrome or windows then it could be difficult to bypass.
I remember the days of, “sorry, you must use Internet Explorer to use this website” when visiting my bank.
I remember that government sites were the same way it was frustrating.
Support financially FOSS developers. And stop using corporate shit.
Kill google
Alphabet needs to be broken up, same as Microsoft and Apple and Amazon. The consolidation of tech into a few giant corporations that have a tremendous amount of power and hold a monopoly/duopoly is doing a lot of harm.
Start replacing your Google and Microsoft products and services with alternatives, bit by bit. Begin by switching to Firefox for the browser.
Don’t close the browser.
I’ve been running the entire internet in my browser for 20 years. If I ever close this window, the entire internet will explode.
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Twice in the past few months I came across a site that would not work with Firefox. The other time it actually did work, but said that it recommends chrome to function properly.
The first one was a local government form that would not let me select boxes, but chrome worked without any problems.
The second was some 3d game or something like that.
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There’s a lot of good comments and suggestions, but the one that I’m not seeing is, “tell others”.
Do you perform support for friends and family members? Explain why it’s not in their best interest to use Chrome (and Google products in general), then ask and help them to install and use alternatives.
Have a laypersons response to why they should avoid Google for that person you’re chatting with on the bus. Have a response ready to the awful, “but I don’t have anything to hide” counterargument. As an aside, being the tin foil hat wearing guy/gal doesn’t help the cause, explain it in plain language.
Use tech and services outside the big tech. Just Fedi over standard social. Use Peertube instead of Youtube.
Run Firefox.
Set up your own servers for yourself or start a community. Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.
Run SearXNG as your search or help others by hosting.
If you can work of free and open source code that helps decentralize and give the power back to the people or create something new. Even if you can code, learning a project and helping others with it or helping create docs, etc.
Spread the word, but don’t be annoying. Help less technical folks get decentralized.
It’s very difficult and can be disheartening, but you don’t have to cold turkey all of it. Each drip in the bucket helps until we’re all united and become a tidal wave.
When all the power is centralized that’s when those central players think they can do whatever they want.
We really ought to just fork the internet. Break away from big tech completely. Use a different protocol than https if we have to.
Create good content and post it on a free platform. Also give it a permissive license.
A free license is better. Corporations can benefit from the work under permissive license without giving back.
