Never forget: https://contrachrome.com/
Maybe the thing to do here, when web sites start enforcing this, is to swamp them with support requests. Don’t write a screed or manifesto with ethical or technical reasons why this is wrong. Pretend to be a non-technically-inclined user and tell them you’ve spent hours trying to get it to work and your browser keeps throwing up errors you don’t understand. They will ignore the principles, but if they think the technology is “too hard” for their “dumb users,” that might carry more weight.
I don’t think this will work. If companies can get away of slapping us by doing “please use Google Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers” just because Google implements the most niche, probably privacy-last, feature ever, then they will get away with it this time, again.
I literally can’t log into the Amtrak Android app unless I have Chrome installed. It strictly relies on Chrome custom tabs. Other browsers that support custom tabs don’t work.
I cannot imagine any reason for this except sheer ineptitude.
Guess what Amtrak support told me when I reported this as a bug?
They told you to take a hike instead of a train
As an AI language model, I cannot understand why you would not already have chrome installed. Chrome is a popular browser choice for the android operating system. Please check the app store for chrome.
That’s what we thought about VBScript, and Active X and Shockwave Flash, and Silverlight, at different points in the history of the Internet.
Adobe and Microsoft have both wrecked hard (at their peak) in their attempts to close and DRM the Internet.
Looks like it’s Googles turn to find out if they have the clout to manage it.
where linux
i know google sucks but still
Android
I can’t wait to have to download a crack for my browser so a website thinks that my browser is using wei and no-adblock.
Just use Firefox. I don’t understand why people are so hell-bent on using a Chromium-based browser.
EDIT: I see now that I was grossly misinformed on the issue. Thanks for the replies.
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my browser hasn’t got higher privileges than my admin user account
They’ll fix that. The endgame might very well be you can only run a trusted browser, safely checked by your OS, itself trusted, running on fully signed code from a trusted source, started on a trusted motherboard/CPU, with hardware lockdown that would only boot trusted kernel and embed private keys so deep that you’d need a full lab to recover them, only to have them remotely disabled if anything funky seems to be happening at any point in that chain.
For now, this is fiction. For now. We already started moving that way with secureboot, opaque UEFI in our systems and TPM modules. The only saving grace is that they currently all have flaws.
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My computer my control fuckers. I’ll stop using 99% of the internet. I don’t give a fucking shit.
I mean, you can just literally read the Google DRM github repo and it’ll tell you everything you need to know about how bad this is for the free internet.
Vudu, Hulu, and I’m sure others already prevent Hdx+ content unless it’s through chrome or Microsoft’s whatever-it-is.
Good thing I sail the high seas. Fuck those companies.
A few of us sitting and using Firefox while Google is suggesting being able to control what computer you use, what software is installed, what plugins you are allowed to have?
This is a very big threat not solved by using Firefox.
They want ChromeOS…on literally everything.
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Honestly, after this latest stunt by Google and Brave’s growing list of issues, I recently switched to Firefox myself. It was actually surprisingly less painful than it was switching from Chrome to Brave.
Give Vivaldi a try, it’s a chromium fork but with a strong focus on privacy.
Despite turning off settings to open new tabs, every website I open browsing on mobile opens a new tab
That shouldn’t happen, I’ve just set Homepage > Opening screen to last tab and when I open firefox it defaults to the last tab that I was on before exiting the browser
I had to adjust a ton of settings to stop it from downloading in the background every file I just wanted to view or print
Iirc its just setting browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline to true at about:config
Fair enough, you have an opinion, that firefox is wrong in everything it does, it’s not valid, but you need to learn the defaults. Be well.
Fair enough, you have an opinion, that firefox is wrong in everything it does
That’s not what they are saying though. A lot of this is configurable for a reason.
but you need to learn the defaults
I don’t think that they do. They have see. They don’t like the defaults and it’s their right to change them. That’s the whole point of configurable FOSS ffs.
Because the browser choice has nothing to do with what Google is trying to achieve with the DRM thing.
Right. I mean there’s always going to be a way. Your open source browser can run a spoof of an “official” browser, present itself as a valid user, load the page with all the ads and tracking in a sandbox in between, strip all of it out and serve you the actual content.
Or maybe people will eventually be fed up and we’ll start our own internet completely out of corporate control.
I hear web3 is a decentralised web.
More DRM. Browsers already support DRM schemes for media playback.
The free internet is bad for Google.
Okay I wasn’t expecting to be attacked like that.
Yeah, it’s a great line. Herbert was a genius and it’s easy to forget that, at many levels, the Dune series is a political science treatise.
That’s clearly Calvins mom. Don’t let her mask fool you.
It’s his babysitter. I forget her name.
Rosalyn
Thank you!
Oh yeah, I forgot about that character. Thanks.
Looks like I was the one fooled by the mask after all lol
Not overly worried - the EU anticompetition laws will swat this down on this side of the atlantic - but not sure about the US
The US will welcome it with open arms. Because of course, America.
You’re just jealous 'cause of all the freedumb!
eagle screaming intensifies
I hate to correct your mostly correct comment, but we ask that you spell it “'Cuz, 'Murica!!”
Thanks.
So what can we do? Egg their headquarters? Because so far our useless politicians haven’t passed bills to fight this.
It’s already too late. Google has a monopoly on the browser market. Do you think your regular normie would continue to use Firefox if Netflix, Instagram, TokTok etc. don’t work anymore?
There is nothing we can do. The internet of old is already lost.
That is exactly what we feared about Internet Explorer 6.
The complete strangle hold of IE6 on the Internet is why I posted this from Edge (IE12ish) and why you’re all reading this comment on Edge as well. /s
It’s too late for Google Chrome even. There’s nothing but IE6, and it will never die. /s
It’d help if the government wasn’t run by a bunch of ancient humans that were there when cavemen would draw on cave walls. The government has shown time and time again they don’t understand tech but always try to act like they do. Take that tiktok case for example. They made themselves look like idiots to the USA. Pathetic.
The worse problem is the corruption more than the age.
I think the moment for me was when they had Mark Zuckerberg himself, testify to Congress.
They didn’t “grill him” as media would’ve liked to have you believe. The guy danced around all of Congress because they themselves didn’t know a damn thing about what he was saying. Of course he wasn’t penalized and got off scot-free.
Just like every other tech company. The FTC, has no teeth. The FCC, has no teeth. Congress, has no brain.
Use forks or other browsers than chrome.
Using browsers other than Chrome wouldn’t work if websites implement it.
But if browsers that aren’t going to implement this had a significant market share then Google couldn’t just push this through.
Yep. I switched to Firefox (again) for this.
Yeah, but they don’t (and good luck trying to convince the average chrome user to switch).
That was the plan all along.
They’re adding DRM? In what way?
Basically by allowing websites to refuse to load unless the browser the operating system running the browser promises that the user isn’t allowed to know what the computer is doing. And Google super duper promises this won’t be used for evil.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
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YouTube doesn’t have invasive DRM (on normal videos), playing any resolution works on Linux. Netflix only ever plays in 720p for me however, regardless of browser (you can check the stats with crtl + alt + shift + d). There are extensions for Firefox and Chrome to fix this issue luckily. But if Google’s DRM for the web goes through this might not be so easy anymore.
I’ve never had this happen on YouTube or any other video streaming website.
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O wow, glad I never paid for any of those then
Yeah, I’m sure they fucking do lol Glad I use a combination of it, Firefox, and Opera GX now to diversify
Everything not Firefox or Safari is Chromium based.
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That’s not a WEB browser, that’s a Googleverse browser.
Also sounds like you’re describing a Chromebook. Which, incidentally, schools seem to be abandoning because of the fact that they become useless on a predetermined date.
They become useless on a predetermined date? What do you mean?
EOL. End of life. All Chromebooks have an EOL date after which they will no longer receive updates and can no longer be considered secure. All the software on them, including Chrome which is the core application, become unviable. When you find an unbelievably cheap Chromebook on sale, it’s because it’s EOL is close.
Can’t you just load up Linux on a Chromebook?
There are mod projects documented on YouTube videos and elsewhere that describe how to do just that. If I remember right, it depends a lot on the specific chromebook and the manufacturer. If I were to buy a Chromebook, I would first find out whether or not it could be wiped and have linux loaded on it effectively. I would probably opt for a lightweight flavor of Linux so as to keep the device running smoothly.
Yeah that makes sense. Further, you could just get a Chromebook past it’s update cycle for cheap and then just wipe it making the update cycle pointless in the first place. Seems like a way to get reasonable performance at cheap prices.
I wonder why chromebooks were built with this expiration - was Google hoping that schools would just throw away the old ones and buy new ones once laptop were past it’s update cycle?
That totally sounds like something I would do for fun when I was younger and had less money. In those days, all my computers were hand built by me, often using spare parts from computers people didn’t want. I didn’t work much with laptops though. It’s a bit trickier, but with the right tools and with plenty of time watching YouTube videos, you can do almost anything nowadays, and save a bundle. Also, eBay is a good source of parts, tools and expired equipment. Chromebooks are creating huge amounts of e-waste because of expiration, so reclaiming and renewing them is something I consider very ethical.
Secutity is not priotity.
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Such a good fucking show
Ah damn it’s still sitting unwatched on my hard drive. I should get on it.
One of the four authors of the proposal is on my mastodon instance. How ironic (and kinda embarrassing).
I’m ok with sites using WEI as an alternative to captcha, but if any site tries to fail closed on WEI I will be first in line to join the DDOS.
To be clear - even in that world, not having WEI would make you much more suspicious than a ‘normal’ user, so you’re effectively describing every Firefox and/or Linux (etc) user seeing captchas all the damn time. If Cloudflare used this as a signal, that’d be a captcha for 20% of websites.
Try using Tor today and see how inconvenient the web becomes. Just ‘not blocked’ doesn’t mean you get a reasonable experience.
The only healthy route for the web is fair access and free competition between clients. WEI sets that on fire.
