Honestly this won’t effect me a ton, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to boot up a windows virtual machine just to check my bank in a few years cause my bank doesn’t know what Linux is and doesn’t want go trust it. I’m mad about it but given slowly but surely I’ve been replacing everything with FOSS stuff. I just fear one day they will force you to use corpo approved software to use WiFi , or get cell service
Time to De-Google I guess. I will keep using Firefox and if or when I come across any website pulling this crap I won’t hesitate to blast them to eternity. I suggest everyone else do the same please.
It’s small, but here’s a real actionable item that you can do to help:
Put a gentle “Use Firefox” (or any other non-Chromium-based browser) message on your website. It doesn’t have to be in-your-face, just something small. I’ve taken my own advice and added it to my own website: https://geeklaunch.io/ (Only appears in Chromium-based browsers.)
We can slowly turn the tide, little by little.
Copy and paste:
<p> This site is designed for Firefox, a web browser that respects your privacy. </p>(I also posted this on the HN discussion.)
Your browser supports Web-DRM. Some features might not be available.
This website does not support browsers that support web-drm
Can you explain to someone not so tech savy what this means?
No more add blockers. No more accessibility tools. Only what google wants you to see.
And this will work for google products only of for chrome as a whole?
A fork like Vivaldi, Brave or Opera could opt not to implement these changes, but then some websites could become incompatible to them.
A fork like Vivaldi, Brave or Opera could opt not to implement these changes
It doesn’t quite work like that. They wouldn’t choose to not implement the change, because the change comes from upstream via Chromium. They would have to choose to remove the feature which, depending on how it’s integrated, could be just as much work as implementing it (or more, if Google wants to be difficult on purpose). Not implementing the change is zero effort; removing the upstream code is a lot of effort.
It depends on how Google wants to play this. If they require website operators to use WEI in order to serve ads from Google’s ad network (a real possibility), then suddenly 98.8% of websites that have advertising, and 49.5% of all websites would be unusable unless you’re using Chrome. It’s probably safe to assume they’d also apply this to their own products, which means YouTube, Gmail, Drive/Docs, all of which have large userbases. The spec allows denying attestation if they don’t like your browser, but also if they don’t like your OS. They could effectively disallow LineageOS and all Android derivatives, not just browser alternatives.
So this is a problem for all browsers based on Chromium right???
No, it is a problem for all browsers, present and future, period.
The point is that major websites, even government ones might decide to be only available on Chrome.
What is WEI?
Stands for Web Environment Integrity. Beyond that, I know nothing.
DRM in the web.
excuse my ignorance, what is DRM?
Digital Rights Management. Usually DRM agreements are imbedded in the terms and conditions no one reads when they install software. It usually gives the software vendor the right to monitor your use of the software in real time via the internet.
Within the context of Chrome and other Chromium based web browsers, this means that Google will be able to monitor your web browsing in a new way any time you’re using a browser based on Chrome/Chromium.
Within the context of Chrome and other Chromium based web browsers, this means that Google will be able to monitor your web browsing in a new way any time you’re using a browser based on Chrome/Chromium.
With only slight hyperbole, we can say that Google can do this monitoring already.
What’s worse, is now they can:
- Refuse you access to information by refusing to attest your environment.
- Restrict your browser, extensions, and operating system setup by refusing attestation.
- Potentially bring litigation against you for attempting to circumvent DRM (in the USA it’s illegal to bypass DRM).
- Leverage their ad network to require web site operators to use attestation if they wish to serve ads via Google. AKA force you to use Chrome to use big websites.
- Derank search results for sites that are not using attestation.
In my opinion, the least harmful part of this is the ability to monitor page access, because they can more or less do this for Chrome users anyway. What’s really harmful here is the potential to restrict access to and destroy practically the entirety of the internet.
People saying de-google like google isn’t in the position Microsoft was in when they killed Netscape. It’s over y’all, once it’s in chromium it’s the standard, period. The open web is dead.
Edit: ok, be in denial then.
Google isn’t alone in the box. The different governments and states should be in the box with them. It’s not like people warned Google and other corps are a threat to competition and freedom.
We didn’t see anything coming as antitrust procedure.
