And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
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Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds
And they went ahead and blocked comments now - “An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past.”
Fucking cowards
EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don’t pay the big tech you can’t access anything.
If they overcome / disable ad blocking, they will lose browser market share - and people don’t design websites for marginal browsers with exotic features.
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this “Web DRM”.
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
All they need is a few major sites and tools requiring it to domino everything on the internet. Suddenly it’s standard.
Most businesses all use either chrome or Microsoft. And they’re both Chromium.
Ironically I don’t think it would take foot. Many average users I know of use adBlockers - albeit shitty ones - and I don’t think companies would be willing to risk it
People at home aren’t what matters. Companies will absolutely use it when it’s the next upgrade and deemed secure by whoever it is that keeps telling them to only use chrome and IE/Edge.
I don’t know: people I know don’t always use ad-blockers and if they do they have no idea that they are less effective on Chrome than on Firefox.
Also they all have been brainwashed to use Chrome because it was marketed as “faster, better and safer” all those years ago and wouldn’t even think of switching browsers (or it would be for another Chromium-based one)
Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don’t really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.
Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet’s favorite content hub
It makes sense that they have YouTube in their sights for DRM lockdown.
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
I’ve always been a proponent of unifying the internet under a single platform, be it Blink or Gecko I don’t really care. Chromium itself was built on FOSS technology, and has its roots in KHTML, which Apple later adopted as WebKit, and Google used and made Blink.
The problem I see is when a single company has such a large monopoly. Chromium should be community-owned, and Google shouldn’t get the final say.
As far as I’m concerned, the web should be developed through universal standards (the World Wide Web Consortium takes care of that), while the job of rendering engines should be reduced to following these standards the best they can.
following these standards as best they can
This is precisely why I want a unified web. I hate adding flags for support and testing across different systems. It’s a massive bother, and ultimately means you’ll test one platform and just hope for the best on the rest because that’s what you have time for.
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It’s such a potent example of why we need antitrust laws to actually be applied to tech companies.
But our government here in the US is both run by geriatric idiots who don’t even know how to use a computer let alone regulate one and also is bought out by these companies.
This is a blatant, out in the open anti-competitive action that is suggested in this article and it shouldn’t legally be allowed to stand, but our politicians understand so little about how technology works that they’ll blindly accept Google telling them that it isn’t monopolistic rather than actually try to understand it.
For what it’s worth, this comment just inspired me to switch my work PC from edge to Firefox. Was already using it in Linux, and will switch my home PC tonight.
Doesn’t Firefox support DRM? I know on netacad.com it prompts me to enable it, or rather on a CCNA course. Or is it something else?
What you are mentioning is media DRM (think Netflix, Spotify). This is something entirely different: a mechanism to ensure the entire content of a web page is not tempered with.
Oh… thanks.
Sites that rely on ad revenue would have every business reason to switch to WebDRM-only.
Everyone talks about this like it wouldn’t open a massive attack surface for the mother of DDOS.
Make the attestor slow or take it out, you take down large parts of their business. I don’t know, i wouldn’t put too much stake in a platform/website that could be taken out so completely.
Hmmm, that’s a good point. It would probably be using some of the DDOS protection services. But make it cost enough and it may not be worth it for the corporations to continue that shit.
Reminds me of Microsoft with the ActivePlatform / Blackbird stuff in the 90s.
Awful to see Google turn into that.
Google will just say that pages with DRM will rank higher in their search and it’s all done.
It’s time to fork the community internet off the corporate one. Set up our own DRM-free sites and our own search engines, run by open source software. With blackjack and hookers.
We kinda have the small web (Gemini & Gopher), but it is a different, much simpler format than html (Gopher is literally plaintext)
I remember gopher but I haven’t used it for about 30 years. Does anyone still use that?
Not just Chromium, but the proprietary binary Chrome. Chromium can still be modified to block ads.
I have exceeding low expectations, but I would hope that would be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit against Google as Chromium browsers account for roughly 70% of all users (based on numbers I pulled from Wikipedia)
Antitrust lawsuit? What’s that?
When is the last time any of the big tech companies got hit with antitrust? Microsoft is brazenly doing shit on windows they wouldn’t even dream of in early 2000s. Resetting user defaults to their products. Constantly advertising their products when user launches a competitors software.
They don’t give a fuck and neither do the governments.
Sounds like EU will come for the rescue. In 2029…
Please drink verification can
ERROR! Piracy detected!
Subscription-based, restricted to verified accounts Chromium, that shares your personally identifiable public key with each website you visit.
ShuddersIt makes such complete sense for Google and Microsoft that it’s a wonder we didn’t see it coming sooner.
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web env. integrity is not as bad as people make it out to be.
yeah I absolutely agree that it’s terrible and also a bad idea (we don’t need MORE drm in our browsers, I’m looking at you, Widevine (although firefox worked around it by running drm in an isolated container)), but it’s main purpose is to detect automated requests and effectively block web scraping with a drm system (it ensures two things: your useragent can be trusted and you’re a real non-automated user), NOT detect ad blockers. It doesn’t prevent web pages from being modified like some people are saying.
there’s a lot of misleading information about the api as it doesn’t “verify integrity” of the web page/DOM itself.it works by creating a token that a server can verify, for example when a user creates a new post. If the token is invalid, server may reject your attempt to do an action you’re trying to perform. (this will probably just lead to a forced captcha in browsers that don’t support it…)
Also, here’s a solution: Just don’t use Chrome or any Chromium-based browsers.
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I will personally stay on the internet instead of what essentially amounts to google intranet.
STOP INVENTING THINGS … Saniz Silverstone 22
Web 3.0 - users, kindly go fuck yourselves p.s. pay us subscription money and view lots of ads
I hate the fact that one of the biggest and richest corporations in the world, is just a massive ad spamming dumpster fire. Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do, if 90% of their effort wasn’t put into cramming ever more ads into people’s eyeballs.
Can someone give me an easy to understand example of what they are proposing? Assume that I don’t allow them to install any software/tool that helps them track me/my device.
I saw this comment and found it helpful but its still not clear to me
At its core, it establishes software components called “attesters” that decide whether your device and/or browser is “trustworthy” enough - as defined by the website you are trying to visit. Websites can enforce which “attesters” users must accept, simply by denying everybody access who refuses to bow down to this regime; or who uses attesters that are deemed “inappropriate”; or who is on a platform that does not provide any attesters the website finds “acceptable”.
In short: it is specifically designed to destroy the open web by denying you the right to use whatever browser you want to use, on whatever operating system. It is next-level “DRM”, introduced by affiliates of a company that already has monopolized the browser market. And the creators of this “proposal” absolutely know what they are attempting here.
And they try to demonise Tor and I2P… At this rate, the dark web would soon be the only place to go.
They’ve really strongly adopted their new “Do only evil” mantra
Well I won’t visit a site that is full of ads now without an ad blocker, so why would the fact that o can’t block the ads change my mind. As soon as a site blocks content for having an ad blocker or immediately starts popping up tons of stuff that’s nearly impossible to close, I leave.
you misunderstood it tbh.
it’s supposed to be used as a way to skip bot verification if the requests are signed by a drm system which includes your unique id (coming from google account or google play id), and one of the goals of the actual proposal is keeping existing extension working AND keeping web pages working without drm.
of course i don’t want any drm in my browser, but it’s kinda already there anyway…
it will likely make the experience worse for non-drm users because they will get hit by more advanced and sensitive bot verification systems or rate limits which is kinda bad but not the end of the world.
y’all are just overreacting and spreading pure bullshit.
it’s not even supposed to be used to verify DOM elements, just that the user is using an official Chrome/Chromium browser, and is not automated.
basically it’s just SafetyNet.
it will not kill js addons.
