They’re literally burning bridges after crossing them huh. Web scraping is illegal? Their fucking search engine was powered by a web scraper.
WEI is plain anti-competition to me now. Most, if not all, of their stated reasons are now just facade to me.
Fuck Google. I know this isn’t constructive or helpful, but fuck em.
Google gained control of the web by populating the world with Chrome/Chromium and wants to strong arm the web as a whole through it. Climbing the ladder and pulling it up from underneath them, with their fisted approach to Manifest V3 the beginning salvo.
For Google it's just another day in the office.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Google is the new Microsoft.
The standard “but it’s different when we do it” principle. It’s a powerful tool.
The reality distortion fields are strong around those Google statements
I can’t even see Google from here (reality)
Quick correction: website scraping and ad blocking is not unlawful. It both is a means to make the web more accessible and the latter also reduces CO2 emission through reducing electricity usage from irrelevant ads. The same case could be made for web scraping as a user can make their own feed of news without having to sift through hundreds of pages. This as well can be done in a way that does not disrupt the pages‘ normal function.
That is where the two larger issues come in:
The „pay for information“ is largely a phylosophical problem. It is no problem to pay for someones book or online course but the blanket statement that one has to pay for it is false. As an open source developer I give my work freely to others and in turn receive theirs freely as well (if they use the appropriate license of course).
We really have two sides forming. The „open internet“ crowd that works together for free or maybe accepts donations and the proprietary crowd which is having a huge influence right now.
Google putting in web DRM will cement that situation and make it possible that you can only use vanilla stuff on your browser and ultimately even shutting down any access to open source things completely by making it impossible to run on ubuntu since google will only accept windows clients (this is a possible outcome, not a guaranteed one).
All in all, we are unable to perfectly anticipate the outcome of this but if we see great harming potential, it is fair to weigh it agains the potential benefits (which is the lofty goal of weeding out bots and scammers). I think the cost benefit relation is heavily tilted here.
TL;DR: Tinkering with your browser is not illegal and should be allowed to continue. The cost of (potentially) weeding out bots and scammers is not worth potentially ruining the open source community.
I work with cultural heritage and have the strong believe, that information should be open and easy accessible. Citizen have a right to access to knowledge and to educate themselves unter their circumstanses. But of course the Infrastructur cost money and this should always be a discurse between all parties. And not been dictated by major companies.
It is a really hard fight for museums, archives and libaries lately. What do you do when your electricity bill jumps up to 5 million during the war in the ukrain?
We need to unite and search for ways to keep the Internet accessible.
I can relate. People like you are the structural pillars of our society.
I‘m not familiar to the laws concerning cultural heritage but some of the museums should be partially tax funded, no?
Thanks 😊
Mostly you are right, of course it depence on the country. a lot of institutes are tax funded, but the cost can't be covered just with that. Rent, wages, special rooms for the heritage... the new competitor is everything digital: a homepage, a database, social media. Museums need all of that to stay relevant. but the budget stays the same.
(And of course we depent on open data, to reduce thr dependence on big tech companies)
The war has shown how fragile this is. Cost of electricity had boomt, but there is no room to reduce it. Paintings, glas, it all needs their own temperature. But explain that to someone who is just Management. We scientist/ academics have a weak basis for negotiation, when the administration wants to save money. In my country cultural heritage is clearly not a priority, that leads to institutes having no money and losing relevance. Which is dangerous for the variety of knowledge.
Thanks for giving me the space to shortly explain this. I think we all need to work together to make the web, the heritage accessible! 😤
Sure. You‘re welcome.
It’s heartbreaking how humanity treats its heritage especially given the extreme advancements of the last 100 yrs.
If you feel like your country does not do enough, consider writing letters to your local politicians and explain the situation. Often, people overestimate the amount effort it takes to make a difference with humans.
Good luck.
Is it just me or are Twitter, Reddit, and now Google, scrambling to lock their doors to any entities trying to scrape the web for new AI datasets?
All these hugely unpopular decisions, taken on short notice, that may be fatal to their platforms, seem to be more like knee jerk reactions to protect their treasure hoards of possible AI input data.
Opinions?
scrambling to lock their doors
From a consumer perspective, it seems like all the FANG conglomerates are trying to shut the stable door after the AI horse has bolted, but perhaps from an industry perspective, their just trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves to curb competition, or stall any emerging upstarts, just like most FANGs where themselves only decades ago.
FANG isn’t really an accurate word anymore.
It’s MAAA: Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon.
You're missing Microsoft, it's bigger than Meta.
oh, MAMAA
I've just killed a man.
Bonus: it sounds like a scream of terror.
They can try and reinvent themselves all they'd like, but I can't be bothered to keep up with their rebrandings if they can't be bothered to commit and sell off the domain name. Something something sacrifice, something, law of Equivalent exchange. /s
I my experience the people running large companies are idiots who got their position by brown nosing the right people so it doesn't really surprise me. Google is pretty well known too for coming up with stupid ideas they scrap in a few years
Reminds me of the CEO saying that they don't play video games but are behind stadia.
I called it in my circle that it would be shut down in roughly 3 years.
They want to close the AI market
Eh... nothing's happening with Twitter outside of Elon being dumb as hell, as per usual.
"WEI can potentially be used to impose restrictions on unlawful activities on the internet, such as downloading YouTube videos and other content, ad blocking, web scraping, etc."
WTF. Most of these activities are actual lawful in the country I life in. (Especially with adblockers, the content mafia tried to outlaw it and failed in court, several times.)
All of them are lawful
not to mention that every single thing your browser is displaying has actually been downloaded. it's conceptually impossible not to be the case...
The proposal is bad enough as it is, but it’s the duplicitous gaslighting BS that really pisses people off.
If they came out and said “We came up with this thing to prevent loss of revenue on ads and prevent LLMs from capturing data” then people would still be against it, but at least it would feel like an honest discussion.
Instead it’s just another page out of Google’s playbook we’ve seen many times already.
For what it’s worth I blame W3C as well.
Their relatively young “Anti-Fraud Community Group” has essentially green lit this thing during meetings as can be seen here:
https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/05-26.md
https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/07-07-wei-side-meeting.md
W3C is in the palms of Google anyway.
I did not know this. I always likened them to the EFF, an organization that aimed to make things better. Never in a million years would I have thought they were just shills for Alphabet 🙁
WEI can potentially be used to impose restrictions on unlawful activities on the internet, such as downloading YouTube videos and other content, ad blocking, web scraping, etc.
Did the author of the article come from some dystopian parallel universe?
Yeah, violating TOS or EULA unlawful? Unbelievable bs. Imagine a world where users become criminals for routine and innocuous activities because of shifting TOS that no one reads and is intentionally impenetrable and user hostile.
Sad truth, this is not a new idea. Glad folks are looking out for this and setting precedent against that nonsense. (PDF warning, but a good read)
That's a good initiative from google to put more tracktion behind firefox again. Its userbase and amount of supporters will skyrocket!
No, it won't.
Upvoted to keep attention on this thing, but that really was a vacuous article with almost no real information in it.
Yeah, I found the discussions on HN and the debates in the Google group mailing list ("Intent to Prototype: Web environment integrity API") much more interesting, but didn't hot link the latter in the OP post to limit brigading. Although that mail list archive is made publicly accessable.
Google can fuck off with its WEI. That’s all I can say.
Nobody asked for drm for web.
Google must have forgotten when they sued Microsoft for trying to corner the browser market for Internet Explorer. Or maybe they are two faced.
Companies have only one goal, more profit. Both actions here work to that goal.
No no, they sued because they were behind.
Now they are not. Nothing wrong anymore.
That was for tying IE to Windows, and it was also done while there were paid web browsers competing with them. Then they forced OEM PC makers to bundle IE or get dropped as a customer for Windows licenses.
What exactly is the attestation checking? As far as I can tell it is a TPM assertion possibly that you have secure boot enables and that the browser has not been tampered with. Is there anything else? I looked in the Github page but alls that I saw was placeholders. Is this documented somewhere?
I think it's up to the attestor. So in theory it could check anything from what you described (most likely) to requiring that all users have a background image of Ronald McDonald (less likely).
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