Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web
Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web
also on r/privacy
Whatever google does is bad pretty much.
I’ve been seeing a lot of shit about google being evil lately… I’m actively transitioning off their products. I’ve now got Firefox on my phone (I fucking can’t do safari, it’s so trash), I’m off android (about a year now) which was super fucking difficult. iOS is much worse, and they aren’t that much better as a company, but it gets updates for more than 2 years..but I hear Linux phones are improving so that will probably be my next move.
My next step is getting rid of gmail which I’ve been on basically since it was launched.. that’s going to be painful.
I through all that myself. Except on the phone front I went GrapheneOS & LineageOS. There's nothing wrong with base Android (the problems with Android are added by Google, Samsung, etc at downstream steps)
And I agree that Gmail was hard to leave. But I went ProtonMail and had Gmail forward there for awhile until eventually nothing was going through Gmail anymore.
Pardon the wall of text incoming -
The reason I didn’t do that is my last two devices (cumulative 5 years of use) had no recovery partition, I didn’t want to brick them until I had a replacement (I did brick one of them -my first ever full bricking 🥹!-, the other was already broken beyond normal use but it took the flash, and I learned), and I didn’t want to buy a new device for the sole purpose of changing the os. There’s a ton of research that goes into doing that which I simply didn’t have the energy for when my last device bit it.
Maybe I should have, but I figured I’d try iOS first. I hate it passionately, but I’ll probably keep it until my phone dies, apple fucks up big dog (I’m aware of the slave labor, almost no tech is spared that, though, and I didn’t know about fairphone) or a good Linux os/device comes out. Hell bonus if I can jailbreak and flash a different OS on this fucker, but I know alllll about how locked down apple is… can’t replace components, can’t even change a fucking ringtone without a gob of work.. it fucking sucks after a decade on android using it as fully as I could. I even switched to Linux (ubuntu) because it felt like android for my pc. (Also fuck windows 8/10/11. Windows 7 was the last reasonably good iteration, and I formatted my drive and reinstalled that shit every 6 mths -bootleg master disc, took about that long for windows to flag me as not genuine- to keep using it until I swapped to Linux. Learned good data management habits in the process!)
I used to use cyanogenmod and a couple others waaaay back in like 2012-2018 or whatever, and I really liked rooting and flashing os, but privacy focused OS weren’t available for my devices. I’m poor, so can’t afford good phones, especially if I’m gunna fuck up the warranty immediately by rooting (only reason I paid as much for an iPhone as I did is they do support devices long-term, which is sorely lacking in stock android and, to me at least, entirely unknown for custom). Especially since a lot of better devices, to my understanding, have a rooted flag that can’t be un-flown by disabling root.
As for proton, I’ve heard good things, from a lot of people. I’m currently looking into self-hosting options for various things to un-dependent myself from services run by unknown entities (it’s gunna be a blast learning everything from square one… but so much better than my shit being “owned” by someone else), and haven’t really decided if I want to try hosting my own email or not. Probably not but it might be fun to play with while I decide.
Apple definitely isn't better as a company. Apple lobby's the US government to ensure they can still use slave labor.
Going to piggyback on this and just throw this here, which details the black box that is Apple data ingestion: https://gist.github.com/iosecure/357e724811fe04167332ef54e736670d.
I had used iOS on and off for years but I feel like I'm finally done with both companies. Its a very interesting read. The only reason Apple seems like a better company with data is a) they aren't a full blown meta or alphabet and b) they market it more cleanly.
The portion about the notification center and all of the integrations was pretty mind blowing for me. Like it makes sense when its spelled out - how invasive it is, which is also what makes it the perfect ad serving vehicle.
Just switch to proton mail. I pay for it so the expectation is set for no ads and the like.
Just use lineage
What Linux phones are available?
https://linuxstans.com/linux-phone/
“Although debatable, most of these Linux phones can’t be used as a daily driver and they can’t really replace your current daily driver. They do lack a lot of features and apps you’d need. They’re meant for developers and enthusiasts”
Well, then what does apple use it for? Since there's already an implementation out there we should have a pretty good idea of what the future holds with widespread adoption?
I could be totally off, but I think that it the browser just implemented the tech to allow this, but websites also have to code their sites to actually do it.
The scary part is this could role out to chrome and most people wouldn't know the difference
I have to ask this, if I use grapheneOS with a Firefox browser like mull and my search engine isn't google, do I have to give a fuck about this DRM bullshit?
Oh, so this third party would rat you out for having an adblocker and websites would be like, “naahhhhh”
I say no to this.
This goes way beyond that. According to the article, this would be the equivalent of getting identified to prove you're a real person with an unmodified web browser (presumably Chromium-based) to enable a fully-controlled browsing experience.
The closest analogy I can come up with is it's like creating a HOA for web content. Keep your web browsing experience "gated" so it is "untainted" by extensions that block ads and/or manipulate web pages. Google is trying to make it sound like it's holding your hand and keeping you safe, but in reality is trying to put handcuffs on your web browser.
It sounds that it actually is safer, that people for example can expect there are no malicious mitm things spying on their browsing or changing/injecting things that are malicious (like these scams lately where they ask to take over your computer and change numbers via dev tools because people don't know what the fuck they're looking at), but at the same time it would make things very cookie cutter. Ads everywhere, no way of changing things with client-side scripts, no looking at source code because why would you can't change it anyway, no alternative frontends for popular websites with horrendous tracking, etc.
Of course, that is for the websites that take advantage of this technology. I can't predict how many websites would implement this, but I hope deep down there are still websites that would not go this route and remain free to visit and browse. That will be my world wide web. I know where the web came from, taking a step back to a smaller sub-web of sorts doesn't really scare me, it might even bring back some of that forgotten glory of what the web once was. Smaller, less content, but with heart.