Chrome & Firefox are a false duopoly. Do we need another option? Should there be a public option? Should it come from Italy?
debanqued @ debanqued @beehaw.org Posts 12Comments 119Joined 3 yr. ago
debanqued @ debanqued @beehaw.org
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Yes, these things are inconvenient. Meaning they are achievable items but at some personal cost and effort. They are not insurmountable.
You’re not getting it. It’s not achievable.
Pre-web:
- cost of posting a letter to the secretary of state: 55¢
- filing a lawsuit for $200: $90
- return: $289.45 ← achievable because this is a positive number
Post-web:
- cost of travel to Washington DC: $400
- filing a lawsuit for $200: $90
- return: -$110 ← unachievable because this is a negative number
Do you understand the math? Pre-web, it was possible to sue a corporation for $200 and recover $199.45 of that. Post-web, that is insurmountable. If you try, you lose even if you win the judgement. Post-web, the only way to win that case is to use the web. You are therefore forced to use the web in the US.
And a new browser isn’t going to change anything.
Of course it does. A public option can give sovereignty from US tech giants. Otherwise you have the injustice of a government forcing people not only to use technology but to subject themselves and the people to the influence of surveillance capitalists.
Pre-web, postal correspondence was treated. Now it’s not. Convenience and difficulty are inversely proportional measures of the same thing. When you take away one out of two options, the other option is not a convenience. It’s a requirement.
The idea that you think people nationwide traveling to DC to get a business record is mere inconvenience is absurd. Are you drunk? You’re making a lot of bizarre assumptions, starting with assuming the travel is even possible for everyone nationwide who needs the service. If someone needs to sue a company for $200 and travel costs to DC to get the registered agent of the company is $400, you’ve effectively killed their access public service by nixing correspondence.
Your perverse understanding of convenience is ultimately just a language game that changes the language but not the problem. So let’s say traveling from California to DC to get an address is a mere “inconvenience” and using the web is “convenient”. That so-called “convenience” is essential in countless scenarios. And because what you refer to as “inconvenient” is actually not plausible in a scenario, the need for convenience in your language becomes essential.
Now it works.. not sure if someone fixed it or if just that community alone really was under maintenance.
First of all choosing the subset of standards that Google chooses is a sovereignty problem. Gov services should not be constrained to what Google in the US decides to implement. Of the 3 browsers you mention, Chrome is subject to google snooping. Firefox is limited in Google’s influence as well. And Safari only serves Microsoft and Apple users officially.
The gov need not produce a browser from scratch, but they need to officially support a non-controversial browser that is not tied to US tech giants.
SoS records are state records, not federal. Are you saying every state shares their corporate database with LoC?
I would not be as fast as you to call the web a mere “convenience” to 99.9% of the country who are not a walking distance from Washington DC. If the analog way of doing something requires thousands of miles of travel, the online way is not a mere convenience. It’s a requirement, in effect.
BTW, it’s worth noting that the LoC has an access restricted Cloudflare website. So their exclusivity makes an offline option essential. If that means face to face in DC, that’s fucked up indeed. You should be able to use the postal service.
Not quite sure what you mean. In the US, banks are constantly giving away free money and free stuff to open an account. Some people make a hobby out of opening accounts just to grab the free stuff and close the account as soon as the rules allow. Works great on college kids who can be bought cheaply.. just offer a free t-shirt. Or if you’re in a red state you might get a free shotgun for opening an account (not joking.. see Michael Moore’s film).
This misses the point. Governments are designing web services for Chrome. So you have two choices:
- pawn yourself to Google and use Chrome; or
- experiment with unsupported browsers, which even if they work you’re still limited to the window of standards Google decided was good for their business
It’s a lousy idea. The gov should be supplying services that are wholly free of Google’s influence.
Even in the US people are forced to use the web for public service even if it’s not officially announced.
E.g., suppose you want to see the state secretary’s records for a corporation. A lot of SoS websites try to force you to solve a #CAPTCHA. Fuck CAPTCHAs. I don’t do CAPTCHAs. So there’s an offline option, right? Ha. Try it. Send a snail mail letter to a state secretary requesting the registration records for an arbitrary business you know they should have records on. They just ignore it now. They don’t even have the courtesy to respond to say why they will not treat your request. Offline services have been quietly taken away without people even noticing.
Absolutely, you are the company paying for all the work of the FOSS app, having to ensure it meets FCC regulations for banking. It’s a huge mess. Costs millions to do.
FCC regs, really? That’s comms. First I’m hearing the FCC regulates banks. But surely those regs must be quite lax because banks in the US are quite sloppy. One-factor auth is good enough.. if someone gets your username & PW they can spend your money. US banks are putting their websites on Cloudflare, so all sensitive banking info and transactions is shared with a tech giant. Pretty much everything is outsourced, even simply printing statements, which puts a lot of eggs in one basket. US banks get breached regularly, like Capone who didn’t even bother to encrypt data at rest on Amazon’s server, so an Amazon contractor leaked the data.
With such lousy regulation, would it really be hard to get approval for a FOSS app?
The only false dichotomy I see here is the claim that you can have FOSS /OR/ expert oversight. There’s no reason why you cannot have both and hire expert oversight on a FOSS project (at least apart from reasons of the corp bottom line).
You also appear to equate FOSS with “security by obscurity”, which makes no sense. FOSS is not obscure, it’s the contrary. Non-free software makes use of obscurity, but that obscurity is not used as a basis for security. So neither FOSS nor non-FOSS inherently makes use of security by obscurity.
Financial reasons to not publicize the code are technical reasons. Finance is technical.
This is an equivocation fallacy. The OP’s use of “technical reasons” implied technological feasibility. You’ve introduced a strangely broad version of the OP’s use of that term in order to muddy the waters.
Sounds like a great idea, so long as Servo has not sold out to Google in any way. If Servo is really an independent browser govs would do right by the public to make that browser officially supported by all web services by the gov and do the necessary to ensure the Servo project is funded.
Millions = mere peanuts, for developed countries. That price tag is also a good reflection of the degree of privacy people are being forced to compromise in order to finance the development and maintenance of Google Chrome. A gov has a duty not to subject its people to arbitrary privacy abuses. Yet some govs are designing web services for Google Chrome and then forcing people to access those services online by removing the offline option.
My comment does not imply when the first browsers were developed. Nor is it relevant. The problematic status quo sequence:
- offer web-based gov services
- leave people to their own devices.. to fend for themselves and pawn themselves to the private sector as needed to reach public resources
.
The sequence should have been:
- ensure sovereignty-respecting public tools exist
- offer web-based gov services that officially support the tools distributed in step 1
.
The internet began as a military project (government). The graphical web later emerged in the 1990s. So all governments have had 25+ years to become sovereign and ensure that the gov itself is not subjecting people to a US surveillance capitalist.
It was only in the past ~2—3 years that my local government closed its doors and decided to force everyone to do public administration tasks online. Indeed things are happening in a reckless sequence of events. Sovereignty from US tech giants should be sorted out before a government forces people to interact with their web-based services. So w.r.t my local gov, the status quo (first sequence) now has a third step:
- force people to use the web-based gov services without equipping them.
.
Do you see the problem? Step 3 is the most abusive, and that’s quite recent.
I just had a look at Debian’s official repos. No Safari browser. Did a search… found “how to install Safari on linux… start by installing WINE…” (yikes)
So in terms of a government offering public services that need to serve all people, Safari is not an answer unless the gov finances porting it to linux.
We can make some headway by pushing govs to adopt OSS. The Italians have a law “public money → public code”. The whole public sector including public schools should be switching to open source. And part of that would compel contributions of some form. Whether it’s code contributions or payment for support. People should be demanding that their tax revenue is not wasted on software that does not enrich the commons. With profit-driven corporations it’s always a game where a number of variables have to be just right for the company. But the public sector is very much overlooked.
I recently looked at a Danish university and was disgusted with what I saw. They used MS Office and Google docs, and students were pushed to use those tools. They used Matlab not GNU Octave, because that’s what they saw industry using. Schools should be leading industry, not following it.
Think about it from a manager’s position. If they pay something for nothing extra (donate), they won’t last long at the company. They are attracted to 2 benefits:
- shedding liability for problems by outsourcing
- special pampered treatment (again via outsourcing)
Corps love commercial software because managers whose neck is on the line can point the finger away from themselves if something goes wrong with it (or so they think… which is what matters in the end anyway). They tend to consider FOSS when there is a fall guy. So e.g. they hire RedHat. But as I think the article mentions, that money doesn’t trickle down from there.
We used a FOSS compiler through a separate contract. The company paid a high price for pampering by the compiler supplier. And the support was magnificent. We got the “pro” version (which for the most part was just a newer release than the version in the commons & perhaps a few extras that were just more of a luxury). But it was really about the support. Anyone on the team could file a ticket with the compiler supplier. Not just for bugs and enhancements, but if something was unclear, or if we needed to know how to do something. They always responded well, gave tips, advice, and workarounds, and if there was a bug they fixed it and we got the fix quickly. They never dropped the ball. Our bugs and enhancement requests would then make it into the core product that benefited the commons. It was a good arrangement.
Then you consider our most heavily used FOSS tool apart from the compiler: emacs. We had an internal team who compiled it and injected our internal mods to customize it for the org. Not sure if any of our customizations would have value outside the org or if that team did PRs.
In short, it’s not enough to just maintain the code and hope for donations. You need to offer a support package that gives 1st class treatment to corps who would pay a premium for it. I’m not sure if the emacs project offers anything comparable to the compiler we used, but I could see the folks I worked for signing up for something like that.
I think I used to know that. Thanks for the reminder.
Regarding your 2nd paragraph, that’s indeed what Cloudflare has started offering. Your browser is moved to the cloud and you effectively run a dumb terminal and get remote desktop of sorts. I think it’s pitched as a security benefit. Cloudflare has a tendency to always assume everyone fully trusts them with everything. Indeed the technology is great for snoops who want to see everything you see and do.
Like the default search engine is not an example of Google’s control, it’s Mozilla’s revenue model.
It’s both, of course. Mozilla’s revenue enables Google control. If Mozilla changes the default search to one that is not in Google’s interest, they will lose their revenue.
The remainder sounds like personal gripes that you’re misconstruing as evidence of nefarious intent.
It’s both. I’m a user so I notice when Mozilla makes an anti-user move. Businesses serve their customers. Mozilla’s customer is Google, not me. So Mozilla serves Google, not the users. W.r.t evidence, I gave no evidence. I did not say “this is evidence”. If you want to challenge a claim because you can’t find the evidence on your own, you can ask for the evidence.
And as I said, I did not keep track of all Mozilla’s anti-user shenanigans over the years. So you’re not looking at a complete list of issues. It’s disingenuous to treat it as if it were.
There’s also plenty of evidence to the contrary, total cookie protection to name but one.
I did not mention anything about cookies, so which of my points do you think cookie protection counters what I’ve said?
Additionally, beurocratic processes produce terrible software.
Nonsense.
First of all, capitalism produces terrible software when you’re the product rather than the customer. It’s often shit even when you are a paying customer. The best quality software is produced outside of capitalistic structures.
I’ve worked on both gov and commercial environments. The gov process was superior for quality. On a commercial gig I was actually told not to fix bugs as they were spotted because it was important for the customer to discover the bug & report it so the supplier could charge them extra for the bug fix. The whole commercial work environment was rife with chasing profit (of course) which means cutting corners to cut expenses. If a developer produces something high quality in a fortune 500 company, they get back-roomed for “gold plating” (which means they’ve invested more in quality than necessary for the consumers). That doesn’t happen on gov projects.
It’s also wrong to attribute bureaucratic processes strictly to government projects. You may have a shit-ton of bureaucracy in the governance outside of the project which leads to: “build a Mars rover”. How bureaucratic the processes are within the organization is independent of whether it’s a commercial project or not. Fortune 500 corps are inefficient due to their bureaucratic structures. I could not reuse code from one project to another within the same company because there were rules about one project benefiting from another internal pot of money. So a piece of code had to be rewritten from scratch on the other project which means more bugs than you would have if the audited code could have been reused.
Finally, browsers are incredibly complex
Precisely why lack of competition is problematic.
If a gov were to take that kit and create a public option which is then compatible with all web services deployed by that gov, I would applaud that for sure. Would be much better than govs being subservient to tech imposed by tech giants, constraining citizens to the will of a US corporation, and allowing the private sector control so Google can cancel things not profitable for Google (like JPEG XL). The public sector should serve the public people, not the private sector corps of other countries.
Nonsense. Of course we expect to get a court remedy when a business or person scams or cheats another. Otherwise why even have civil courts? It’s a foolish idea to think the government has no responsibility in providing a functional justice system. Where do you think the responsibility for justice in disputes lies, if not the government? You have don’t even have leverage to negotiate an out of court settlement unless the threat of losing your ass in court is real. Even if you live in a small indigenous tribal community, there’s a tribal leader serving as the “government” to arbitrate disputes.
It’s noteworthy that you used the term “profitable”. When I wrote the example I had recovery of actual damages in mind. But that’s fine, we can run with that too. When a lawsuit generates profit, that means we’re dealing with tort or statutory damages. Since it would be small claims, we can nix tort. Statutory damages refer to situations where the law sets out a penalty for violators whereby victims need not show actual damages. E.g. telemarketers breaking the TCPA, or credit bureaus breaking the FCRA. In these cases, the people elected Congress to write law to protect consumers, and as representatives of the people Congress opted to codify statutory penalties that are directly actionable by victims. Of course the gov has a responsibility to support their own law and make violations thereof actionable. This is what they were elected to do.
You’ve misunderstood my position. This is also non-sequitur logic. Blink is not a browser, so if you build a new browser which makes use of Blink, it’s still a new browser. (Hence the non-sequitur). From there, whether Blink is sufficiently brand-agnostic to effectively offer sovereignty from tech giants is a separate question. If yes, then Blink inside of a Google-free creation is fit for purpose. If not (due to Google steering things even from the rendering engine), then Blink would defeat the purpose and thus it would be unfit for purpose.