The state of the internet 2023

I think a lot of people here don't understand the danger of this fully and dismiss it with "Just use Firefox, problem solved".
Unfortunately, once this becomes widely available, that is once Chrome ships it, websites will start to use it.
Maybe Amazon will just not sell to you anymore when you're browsing with Firefox?
Maybe YouTube wont serve any videos if you're using Linux?
Your bank will certainly implement this and only allow Windows 11 with Edge or some shit like that.
Once this is implemented, we will all suffer, even if we're using better alternatives right now.

Your bank will certainly implement this

My brother in Christ, it was 2020 before my bank supported passwords longer than 8 characters. We have 30 or 40 years before we need to worry about the banks.
- Some banks are still running windows 98 internally, admitedly so long as said system isnt connected to the internet it should be fine.
- Have you ever rooted an android phone?
  
  The google SafteyNet Attestation is the precursor to browser DRM. It's essentially phone DRM.
  
  There are many banks that have apps that require you to pass at least the basic level attestation, if not the CTS profile matching that fails the moment you modify any system level resources, even the bootloader
  
  luckily you can force disable CTS so it falls back on the basic level, for most apps at least. You will never have access to Google or Samsung pay though, as it actually knows your phone model should support CTS and will autofail if it no longer reports that it does.
  
  Alongside that apps like Pokemon GO and Netflix also require at least basic attestation to function - demonstrating the DRM and anticheat capabilities of such a system.
- Yes, US banks.
  
  Banks in europe are much more up to date with tech.
  
  They have APIs to sink transactions with external providers like nordigen API.
  
  They have 2FA that is linked to your national identity card which is chipped
  
  Nationally used apps that are universal 2FA linked to national IDs that banks, medical, and government services all tap into
  
  Everything is contactless payment nowadays, the US just recently started contactless cards
  
  Inter-bank transfers without external apps like venmo
  
  There are MANY problems with EU people getting their banks to work on a rooted phone.
  
  They will absolutely implement DRM if someone sells the bullshit to them under the illusion of "safety."
  
  Hell, the US had handwritten "vaccine cards" for covid while European nations even had open source user spinoffs on nationally funded apps linked to national IDs to manage COVID vaccination and testing passes.
I wonder if that would be a valid anti trust violition ?
- If we lived in a sane country all 4 major tech companies would have already been brought to court over this in like, 2016. (Microsoft for the second time…)
Technically the idea is that if Chrome has barely any market share (will never happen, but let's pretend), they cannot implement this as it will anger and lock too many users out of day to day life.

However...

With Google Search and YouTube being by far the most 2 popular websites in the world, I think they still could. The vast majority of people would never give those up and if they're told to use another program to access them, they absolutely will, meaning in an ideal world with a browser competition, they can easily destroy it immediately.
- Google search has become very bad and is easily replaced by basically any search engine. YouTube is still unparalleled though.
It's IE6 all over again.
Would apple just roll over on this? Or would they fight to make sure safari is also an option to freely use the internet (or at least severely limiting apples ability to do something similar) And websites that depend on ads, the number of Firefox and safari users have to be greater than the number of users who use ad-blockers. So wouldn’t it negatively affect ad income on websites if they implemented it and cut out all non-chromium browsers?
- I think apple would figure out some very creative ways to fuck it's customers, some more.
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Did Firefox even say that they would not implement it as well? Are there any informations on that?
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Doesn't that also mean they lose customers or possible transactions which could have made them money?

For the millionth time, Stallman was right.

Yep, you send me html, my browser can interpret it any way that I want it to. If I want to ignore all of the image and script tags, I can. I don't need Chrome or even Chromium. As Stallman says, you should know what is running on your system.
- We need to go back to html and css. Using an ad blocker and noscript literally breaks webpages. I just want to read the article! You know the content ppl actually come for
That doesn't mean his strategy and approach is good.
- That doesn't mean his strstegy and approach is good.
  
  Who cares? Whether or not Stallman is a likeable person isn't what's important. His ideas are.

Just use Firefox, Mozilla already put their stance forward as opposing this garbage

Firefox is faster than chrome anyway nowadays.

Nowadays? I think you mean since always :)
- I get your sentiment, but chrome 1 was crazy fast and seemed barely functional coming from a world of toolbars for most people.
  
  At the time people were like "I can't use this, there's only this search bar"
That may be true on desktop. But, unfortunately, the mobile app is way behind chromium. From being unresponsive, to outright buggy. It's not a good experince. It's been 2 years since the rewrite but it's not getting much better or even close to fixing most of its issue. Meaning, using firefox on android is a handicap on yourself.
- Gonna need some statistics on this, because your anecdotal experience is not at all like mine. FF is totally useable on Android.
- I use it because I can use it to block ads. If a page doesn't work, I'll use chrome.
  
  I actually use Chrome on Windows. I just dislike ads more than I like Chrome.
- That has not been my experience with FF on mobile and my phone is a few years old
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- Yeah, to be honest the FF Android experience just can't match Chromium.
  
  I don't really NEED to, so I'm not switching from Firefox anytime soon, but I wish they'd at least fix recently closed tabs reappearing every time I reopen the darned thing...

Stop using chrome. Yes brave is chrome

@nicman24 firefox is not chromium....
- Gecko, the underlying engine behind Firefox, is an entirely different code base from Chromium
- are you saying firefox is chrome? because i wanted to thank you for exposing me to the stupidest shit ill read today, thank you for getting it out the way early.
- Firefox doesn’t use chromium. It uses Gecko, which is an entirely separate codebase.
- Firefox uses their own engine IIRC, that’s why more people should be using it so we can get some competition with Chromium.
- Ikr
- But that’s also not private as has been claimed as a reason to go FF. The only reason to use FF is only to not use chrome. Not for all the reasons that chrome is bad.

DRM is stupid because it interferes with paying customers and isn’t effective. If there’s a will there’s a way

I guess we have to get a subscription on top of our monthly internet bill to use the internet.
- Can't wait to have to subscribe to everything and they'll still sell my data
- Not one-for-one, but the BBC actually wanted to put a tax on broadband bills in response to the resentment towards the TV License.

One more time if anyone says that capitalism breeds innovation we need to show them this ¡!

restricted capitalism does that. regular capitalism makes monopoly.
- Does it though? Universities seem to be doing the heavily lifting innovation-wise.
- This ain't capitalism, this is going back to a rent based economy.
  
  Aka: Techno Feudalism
  
  Let me just point you to this:
  
  https://doctorow.medium.com/autoenshittification-cb851c2574fb
This is innovation though, an internet wide DRM would be quite an impressive technical feat. It's just not innovation built to benefit you and me, it's built to benefit Google's true customers, advertisers
Yeah... They find innovative ways to milk us of our money and attention and annoy the heck out of everyone
Oh almost like if in capitalism they didn't say that oligarchys are a problem. What we needed is to send these giants down.

That would prove difficult considering money rules, you can make people do you bidding, make them disappear and suffer little to no consequences.

So what we needed is a decent anti-monopoly, anti-oligarchy force.

Just like when the us gov dismantled AT&T into thousands of smaller different services and that created things like mobile routhers and etc.

Soo the companies like Google (for example), at this point are putting down more inovation than they are bringing into the table.

Problem is not capitalism, it's all that power centered in the same place. Almost like a dictatorship.
- Well that was when anti trust laws actually worked ! Alphabet , meta etc are literally sucking americans poor. Still we dont see anything !
- The problem isn't capitalism, it's just the system that allows power to be centralized through market forces and used to bribe regulatory bodies. Oh wait...
I mean, it's all innovation in some way... Just all anti-consumer.
So you want government to do this?
- Anarchy please

Like, seriously, went through the last 10 years spending a good chunk of my day on Twitter and Reddit using Chrome, and suddenly I'm on Lemmy/Mastodon on Firefox.

Firefox's been better since Quantum.
- It feels like much much faster than Chrome, not gonna lie.
This is my exact change. They want to shittify things I'll switch or just stop using it. I'm at my breaking point.
Eerily feels like I wrote that comment.
- Seriously... my oldest account on Reddit was 12 years old. I've been through so many changes that turned me off, but the API stuff was the last blow, and the CEO's love for Elon Musk just sealed the deal.
- Add me to the list with a side of furiously searching for security and privacy of cloud storage services and figuring out which Linux I want to use. I'm shaking my head at how complacent I got with my services. I always do my due diligence when starting to use anything but I somehow forgot to keep up in the past couple of years.
Do you miss anything?
- I won't lie that it's been an adjustment. Old habits die hard. Reddit is the one that I am more certainly done with. No one is on Mastodon yet so I do browse Twitter a little bit to get updates on the stuff I like, but don't interact there anymore.
- I miss a lot of my niche content

Google in 2004: don’t be evil Google in 2023: turns into Dr. Evil

Something-something die as a hero or become the villain.
Now we can scream that they're truly evil
The "don't be evil" shtick was tongue in cheek to start either. Thry always ended up in it to make money.

"What's internet? It it like Googlenet but worse?"

-Some kid in the future

API changes*

No no, they changed their beer. I hear they added more hops to it.
- Changing a beer to an IPA is actually a pretty good analogy, according to this beer lover who doesn't like overly hoppy ones..
- Nah, nah, it was the International Phonetic Alphabet. Can't have something like that on the 'murican internet.
- Easy there, McLovin
- Ok, I'm going to need to see some ID.
Deliberate typo for increased engagement.
- witter bought y musk
- *Oh, yeah, it's big brain time*
dab ym spoo!
hmmm IPA 🍺

Plus the paid streaming services adding ads back in and they are all the SAME fucking ads?

🎶 Do what you want because a pirate is a free, you are a pirate! 🎶

Ngl I am so done with streaming services asking for device specs and blocking things on my devices that I pirate stuff anyway !
🎶Yar yar figle di fi🎶
I just dusted off my pirate flag, the rising costs of everything has made it impossible for me to do the legal thing.

I'll start my journey sailing the vast sees upcoming weekend.

Reddit don't have IPA on tap anymore?

I don't want their IPA, I want my Ruby Beer

Ah yes, 2023. The year I wore a pirate hat and touched more grass. Soon they'll be bribing the govt to make going outside illegal.

Soon they'll be bribing the govt to make going outside illegal.

That was 2020
Oh don't worry, it's poisoned and the animals are gone. Once the heat bakes off the greenery, there will be no reason at all to go out there except to get to your car

We'll make out own internet! With blackjack and hookers!

You know what, forget the internet!
You jest but I'm feeling pretty ready to switch to mesh networking. I'd rather have a libre internet than faster bandwidth.

Does anyone else think that maybe this may cause a shift back to times before internet

Honestly, reddits API change was an awful thing to do but my phone usage has plummeted since then. I've been trying Lemmy but it's not been an easy 1:1 replacement and I find myself not engaging or feeling so invested in conversations and content as much.

That works in my favor, though, because I really have been spending way too much time looking at screens anyway.
- Most corporate media tries to get you to spend too much time on their apps/sites. Getting on the fediverse felt like moving on from a toxic ex.

Honestly this is just depressing. And a little scary ?

Corporate greed is taking new heights and the things we took for granted are being taken away. It is all so dystopic...

Yeet.

Wait, Google's doing what now?

They want to implement a "feature" so websites only load for you, if your browser, OS and hardware are deemed "trustworthy" aka you load every ad and malware that the website wants to shove down your throat.
- Oh God... I think I'm going to be sick. It's too easy to see how you could weaponize this against dissenters.
  
  Don't like something about our product? Have fun being banned from the internet!
- There are times I build my own browser and OS probably in future ( basically building open souce code , sometimes removing ssignatures and enhancements) , I wonder if I will be able to use stuff then !

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? They’re just following the end game of capitalism, they’re trying to squeeze every last bit of profit out of the internet that they can, it has nothing to do with the internet “threatening” power, they already took care of that with all of the spying laws they passed when the internet started getting popular
- I don't think the "spying laws" are what makes the internet controlled. It's the constant, huge waves of misinformation and weak thought, which are enabled by those "spying laws", among others ways. Just my two cents, tho.
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"the rulers" dude, this isn't D&D
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- You've done it, the bourgeoisie are no more!
- Nope... it's far worse.

Why watch the news when you can learn everything from memes

I hadn't heard of the YouTube thing. Doesn't matter because I don't use it, but it's still outrageous.

I am willing to watch an ad or two every 15 minutes, so long as they are no more than a minute total of wasted time. This ultra-monetization crap where it's a minute and a half every 5 minutes is why people use AdBlockers and pirate media.

Be reasonable as a business, and you'll get a reasonable response. Flood my free time with ads, and you get AdBlock and piracy.
- God we need an alternative to YouTube

For those interested in actively opposing this - the following blog offers some advice on how to do so.

https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/web_platform_change_you_do_not_like/

cool, but occums razor doesnt work for tech corps
- *Okham's razor

Dyslexic's being attacked by that font

I'm used to dealing with DRM, too. If it can be stripped out of a game or other software, it could be stripped out of the internet itself. Maybe some of the old cracking scenes that quit due to boredom will return for the challenge.

You can be sure as hell they will. If greater the force, the greater the resistance.
- It’s interesting to think about from a technological point of view, and there could be multiple ingress points to combat it.
  
  The proposal doesn’t have a complete implementation, but it in essence they want websites to ask browsers for a key if sorts (attestation). In theory this flow would be a lot like hoe notifications work. Keeping that in mind, when the website asks the browser, what’s stopping us from making our own attestation server?
Analog hole exists and will be prevalent on new internet unless they push DRM monitor https://xkcd.com/129/

tbh I'm just tired of all of this, we can't have nice things, ever... Every fucking thing in this world is being swallowed by corporate greed. Every service there's a catch, and I'm getting mad with it, things aren't made to serve their purpose, they only exist to make money and more money for people who already have infinite money, it's frustrating. Things need to change or everything is going to collapse... fuck companies, fuck billionaires, fuck stocks, fuck all of this

Well, well, well, would you look at that? We've done full circle, haven't we? It's time to go back to the old internet again.

You’d think fucking with our beer would have been the apocalypse moment

We are living in a real life 1984

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.

Can someone explain? I'm definitely out of the loop on this one

We saw the mass adoption of the internet, which before was mostly used by a small group of techies. Now we might be heading to a split: The mass walled garden and a separate smaller but free internet.

The next internet will be Phoenix: born from the ashes of the old, dead internet
- Unless things get really bad really fast and internet becomes so locked down you cant download anything that bypasses restrictions (vpn, tor, proxy)

I'm out of the loop.

Why is meta threatening the fediverse?

Meta alternative to twitter (thread) was(is?) supposed to federate with the fediverse
- I'd like to know more.

IPA changes?

The ale will no longer be Indian or pale.

Hold on, what about Meta and the fediverse?

Threads is going to be federated. But lots of instances have already said they’re going to defederate it immediately, because lots of people expect that federation is part of the EEE business plan. That’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Originally pioneered by Microsoft, it’s basically a way to kill off tech that you don’t want to compete with.

First embrace it, and do everything you can to be friendly towards the people using it. It’s an open standard, and you want to act inviting and supportive. Lull your competition into a false sense of cooperation.

Then extend it. Start creating proprietary additions which exist outside the standard. Do this under the guise of supporting the standard. These additions should be difficult for competitors to implement, but you maintain that this is all done to further improve the standard and bring more functionality to the end user.

Then extinguish the competition. Once you’re the de facto producer for this tech, (because users have come to expect those proprietary functions,) then lock down those proprietary changes so competitors can’t use them at all. Make the alternatives noticeably worse to use in every way, to force everyone into your (now closed standard) platform.

A good example of this is Microsoft Office. Ever notice that Word documents have historically been awful to try and open/edit in other word processors? This was because Microsoft was using EEE to make the other word processors worse. It’s also what Google does with Chrome, implementing non-standard additions then using their market share to bully competitors into joining; Every Firefox user has seen the dreaded “your browser isn’t compatible with this site. Use Chrome instead” message at least once.
- Lovely, detailed explanation! :)
- Thanks for the explanation! ;)
Meta's new Threads network is supposed to start federating via ActivityPub at some point.
- well, i guess some silver lining is that threads is basically non-existent after its launch. The serious and place to be instances will block threads. If i need to go see something on threads i'll join an instance that allows it, but doubt i'd ever bother.
  
  Didn't even bother checking it out.

I recently played Hacknet, a hacking game published in 2015. That game talks a LOT about being tracked on the Internet, telling you to delete logs and some IP address data in file headers.

I think it's becoming reality.

The game tells you to delete the logs on servers because computers can track all incoming requests, which can be a problem when you are doing nefarious actions and looking through confidentional infornation. Tracking who is accessing a computer/server and why has been a common practice, especially for buisnesses.

You also don't actually need to delete the logs while playing. There are only 1 or 2 minor moments where there is a consequence for not doing that, and in those cases a fork bomb is also needed (to prevent leaving a disconnect log).

The actual scary part of the game is (SPOILERS) a big tech company developing a massive 0-day exploit and wanting to monopolize the patch for it.

F

Dont forget the drone tracking bill, remoteID. Louis Rossemann

This might be an unpopular and ignorant take.

Services like Reddit, Twitter and Youtube needs to make money somehow. They provide a service that the users enjoy, and it is fair that they want componsation for those services. Aslong as they are upfront with how and what you are paying with I think it is fine, and the user can themself choose not to use the service if they feel like the payment is too high.

It seems like we are whining about not being able to watch quality content for free. Even Lemmy needs donations or kind souls to keep running.

The DRM and Chrome changes might be worse... But in the end it is the same base argument, we need more competition to reduce the price or stop using services we don't like / want to pay for.

I wouldn't say its unpopular, but I do agree its a bit ignorant but not in the probably negative way you mean.

I think its your acceptance that its fundamental that "Business MUST profit and we MUST suffer to allow them to profit"

You're making a huge leap that we need to suffer through all of the internet getting worse just because a corporation wants to profit. Fuck Google, Fuck Reddit, fuck all businesses that fail. Who cares? We owe them nothing.
- I guess they don't have to profit, but I believe they do have to cover their expenses (salary, hosting, etc). This is needed with capatalism or any other model (yes I know they have huge profits sadly)
  
  I do agree that the market is failing, where we have way to little competition. Or that maybe a alternative to capatilism would solve the issue.
  
  But in every thread here I feel like most people just expect to use everything on the internet for free, which is absurd to me. Why would anyone host a service like youtube if you didnt get any income from the users? The server costs alone must be huge.
  
  Why would people write articles if they do not get any money from it?
I'm fine with paying for YouTube premium. I find good value in it and like YouTube music. Fuck Google for continuing to push this though. I'm working on degooglefing myself.