So mainstream press finally starts covering the egregious behavior of big tech companies and the response is to attack them as complicit co-conspirators?
Might sound smart but perhaps not the wisest of criticism.
Let’s encourage dissent so we can preserve democracies.
I think you are misreading the situation. It’s not enough to have open standards if the big guys just consume that data into their closed platforms.
The author argues they are too powerful. We had open standards and big tech embraced and then locked it into their platforms. We need regulations at this point.
The universe let it all happen. By using cloud services, analytics, and free email services to allow monoliths to be able to run surveillance on basically every original idea launched since the early 2000s, users let and enabled this to happen. Not only did people open their information and identities deeply to companies like google, they also funded them vastly by caving in once free services became paid services.
On the back end, there is I'm sure a complex and covert dashboard project and monitoring systems to detect ideas and trends that fuel/drive decisions in Google's deeply anti-competitive behavior. There's even a solid chance that legislators are tapped via enterprise Gmail services the government now heartily uses (for example), and Google knows everything that is coming through the pipeline. Everyone was warned by scholars long ago about exactly this scenario, but we keep re-inventing the Titanic and the Hindenburg on hubris and ignorance, it never fails. It's far too late to regulate this away. Google needs to be broken up and diversified into new and totally individually distinct and independent companies for future accountability and segregation of info to be upheld.
If you want to self host a site your ISP won't let you. If you want to self host email, none of your messages will get through.
15 years ago I could host a site at home. Today, it can't be done.
Want to regulate something... Make ISP's allow for self hosting. My 5 year old android phone has the power to host a small personal site, but my ISP won't let it happen.
I agree its a bigger discussion. The fediverse is not a magic wand. Its a direction, not a destination. Lots of unresolved problems.
But those giant sclerotic organizations could assume some responsibility for the mess they have helped create by, in the first instance signalling they understand this.
Somebody mentioned in the thread they have a trial account on mastodon. Good, five years late but better than never.
> They made a Faustian pact. Now they are crying foul.
Only because they got caught with leaks like the Twitter Files. Now their trustworthiness is at an all time low, and they need to make someone else look like the bad guy. Insert spiderman pointing at spiderman meme here...
Where exactly? Visible through your rose tinted glasses? There is no visual hint on the page (RSS has a well established logo) and my rss reader does not autodiscover it from the main page.
The "whatabout" type replies would seem to require that the only websites that can report on the ills of the internet are ones that have no ads, no tracking, no telemetry, no data collection, and so on. Everything must be perfect. That's a bit silly. Shooting the messenger.
Arguably, it does not really matter who is delivering the message. It's the message that matters.
It's not too difficult to transform sitemap XML into RSS.
This type of internet forum reply is so commmon there is a name for it and even a Wikipedia page [1].
"A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction"
I did not ask that they don't have ads, not track their readers, and so on. I asked why there is no link whatsoever besides the usual big tech traps.
"Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about...?") denotes in a pejorative sense a procedure in which a critical question or argument is not answered or discussed, but retorted with a critical counter-question which expresses a counter-accusation."
Critical question or argument: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
Counter-question or counter-accusations: 1. Why doesn't DW have a link to a fediverse. 2. DW does not have an RSS feed. 3. The press is complicit in hijacking the internet.
The critical question or argument is neither answered or discussed.
Why would they bother adding the fediverse, it's mostly useless, would provide no benefit to them, and they'd probably get defederated eventually for publishing something someone doesn't like.
They're hijacking your internet. I'm not on social media and let me tell you the rest of the web still exists. Its pace is much slower, but it's there.
Imagine a couple of years from now, you're working on some stuff for a client. Client sends you a link, but you can't open the link with your non-chromium browser of choice - it's been built on tech provided by google, and google says: You can only use chrome to view this site.
You try to download chrome, but since you once used some ad-block plugin, you've been banned from using all alphabet products. Google has also decided that in order to use chrome, you need to have a valid user account to login with.
This is already happening with lots of small business websites -- they are only on Facebook, so you can't eg. look at the menu without a Facebook account.
Or company help desks, at this point after twitter changes its licensing lots of companies quit it, it was the only social media account I still used for chat-like help. Most now offer Facebook but under no circumstance am I going to create another account. Now I'm stuck with calling and waiting in line since they also stopped doing email (only callback service, which rarely works).
I send them instructions how to SFTP files to me if it's important enough they will do it. I've managed to get lawyers to use SFTP albeit with a GUI [0a]. If anyone wants to test it out, put "ohblog.net" in the host field, then something like mysql [0b] in the username, leave the password blank and upload silly things into the /pub in the directory. AdminHands is a decent SFTP app for cell phones. If that isn't an option they can mail them to me. If they are important and time sensitive then FedEx have door-to-door courier options.
Nowadays it is super simple to use GPG with email using Thunderbird, barely an inconvenience. [1] In my opinion everyone should set this up even if they do not plan to use it in the event something sensitive needs to be discussed and one does not trust platforms like Signal or WhatsApp which I do not. GPG is email provider agnostic. Mozilla are working on Thunderbird for phones. [2]
I agree. For me personally that is a signal to cut ties with a business or organization. It's a red flag when orgs use crappy web portals that demand illogical or ill conceived compliance. I find those "turn key" solutions or platforms like Facebook to be full of dystopian and incompetent practices that are best to distance ones self from. Some may not find that an option but I can only hope that more people push back aggressively on malevolent patterns.
I think we can all think of potential futures. I don't see why this one is particularly likely. Google has open sourced the guts of its browser so others can make non-Google controlled browsers, and they fund one of the two only real competitors to their browser.
> you can't open the link with your non-chromium browser of choice - it's been built on tech provided by google, and google says: You can only use chrome to view this site.
That part is particularly likely because that's literally what Web Environment Integrity does.
Can you speak plainly? I don't think that is literally what it is. That might be a side-effect, but I'd need to see some evidence of that being the case.
WEI is a way to cryptographically prove to a remote website that you're really browsing it with an unmodified build of Chrome. Google hasn't said out loud yet that it's going to be used to block other browsers, but what else is there to use it for?
The use it to validate if the browser you are using is one of their signed binaries.
Of course the original intention was to detect fraudulent ad clicks, but the reality will that you will be met by captchas every step of the way if you dare to compile your own binary.
> It would provide websites with an API telling them whether the browser and the platform it is running on that is currently in use is trusted by an authoritative third party (called an attester).
> The proposal threatens the free and open internet in a number of ways, but one of the biggest revolves around the fact that should there be a central server that attests to whether a browser can be trusted or not, it means that anything non-standard will not be trusted. In other words, new browsers would not be trusted, and legacy software would no longer be able to access much of the internet after a certain length of time. Given that it verifies the integrity of the browser, it could also technically block certain extensions (such as Adblock) if Google were to go down that route.
I understand what it could be used for - DNS and PKI as centralised structures could also be used to block things. Parler was kicked off all cloud platforms for political reasons.
But that doesn't mean that its sole purpose is to verify that you're using an official Chrome build.
It's being used to be able to tell bots from humans. A human will be required to run a browser with proper attestation that they're a human. It can be used for good (prevent bots from accessing the site) and bad (prevent humans from using anything but chrome).
> WEI is a way to cryptographically prove to a remote website that you're really browsing it with an unmodified build of Chrome
What you're saying (and what I read) appears much more general than that. It could be used to block anything but official builds of Chrome, but that doesn't mean that's what it's for.
The thread makes this clear. I'm arguing that "You can only use chrome to view this site." is not the only use. You seem to be agreeing, but adversarially.
People can fork Google Chrome, yet none has done this so far. Not counting pretty GUI or some integrated extensions as a fork really. Google Chromium is genius marketing idea, hats off to the people who invented it, they convinced even programmers that there is some mythical "independent" Chromium project and anyone can fork it. Well, theoretically it is possible, but practically - not so much. The strategy is so successful that not even anti-monopoly departments aren't that interested in it.
Easy check - does Chromium project makes independent decisions and diverges from the decisions Chrome makes? Meaning, is it a true fork (disregarding who was first/original for a second) or not? So far it seems that everything Google pushes happens both in Chrome and Chromium. I mean significant decisions, like protocol support, rendering, etc. Sure, they cut out their spyware from it, just to please anti-monopoly organizations, but that's about all. Chromium is a puppet entity, existing only for Google's sake.
This is what is happening with my "Android for Work" profile. Since it's all Microsoft and "segregated", Outlook (for work) refuses to open links because I don't have Edge installed, even though I have Chrome and Firefox.
For now - but with changes like WEI (attestation) you may find that you have little choice to be part of "the rest of the web" unless you use an Approved Browser to do only Approved Things.
I'm not into social media either. But unless you want to live like a hermit, you don't have much choice nowadays but to visit these sites from time to time.
1. I can't use anything else other than WhatsApp for messaging with families and friends. Thank God my kids' school still uses good-old email for communications.
2. Almost all the useful video tutorials/mini-documentaries/science-shorts are on Youtube and nowhere else.
3. Family and friends always send me links to videos and posts on Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok. I don't usually click when it's just some meme or for laughs but sometimes it a post that matters to me/them enough to click on it.
Thought experiment: Online advertising is regulated. How do so-called "tech" companies respond. Do they have a plan. Even if they continued to sell surveillance and data services, they would shrink in size.
There are various ways ads could be regulated and historical precedents.
Regardless of whether this ever happens, currently, online advertising is highly centralised and under increasing scrutiny. This centralisation is not the result of innovation by a select few companies but plain old M&A by the so-called "tech" giants, while the the government was apparently sleeping. If more competition were to take place in online ad services, this could potentially have a serious effect on the lifeblood of so-called "tech" giants. Time will tell.
There's a solution that's far less invasive. The article offered it, and I've also repeatedly espoused it: "Enforcing open standards to enable users to share videos, images and texts across platforms is paramount."
The reason there are tech monopolies is because of the network effect. It's not practical to expect healthy competition in domains where your product's quality is primarily driven by the number of users you have, and they start with billions, and you start with zero.
Enforce open standards, prevent companies from coercing users to sign away their rights to content they generate, and you will have rich competition because you effectively eliminate the network effect.
There are definitely people who will and still do pay for these things, Apple News+ or whatever is an example of news...also WSJ, NYT, Economist subscriptions...Instagram verified checkmarks. The question is how do these companies capture both the paying and non paying users...and that is through advertising. If you pay any attention, the amount of ads you watch is your payment to these companies for "free" services.
I am one of those people but this is a far cry from the days where you had to use a newspaper vending machine or walk into a video rental store. Free wasn’t really even an option.
Anyway my point is that the problem is not the lack of open standards. The problem is that we discovered how to do
“free” and a lot of people prefer this way whether they want to think about it or not.
I think we got bait and switched. Initially a lot of the services used network effects to reach a peak mass and got dependency lock in(think using FB or Google as login options as an example), and then monetized through "ads or subscription", which inherently made the experience absolute crap.
I can get behind ads in moderation or subscriptions that aren't mired in dark patterns, but I feel like 30% of my time consuming anything on social media is spent on watching ads, so I just go do something else now.
I'm not really seeing your logic here. Yes, things are "free." What does this have to do with network effect driven monopolies, or open standards as a solution?
Even if this were true, this is a talking point from the beginning of the internet when there were way less people hooked to it, why does it follow that that makes anything okay? If people won’t pay for a service it’s because they really want or need it.
You’re simply making the case that these services that no one believes useful enough to pay for are controlling everything because they’re frontends for marketing agencies. This isn’t the gotcha you seem to think it is
I use plenty of services that I do really want but as long as I don’t actually have to pay for it, I won’t pay. Do I watch Disney+ or HBO or Netflix a lot sometimes? Yes. Have I ever paid for any streaming service? God no, because I always got some friend I can bum off of. And as long as I can bum, I will continue to bum.
The only things I willingly and voluntarily pay for are news and music subscriptions and that’s because I value them the most and consider them important to society but I definitely don’t necessarily use them the most.
Anyway my only point is that it has nothing with open standards. People want free and will take advertising if it means it’s free.
I use Google News because it is, imo, the best news aggregator. If it suddenly started to cost me money, I would move to something else. Eventually I would move to OTA TV stations that pay via ad revenue. If OTA TV started charging for viewership instead of ads, I would just stop looking at news. I care, but not enough to spend money. Same with Reddit, tiktok, hn, basically everything besides video games, stack overflow (which is another statement because it might drop in quality so much if it went pay that it might not be useful anymore), and cell services+home internet.
You could rely on government to try to rein them in — good luck. Didn’t work with Ma Bell, the pieces still charged $3 a minute.
Or you could contribute to open protocols, and do to the tech giants what:
The Web did to AOL, MSN, etc.
VoIP did to AT&T, Sprint, etc.
Wikipedia did to Britannica
OpenStreetMap will do to Google Maps
etc.
Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough.
I spent 10 years and over $1 million from my company’s revenues to build an open source social operating system to power pretty much all the applications you’d want:
It took me a while to even begin to understand what Qbix is trying to sell people on. In my humble opinion the website is a disaster, especially on mobile. After a few minutes all I could gather was that it claims itself to be a "social operating system" (nice buzzword). After exploring the GitHub readme it got a bit clearer but it kinda "just" seems like WordPress but for websites seeking out more user interaction?
I have not looked into it too deeply, but I also have not seen any mention of any sort of open standards that would lift Qbix from being another vendor to be locked into. No OID/OID Connect, ActivityPub, etc. Instead it mentions integration with Facebook of all things.
Where is the openness?
I went to your website, selected “I’m a software developer”, tried to select “what it’s all about” and nothing happened. Doesn’t really give me confidence in the technology or make me inclined to spend time watching the videos on the same page
I’m using Firefox Focus on an iPhone 14, iOS 16.6.1
> Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough.
Generally yes, but not necessarily - look at what happened when we (the nerds who write free software) collectively decided that IRC was “good enough” :(
Luckily you can get the https easily. I’ve been using https://letsencrypt.org/ to get it encrypted. Was fast and free. No real barrier just a bunch of setup.
Your missing the point. In that browsers insist that you now -must- have HTTPS. And that if you wish to serve an static HTTP website over HTTP you can not without a glaring "This site is unsafe" thrown in your face.
That's because it is unsafe. Without HTTPS, an attacker can inject arbitrary malicious javascript into the page.
The only context in which plain HTTP is ok on today's internet is when you a loading a page from your own server on the same LAN, behind a firewall, when you are reasonably sure that nobody else is in you network.
> That's because it is unsafe. Without HTTPS, an attacker can inject arbitrary malicious javascript into the page.
No they can't. If they can inject malicious content then you should fix the exploits on your platform. HTTPS isn't going to save you. If exploitable under HTTP hey can do the same under HTTPS.
So, How is a static webpage of "hello world" unsafe?
There is no such thing as a "static" web page in the context of a MITM attack. The MITM can change the page to ANYTHING he wants it to be. The HTML you receive can be a completely different page than the one sitting on your server.
HTTPS protects you from that. It ensures that the HTML you receive is the same HTML from the server. That's why I sad: The only way unencrypted HTTP is reasonable is when you are fairly sure that there isn't a MITM. Like on your local LAN--anything that goes across the public internet is suspect.
> If they can inject malicious content then you should fix the exploits on your platform.
This is not reasonable. Literally every browser out there has multiple 0-days show up every year. Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Safari, Edge, you name it.
Now try connecting to public wifi with that. Doing a MiTM and replacing anything with anything else is super easy. Just put a router with some Linux distro acting as extender (or mobile connection AP) with the same name and you can change traffic on any non-HTTPS website.
Or not even a public wifi. Someone can put a device somewhere between your home and ISP and MiTM attack you the same way as above.
Oh, and I will just show you fake e.g. Google login page, not just replace the context. And you are tired and just want to use the web... You won't notice the unsecured connection.
> The scenarios you listed can even make HTTPS insecure.
You don't understand what HTTPS does, then.
HTTPS is specifically designed to counter MITM attacks, so it is, in fact, not insecure in the scenarios listed by the parent comment.
> If you were visit that page on an network that is not MiTM the website is still secure. There is no requirement for SSL.
That is really only relevant when you and your sever are on the same LAN, behind a firewall, and you are reasonably sure that you don't have an intruder (like I mentioned upthread).
When you are browsing a server across the public internet, you should assume you are being MITM'd. With HTTP (not S), the MITM attacker does not need to be between you and the server. If they can guess the TCP sequence number and when you are browsing, the MITM can inject (or replace) arbitrary content into the pages you load.
> The only way to fight back is to self host DNS, HTTP and SMTP at home.
Agreed, but DNS at least needs to be shared via encrypted p2p, to avoid congesting someones broadband with million requests and prevent the inevitable hijacking by malicious actors.
How could it be otherwise in a world where every startup dreams of selling to a large corporation? You won't get 60 million dollars or a billion dollars faster and only large corporations have that kind of money, it's math time = money. Justice was possible before 2000.
In my practice, I have been developing an alternative platform, OS and browser for 11 years and I realized that without major players your donation will be 0 for freedom, since you again need money and time to find relevant users.
If interesting, here is the link to the platform demo video:
https://vimeo.com/animationcpu
In my current job I was discussing with a C-person and they were expressing their worries about "Microsoft Cloud" taking cover of everything, and how 'we' could reverse that without crippling the business.. to which I answered that we are past the point of no return, and this is a dialogue that we should have had 3-4 years ago. But when this was discussed everybody was 'thrilled' to have a solution up and running in Y time at Z cost instead of alternatives with 3xY time and 3xZ cost.
> Also, it must be ensured that user data is accessible to all competitors.
This doesn't sound like a good idea. The collection of user data and the underlying advertising business model is a problem to be removed, not a playing field for more competition and "improvement".
The only way to make it inaccessible to competitors is to make it impractical to access for the user themselves. GDPR demands this portability and in theory, it's awesome. Though I haven't seen a lot of examples yet it should make it easy to do things like port your favourites and listening history from spotify to another platform. It's your data, after all.
Big tech is big because they built sustainable products that appeal to billions of people.
There was no hijacking. Anyone can still make their own site and become popular. TikTok was able to become the number one site despite not being from big tech.
I'd agree that big tech are big because they built a (good) product that appeals to the masses. Make no mistake though, they've also used their power to abuse the system and cement themselves as monopolies which is modus operandi for a monopoly.
As for the comment that TikTok got big, sure they've managed to amass a fairly large user base but they pail in comparison against the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc on any metric that matters.
TikTok are also the new hotness and could just as easily go as much as they came. The big tech companies have survived massive market shifts, economic catastrophes, dodged/maneuvered their way through government regulatory apparatus around the world measured in decade time scales.
Exactly, it's just a scare tactic to make us and 'the enemies' believe that there's no way out and we already lost. The solution is in front of us, all that time. I follow a lot of blogs I scrambled together over the years from this place called HN, I do that with RSS. It's enough for me to get a good and healthy information diet (all your blogposts together are way more interesting than any social media platform can offer me). The only thing I miss are feeds with images, to have an image pop-up in my RSS-based timeline is always nice. And some kind of replacement for Youtube would also be nice to have.
How will anyone find your site in order for it to become popular, if Internet giants gatekeep the only methods that people use to find or access things?
Internet giants control your browser, your smartphone, your search engine, your digital assistant, your DNS, most of the traffic going through CDNs, advertising, online shopping, app purchases, news, etc. Most of the internet is only accessible through the giants. Most of the experiences people have with the rest of the world is through them. (I'm being charitable; it's likely all the experiences people have with the rest of the world is through them)
Completely agree. I was just commenting on this earlier today: instead of complaining about American big tech incessantly, the EU needs to actually develop viable software products that users want to use. Until they figure out how to do that for more than just CRUD websites, they have no alternatives.
I do think that antitrust should stop big tech companies from acquiring potential competitors (or all their customers) though. Facebook should not have been allowed to acquire WhatsApp. Microsoft should not have been allowed to acquire Activision.
Exactly my thoughts, all those tech companies were famously unsustainable, then had to find ways to become sustainable (and profitable) and got way less attractive to users in the process.
Google is spending many millions of dollars per year developing and maintaining free software like Chrome and Android.
If the government will miraculously enforce the current anti-competition laws and break the company like they did with Bell Systems in 1982, these Google’s products will suddenly become unsustainable.
Chrome protects Google from any existential threats of being locked out of the web or the web losing to other platforms. Google search earns them billions of dollars.
Google has to play store on Android which earns them billions of dollars.
DW does not even have an RSS feed for chris sake.
The press is complicit in the hijacking of the internet. They made a Faustian pact. Now they are crying foul.