2338
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
2338 points (99.3% liked)
Privacy
31379 readers
444 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
The point of the proposal is to allow servers to be sure the software (ie browser) running on the device is what it says it is, and take away the ability to spoof what browser you’re running (which is currently fairly trivial).
So if someone makes a browser that doesn’t allow adblockers and always shows ads, the server can do things like only serve content to that browser.
Imho, without hardware support they won't be able to keep up against the hackers. In the end it's software and it's running on hardware outside of the control of the server. There are millions of possible attacks to break/bypass this.
Problem is the effort to find a vulnerability and exploit it is often higher than the effort required to patch it. Because by its nature a browser and the server it talks to are internet connected, Google will be able to revoke keys for older exploited versions at will. As long as it’s well-engineered I think there’s a good chance they’ll be able to keep that secure.
Though I’m sure there will be some successful approaches to ad blocking etc but if something like this gains traction it could completely change the internet. If enough people are running browsers like this then sites could effectively be able to kill off competing browsers that aren’t restricted.
I think the key is to not let it happen in the first place, and boycott browsers that implement stuff like this.
So if we already took down Twitter, and Reddit, how do we kill Chrome?
So what it boils down is companies are going to try to cut off their user base if they don't view ads? People will complain they can't view their page and cancel their subscription? Nobody's going to willingly install a browser that won't let you install an adblocker, right?
It's not subscription business models that will be affected by this, it's ad-supported ones.
The problem is you're running Chrome now*. Google are in the process of severely restricting the mechanism by which adblockers work in Chrome and its derived browsers - so it's happening now. The only viable alternative left is Firefox, if Google manage to get this proposal past then there's nothing stopping ad-supported sites from forcing you to use Chrome or another browser they know they can serve you ads with. Those types of sites are already comfortable with aggressive anti-adblock tech so no doubt they'll be comfortable with this too.
Switch to Firefox!
* statistically speaking!
But what about Apple?!?! Can't they strong arm this?