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Google's New Web Environment Integrity Proposal Dismissed by Brave, Mozilla, and Vivaldi
(news.itsfoss.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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You're right. But it's so much worse than that.
Imagine, for a minute, that this passes. If a website exists that a specific entity disagrees with (say... a whistleblower forum, or accounts of how Google is abusing its powers, or accounts of a Government is abusing it's citizens), all that would need to happen, is for the "integrity authority" to deny access to that site, and it will be censored. Whereas now, a website has to be taken offline (in most cases) to be effectively censored, if this passes, the "integrity authority" would just need to say nay.
Imagine never hearing of the Snowden files, or George Floyd, or the Russian-Ukraine war. Not because they didn't exist or didn't happen, but because you 'weren't allowed' to see them by an entity who benefits from you not seeing them or knowing about them.
If this passes, we would be -officially- entering a dystopia.
It's kind of the opposite of this though, it's not censorship. It's not that you aren't allowed to visit other sites, it's that sites can choose to let you in or not.
The scary part is we don't know what makes that decision, and from Google's proposal is that it could just be anything they decide. So it's not censorship, but it is saying "You aren't playing by our rules (like by using an ad blocker, or you visited too many whistleblower forums, or we just plain decided we don't like you) so you don't get to use gmail/your bank/whoever decides to implement this"
That's true. But the "integrity authority" has the power to censor. Maybe that's not how it will be used now, but the infrastructure will be there and ready to use.
When I see these things come about, I'm always reminded of that quote, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should"
Google can already do that. It's called "safe browsing" and if your site ever gets on the wrong side of it good luck. It's easier to get off a spamhaus registry than it
Won't there need to be backwards compatibility with sites that don't implement this? The default would have to be that the browser is allowed to see a site that doesn't require attestation. So if the whistleblower or political site just didn't implement this, would that be a way around it?
At first, maybe. But not ultimately. If you compare it to TLS, for example, if the site use TLS 1.0, your browser will simply not load the site. This web integrity thing is similar.
Another, maybe more relevant, example, is Flash. Once Google decided Flash will no longer be supported on their browser, Flash died. I actually don't disagree with the killing of Flash, but the idea is similar.
I miss it sometimes. There's still no good way to have lightweight vector animations that wen designers or animators can work on (no code required), that work the same cross-browser. There's some JS libraries but they often need developer involvement (a designer can't always set everything up themselves) and tend to be quite heavy libraries (which slows down the page, which reduces your ranking in search engines)...
I still use Macromedia Flash 5 from time to time, to create quick animations to be used in videos. I haven't found anything as easy to use. Maybe you know something? I've tried a few things, can't remember the names, but paid stuff, free stuff, and FOSS stuff. MacF5 is easier and quicker.
I haven't had to make animations in a long time, but I'd probably go for Flash too. I think I've got an old version somewhere (not as old as 5 though; might be CS2 or CS3).
I remember Flash MX came out in my first year of high school, and a bunch of people were having issues getting their Flash 5 projects working in MX (we had a computer animation class that used Flash).