c54c33e3c2785e958f9b611d970876a8
World Wide Web Deteriorating
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
THE more recent Daily Links (from this past week) included coverage regarding the “Web Integrity API”, which is a misleading name. We include them again below [1-5] for readers' convenience and some context. Digital artist David Revoy has since then published a "picture [he] had in mind about the topic of Web Environment Integrity." [6]
"Fighting For The Open Web" by David Revoy âËâ CC-BY 4.0
"One solution that seems far-fetched (at least for now) is abandoning the Web and gradually adopting something else."So what's the solution to all this? In the video above I explain that changing one's Web browser won't solve the issue. A lot of the problem is upstream. The Web itself is becoming poisonous to the client side.
One solution that seems far-fetched (at least for now) is abandoning the Web and gradually adopting something else. It may take a long time to gain a foothold. But it's progressing. 4 years ago Gemini started and we kept an eye on it months later, then adopted it. Techrights started 2.5 years ago (its first capsule iteration was very simplistic) and it grew over time to nearly 50,000 pages. Now there is almost 1-to-1 parity between our site and our Gemini capsule. The same is true for Tux Machines, which adopted Gemini less than a year ago (still very young, but the site turns 20 next summer). It has been a worthwhile effort and a smooth ride. Tux Machines saw over 100 unique IPs today in Gemini. Pages are requested about 50 per day per unique visitor. So Gemini is growing and it's awesome. The next milestone might be 1,000 unique IPs per day. Techrights is exceeding 500 some days.
"This is more like Adobe Flash or a blob with ActiveX/ActionScript and some "protected content" (DRM)."The Web isn't dead, but it's waning. Publishers or "News Web Sites" that stay only with the Web are not keeping up with changing times. Today's "modern" Web is becoming a DRM-enabled transport layer for a "virtual machine" called "Web browser" (or "app"), running WASM (WebAssembly), JS (JavaScript) etc. This is more like Adobe Flash or a blob with ActiveX/ActionScript and some "protected content" (DRM). It's not open. Don't help the openwashing. Accept that adoption of such "standards" just further marginalises small players. ActionScript is already small and primitive compared to what the Web is today.
The video above further discusses a worrying trend in the content one finds on the Web these days. As noted the other day, summaries get created by bots and a lot of things people read aren't even composed by humans. While grinding through today's headlines one finds a lot of clickbait and deceptive sentences. In some cases those are composed with SEO in mind, not with humans in mind. In other words, the headlines are written to target bots (like Googlebot), not humans. Where are we going with this?
"ActionScript is already small and primitive compared to what the Web is today."Now, back to DRM. When Julien Picalausa wrote about it 3 days ago he made it abundantly clear that “Web Integrity API” or "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) from Google is DRM by another name. As a reader told us, the Web browser Vivaldi's site tears apart the PR. And there is low-profile trouble brewing with DRM in Chromium which Google is pushing. WEI is the "Web Environment Integrity API", which is yet another name (among many others) for DRM. It's Google-controlled DRM with another new euphemism.
Google has been by far the worst culprit when it comes to putting DRM in the Linux kernel. Maybe it's time to say goodbye to Google. If it's hard to use the Web without a Google-controlled browser (Chromium derivative or Google-funded Firefox), we might have to discard the Web, too. ⬆
Related/contextual items from the news:
Google's newest proposed web standard is... DRM? Over the weekend the Internet got wind of this proposal for a "Web Environment Integrity API. " The explainer is authored by four Googlers, including at least one person on Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" team, which is responding to the death of tracking cookies by building a user-tracking ad platform right into the browser.
The new proposal details "Web Environment Integrity," which would use what sounds like Trust Tokens to ensure that the client viewing a website is a human without revealing too much about them. Google suggests the system could be an alternative to captchas and other solutions that websites utilize to block bots, online game cheaters, and other malicious actors.
However, the GitHub page admits that servers could use the tokens to block visitors based on what they're using to access a site. The result could theoretically be DRM prohibiting ad blockers, extensions, or modified operating systems.
This therefore starts to slide the web toward a time in which only authorized, officially released browsers will be accepted by websites.
And since Chromium serves as the foundation of not just Google Chrome, but also Microsoft Edge, Brave, and a number of other browsers, WEI could have a broad effect on the web – if and when it gets deployed and adopted.
A working draft specification for a new browser API from Google has raised outcry from the technical community about ethics, trust and adding DRM to the internet.
The Web Environment Integrity API (WEI) is not a heavily promoted project - the documentation is only hosted on an employee's personal Github account, rather than an official repo - but there are signs that Google is actively working to build the feature into Chrome now.
"This means Google decides which browser is trustworthy on its own platform. I do not see how they can be expected to be impartial," he noted.
"On Windows, they would probably defer to Microsoft via the Windows Store, and on Mac, they would defer to Apple. So, we can expect that at least Edge and Safari are going to be trusted. Any other browser will be left to the good graces of those three companies."
Picalausa said it would not be possible for browser firms not to implement the specification if it was accepted. "Any browser choosing not to implement this would not be trusted and any website choosing to use this API could therefore reject users from those browsers. Google also has ways to drive adoptions by websites themselves," he pointed out.
"First, they can easily make all their properties depend on using these features, and not being able to use Google websites is a death sentence for most browsers already.
"Furthermore, they could try to mandate that sites that use Google Ads use this API as well, which makes sense since the first goal is to prevent fake ad clicks. That would quickly ensure that any browser not supporting the API would be doomed."
He said that it was possible that laws in the European Union would "not allow a few companies to have a huge amount of power in deciding which browsers are allowed and which are not. There is no doubt that attesters would be under a huge amount of pressure to be as fair as possible".
However, Picalausa added, "Unfortunately, legislative and judicial machineries tend to be slow and there is no saying how much damage will be done while governments and judges are examining this. If this is allowed to move forward, it will be a hard time for the open Web and might affect smaller vendors significantly."
A picture I had in mind about the topic of Web Environment Integrity.