Comment by philluminati@lemmy.ml on What can we do to keep the web open?

What can we do to keep the web open?

Shout-out to Librewolf as well (basically Firefox with better privacy focused configs).

People don’t care enough about using browsers that reduce Google’s influence on web standards (i.e. non chrome-based browsers)

IME, big momentous events are actually continuous transitions that we only notice in a drastic moment.

This whole chrome thing has been building to this for ages. So beyond using Firefox, there’s also some basic principles that need to be formulated and distributed as “it’s free because you’re the product” is now … not to mention breaking up monopolies.

And an alternate email service like ProtonMail.

They also have ProtonDrive as an alternative to Google Drive. Apple’s iCloud is also end-to-end encrypted now. pCloud is another popular option. There are a number of choices for secure cloud storage these days.

Web search is a bit more difficult. DuckDuckGo is heavily integrated with Bing. Brave Search is hit-or-miss. Yahoo is just a front-end for Bing.

If you need live document collaboration, you’re probably already in a setting where either Sharepoint or GSuite are mandated. If you’re not, BitAI may be worth looking into.

All great advice, but I personally cannot urge people towards pCloud. I have one of the permanent tiers, but I found the service frustratingly buggy and, when contacted, support was rude and unhelpful. There are so many little odd limitations on the pCloud file system it was frustrating. I also worry that their buy-once business model is not sustainable.

Sync.com provides an even more secure service (zero-knowledge across the board) with similar (better than US anyway) privacy protections in the host country (Canada) that has been, so far for 2 years of use, rock solid (I couldn’t go a week without pCloud farting out some error). The subscription model is affordable and generous and the customer-facing pages for sharing files are very professional looking (important to me, because I professionally share files and pCloud looked like a hobbyist page in this regard AND leaked private information).

EDIT: Regarding iCloud. Not only is iCloud end-to-end, but you may turn on zero-knowledge encryption now, as well (Advanced Data Protection I think is what they call it) so that Apple doesn’t even have the keys to decrypt your data, making it quite similar to sync.com now.

Kagi is also really nice. But it’s not free…

🤔 Who runs ProtonMail?

Swiss technology company that focuses on privacy products. Initially funded by a Swiss startup capital firm and now uses a subscription model. ProtonMail is not open source or non-profit, but the product they offer is privacy. Switzerland also has strict privacy laws and resists state-based information requests. Best option is to run one’s own email client server, but simple folks like me don’t have the skills to do so. (FWIW, I use ProtonMail and think it works great.)

I am confused by why everyone thinks this is a big threat?

What stops the FOSS community from just continuing to allow ad blockers and other webpage editing features?

If the web is DRM’d in a way that requires chrome or windows then it could be difficult to bypass.

I remember the days of, “sorry, you must use Internet Explorer to use this website” when visiting my bank.

I remember that government sites were the same way it was frustrating.

DRM is already applied for certain content in websites such as Netflix, etc, and it makes it waaaay harder to bypass.

For example, Netflix (and the others) use DRM to block Linux computers from higher quality content. Why? I guess “hackers” and “think of the children”. Truth is… content is already pirated from the second it gets released on any of these platforms… so they are not really fixing anything… I guess they really want you to use a tracking OS.

Imagine this kind of system but for an entire website. Big companies imposing their devices and software as the only way to access a website… which is really just HTML and Javascript files, entirely platform agnostic… but who cares? They are struggling for money so they are squeezing every little possibility.

You don’t need to “be smart” to switch to Linux. Linux for the most part ‘just works’ these days of you choose the ‘right’ distro.

Agreed but you do need to be willing to tinker a bit. Even ubuntu required a lot of tinkering to get working on my system. I’m all for getting people to switch, and it’s much easier than it was 15 years ago when I started, but for most people they’re not going to just install linux. We definitely are in the <1% of users.

If you have bleeding edge hardware, that can be a problem from time to time, but if I’m being honest, I haven’t seen any real issues since the early 00’s needed tweaking to work. To suggest that Windows is tweak free is disingenuous, and Apple is a walled garden that is designed to ‘just work’ but Apple expects their users to just buy a new device when something becomes mildly inconvenient to them.

Well, it all comes down to tastes and preferences, but Linux Mint is made to be a very easy transition for (ex-)Windows users. It works out of the box, looks intuitive and has great support on their forums. Give it a try and if you feel like you want to try out other distros later, it all gets easier once you are familiar with Linux overall.

And yes, what you mean is dual booting and Mint asks you on install if you want to choose that option and sets everything up for you.

Ubuntu or Linux mint are good options. There are other newbie friendly distros out there, but I only tried these 2.

Yes you can dual-boot. When you start your computer, it will show you a menu where you can choose between Linux or Windows.

Sounds ‘ominous’

I was trying to convey that there is no right or wrong answer to which distro to choose, but some distros are more advances than others, so if the most applicable distro is selected it should be fine. But I get what you’re saying.

Amazon too, Went freaking nuts trying to figure out why I couldnt watch any of my shit above like 180p quality on amazon. until I found out they intentionally and maliciously degrade the quality on non-windows machines.

How the fuck is that even legal?

This abomination is generally the answer to any DRM related fuckery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

It’s a big threat because once it’s easy to block unapproved browsers, lots of people will do it. Yeah, there will always be a few weirdos like us that don’t enable it, but just imagine when it’s your bank, your insurance company, your government, and most every linked-to page on Lemmy. You’ll be forced to use Chrome to interact with large parts of the internet then.

netflix on linux firefox comes to mind. Just changing the useragent shows that it’s not a technical problem.

I’m banking (ha) that most web dev is lazy and won’t change shit that isn’t broken. It’ll be YouTube mainly since Google hasn’t figured out how to stop uBlockO.

Most other websites are probably not worth it and the Internet is designed day one to route around damage. A whole bunch of Blogspam SEO sites banning Firefox is a win.

Otherwise they’re be a addon extensions for Firefox developed in a week probably to “fake” it.

I wouldn’t count on that. Web devs aren’t going to push for this, it’ll be the suits that have some dumb automated “security” tool tell them they need to enable it or they’ll get hacked.

There will always be a cat and mouse game where some people figure out clever ways around this, but I wouldn’t count on it being as easy as installing an addon. Sites could start requiring a specific attester that requires that you run their rootkit malware to spy on your entire OS and only supports a few popular OSes. Thanks to projects like TPM, your own hardware could be working against you.

As usual, Stallman predicted the world that large companies would like to drag us into: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Exactly right, gonna be some big corpo push that it has to get done because “1% of our userbase is getting around the ads, that’s 1% of our profit we need!!”. And as a web dev, sure I could say I refuse. and then get demoted, fired, and they’ll get someone else to do it anyway.

The saving grace is that this will be expensive to do, and Google has proven time and time again that their tech isn’t trustworthy or long-term to most companies. If this does get through, that’s how I’d pitch it to my company. Google gets ideas, gets bored of them, throws them away or changes them so drastically that we have to redo all the work anyway, so it’s not worth doing any time soon. A great case of this is AMP, and while there are some pages that did switch to AMP, the vast majority of sites didn’t bother with it. Not worth the investment. Granted this is different because its ads, and we should by no means rely on this and give up the fight.

First line in the sand is to say this goes against the web’s foundations directly and that Google is actively trying to monopolize the internet.

That’s a great way to push back internally. “Oh you know Google, always killing things. Why should we waste the effort? This’ll just end up on https://killedbygoogle.com/”

I guess, but somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of people already use ad blockers. It’s not a small segment of the population. Even more people use some sort of plugin.

I think it is more likely that certain sites require secure mode; just like today. I guess I could be wrong, and most sites will end up doing it. I still suspect there will be a work around; even if it is as complicated as a secure browser being run in a virtual machine and then AI removing the ads to show you the ‘clean’ version.

If those can’t be avoided then use a compatible browser for those functions and a free browser for anything else. It’s a pragmatic solution.

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What can we do to keep the web open?

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