I read this stuff and I feel super cynic about it. I feel like "no way, not on my watch!", and then I realize that all I can do is sign a petition, or send an email to a representative that has zero fucking clue what this means... Same reason it does not matter to my zoomer brother its contemporaneous TikTokers.
People DO-NOT-GIVE-A-SHIT. Because there are bigger problems, like "what the fuck am I going to pay the rent with tomorrow", and more entertaining spectacles, like watching a person pretend it's an NPC for 5 hours straight and give them money for it.
And I feel a lot of the people I have worked with are the same type of individual, used to realizing they are getting screwed sideways, addicted to complaining, but only as long as it's among a very select group of individuals sharing common interests.
It's the most draining type of revolution. Nothing ever gets done, fucks are handed left and right: DNS, JS-fiasco, web neutrality, browserland... And we always just kick the buck and revisit the good 'ol days on another thread further down the line, once no other rights are left be destroyed...
What is all these negative nonsense about "people don't give a shit" on every thread about this. We don't need every single person in the street to give a shit. We only need enough influence within the industry and regulatory to give a shit. And they are. We are all upset by this and upvoting it and companies and organizations are writing about it. Keep that up and push for other companies to reject it or for regulation to stop it.
You know what Google fears most? Being broken down. If they push for this, we can organize calls to our representatives and raise our concerns and call for regulations and/or breakdown of Google's anti competitive behavior.
Hah, I like this idea, "It appears your browser passes web environment integrity, please come back when it fails"... I'd love to see a similar thing for SafetyNet on Android.
Why not. There are countless job positions for UX-designer unicorns while almost every page will give you anti-UX pop-up. One more banner will not going to harm the page.
> We only need enough influence within the industry and regulatory to give a shit.
What exactly is this supposed to mean? All we have to do is control the government and the industry that we're complaining about, and we can win? They already have that. Doesn't that mean they already won?
> Keep that up and push for other companies to reject it or for regulation to stop it.
They are being paid to push in the opposite direction. You are paying to try to defeat them. Each of their victories brings them more money and influence, each of yours means you have to reset and construct an entirely new argument to defeat the same thing again, differently worded. The outcome is obvious.
And in this special case, Google needs no approval to take the web, because they bought Firefox and cooperate with Apple. There is no pressure that you can bring to a politician that will counteract the campaign funding, or access, or future employment, these awful companies can offer.
edit: This is a "why didn't the slaves all get together and end slavery" type argument. It's not cynical to resent the suggestion of the same tactics that have failed before so many times. Our problem is government, not any particular company.
> All we have to do is control the government and the industry that we're complaining about, and we can win? They already have that.
Nobody controls all of the industry or all of the government. Half the people on this site work in the industry, often in prominent companies in a position of influence. Many of them own a major stake in a prominent startup, or operate a community with a large number of users.
Legislators care about whatever they think voters care about, and use voters calling them as a proxy for this. Don't pretend this doesn't matter.
> They are being paid to push in the opposite direction. You are paying to try to defeat them. Each of their victories brings them more money and influence, each of yours means you have to reset and construct an entirely new argument to defeat the same thing again, differently worded. The outcome is obvious.
Every time they do something like this, another person gets pissed off enough to extricate the perpetrator's services from their life even if it means re-implementing some of them themselves, and then post what they used to do it on Github. Which makes it easier for the next person to do it.
Some of them even find a way to make a business out of it and make money. I know it's not a popular belief, but it's actually possible to build a sustainable business by giving customers what they want for a fair price and not screwing them over -- businesses may find that customers even prefer this.
We're not all connecting to AOL using AT&T Unix(R) on Itanium. Why not? Those companies had real power. How did they lose?
> This is a "why didn't the slaves all get together and end slavery" type argument.
Your argument is what, that no one should make any attempt to end slavery because the slavers have too much power?
No, you keep fighting until you win. Be creative, coordinate with like-minded people. This is not a community of powerless victims. There are people who hate this who have money and skill in surplus. It's not illegal to do something which is net negative for you but net positive for society purely out of altruism, or anger, because it's your life and you get to choose what you do.
Reallocate the time you spend advocating defeatism to building something which is a threat to the people attacking you.
Please don't do that. People with different ideas aren't shills - sometimes people disagree with you, see things that you don't or just understand the situation differently.
At the same time, astroturfing exists. It’s also incredibly frustrating how every time there’s a movement, people try to dampen its momentum by drawing attention to general apathy, a complete red herring for reasons explained in the GGP comment.
I'm actually heartened by the amount of public debate and pushback there has been already. Remember that this issue only came to the forefront about a week ago. You can't expect just to win overnight.
People do care, but there are steps to creating public pressure. The public needs to become aware of the issue, to learn and understand the technical aspects of it, and to organize opposition. This is not necessarily a quick process.
You can write to them, but I promise you: incoming mail basically gets circular-filed if it's addressed "To whom it may concern," and if you try to inconvenience an individual Googler by calling them out they'll eventually leave directions with the front desk team to circular-file their mail for them and all you're doing is inconveniencing someone in the mail room every morning.
Which, hey, if you think that's worth it, it's a free country and I can't tell you not to. Maybe you'll convince a front desk receptionist to petition the temp agency she works for to change companies.
Google maintains a physical address because Googlers sometimes order packages and it's a legal requirement so they can be served formal court papers. That's it.
There is something you can do. Becoming a privacy tool power user helps change the landscape of how people use and interact with tech.
My question reading, assuming it’s main purpose is preventing as blocking, this is whether my pinhole dns blocker would be affected. If the new standard is dns blockers for everyone that’s an improvement in the landscape, at a small cost to the users.
There is little adoption or support of privacy tools when there is no need for it and we trust our systems to be free and open, everyone is a tinfoil hat wearer until they aren’t and the boundaries have shifted. People should generally have better understanding of personal data protections, control over their services and the like but we are lazy until there is no other option but to take back control.
you are upset so.. empathy on that, first. Please consider that the pressure of the situation somehow escalates blame on exactly the people who are not doing this.
Consumer electronics users are not the ones who "vote" on the content. Closed-box computer systems with hierarchical, private and internal decision making, are arriving at decision points.
MSFT may have lost their web edge (and I'd argue that had more to do with Google legitimately out-maneuvering them by starting over on a new browser design from scratch than anything MSFT did), but in a sense they did "move on." Their stock value in the '90s when they got regulated was around $37; it's around $340 now.
They pivoted to cloud services and their server products still do robust business.
Not really "from scratch" though, Blink is a fork of WebKit. Sure, it's taken its own path since forking, but it's damn near impossible to start a browser from scratch these days (which is why ladybird is so impressive).
People DO-NOT-GIVE-A-SHIT. Because there are bigger problems, like "what the fuck am I going to pay the rent with tomorrow", and more entertaining spectacles, like watching a person pretend it's an NPC for 5 hours straight and give them money for it.
And I feel a lot of the people I have worked with are the same type of individual, used to realizing they are getting screwed sideways, addicted to complaining, but only as long as it's among a very select group of individuals sharing common interests.
It's the most draining type of revolution. Nothing ever gets done, fucks are handed left and right: DNS, JS-fiasco, web neutrality, browserland... And we always just kick the buck and revisit the good 'ol days on another thread further down the line, once no other rights are left be destroyed...
And yet, what am I going to do? reject the PR?