What can we do to keep the web open?
Don’t close the browser.
I’ve been running the entire internet in my browser for 20 years. If I ever close this window, the entire internet will explode.
Our saviour, the last bastion.
Hey could you press alt+F4 to make my internet faster please?
Kill google
Alphabet needs to be broken up, same as Microsoft and Apple and Amazon. The consolidation of tech into a few giant corporations that have a tremendous amount of power and hold a monopoly/duopoly is doing a lot of harm.
And Verizon, Comcast, and all the other large ISPs. Probably cell providers too.
Not that I like Verizon and Comcast but they are only regional problems. They don’t operate everywhere in the world.
In many countries, a lot of large ISPs are the inheritors of national monopolies and are not overly interested in global domination. They are shit, yes, but at a smaller scale. In this regard, they don’t really pose as a threat to the idea of open internet.
Of course the US ISPs have a special place in the system and shouldn’t completely be forgotten but they are very far from the global domination of Google et al.
But it probably won’t be, if we’re being honest.
That’s why we need to take matters into our own hands and refuse to use their services and support FOSS with all our efforts. The government ain’t gonna do shit, this is a DIY project to save the open internet.
Activism exists for a reason. This isn’t a DIY project, this is one that needs people to be more vocal and active so that governments do something about it.
The EU didn’t start regulating apple & co because it woke up one day and felt like doing it, it did so because activists and people pressured them to do so or joined the world of politics to fix these issues.
The solution isn’t to tackle it individually, that’s how the corporations win, it’s to get politically involved in whichever way we can and want to and tackle it as a group.
I’m not saying to tackle it individually, I’m saying to tackle it independently. As in independent groups that are not part of any government or corporation.
Any type of activism which is enacted through the channels of government and/or business is inherently meaningless in the grand scheme. You can move a few pieces around the board and get a small concession, but the wealthy will always find a way to outmanuever and come out on top. The game is rigged, and the fact that most well meaning people spend all of their activist energy playing into this rigged game is a tremendous waste.
It’s necessary to quit the game entirely and start a new game. Which entails sustainable, self-sufficient, non-capitalist communities and structures. Eventually political interaction with established power structures will be necessary, but right now the average person has zero leverage. In order to have leverage, you need to not be working for the people you are trying to negotiate with, no?
The problem with activism is that it puts duct tape over leaking pipes, but never goes down to the basement and turns off the water pressure. It’s a mental treadmill that drains revolutionary energy from people without producing meaningful change.
Don’t get me wrong, you should definitely advocate for institutions to be better, it’s a net positive (probably). But my point is that this whole paradigm needs to be disrupted, and activism is like mental masturbation for those who claim to want real change, but are uncomfortable with the drastic actions necessary to enact such change.
Absolutely. Nothing should be above the rest. And we should know exactly what they are lobbying for “bribing”
Just use Firefox
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)
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.
Another example is Microsoft’s Bing AI, which will only work in Edge. I tried it in Firefox and just changing the user agent header made it fully functional, thus showing that it was deliberately nerfed for other browsers. It wouldn’t be too hard to convince people to use an extension to spoof chrome to access non-functional web sites, though in practice any site that accepts Google’s DRM is dead to me.
Obligatory fuck Google and Microsoft. I wish I were smart enough to switch to Linux.
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.
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.
Do you know which is a good starter version?
I’m really tired of Windows and Microsoft’s intrusive bullshit. I’ll probably keep Windows 10 on my current PC, but I really think it’s time to move on whenever I’m ready for a new rig in the future.
I think there’s even a way to run it along with Windows, isn’t it? Like you can boot into it instead of Windows? Just thinking I could start learning how to use it.
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.
Ubuntu has gotten a reputation for doing intrusive bullshit too, so I wouldn’t recommend that to someone looking to get away from it.
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.
Sweet, thanks so much. I’m at a work conference, so I’m bookmarking this so I can try it first thing when I get home
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.
Yeah, but you can’t tell me that the levels of tweaking are the same.
For example. I have never had to go in and modify conf files for nvidia drivers on Windows to be able to run basic games. My ubuntu install? Definitely had to.
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?
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.
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: 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 killedbygoogle.com"
That’s how I’d approach it. All of their programs are just hell to maintain, and one that actively blocks users will be worse. Even simple things like Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics for some reason still need someone touching the code at least once a year
netflix on linux firefox comes to mind. Just changing the useragent shows that it’s not a technical problem.
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.
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 options 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.
For web search, I always first try (SearXNG)[searx.space], but if I dont find what I need, I use startpage.com (private frontend for google.com)
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 has strict privacy laws, and it 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.)
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).
Stop supporting those who intend to close it.
I just want remind everyone that Windows 11 requires your computer to ship with TPM2.0 enabled. This will complete the circuit meaning remote streaming websites can ensure you don’t have DRM on your machine.
That will be nice for them.
What about pirated win 11? Is it possible to remove the token?
If you don’t have a valid token generated by the hardware device on your machine, the website can just refuse to serve you.
A hacked copy of windows 11 may not be able to boot soon.
As many people as people possible need to use Firefox.
Twice in the past few months I came across a site that would not work with Firefox. The other time it actually did work, but said that it recommends chrome to function properly.
The first one was a local government form that would not let me select boxes, but chrome worked without any problems.
The second was some 3d game or something like that.
Could you maybe still go back and find those links? I use FF for well over 10 years now. And I would say, the amount of websites that do not work, are less than one a year. The only reason are really bleeding edge css filter. Video, JS, and HTML is nearly Browser agnostic by this time. I would love to see those non working firefox websites everybody always talks about.
They actively prohibit to use their website with FF. When I look at it in Chromium (only Chrome and Chromium are allowed. No Edge, No Safari, …) I can not see anything why it should not work. Drag and Drop an Image into a dropzone.js container is no crazy technology. Imgur does it every day. Do you know why they think it would not work in FF? It is just a translation service. I think this is not a good example, as it more seems like they do not want to support webkit and optimized it only for chrome, but their product does not seems to crazy for FF.
I 
agree and I don’t like it either (I use Firefox as my daily driver). However I occasionally work as a translator and the competing CATs are inferior. So I have installed Chromium just for this one website.