Note of amusement: The GitHub issues tracker for that proposal got swamped with tickets either mocking this crap or denouncing it for what it is, this morning the person who seems to be the head of the project closed all those tickets and published this blog post, in essence saying "Shut up with your ethical considerations, give us a hand in putting up this electric fence around the web". Of course that didn't stop it.

Also somebody pointed out this gem in the proposal, quoted here:

6.2. Privacy considerations

Todo

Quick edit: This comment on one of the closed tickets points out the contact information of the Antitrust authorities of both US and EU, i think i'm gonna drop the EU folks a note

Edit: And they disabled commenting on the issues tracker

This is why we need Firefox.

And Firefox needs to be a market that can't be ignored.

THIS IS NOT (just) ABOUT GOOGLE

Currently, attestation and "trusted computing" are already a thing, the main "sources of trust" are:

• Microsoft
• Apple
• Smartphone manufacturers
• Google
• Third party attestators

This is already going on, you need a Microsoft signed stub to boot anything other than Windows on a PC, you need Apple's blessing to boot anything on a Mac, your smartphone manufacturer decides whether you can unlock it and lose attestation, all of Microsoft, Apple and Google run app attestation through their app stores, several governments and companies run attestation software on their company hardware, and so on.

This is the next logical step, to add "web app" attestation, since the previous ones had barely any pushback, and even fanboys of walled gardens cheering them up.

PS: Somewhat ironically, Google's Play Store attestation is one of the weaker ones, just look at Apple's and the list of stuff they collect from the user's device to "attest" it for any app.

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It's time for Alphabet to be broken up into separate letters.

The number of people protesting against them in their "Issues" page is amazing. The devs have now blocked the creation of new issue tickets or of comments in existing ones.

It's funny how in the "explainer" they present this as something done for the "user", when it's clearly not developed for the "user". I wouldn't accept something like this even if it was developed by some government – even less by Google.

I have just reported their repository to GitHub as malware, as an act of protest, since they closed the possibility of submitting issues or commenting.

Give me Firefox or give me death.

Ad blockers are my best disability accommodation. The things they do with ads to capture attention f with my brain. I'm really going to struggle if this happens. And I'm dependent on the internet for so many things, from groceries to prescriptions to people.

That's one way to kill the WWW.

I'm a non-techie and don't understand half of this, but from what I do understand, this is a goddamn nightmare. The world is seriously going to shit.

This is a total affront to the ethos of the web and everyone involved in drafting this awful proposal should be publicly shamed. Stick sandwich boards on each of them saying "I tried to build the Torment Nexus", chain them together and march them through the streets while ringing a bell and chanting "shame".

This is nothing less than a brazen attempt at total control of the primary large-scale communication mechanism of humanity.

This is so silly. There is no technical solution to trust. What if Russia or China want to run a bit farm? Or the US goverbment? Are you not going to trust their signatures, and face legal action i their markets? This stuff is so stupid, just be honest that you want people to watch your ads. Than we can all refuse and move on with our lives.

Well good thing they have a company slogan of do no evil...... Oh wait.

Yep, that sounds like a very Mega-Corp thing to do.

OTOH, this will create a massive "in" group, and a much smaller "out" group. It almost formalizes the Indie Web, which would take us back to the early 90's, but with better bandwidth. I'd be into that.

I just had to change my domain name because Google wouldn't stop blocking my personal server webpage for being a "phishing" website, there was no way it could be interpreted in that way at all and it didn't matter, my personal server apps were basically blocked on 80% of browsers.

Alright, I'm kinda slow today, so tell me if I got it right: We, the users, will be "kindly asked" to get one thingamabob signature/identifier of "integrity", so websites "know" whether we're good or bad guys?

Can someone explain to me how this is different to the trust system used by SSL Certificates?

Ugh. DRM. I freaking hate DRM. I "buy" a book from Amazon and it's all DRMed. I like the Kindle app so I keep buying there. But when I can I buy physical books at a LBS