Yesterday, the sentiment on Google's early proposal was "company breakups start to make a lot of sense", "Go f yourself, Google", "It's maddening and saddening", "[the people involved] reputations are fully gone from this".
Today it turns out Apple not only proposed but implemented and shipped the actual feature last year. "It could be an interesting opportunity to reboot a few long-lost dreams". "I kind of get both sides here". "I guess I personally come down to leaving this turned on in Safari for now, and seeing what happens". Granted, the overall sentiment is still negative but the difference in tone is stark. The reality distortion field is alive and well, folks.
Probably not the RDF but rather that Google is famously bottoms-up driven, they're asking for feedback in an open forum, and the proposal is by individuals who are responding as individuals. One of them even posted to Hacker News. That unfortunately incentivizes bullying behavior by people who don't like it and hope that if they're nasty enough, the individuals in question will give up.
Apple has no time for any of that. They consider, they plan, they act. You never learn the identities of anyone involved, they don't generally ask for feedback, they often don't even give the justifications for their plans, and squishy tech sentimentalities are considered irrelevant compared to consumer UX. Getting mad at what Apple does on some web forum is no more useful than getting mad at a brick wall.
There are reasons why the "faceless corporation" is a cliché, after all. It's a deliberate policy designed to protect employees.
It does in these cases protect employees, but that's not the design. It's designed to avoid accountability. If a company decides to illegally dump pollution into the ocean or bribe a foreign regime, they by no means want the executives who made those decisions to be easily identifiable. Companies don't go to jail.
This is not true. Remember iCloud scanning for CSAM? Even though Apple was simply creating a process to do what everyone else (GDrive, OneDrive) was already doing, only with MORE privacy protections, they scrapped the entire thing after significant backlash.
Consumer voice is powerful. It shouldn't be underestimated.
It's the strangest thing. On any other platform, people want freedom. They don't want MS to force them to use Edge. They don't want websites to force them to use Chrome, etc.
With Apple, it's the opposite. Freedom to install third party app? That would be dangerous! Freedom to use iMessage in the browser? That just doesn't make sense! Freedom to use third-party browsers on iOS? I guess most people just don't care about that one.
It's just striking that for every other company, lock-in is bad. But for Apple, lock-in is actively evangelized by the user base.
I think most of their users are just happy with the way things are and don’t want any changes that might screw things up.
Overall they trust Apple to take care of things - that’s why they bought Apple stuff in the first place - and feel that anything that takes control from Apple and could prevent Apple from doing its job, would be bad for them.
It’s really not the same intention or implementation.
We should also consider that Apple’s solution is a way to distinguish between human vs. Non human users on an Apple device. It doesn’t allow a service to randomly lockout browsers and/or OS (which Google’s proposal does), just that if you’re already on your Apple device, you don’t have to do a “verify I’m a human” captcha.
Totally agreed. Apple's marketing is simply the best. Google on the other hand, repeatedly let its reputation erode by a loud minority of Google haters without doing any PR to control the narrative. As if they still believe that one echo of "don't be evil" could still reverberate after twenty years.
Yup -- you see this same effect on articles about Apple's draconian OS policies.
When Microsoft bundled IE with Windows that was terrible. But Apple bundling Safari and locking out competing browsers? That's just what's best for the customer.
The difference can probably be explained by nobody having any idea that Apple already implemented a version of this.
And on top of that, Google's reputation of brutal power grabs on the web may make a difference in tone.
Importantly though, we shouldn't frame this as Apple vs Google. I can ensure you that both companies absolutely hate the open web and open computing in general.
Apple is big but insular. I never bought any Apple device so I never had Safari (*) and any attestation affecting Apple's customers didn't affect me. Web sites could harass them but not everybody else. Google is a different beast. Their browser engine can't run on iOS but it runs on Macs and on every other major OS.
(*) there was a Safari for Windows in the early days of the iPhone. It had a Mac UI which was horrible to look at inside Windows. Maybe it was the time Jobs thought web sites were the way to go for the iPhone. Then he realized that an app store would make a lot of money. Nobody gets everything right all the times.
Apple released Safari on Windows when a majority of Windows users were still using IE7. It was a genuine play for a pie of the Windows browser market and its search revenue. It had nothing to do with web apps. When it happened, Jobs positioned its release as a way to make Safari even better, since more people would use it and report issues and bugs.
As the "kind of get both sides" person I come to defend my honour. Honestly I see both (the apple implementation and the google about-to-be as pretty much the same thing just going about it in Apple- and Google- style.
It's not a fan boy thing (and I would hate to be the guy whose github was filled with anger yesterday - it's not his problem, and he should be left alone).
It's just a marker on the journey - we know the rough destination.
(Also Insuspect the second time you hear bad news the community has had time to adjust - FU is usually a first time emotional reaction. Wow I really am into "see the good in both sides". )
Apple makes money by selling goods and services. Google is in the business of targeted advertising. So they have diametrically opposed incentives wrt privacy.
point taken, but as the blog post here and many other comments have pointed out, there is a very sharp qualitative difference between just-Apple and Apple+Google doing this. Apple alone has a minority market share but together they cover enough of the market that many websites would be tempted to only allow connections from trusted clients.
This might be where the internet really gets forked, as it's been predicted over and over since the '90s.
On one side, we'll have a "clean", authority-sanctioned "corpweb", where everyone is ID'ed to the wazoo; on the other, a more casual "greynet" galaxy of porn and decentralized communities will likely emerge, once all tinkerers get pushed out of corpnet. It could be an interesting opportunity to reboot a few long-lost dreams.
IMO we've had a version of this fork for several years now, though it was more at the social layer. I've imagined it as a social super-structure of the internet, basically a bubble that represents "society". Microversions of it have existed since the 90's but really came to fruition with the rise of social media (myspace, facebook, twitter, etc). I don't think it's a coincidence that "cancel culture" came soon after, because once you have a virtualized public sphere, it's now a matter of deciding who/what belongs.
It reminds me of the "cozy web" concept, which is defined as walled gardens with community gatekeepers, such as group chats. Small bubbles where you feel safe and not exposed to outside trolls, corporate or advertisers.
Internet anarchists getting excited about the prospect of forking the Internet feels a lot like when a lot of preppers got excited about the potential breakdown of society when Covid hit.
“Finally I can put all my skills to the test, which people have been teasing me about for so long.”
In both cases, this attitude has the problem that they ignore the vast majority of people who would suffer under the new order. Very few people would find their way out of the corporate walled gardens and into the free information superhighway.
> Internet anarchists getting excited about the prospect of forking the Internet feels a lot like when a lot of preppies got excited about the potential breakdown of society when Covid hit.
> “Finally I can put all my skills to the test, which people have been teasing me about for so long.”
Veering offtopic a little, but your comment reminded me, hilariously, that after Stay-At-Home was mandated, my older, "prepper" friends and acquaintances were generally the first to crack and start complaining on Facebook about unfair it was that they were expected to just stay home in their bunkers and not go to bars and shop for their khakis. So much for the rugged self-reliance they loved to crow about!
I can imagine the Internet Anarchists behaving the same way. They'll be, in reality, the first to sign up for the AmazoGoogoMetaAppleInternet so they can keep posting to Social Media and doing their online shopping.
It's a bit sad that a "daytime hacker, night time musician" from Sweden sees "internet anarchists" as something of a slur. I guess punk really is dead.
Besides, it's not about being excited as much as trying to find silver linings in a rapidly deteriorating environment.
I read "preppies" as something very different from what you intended, at first, and was really confused, but also got some really funny mental images out of it.
Popped-collar-lacoste-polo madras-shorts-wearing dudes whose only survival skills are knot-tying, trying to get by in the apocalypse. LOL.
Story idea: This will probably result in the "corpweb" not being archived and thus will be forgotten in the next centuries (given we'll not hit a filter), while the "greynet" will survive the ages and only the vague echoes of the "corpweb" will be preserved through it. Digital archaeologists will struggle to uncover the "secrets" of the lost wisdom hidden in the "corpweb".
Probably already written by someone, but it fits, I guess.
The problem I have with this web attestation concept generally is that I really want it _inside_ my shiny SSO-everywhere-Zero-Trust-at-the-edge-mTLS-everywhere business network.
I also kind of want it in the public-cloud-meets-private-use home environment (that is, my Cloudflare Access tunnels and MS365 business tenant I use for private stuff).
I don’t want it to touch my personal browsing experience or in any way involved in my personal-use browser environments.
These are effectively opposed desires at this point, and it’s a cat-out-of-the-bag technology.
The fundamental problem with current remote attestation schemes is the corporate-owned attestation key baked in at the factory [0]. This allows the manufacturer to create a known class of attestation keys that correspond to their physical devices, which is what prevents a user from just generating mock attestations when needed.
If manufacturers were prohibited from creating these privileged keys [1], then the uniform-corporate-control attestation fears would mostly vanish, while your use cases would remain.
A business looking to secure employee devices could record the attestation key of each laptop in their fleet. Cloud host auditors could do the same thing to all their hardware. Whereas arbitrary banks couldn't demand that your hardware betray what software you're running, since they'd have no way of tying the attestation key to a known instance of hardware.
(The intuition here is similar to secure boot, and what is required for good user-empowering secure boot versus evil corporate-empowering secure boot. Because they're roughly duals.)
[0] actually it's something like a chained corporate signing key that signs any attestation key generated on the hardware, but same effect.
[1] or if the user could import/export any on-chip attestation keys via a suitable maintenance mode. Exporting would need a significant delay of sitting in maintenance mode to protect against evil maid attacks and the like.
I can also imagine an IPv7 with ephemeral addresses based on private keys (like on yggdrasil), and a way for the browser to remember keys if wanted by the user. Authenticate sessions with the "IP address".
You can make devices around being unbreachable and self-attesting. Go build a SBC and sink in a block of epoxy.
But they also want the appeal of the open, hackable world-- cheap kit that's advancing quickly, commodity technology and infrastructure.
I am actually sort of disappointed we never ended up with a world of special-purpose sealed devices-- put a proper payment terminal on everyone's desk instead of trusting nobody slapped a keylogger into your browser while you're typing card numbers, for example.
If that happens, governments will just order ISPs and mobile carriers to block greynet access.
As cool as 90's cyberpunk dreams are, to me they always seem to ignore the physical reality that your connection to "the net" always has to go through the chokepoint of an ISP, and that this ultimately is an indissoluble barrier on just how anti-establishment the internet can ultimately be.
There are already a lot of community driven meshed networks all over the world.
It doesn't really take over because so far we are pretty much free to do what we want from our ISP connection. Some countries impose dns censorship but appart from the few dictatures that run their great firewall, it is light censorships as they let people query the DNS server they want.
yep, I think it is a miracle that we can still reach almost any IP from any other one. Only a matter of time until this goes away imo. I‘m already increasingly forced to bounce around VPNs to access websites from different countries
... until your phone and OS web browser will refuse to connect to the "greynet", or that just attempting to do so has you categorized as being a potential outlaw.
That already exists in some form today, but you’d regardless have to use an attested device to be able to partake in basic societal functions such as filing taxes, logging into your bank account, and so on.
But the question is, who and what is going to be allowed to connect to the corpweb.
Running an adblocker? Sorry. Using a non-Chromium based browser? Nuh-uh. Running an old machine with no TPM? Sucks to be you. Running a Linux distribution? Tough luck.
Sure, you can have fun with your free decentralized web. But at the end of the day even tinkerers have to log into their gov website to pay their taxes.
You can compartmentalize such activities to a dedicated device, much like one may need a Windows device for certain software or an Android device for features in banking apps that aren't available on the website.
> on the other, a more casual "greynet" galaxy of porn and decentralized communities will likely emerge, once all tinkerers get pushed out of corpnet.
The entire internet is "corpnet." For this fantasy freezone to happen, actual alternative physical networks would have to be built, the parts that those networks require will have to be sold to consumers without the hardware being locked down or nerfed, and if authorities do not approve of these networks, they'll have to be invisible.
I don't see a technical answer to that. Sneakernets maybe, but dogs can smell hard drives. Certainly not anything wireless, unless there's some sort of geometric arrangement or algorithm that allows them to hide their locations in other signals.
I'm of the clearly minority opinion that the people who run totalitarian governments are neither stupid nor weak. I also believe that the fantasy that there's always going to be an answer (that always looks like teen hackers dressed up like 90s punks in a Gibson Blade Runner urbanscape theme park) is a drug that allows people to take our real situation less seriously.
> actual alternative physical networks would have to be built
I'd say this is an unfounded assumption. Given a choice of two massive changes that I could snap my fingers and will into existence:
1. Grassroots community and individual-run mesh networks of individual dwellings, not controlled by corporate entities, running IP/DNS/HTTPS and other naive protocols already in widespread use.
2. The same corporate-controlled physical Internet we have right now, but with widespread use of protocols that allow for decentralized permissionless identities (nyms), independent of the centrally-adminstered IP/DNS namespaces. Most traffic going to individually-run VPSs or consumer connections.
I would choose #2 in a heartbeat. The only reason I would see that we might need #1 is because #2 failed to gain a critical mass before the ISPs clamped down on non-corporate-endpoint traffic while it still only affects a minority of users. It's also not clear how the networks in #1 wouldn't just borg back up into corporate Ma Dell, or at the very least succumb to government regulation (each a different avenue for authoritarianism).
Can the non-authority web be counter-attestation? That is if your attestation comes back as valid you can't visit the "cool kids" web? If there were sufficiently interesting content, maybe it could break attestation.
Even if you run a hobby site it's way easier to do so with attestation. Especially if that attestation will allow you to uniquely identify the device making a request. It will end DDOS and make bans much stickier than they are today making all sorts of problematic content easier to deal with.
IMHO, there won't be a split like this if attestation or similar proposals come to pass. Simply put the number of problems that come with anonymous users dwarf whatever legitimate benefits that anonymity provides. Everyone will build sites using it because of the problems they solve. And they will ignore the segment that refuses to use them because that segment will be small and a significant chunk of them will use that anonymity to do bad things you don't want on your site.
Maybe I'm wrong but Web Attestation will also be a death knell for Linux devices (not Android/Chrome OS) as far as being able to use them as equal clients to use the Web goes. They're simply too diverse and 'hackable' as a plotform for remote attestation to work reliably and thus they'll be excluded altogether (except a few 'blessed' distros that will then become industry controlled, and not Linux in spirit anymore).
So far, Private Access Tokens are not widely adopted so you can get a feel for the potential Linux experience by browsing the web with iCloud Private Relay enabled. This flags almost every website's anti-spam classifiers, and you end up having to do 3-5 captchas to access anything protected by one. Wikipedia also blocks you from editing: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_iCloud_Private_Re....
Playing devils advocate: how else do you prevent spam without requiring a login on every single web page? Especially in the world of AI-powered spam that can be indistinguishable from humans and automated at scale and can solve captchas.
Spam destroys everything. The open web has been at war with it forever, and soon it will win just like it has won in every other domain that is not completely locked down.
I love the fediverse but I fully expect it be destroyed by spam as soon as it gets big and influential enough to be a juicy target.
The Internet is a dark forest. The future is private encrypted networks, private forums, etc.
I slightly suspect that the only platforms that will actually implement Web Attestation are the ones I'm trying to remove myself from, so I secretly[1] hope this is the catalyst I need to stop going on crappy social networks and video platforms.
I apparently don't have the will power to stop going on these sites so maybe stopping me loading content from the other side is exactly what I need.
[1] Not so secretly now I've mentioned it here I suppose.
If this happens, I expect the majority of Windows and Android devices to stop working too. They are also a diverse and hackable platform that is apparently insufficient for a future where I have to attest to owning certain hardware.
> except a few 'blessed' distros that will then become industry controlled, and not Linux in spirit anymore
You know, I hear this a lot but seldom hear the details of how it might happen. Industry-controlled UNIX is the reason Linux exists - if you take the spirit away from Linux, it gets forked into another community project. Unless you're stripping it of it's GPL license, Linux will be "Linux in Spirit" until it stops being used altogether.
New Android phones have hardware-backed SafetyNet, new Windows devices have Trusted Boot (not to be confused with Secure Boot).
Both can and will be used to attest the browser environment. Linux devices will get hit (unless I guess we see locked down signed kernels, Chromebook-like things).
If people can't use their prefered Linux distros to do banking, or can't connect to social networks,email providers, music streaming services and so on this will mean practically they are forced to switch distros. Which would eventually add more control power to some Distros to what goes into development and what not.
You can see systemd and it's history about how it hold power.
> Industry-controlled UNIX is the reason Linux exists
Linux only exists because it is free and it runs free apps for every category of keyboard-driven task a typical user would want.
The answer to my question of how a predator like IBM is going to take out the other non-RHEL based distros is starting to come into focus. This should help Ubuntu get the Mint monkey off its back too.
I assume that IT departments in most orgs will just swap those attestation tokens for a generic "ACME Corp" token at the network layer. And I expect that home routers will give us that option as well.
> That said, it's not as dangerous as the Google proposal, simply because Safari isn't the dominant browser. Right now, Safari has around 20% market share in browsers (25% on mobile, and 15% on desktop), while Chrome is comfortably above 60% everywhere, with Chromium more generally (Brave, Edge, Opera, Samsung Internet, etc) about 10% above that.
I don't agree, in fact I think it's equally as bad for Apple to do it as Google. Apple has completely let us down. If Google forced it through but Apple refused, it would never be practical to enforce it. The numbers may not be as high, but they're plenty high enough that you couldn't cut all iDevices out. Apple and Google and Microsoft are the only three that really matter.
> If Google forced it through but Apple refused, it would never be practical to enforce it. The numbers may not be as high, but they're plenty high enough that you couldn't cut all iDevices out.
Yes. Up until now, the amount of Google bullshit that Safari has saved us all from is _staggering._ It is unfortunate that this won't be another catastrophe deflected.
This is also why I'm concerned about legislation requiring Apple to open up sideloading onto their devices. As much as I love the idea of people having control over their own systems, in practice I'm afraid that it's just going to be the final nail that solidifies Google's complete control over the web all the way out to the client.
While I don't even get your point, most people aren't going to sideload anything. Just like pretty much no one sideloads anything on their Android phone. It's irrelevant.
You should meet my web developer colleagues. They consistently insist that I should switch from Firefox to Chrome any time I point out that something they implemented was not cross-browser compatible. Never once have anyone said that I should switch to Safari to get something to work. I think that speaks volumes.
I guess that's only for Safari, but not Chrome if you have that installed as well? Also, what if you never signed into your iCloud account? Is it impossible to disable?
The ability to disable this is entirely irrelevant. If Chrome ships WEI the various Chromium forks will also let you disable it, even if Chrome doesn't. Or you can use Firefox.
The problem is when your bank, tax office or favorite streaming service starts requiring this to let you use their services. The problem is the ability for large fraction of casual users to have this at all.
I actually noticed this (and considered blogging to myself about it) but in practice the only reason why this was not seen as an issue (IMO) is because it being implemented only on Apple platforms meant that there was no possible way you could really limit your services using it. It was just an additional thing people could use as another signal.
However, the Google proposal is explicitly concerned with pushing this as an always-on feature.
> However, a holdback also has significant drawbacks. In our use cases and capabilities survey, we have identified a number of critical use cases for deterministic platform integrity attestation. These use cases currently rely on client fingerprinting. A deterministic but limited-entropy attestation would obviate the need for invasive fingerprinting here, and has the potential to usher in more privacy-positive practices in the long-term.
All Apple implementing it ahead of time is proof of is that anyone hoping Apple will save us is naive.
> A deterministic but limited-entropy attestation would obviate the need for invasive fingerprinting here, and has the potential to usher in more privacy-positive practices in the long-term.
In reality: an attestation will be used along with fingerprinting.
This feels like such a juicy and divisive area to me. There are an immense number of use cases where we'd like to know we're talking to a 'trusted' hardware and software stack on the web. For many years now, we have just assumed there is little to no trust in the stack, and architected and built accordingly. It adds an amazing amount of complexity and cost, limits features, and makes everything way, way harder than if you could assume a trusted stack.
At the same time, as is being pointed out quite vocally right now, 'trusted' is a very, very difficult concept when large tech monopolies are involved.
On the one hand, it's difficult because there are only a few companies in the world that can field large tech teams that deal with persistent threat actors, and therefore, it would be very nice to be able to trust the security promises made. And, if those promises are trustworthy, they are better promises than any individual can make for their own software and platfoms.
On the other hand, if you're a hacker (in the platonic sense), 'trusted' immediately codes to 'monopoly-backed', along with 'probably back-doored by a local government agency' and we head one more step down the primrose path of control, lack of innovation and finally perhaps a fascistic technology future controlled by a few players.
Ultimately, I think the solution here can only be successful if it involves a trustable, open hardware certification technology that's not registry based, e.g. can create strong local proofs that are independently verifiable. There are a few tech companies I know of working on this on the silicon side, but it's a very difficult problem, and I'm not clear if there's really enough demand to make them viable right now.
I guess I personally come down to leaving this turned on in Safari for now, and seeing what happens over the next year or two.
For me it is about for whom the supposed "trust" or "security" is offered: DRM-tech is discussed using these terms, but the goal is to afford trust to the developer or content owner, not the user.
In practice "trusted Android" means Android shipped with Google adware and spyware (and possibly much more vendor-specific bloatware) which you can't remove. One can clearly see that it might not really be about trust..
If you don't want to be part of "State" society, then you communicate peer-to-peer with your friends. You have to choose whether you want the benefits of the State system and if it is worth the cost.
The problem with most of these systems is they can never cope with any edge cases. This means it works fine for 99% of the population but the other 1% can get stuffed.
It would be like having a robot deny you access to the office after work hours even though you only need to grab your car keys that you forgot. The system is designed to be secure so you can't talk your way past a robot. If it was a human, it would be much easier to reason with them (normally!) and find a solution that works.
Techies gonna tech though. "If there was a problem yo I'll solve it, check out my tech while the DJ revolves it."
> If it was a human, it would be much easier to reason with them (normally!) and find a solution that works.
The Internet has shown that if you drive down the cost of interacting with this human gatekeeper to zero (you can be anywhere in the world rather than a specific place and time), social engineering attacks inevitably result. That's how we get hackers getting into your bank accounts just because they are eloquent and they make a great case reasoning with the human gatekeeper.
Another problem is what is the actual root of the attestation? If it was the means to say, "yes this is a real person" it might be useful but this is simply system attestation so no real way of knowing whether it would stop bad actors from doing bad stuff and whether it would be misunderstood and misused like many other systems (CORs anyone?)
The logical conclusion of this system is "if you have a legit system, you are legit; if you don't you aren't".
Readit News
Today it turns out Apple not only proposed but implemented and shipped the actual feature last year. "It could be an interesting opportunity to reboot a few long-lost dreams". "I kind of get both sides here". "I guess I personally come down to leaving this turned on in Safari for now, and seeing what happens". Granted, the overall sentiment is still negative but the difference in tone is stark. The reality distortion field is alive and well, folks.
Apple has no time for any of that. They consider, they plan, they act. You never learn the identities of anyone involved, they don't generally ask for feedback, they often don't even give the justifications for their plans, and squishy tech sentimentalities are considered irrelevant compared to consumer UX. Getting mad at what Apple does on some web forum is no more useful than getting mad at a brick wall.
There are reasons why the "faceless corporation" is a cliché, after all. It's a deliberate policy designed to protect employees.
Consumer voice is powerful. It shouldn't be underestimated.
With Apple, it's the opposite. Freedom to install third party app? That would be dangerous! Freedom to use iMessage in the browser? That just doesn't make sense! Freedom to use third-party browsers on iOS? I guess most people just don't care about that one.
It's just striking that for every other company, lock-in is bad. But for Apple, lock-in is actively evangelized by the user base.
Overall they trust Apple to take care of things - that’s why they bought Apple stuff in the first place - and feel that anything that takes control from Apple and could prevent Apple from doing its job, would be bad for them.
Dead Comment
We should also consider that Apple’s solution is a way to distinguish between human vs. Non human users on an Apple device. It doesn’t allow a service to randomly lockout browsers and/or OS (which Google’s proposal does), just that if you’re already on your Apple device, you don’t have to do a “verify I’m a human” captcha.
cf. https://developer.apple.com/wwdc22/10077
translation: loud minority of people who has a clue what Google really does
When Microsoft bundled IE with Windows that was terrible. But Apple bundling Safari and locking out competing browsers? That's just what's best for the customer.
Microsoft was a monopolist (the government went after them for misuse of their monopoly power).
> Apple bundling Safari and locking out competing browsers? That's just what's best for the customer.
I'm not sure how common that sentiment is, but no sane person would argue that Apple has a monopoly on basically anything.
And on top of that, Google's reputation of brutal power grabs on the web may make a difference in tone.
Importantly though, we shouldn't frame this as Apple vs Google. I can ensure you that both companies absolutely hate the open web and open computing in general.
If Google says it is to prove to advertisers that a human is seeing their ads, trust them at their word, with all the implication it entails.
2) Apple users being willing to sell themselves down the drain is nothing new.
However, this is shit irrespective of who does it. Period.
Obligatory repost of "The Right to Read": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
(*) there was a Safari for Windows in the early days of the iPhone. It had a Mac UI which was horrible to look at inside Windows. Maybe it was the time Jobs thought web sites were the way to go for the iPhone. Then he realized that an app store would make a lot of money. Nobody gets everything right all the times.
It's not a fan boy thing (and I would hate to be the guy whose github was filled with anger yesterday - it's not his problem, and he should be left alone).
It's just a marker on the journey - we know the rough destination.
(Also Insuspect the second time you hear bad news the community has had time to adjust - FU is usually a first time emotional reaction. Wow I really am into "see the good in both sides". )
Who should we get behind? Stallman?
You?
All the startup CEOs whose business was based on low interest?
Where you planning on going? Mars? There’s only Earth.
Apple makes hardware people like and happens to interoperate with the web.
Google wants us believe it is the web.
I can do weird computer science with a MacBook and no Google. Can’t without a MacBook.
They are vastly different companies and the discourse is vastly different. Shock. Awe.
Hence the rather different reaction when Google proposes something similar (and worse) on top of its 70% market share.
summer spectacles have been applied: e.g. barbieheimer and women's soccer world cup
I wonder what else
On one side, we'll have a "clean", authority-sanctioned "corpweb", where everyone is ID'ed to the wazoo; on the other, a more casual "greynet" galaxy of porn and decentralized communities will likely emerge, once all tinkerers get pushed out of corpnet. It could be an interesting opportunity to reboot a few long-lost dreams.
https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
“Finally I can put all my skills to the test, which people have been teasing me about for so long.”
In both cases, this attitude has the problem that they ignore the vast majority of people who would suffer under the new order. Very few people would find their way out of the corporate walled gardens and into the free information superhighway.
Veering offtopic a little, but your comment reminded me, hilariously, that after Stay-At-Home was mandated, my older, "prepper" friends and acquaintances were generally the first to crack and start complaining on Facebook about unfair it was that they were expected to just stay home in their bunkers and not go to bars and shop for their khakis. So much for the rugged self-reliance they loved to crow about!
I can imagine the Internet Anarchists behaving the same way. They'll be, in reality, the first to sign up for the AmazoGoogoMetaAppleInternet so they can keep posting to Social Media and doing their online shopping.
Besides, it's not about being excited as much as trying to find silver linings in a rapidly deteriorating environment.
Popped-collar-lacoste-polo madras-shorts-wearing dudes whose only survival skills are knot-tying, trying to get by in the apocalypse. LOL.
As opposed to the masses of people exploring sites other than Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit? We're already there.
The other way around is not so simple, because of the IDs etc.
Hence the anarchists lose.
Their revealed preference is that they don’t want a free information superhighway.
Probably already written by someone, but it fits, I guess.
I also kind of want it in the public-cloud-meets-private-use home environment (that is, my Cloudflare Access tunnels and MS365 business tenant I use for private stuff).
I don’t want it to touch my personal browsing experience or in any way involved in my personal-use browser environments.
These are effectively opposed desires at this point, and it’s a cat-out-of-the-bag technology.
The fundamental problem with current remote attestation schemes is the corporate-owned attestation key baked in at the factory [0]. This allows the manufacturer to create a known class of attestation keys that correspond to their physical devices, which is what prevents a user from just generating mock attestations when needed.
If manufacturers were prohibited from creating these privileged keys [1], then the uniform-corporate-control attestation fears would mostly vanish, while your use cases would remain.
A business looking to secure employee devices could record the attestation key of each laptop in their fleet. Cloud host auditors could do the same thing to all their hardware. Whereas arbitrary banks couldn't demand that your hardware betray what software you're running, since they'd have no way of tying the attestation key to a known instance of hardware.
(The intuition here is similar to secure boot, and what is required for good user-empowering secure boot versus evil corporate-empowering secure boot. Because they're roughly duals.)
[0] actually it's something like a chained corporate signing key that signs any attestation key generated on the hardware, but same effect.
[1] or if the user could import/export any on-chip attestation keys via a suitable maintenance mode. Exporting would need a significant delay of sitting in maintenance mode to protect against evil maid attacks and the like.
I can also imagine an IPv7 with ephemeral addresses based on private keys (like on yggdrasil), and a way for the browser to remember keys if wanted by the user. Authenticate sessions with the "IP address".
You can make devices around being unbreachable and self-attesting. Go build a SBC and sink in a block of epoxy.
But they also want the appeal of the open, hackable world-- cheap kit that's advancing quickly, commodity technology and infrastructure.
I am actually sort of disappointed we never ended up with a world of special-purpose sealed devices-- put a proper payment terminal on everyone's desk instead of trusting nobody slapped a keylogger into your browser while you're typing card numbers, for example.
As cool as 90's cyberpunk dreams are, to me they always seem to ignore the physical reality that your connection to "the net" always has to go through the chokepoint of an ISP, and that this ultimately is an indissoluble barrier on just how anti-establishment the internet can ultimately be.
You say it can't happen again, but IMHO that's not true.
It doesn't really take over because so far we are pretty much free to do what we want from our ISP connection. Some countries impose dns censorship but appart from the few dictatures that run their great firewall, it is light censorships as they let people query the DNS server they want.
Running an adblocker? Sorry. Using a non-Chromium based browser? Nuh-uh. Running an old machine with no TPM? Sucks to be you. Running a Linux distribution? Tough luck.
Sure, you can have fun with your free decentralized web. But at the end of the day even tinkerers have to log into their gov website to pay their taxes.
The entire internet is "corpnet." For this fantasy freezone to happen, actual alternative physical networks would have to be built, the parts that those networks require will have to be sold to consumers without the hardware being locked down or nerfed, and if authorities do not approve of these networks, they'll have to be invisible.
I don't see a technical answer to that. Sneakernets maybe, but dogs can smell hard drives. Certainly not anything wireless, unless there's some sort of geometric arrangement or algorithm that allows them to hide their locations in other signals.
I'm of the clearly minority opinion that the people who run totalitarian governments are neither stupid nor weak. I also believe that the fantasy that there's always going to be an answer (that always looks like teen hackers dressed up like 90s punks in a Gibson Blade Runner urbanscape theme park) is a drug that allows people to take our real situation less seriously.
I'd say this is an unfounded assumption. Given a choice of two massive changes that I could snap my fingers and will into existence:
1. Grassroots community and individual-run mesh networks of individual dwellings, not controlled by corporate entities, running IP/DNS/HTTPS and other naive protocols already in widespread use.
2. The same corporate-controlled physical Internet we have right now, but with widespread use of protocols that allow for decentralized permissionless identities (nyms), independent of the centrally-adminstered IP/DNS namespaces. Most traffic going to individually-run VPSs or consumer connections.
I would choose #2 in a heartbeat. The only reason I would see that we might need #1 is because #2 failed to gain a critical mass before the ISPs clamped down on non-corporate-endpoint traffic while it still only affects a minority of users. It's also not clear how the networks in #1 wouldn't just borg back up into corporate Ma Dell, or at the very least succumb to government regulation (each a different avenue for authoritarianism).
For anyone reading this, look for the π symbol and CTRL click onto it.
Dead Comment
IMHO, there won't be a split like this if attestation or similar proposals come to pass. Simply put the number of problems that come with anonymous users dwarf whatever legitimate benefits that anonymity provides. Everyone will build sites using it because of the problems they solve. And they will ignore the segment that refuses to use them because that segment will be small and a significant chunk of them will use that anonymity to do bad things you don't want on your site.
Spam destroys everything. The open web has been at war with it forever, and soon it will win just like it has won in every other domain that is not completely locked down.
I love the fediverse but I fully expect it be destroyed by spam as soon as it gets big and influential enough to be a juicy target.
The Internet is a dark forest. The future is private encrypted networks, private forums, etc.
I apparently don't have the will power to stop going on these sites so maybe stopping me loading content from the other side is exactly what I need.
[1] Not so secretly now I've mentioned it here I suppose.
[1] https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcrip...
> except a few 'blessed' distros that will then become industry controlled, and not Linux in spirit anymore
You know, I hear this a lot but seldom hear the details of how it might happen. Industry-controlled UNIX is the reason Linux exists - if you take the spirit away from Linux, it gets forked into another community project. Unless you're stripping it of it's GPL license, Linux will be "Linux in Spirit" until it stops being used altogether.
New Android phones have hardware-backed SafetyNet, new Windows devices have Trusted Boot (not to be confused with Secure Boot).
Both can and will be used to attest the browser environment. Linux devices will get hit (unless I guess we see locked down signed kernels, Chromebook-like things).
You can see systemd and it's history about how it hold power.
Linux only exists because it is free and it runs free apps for every category of keyboard-driven task a typical user would want.
The answer to my question of how a predator like IBM is going to take out the other non-RHEL based distros is starting to come into focus. This should help Ubuntu get the Mint monkey off its back too.
If that catches on, it could rapidly be 90% of websites that won't serve content until they get the magic Google "no-adblock-here" handshake.
I don't agree, in fact I think it's equally as bad for Apple to do it as Google. Apple has completely let us down. If Google forced it through but Apple refused, it would never be practical to enforce it. The numbers may not be as high, but they're plenty high enough that you couldn't cut all iDevices out. Apple and Google and Microsoft are the only three that really matter.
Yes. Up until now, the amount of Google bullshit that Safari has saved us all from is _staggering._ It is unfortunate that this won't be another catastrophe deflected.
This is also why I'm concerned about legislation requiring Apple to open up sideloading onto their devices. As much as I love the idea of people having control over their own systems, in practice I'm afraid that it's just going to be the final nail that solidifies Google's complete control over the web all the way out to the client.
- Go to Settings
- Select your user account at the top
- Go to 'Password & Security'
- Scroll down to Advanced and disable 'Automatic Verification'
1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-enable-private-access-tok...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213449
System Settings->iCloud Settings (your name)->Password & Security->Automatic Verification.
The problem is when your bank, tax office or favorite streaming service starts requiring this to let you use their services. The problem is the ability for large fraction of casual users to have this at all.
However, the Google proposal is explicitly concerned with pushing this as an always-on feature.
> However, a holdback also has significant drawbacks. In our use cases and capabilities survey, we have identified a number of critical use cases for deterministic platform integrity attestation. These use cases currently rely on client fingerprinting. A deterministic but limited-entropy attestation would obviate the need for invasive fingerprinting here, and has the potential to usher in more privacy-positive practices in the long-term.
All Apple implementing it ahead of time is proof of is that anyone hoping Apple will save us is naive.
In reality: an attestation will be used along with fingerprinting.
At the same time, as is being pointed out quite vocally right now, 'trusted' is a very, very difficult concept when large tech monopolies are involved.
On the one hand, it's difficult because there are only a few companies in the world that can field large tech teams that deal with persistent threat actors, and therefore, it would be very nice to be able to trust the security promises made. And, if those promises are trustworthy, they are better promises than any individual can make for their own software and platfoms.
On the other hand, if you're a hacker (in the platonic sense), 'trusted' immediately codes to 'monopoly-backed', along with 'probably back-doored by a local government agency' and we head one more step down the primrose path of control, lack of innovation and finally perhaps a fascistic technology future controlled by a few players.
Ultimately, I think the solution here can only be successful if it involves a trustable, open hardware certification technology that's not registry based, e.g. can create strong local proofs that are independently verifiable. There are a few tech companies I know of working on this on the silicon side, but it's a very difficult problem, and I'm not clear if there's really enough demand to make them viable right now.
I guess I personally come down to leaving this turned on in Safari for now, and seeing what happens over the next year or two.
Dead Comment
It would be like having a robot deny you access to the office after work hours even though you only need to grab your car keys that you forgot. The system is designed to be secure so you can't talk your way past a robot. If it was a human, it would be much easier to reason with them (normally!) and find a solution that works.
Techies gonna tech though. "If there was a problem yo I'll solve it, check out my tech while the DJ revolves it."
The Internet has shown that if you drive down the cost of interacting with this human gatekeeper to zero (you can be anywhere in the world rather than a specific place and time), social engineering attacks inevitably result. That's how we get hackers getting into your bank accounts just because they are eloquent and they make a great case reasoning with the human gatekeeper.
The logical conclusion of this system is "if you have a legit system, you are legit; if you don't you aren't".