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552 points freedomben | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.421s | source
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sho ◴[] No.41809962[source]
Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome. Despite all their made-up "security" reasons, everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective. For many users, adblock is what makes chrome bearable - and if they make it unbearable, then those users will leave. Slowly but surely.

Google seems much too sure of itself making this change. I hope their arrogance pays off just the same as Microsoft's did with IE.

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freedomben ◴[] No.41810118[source]
Agreed on hoping this is the inflection point, but only partial agreement that it's about adblock. For sure Google wants adblock to die, but I think it goes even deeper than that.

I think it's part of a much bigger trend in tech in general but also in Google: Removing user control. When you look at the "security" things they are doing, many of them have a common philosophy underpinning them that the user (aka device owner) is a security threat and must be protected against. Web integrity, Manifest v3, various DoH/DoT, bootloader locking, device integrity which conveniently makes root difficult/impossible, and more.

To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in. The next generation won't have the wonderful and fertile computing environment that we enjoyed, and it's (partly) your fault.

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pipo234 ◴[] No.41812153[source]
> To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in.

I recently quit my job, developing among others the means to "protect" media using DRM. While this was not a primary motivation, I'm glad to somewhat clean my hands.

The technology (dubbed Common Encryption) is a bunch of smoke and mirrors that a childishly easy to hack around. Yet clearly aimed against good faith consumers.

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1. immibis ◴[] No.41812306[source]
That's a good job - people who don't like DRM (you) get more money, and the bad DRM is a distraction that delays the implementation of good DRM.
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2. account42 ◴[] No.41847021[source]
On the other hand, even weak DRM trains users to accept it while power users are less likely to rally against it if they can find workarounds for themselves. So you don't really end up delaying the implementation of good DRM but helping prime its acceptance.