Author Topic: Google's web DRM?  (Read 4366 times)

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Offline mendip_discovery

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #25 on: July 27, 2023, 01:15:53 pm »
Browsers are the new OS. You need skills in many scripting languages just to get a site to work these days. Scares my why the browser needs 4 GB of RAM to just view 2 webpages.

Lastnight I swapped a site over for a charity, it's gone from a 50 MB site to a 550 MB site. Now the bloat is because of the 'designer' only using wordpress and not resizing pictures before uploading.

I think I might go back and do my next site in notepad with HTML and CSS. It's not fancy but it just works.
Motorcyclist, Nerd, and I work in a Calibration Lab :-)
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So everyone is clear, Calibration = Taking Measurement against a known source, Verification = Checking Calibration against Specification, Adjustment = Adjusting the unit to be within specifications.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #26 on: July 27, 2023, 01:46:26 pm »
I can see the rise of a stealth adblocker.
Indeed.  Something like this proposal would be the only thing stopping users from using those, if they became widely used.

I do need to use adblockers, because ads and similar distractions are too aggravating and annoying to me.  I can't watch TV, or videos with ads at all, I just get annoyed about them.  (I also have NoScript enabled by default, and only allow enough JavaScript to make the sites usable.)

I do perfectly understand the way ads support sites like this here, and content creators in general, but I just cannot deal with them properly without getting >:( .  If Dave told us we need to disable adblocks for EEVblog forums, I'd have to stop participating; otherwise I'd really risk becoming a serious nuisance, because I'd be always in a really bad mood and distracted.  I'm not kidding, ads – even domain-specific ads for test equipment and prototype PCB services – have that effect on me.

Sure, it is my personal problem, not Dave's or Youtube's or Google's.  The question is, do we want a society where people like myself with the limitations I have are completely excluded from participating?  Where everything is permitted or not allowed based on whether some company can make a profit out of it? Right now, I don't even have the funds to subscribe to Youtube Premium or Patreon for the content creators I would like to support.  If my financial situation was better, then it'd be different (and I did do that often when I was better off financially).

But before anyone makes their mind up about leeching or supporting financially, I'd like to point out that whenever the effects have been fully measured in practice –– the first real experiment I know of personally was by Eric Flint and Baen Free Library –– it turns out that giving out some content for free tends to be a massive driver for related content sales.  It applies even to games' piracy: the ones who pirate most, statistically tend to also spend most money on games.  Not to say what kind of effect first open libraries, and now the free availability of information on the web, has made on people's ability to truly learn, without having gatekeepers on knowledge.

Thus, even though some want to frame it as a question of stealing or freeloading, the larger picture is more complex and more interconnected, and not as simple as many in Google's position seem to believe.  It is definitely about the direction of global cultures, not just business needs.  (Of course, people who know as little as possible are easier to rule, if you're into manipulating and controlling others.)
 

Offline Faranight

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #27 on: July 27, 2023, 06:08:20 pm »
I think I might go back and do my next site in notepad with HTML and CSS. It's not fancy but it just works.
Exactly, there's too much bloat everywhere today. I do come from a time when websites were done in HTML+CSS, and they just worked. Even if you had javascript disabled in your browser they still worked.
But today if you disable javascript, you will get mostly blank white pages on many websites. There's way too much reliance on javascript, and it often slows down page loading to a crawl.
Fara-day? Fara-night.
 

Offline MrMobodies

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #28 on: July 27, 2023, 06:20:18 pm »
But today if you disable javascript, you will get mostly blank white pages on many websites. There's way too much reliance on javascript, and it often slows down page loading to a crawl.
Some of them seem fake where if you disable CSS (via an extension) you see just the text.

I have seen webpages in the past load which the contents can been seen briefly for about a second then a white overlay appears to make it looks like it don't work.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-apps/c/Kpbc6lT6Id4
Quote
Boycott Google Chrome 147 views
wrox osbourne
Jul 11, 2010, 1:39:07 AM to Chromium Apps

As a Computer Science student and expert Web Developer, I looked into
what Google is doing with their Chrome browser.

It's a nightmare for all developers and programmers across the Free
Internet and world.

Google's Chrome and its very design is breaking all known and stable
internet standards (like JavaScript) for corporate/control reasons.


The goals and vision as stated by Google are not to work with W3C,
Mozilla, Microsoft, etc. on standards, but to rewrite the WWW.

With wild claims of a Google platform for "rich interactive
applications" that are non-existent or simple/dumb, it's questionable.


Perhaps a corporate power grab, masked in the language of "open
source" and media hype, Google's Chrome must be boycotted.

Google is effectively building a G-Browser for a "Google WWW", not the
stable Free Internet we all share.


In the end, no smart user will trust a Google "Cloud" server with
their privacy or passwords
.

From 2010 and well it has already happened now they have been given all the power they need to do it.

I remember their Picasa platform was great in 2009 until they bloated it horribly in 2014 where the thumbnails were made oversized (fewer per line and page) and stuck the stupid gradients all over them (didn't use adblock then or know I could use it to hide them) and I deleted all my pictures from it. Then Picasa started out with their stupid fixed header after Yahoo destroyed their page with it (with a massive big spammy toolbar in the way following down the page) as I remember a response to the complaints about it was to "streamline it  :bullshit: " with it's branding and all the other companies it brought out.

Maybe it is time for vendors like Opera, Vivaldi and Brave to start working on switching to Firefox engine oh wait then all their users could be eventually cut off from anything Google and that could start a war.
« Last Edit: July 27, 2023, 08:07:40 pm by MrMobodies »
 

Online amyk

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #29 on: July 27, 2023, 11:37:07 pm »
The number of web sites that work with Chrome/Chromium and not with Firefox for instance is growing and hint, it's not because Firefox doesn't comply with the standards.
It's because the websites don't comply with the standards since Chrome has led them astray.
Google already has effectively complete control of the "standard". They even came up with the oxymoron "living standard", which means they can change it whenever they want. Then they spread propaganda about how other browsers are "holding back progress" or whatever, when their idea of "progress" is to constantly make many changes to its browser and "standard" to force others to keep trying to catch up.

This could've been completely ignored, but also thanks to Big G's propaganda, we have tons of gullible web developers making sites with these Chrome-only features when they weren't ever necessary. That's also why they're so bloated.

Fortunately this site isn't one of those. I can still post here from an oscilloscope running XP with IE6 :P
 

Offline mendip_discovery

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #30 on: July 28, 2023, 09:15:33 am »
I partly blame the bloat down to the need to create two red lines but with blue ink.

G keeps creating new tools for developers without asking if we really need them. It reminds me of some of the IE stuff MS came out with back in the day, marquee. They have turned into the one thing they hated.

I must say I never really liked CSS even though it was written for designers it seems they were never asked about it. I remember a number of work arounds you had to use just to get somthing to be centred on a page.
Motorcyclist, Nerd, and I work in a Calibration Lab :-)
--
So everyone is clear, Calibration = Taking Measurement against a known source, Verification = Checking Calibration against Specification, Adjustment = Adjusting the unit to be within specifications.
 

Offline madiresTopic starter

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #31 on: July 28, 2023, 10:05:45 am »
Do you remember YouTube's Polymer redesign a few years back? It was based on an old deprecated API only available in Chrome. With Firefox or Edge page loading took about 5 times longer.
 

Offline AndyBeez

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #32 on: July 28, 2023, 10:50:42 am »
Browsers are the new OS. You need skills in many scripting languages just to get a site to work these days. Scares my why the browser needs 4 GB of RAM to just view 2 webpages.

Lastnight I swapped a site over for a charity, it's gone from a 50 MB site to a 550 MB site. Now the bloat is because of the 'designer' only using wordpress and not resizing pictures before uploading.

I think I might go back and do my next site in notepad with HTML and CSS. It's not fancy but it just works.
Yah! Go Old Skool!  Sadly hand crafting is a dying art form. The generation of new Web developers think they need a framework/s with fancy IDEs, because this is how it is done.

I recently wrote a simple JS event handler to efficiently handle keystrokes - and update other values on the fly. Wrong. Should have used React and Docker, as that how onChange event handling is done in the 2020s? It's rather like an EE being told they have to use the Arduino platform and open source ChatGPT code to blink an LED, rather than just use a capacitor and a UJT. Anyway, no-one there knew how to code from scratch in the first place.

It is now a case that code bloat rises to cover the bandwidth available. I ponder has anyone worked out how much extra CO2 Google's bloat culture is contributing to? Is Chrome causing climate change? I await the 'expert' on YouTube to tell me.
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #33 on: July 28, 2023, 11:46:22 am »
Quote
The generation of new Web developers think they need a framework/s with fancy IDEs, because this is how it is done.

Same could be said about new embedded device developers, needing Arduino or whatever 'simple' framework to do anything.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #34 on: July 28, 2023, 04:09:37 pm »
Yah! Go Old Skool!  Sadly hand crafting is a dying art form. The generation of new Web developers think they need a framework/s with fancy IDEs, because this is how it is done.
I've been trying to entice people to create simple tools as self-contained web pages, so they need only a browser and not even an internet connection.  The JS implementations in current browsers are pretty damn efficient, and if written without any browser-specific tricks, these things work even on phone browsers if need be.  An example I often point to here is my finite impulse response analysis example, all of 372 lines of HTML+CSS+JS in that single file, that you can stuff your FIR coefficients into (at top of page), and it'll show you the frequency response.  Could be made much more useful, if there was an actual use case – maybe add frequency or wavelength ticks horizontally? – but its brevity and simplicity should show how easy these things are to make, if one were to learn a bit of HTML, CSS, HTML DOM, and JavaScript.
 

Offline MrMobodies

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #35 on: July 28, 2023, 06:35:33 pm »
https://www.webpronews.com/google-rightfully-gets-panned-for-its-web-environment-integrity/
Quote
Google Rightfully Gets Panned For Its ‘Web Environment Integrity’
Matt Milano July 28, 2023

Unfortunately, rooting a device or installing a non-standard version of the OS can interfere  :bullshit: with the attestation, setting up a user to be locked out from using some apps. Yet this is the model that Google is taking inspiration from for the web.
Rubbishly put.

How about the other way around, "attestation can interfere with your devices access to things and cut you off".

An operating system's job is to operate so how can that interfere, why should it interfere being the same thing with a few modifications here and there if deliberately done by the owner. Sounds to me like they they want to set it to interfere not the other way round.
« Last Edit: July 28, 2023, 06:40:48 pm by MrMobodies »
 

Offline eutectique

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #36 on: July 31, 2023, 02:41:38 pm »
I can see the rise of a stealth adblocker. And maybe some scripts to intentionally generate a lot of fake ad "views" and make the whole idea of push advertising come crashing down.

I use AdNauseam for Firefox, which does exactly this -- clicks quietly every ad found on the page. Of course, it does not render the original ad frames.
« Last Edit: July 31, 2023, 02:48:40 pm by eutectique »
 
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Offline PlainName

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Re: Google's web DRM?
« Reply #37 on: July 31, 2023, 06:50:07 pm »
I can see the rise of a stealth adblocker. And maybe some scripts to intentionally generate a lot of fake ad "views" and make the whole idea of push advertising come crashing down.

I use AdNauseam for Firefox, which does exactly this -- clicks quietly every ad found on the page. Of course, it does not render the original ad frames.

Saves Facebook and the like putting single-pixel trackers on the page. And as a bonus their advertisers can track you too!
 


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