Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 3 Posts
  • 339 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle






  • Apple tried this with the EU usb c but eventually backed down

    Umm, what? Apple was always going to move to USB-C. The EU regulations at most hastened that by a couple of years. Their tablets and even laptop computers were using USB-C before the EU even enacted that legislation. It was only a matter of time.

    But back on the subject at hand, this is nothing like that sort of bullying. This is a company being asked to build more infrastructure at their own expense, and then use that infrastructure to place its own users at risk. They’ve made a simple calculation that it’s better for their bottom line and their reputation to choose not to comply, and instead pull out of a few small markets.


  • There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.

    It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that’s as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.

    If you mean in terms of privacy, you can’t protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It’s a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website “a trusted third party has verified I’m over 18” but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.

    This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There’s still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don’t think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it’s still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?

    I’m merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn’t, for non-technical reasons.


  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlMath
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    17 days ago

    Idk what middle school really is because it’s not been a thing at any of the schools I’ve been to, but it’s definitely something you do a lot earlier than calculus. If calculus comes in in your last three or four years of high school, quadratics are what you’re doing for at least two years before that.


  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlGoogle be like
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    17 days ago

    None of the Chromium forks are hard ones

    For now. If Firefox became a Chromium fork, ideally it would stay that way. But if Google did make things too hard in the way you describe, then I would suggest Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. should share a sort of medium-hard fork of Chromium. Keep their own track with features they need, but keep it close enough that the basic rendering engine can still be merged in from work Google does.

    We need diversity in web browsers

    That’s an ideological position. I don’t agree that there’s any inherent value in the underlying browser engine being diverse. If anything, I think it’s useful for it to be consistent and predictable.

    As I write this, I’m talking myself into a slightly different position. Maybe they don’t need to fork Chromium, but it would be valuable to dump Gecko in favour of Blink. I don’t actually know what Chromium gets you besides Blink (and V8, which I lump together with Blink because for the same reasons, I think it would make sense to unify around). Stick with Blink & V8 to let Google to the work on the rendering side (while still being able to contribute back yourself where necessary), while maintaining your own browser and extension ecosystem. So web developers get a single platform to develop against, users get the full experience of any site they visit regardless of their browser, and Mozilla can maximally utilise their development resources in building and maintaining features that differentiate them.






  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlGoogle be like
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    18 days ago

    it is still developed and maintained by Google

    Sure, but Google has no control over any forks of Chromium. They can’t control Edge, or Brave, or Vivaldi, or a hypothetical Mozilla fork. And if those other forks want, they can collaborate together to maintain any features they want to have that Google themselves don’t want.

    Like, yeah, more funding for Firefox would be the ideal case. But that’s not something Mozilla really has the ability to effect. They can choose what engine they’re using. And using Chromium would allow them to essentially “steal” the work Google has put in, while not preventing them from changing stuff that they don’t like. In fact, in some respects it would help them even with that stuff they don’t like from Google, since they can pool resources with other privacy-forward browsers like Vivaldi and Brave. I honestly see it as win-win.




  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlGoogle be like
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    18 days ago

    I don’t use Google Chrome, but there are plenty of other chromium-based browsers out there.

    This isn’t the first time I’ve run up against technical shortcomings of Firefox, either. I used to frequent a site which made use of the CSS class column-span. Chrome added full support for that class in early 2016. I was probably accessing this site from about late 2016 until about 2018 or so. Firefox didn’t support column-span until December 2019. The whole time I used the site, Firefox simply could not render it in a usable way.

    I’ve said for a long time that we’d be better off if Firefox switched to Chromium. They clearly don’t have the resources to keep up with the rapid pace of change on the web. 5 years and they still don’t support a browser feature that Google got out in a out 1 year and I think Edge got it done in 2 or 3 (and unsurprisingly, Apple has it ready day 1, though that’s an unfair comparison for obvious reasons). Three and a half years behind other browsers in getting out a CSS feature that’s being used live on the web already.

    If they based their browser on Chromium, there would be so much less work for them to do. They’d have to spend some effort maintaining features Google has decided to drop, like Manifest V2, but they wouldn’t be alone in that effort, since they can pool resources with the likes of Vivaldi and Brave, and maybe even Microsoft in some cases. So I’m the end a much higher percentage of their resources could be spent developing features that differentiate them and help maintain them as a great privacy-focused browser, instead of merely keeping up on the treadmill of platform change.