Apple has deployed a system called Private Access Tokens that allows web servers to verify if a device is legitimate before granting access. This works by having the browser request a signed token from Apple proving the device is approved. While this currently has limited impact due to Safari’s market share, there are concerns that attestation systems restrict competition, user control, and innovation by only approving certain devices and software. Attestation could lead to approved providers tightening rules over time, blocking modified operating systems and browsers. While proponents argue for holdbacks to limit blocking, business pressures may make that infeasible and Google’s existing attestation does not do holdbacks. Fundamentally, attestation is seen as anti-competitive by potentially blocking competition between browsers and operating systems on the web.
“Sorry, your device appears to be running Linux, please only use approved Apple or Windows devices to log in, with our required surveillance system pro installed. Thanks.”
Unfair. Google, Amazon and Facebook devices will also be allowed.
Companies can already do that
“Can” and “have a reason” are different things. With attestation they actually have a reason.
Google already does that with Android and SafetyNet
Yeah, but so far you can just spoof your user agent. Not sure how easy cracking private access tokens will be. I assume they’ll be pretty proactive about keeping it locked down.
Just use a vm
That’s easily detectable. Try beating Google Safety Net that way.
Should you chose not to continue, you agree to kick yourself in the balls.
If a website doesn’t want me to see their shit, then I guess i won’t see their shit. I already have some sites that don’t work because of my aggressive use of lists on my pihole, in addition to the usual browser plugins. If a site doesn’t work now, I just move on. I don’t give a shit about any site enough to put up with this type of bullshit.
If a website doesn’t want me to see their shit, then I guess i won’t see their shit
That’s how I react to Twitter and Facebook requiring login to even view most things.
Whatever you’re showing isn’t important enough to be worth me making an account.
What if it’s your bank’s website? Or email provider? Or literally anything else you actually have to choose and can’t pick? “It’s okay because I don’t think it affects me / I can ignore it” is always a bad reason to allow a bad thing happen.
We’re not allowing it. We don’t have a choice.
Well you can protest, inform others, switch browsers, make your family switch…
It’s not easy and might not accomplish much but at least you’re trying.
We won’t be allowed to switch browsers any more. That’s the whole problem.
To see how your approach works, try using the Internet with Javascript turned off for reading text. You will realize you can’t organize your life nowadays without bowing to what websites do technically.
You can’t use websites when you disable a major piece of functionality? Shocker
Why would Javascript be a major piece of functionality for a website that is based on text articles?
We need to fight against this and stop this from happening before it’s too late.
Fight how?
Expect corporations to be lazy. Just look at how every website handles cookies now. They could do it smartly, limit their cookie exposure, or only send the messages to IPs in the EU. But they just put an “accept all cookies or get out” OK box on your screen. And that’s what they’re going to do once attestation gets popular.
Sites will just require an attestation token and likely only accept ones from Safari and Chromium browsers since those are the ones pushing it. That will effectively make Firefox, Opera and other browsers incompatible with those websites. And once it catches on or becomes law somewhere, it’ll be the entire internet. It’s an extremely anticompetitive measure and it’s internet-wide DRM. Fuck. that.
But they just put an “accept all cookies or get out” OK box on your screen.
Which doesn’t comply with GDPR
Which only affects companies doing business in the EU. Granted, that’s most of the big players.
Very grateful for the EU to unfuck most of the world from a lot of American regulatory capture.
Back to the days of using a different web browser for each website. I remember the acid test, IE 5.5, etc. Not fun as a user or web developer.
if you use Safari or Firefox as your main browser it’s already been this way for a while. websites are only tested against Chrome and often times when something doesn’t work switching browsers temporarily alleviates the issue. it’s a sad state of affairs in browser land.
Actually I like this.
All those people who’ve been trying to keep corporate technologies “open” were, in fact, working for the corporations to make people come to them. Most unknowingly, maybe. It’s just, well, litany of Gendlin case. You rely on corporate power, even if you are trying to hide it and talk about “open Web”.
The most important thing is that we take ideologically corporate technology where it’s not needed (there’s been plenty of hypertext systems in history, some kinda successful, and all that JS and AJAX stuff and various frameworks on top are so complex not because of any usefulness, but because of the corporate goal of backward compatibility, lumping everything together and even intentional complexity to cut off competition, and a single space).
We’d be just fine with a bunch of incompatible between themselves Hypercard-like things working over network. That’s what I think.
I really dislike Apple for what they’ve been in my somehow conscious years (born 1996), but things like Hypercard and Hotline (or KDX) from their older time seem to be just the right way to use personal computers.
Any single space with propaganda of “fragmentation being bad” is either not immune to what has happened to the Web, or already compromised.
Google mentioned these in their explainer (they don’t like that they’re fully masked): https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md#privacy-pass--private-access-tokens
Cloudflare explains them more too: https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-and-macs-using-new-standard/
They are currently going through an IETF standardization: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/
You can also read the architecture. In general I do trust Cloudflare more than Google. I have no doubt shitty sites won’t fall back to a captcha and will instead block access though, with either solution.
In general I do trust Cloudflare more than Google.
A large portion of the internet runs through Cloudflare’s network though, so IMO they’re just as much of a risk as Google.
However unlike Google, CloudFlare doesn’t have a history of killing off products just as users begin to adapt to them.
That’s not why Google is harmful though - they’re harmful because almost all of their revenue comes from advertising - everything else they offer is just a funnel to gain data on the worlds population in order to better target advertising.
As for cloudflare - they showed their true colours last year with kiwifarms. They’ll happily host the worst websites in the world as long as they don’t get bad press.
The main risk with Cloudflare is that if they think your device is malicious, it gets very hard to browse the internet, as every site hosted behind Cloudflare starts showing CAPTCHAs or rate limiting you. This could get worse if new APIs that determine if you’re legit don’t like you for whatever reason.
CF has only been public for a few years. Give it a decade and I’m sure they’ll be just as evil as Google.
That still however doesn’t relieve them. Whether they’ve killed of less products, IMHO still leaves them at the position that they route MASSIVE amounts of the entire internet.
One point of failure or control is still a big risk, no matter how you turn it
