Privacy Guides

17026 readers

160 users here now

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.

You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more...

Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!

This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.

Moderation Rules:

We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1110

Google's trying to DRM the internet, and we have to make sure they fail (par1.iv.ggtyler.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

216 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What part of this can be used for DRM? It looks like its just a crypto-graphically provable User-Agent, assuming I'm reading it right. Am I misunderstanding?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The proposal's explainer dances around the fact that it can be used for that.

Some examples of scenarios where users depend on client trust include:

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.

Users want to know they are interacting with real people on social websites but bad actors often want to promote posts with fake engagement (for example, to promote products, or make a news story seem more important). Websites can only show users what content is popular with real people if websites are able to know the difference between a trusted and untrusted environment.

Users playing a game on a website want to know whether other players are using software that enforces the game's rules.

Users sometimes get tricked into installing malicious software that imitates software like their banking apps, to steal from those users. The bank's internet interface could protect those users if it could establish that the requests it's getting actually come from the bank's or other trustworthy software.

Combine them and you have an anti-adblocking feature.

It also says

How does this affect browser modifications and extensions?

Web Environment Integrity attests the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack, it does not restrict the indicated application’s functionality: E.g. if the browser allows extensions, the user may use extensions; if a browser is modified, the modified browser can still request Web Environment Integrity attestation.

Which is a whole lot of nothing. Of course you can still install extensions and sure, it can still request attestation, but that doesn't mean it will get it. But this isn't even important because I'm sure attestation for being a human (case 1) will fail anyway if the ads get blocked.

But even assuming that it doesn't interfere with ad blockers, this is still going to allow some shitty website to query code running on your device that isn't under your control to snitch on you. It's fundamentally stupid and wrong to trust any client data about the client, using extra processors and features is a garbage, intrusive workaround that still doesn't even actually work reliably from the shitty developers/website owner's point of view. Also see: Android custom ROMs and the lengths they successfully go to in order to run banking apps.

[–] wildbus8979 7 points 1 year ago

And the second and forth points are already solved using client certificates.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Sounds like it is a technology that is taking control over your own computer from you i.e. DRM.

Why is anything like this needed?