RMS has offered broadly solutions/alternatives since the beginning, along with reporting early on trends that other people ignore.
Unfortunately, "build it yourself" is relatively easy when it comes to software, and almost impossible when it comes to the hardware running that software. It doesn't matter if you have full ownership of a complete open-source stack if no hardware manufacturer will permit you to run unsigned arbitrary code. The lack of open hardware--chips that you could build in your garage using materials nobody could reasonably prevent you from acquiring--is the lynchpin upon which open source software will wither and die.
My god AMP was such an annoying thing ~4-5 years ago when I was working in a marketing-forward web dev shop.
"Google really likes when you pipe your words into their shitty UI because it saves some time for the user"
We were all like, cool so on one hand we're being given complex designs for sites to differentiate them, and on the other hand we're bowing to a megacorp who actually wants to skip the whole web design part entirely and pipe our content through their pre-defined UI.
So glad it died. Should have known it would die in a matter of a couple of years with that being the track record for Google in general.
It's a shame this part didn't stick. I use reading mode every chance I get be cause the more design a page has, the worse it is. For some reason orgs agreed that it is ok to let medium or substack own their content, but hated Google's high speed CDN.
It's not just Google. It's governments, corporations, all around the world, simultaneously. The noose is being tightened gradually, then all at once. And it's coming for all of us:
https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
The threats above interlock by design or convergence: Identity layer (1-5) creates the prerequisite for the others. Once identity is established at SIM/account/device level, the carve-outs that make surveillance politically viable become possible (powerful users get exemptions; ordinary users get watched).
Device layer (10-12, 16-19) creates the surveillance endpoint. Once content is scanned on the device before encryption, the cryptographic protections at the communications layer become irrelevant.
Communications layer (6-9) is the most-defended. Mass scanning has been defeated repeatedly. This is the layer where the resistance has the best track record.
Reporting layer (13-15) is nascent. Direct OS-to-government reporting hooks haven't been built yet at scale. The UK's December 2025 proposal is the leading edge.
Platform control (20-24) determines whether alternatives can exist. Browser diversity, app distribution diversity, and engine diversity are the structural protections. All three are narrowing.
A society with all five layers complete has the technical infrastructure for total surveillance with elite carve-outs. We are roughly 40% of the way there. Whether that infrastructure becomes a dystopia depends on political choices, not technical ones.
HN as a whole is surprisingly oblivious to the noose tightening, because many here are super against decentralized distributed things, if they involve any sort of token. You can complain all you want, but downvoting and burying the decentralized alternatives just for groupthink makes you somewhat complicit in the erosion of our privacy and liberties. Even if you might disagree with a project, all the work that goes into it might be a good reason to upvote it instead, considering that without this work, we're basically doomed.
When IPv6 was designed it was normal for each IPv4 address to be traceable to someone's desk. Fortunately, as that changed with IPv4 so did it with IPv6, so we got IPv6 privacy extensions.
Always has been.
Google was creating cartels like the "Open Handset Alliance" literally decades ago.
Via their control of Chrome and Search which are both monopolies, Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.
I'm on Firefox and use DuckDuckGo.
How is Chrome, of all things, a monopoly? Have words just entirely lost all meaning and now monopoly just means "things which are popular that I dislike"?
>> Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.
This is still 100% correct. Google owns the dominant browser and the dominant search engine, this means that they get to dictate how websites function and pick winners and losers through their search algorithm. If you're a publisher (i.e. anyone who hosts a website) you're forced to fall in line or go out of business.
[1] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-05...
I use Firefox right now. Occasionally I need to open a site in Chrome instead, but it's rare.
People absolutely did like Google at the time, but the majority of its growth is actually shoveling hijackers into other software installs just like BonzaiBuddy.
the fact that this kind of comment gets downvoted proves my point. so what if you personally don't like WEI? it doesn't mean the problems aren't real...
that aside, i don't know how people say stuff like "malicious force" and then you go and use a bajillion Google-authored, completely free as in beer and often free as in freedom technologies that nobody obligates you to use at all. It's not like Apple, where their software is so shitty (Messages, Apple Photos, etc.) that the only reason people use it is because it is locked down and forced upon you. it's interesting to me that @dang worries about the tenor of conversation changing - he longs for that 2009 world of university-level math people hanging out and writing comments about LISP or whatever - when the real deficit is not intelligence about math but, at the very least, seeing that things are nuanced, to see more sides to a problem besides the most emotionally powerful and the most mathematically neutral ones.
