Alphabet will definitely try to do that (within their business interest and all that), but I still choose to believe in the precept that “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, as old and outdated as that sounds.
A number of my privacy-minded friends choose a bi-modal approach: have two phones, one for work and one for personal. They don’t get the recent model (costing half as much), hold onto the old phone for as long as they can, use one phone for “required” apps (Okta, Slack, those websites that only work on Chrome…) and the personal phone for everything else.
As annoying as it is, i think that compartmentalized devices/accounts/apps are the only way forward.
With the ramping up of 18+ verification in Australia and now Europe (and South Korea and China already having such a programme for many years, including game time locks for young people), yeah.
It doesn't seem that big a leap to connect the dots from device attestation > web browser integrity > identity verification > verified web access
There is actually a relatively old game series of the 2000s called Bluesky Hacker Replay that has this as the core element of its worldbuilding. Governments and corporations became tired of the internet being overrun with spam, viruses, porn and cyberterrorism and decide to create an internet 2.0, tightly controlled by corporate interests. Hackers persist on the old 1.0 internet called the SwitchNet.
And really, when you think about it.. if you composed an internet solely from the big name social media, entertainment, work, food, news and knowledge services, running atop Cloudflare who verifies everyone via government ID, how many would really complain? 99% of their internet time is already spent inside that bubble.
Interestingly, I think if the Chrome browser gets spun off from Google, it might make sense for Google to have to make annual payments to support the development of Chrome like they do Firefox. Obviously being the default search in Chrome should have significant value worth paying for the same as Firefox and Safari. And it might be the most plausible economic model for Chrome if it's not being funded by Google.
They will try, but anti-trust laws and -lawsuits should compel them otherwise. Microsoft had to pay hundreds of millions in fines to the EU for not complying with a previous browser choice order [0], following previous lawsuits in the US about their tight coupling of Internet Explorer [1] in which they settled for $1 billion. Google has to pay a fine in excess of 4 billion (!) to the EU for anti-competitive practices in Android [2].
This does raise a very interesting point though in my opinion. There's been some debate about whether Google should be compelled to sell off its chromium browser, but I wonder if it makes more sense to spin off Google's various attempts at boning internet infrastructure such as AMP and 8.8.8.8.
I guess AMP is being wound down but it was a play for shifting more of the Internet onto Google infrastructure.
Now we are talking! Let's see the required steps, not necessarily in this order:
1) create a dominant browser
2) create a dominant mobile OS
3) create a dominant e-mail service
4) create a dominant search engine
5) leverage each of these to make other solutions, especially open ones, difficult to use
6) make other browsers perform badly when interacting with your services
7) lock other browsers from accessing your services, effectively crippling them
There are some more minor steps, like making your main browser competitor dependent on your funding, but we can leave out the details. So we are now at... step 6?
I find that so incredibly unlikely. Granted I haven't been keeping up to date with the latest LLM developments - but has there even been any actual confirmation from OpenAI that these models have the ability to do such things in the background?
I am using qBittorrent, and from the top of my head:
- WebTorrent and WebSocket patch for qBittorrent is ready but not merged (waiting on libtorrent's decision),
- cross-seeding support is poor (a separate "cross-seed" binary can be used to set up hardlinks to fool qBittorrent into cross-seeding, but it cannot detect duplicates on its own)
- when it comes to torrent management, there is no way to group torrents into groups with common settings (important if you use multiple private trackers) - people recommend having multiple installations of qBittorrent side by side
- when it comes to reconfiguring NAT and firewall, qBittorrent supports UPNP IGD protoocl, but I am not sure about NAT-PMP and PCP
- I have never seen qBittorrent connect to a single IPv6 peer - so I don't know if the support is there
- download order - you can choose "download in order" or "download rarest first". I dont think "download in order" downloads footers, so mp4 files won't work (IIRC mp4 store metadata in footer, mkv in header)
> - when it comes to torrent management, there is no way to group torrents into groups with common settings (important if you use multiple private trackers) - people recommend having multiple installations of qBittorrent side by side
Probably easiest to do this via docker-qbittorrent-nox.
> - I have never seen qBittorrent connect to a single IPv6 peer - so I don't know if the support is there
The Linux ISOs (not a euphemism) I'm seeding probably get about a third of their peer connections via IPv6.
See my other comments, but my client fully supports Webtorrent and webtrackers.
Not much support for port forwarding.
IPv6 definitely works.
Download order is handled by providing readers directly into torrent data and using that for prioritization. So basically request what you need when you need it. No arbitrary list of algorithms.
Personally, "being as small as uTorrent used to be", but clearly that's not a deal-breaker. (Then again, neither is like two thirds of the stuff GP mentioned!)
To be fair, circa 2010 all torrent clients got "good enough", so my wishlist above is just a wishlist (because torrents are cool and I like to see progress). I use (and sponsor) qBittorrent myself and have no plans to change.
