this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
968 points (98.9% liked)

Technology

34976 readers
116 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It seems logical to assume that there would be no point to the whole thing if it was so easily avoided just by modifying your browser. Someone who's, for example, selling fake engagement (e.g., fake reviews), which is listed as one of the things Ben Wiser at al. want to prevent, will probably have enough technical expertise to use a modified browser that will circumvent WEI, so why would Google even bother?

[–] FreeloadingSponger@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To make it harder, even if not impossible, for the average user to ad block them.

Are you asking because you're not sure of the answer, or because you are, and you know that web integrity will require a pre-compiled closed source binary to browse the web?

[–] salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No, I'm not sure. It's possible that this is a benign technology, but many believe it's not, including people at Mozilla, people at Vivaldi, Cory Doctorow, Jay Freeman (aka "Saurik"), the developer of Cydia (via The Register), so I'm concerned.

This recent blog post also mentions the intent of disallowing unsigned software to browse the web. Perhaps you'll find it interesting.