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Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles:
A proposed Google web specification threatens to turn websites into inscrutable digital blobs that resist content blocking and code scrutiny, according to Peter Snyder, senior privacy researcher at Brave Software.
On Tuesday, Snyder published a memo warning that Web Bundles threaten user agency and web code observability. He raised this issue back in February, noting that Web Bundles would prevent ad blockers from blocking unwanted subresources. He said at the time he was trying to work with the spec's authors to address concerns but evidently not much progress has been made.
His company makes the Brave web browser, which is based on Google's open-source Chromium project though implements privacy protections, by addition or omission, not available in Google's commercial incarnation of Chromium, known as Chrome.
[...] The Web Bundles API is a Google-backed web specification for bundling the multitude of files that make up a website into a single .wbn file, which can then be shared or delivered from a content delivery network node rather than a more distant server. It's one of several related specifications for packaging websites.
The problem, as Snyder sees it, is that Web Bundles takes away the very essence of the web, the URL.
"At root, what makes the web different, more open, more user-centric than other application systems, is the URL," he wrote. "Because URLs (generally) point to one thing, researchers and activists can measure, analyze and reason about those URLs in advance; other users can then use this information to make decisions about whether, and in what way, they'd like to load the thing the URL points to."
An individual concerned about security or privacy, for example, can examine a JavaScript file associated with a particular URL and take action if it looks abusive. That becomes difficult when the file isn't easily teased out of a larger whole. Web Bundles set up private namespaces for URLs, so privacy tools that rely on URLs don't work.
"The concern is that by making URLs not meaningful, like just these arbitrary indexes into a package, the websites will become things like .SWF files or PDF files, just a big blob that you can't reason about independently, and it'll become an all or nothing deal," Snyder explained in a phone interview with The Register.
Separately, Google has been working to hide full URLs in the Chrome omnibox.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:40AM (5 children)
That's not what this does. The web browser has to be able to display the thing at the end of it all. That means the web browser has to be able to figure out what the data is and/or where to grab it from.
This sounds like quite a bit of FUD to me.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:57AM (2 children)
The idea is to force you to download everything instead of blocking crap you don't want. Obviously not going to work, especially when you pre-sanitize your local copy to remove any reference to file types you didn't whitelist. It's like covid - lots of sanitizing, mask out undesirable file types, keep away from suspicious files.
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday August 30 2020, @09:40PM (1 child)
>You can use FTP to seek to the index
you meant http range request I think, the number of websites with an anonymous FTP server active for the domain must be quite low these days.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday August 30 2020, @10:29PM
This whole thing is only going to be used by google alone for their next generation to of AMP , so if you don't use google search you'll be able to see the original site, and not some web bundle that they want to serve up to act as a sort of private web, depriving the original site of hits while simultaneously inserting their own ads, so it's not like it's anything to be really worried about unless you serve up static content - and the original site can always poison googles crawl.
Everyone is trying to make parts of the web into their own walled gardens, the biggest offenders being Facebook and Alphabet. But what do they supply that you really need?
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by deimtee on Sunday August 30 2020, @06:07AM (1 child)
You've got to look further ahead. The next step after this is widespread is obviously to encrypt/decrypt the bundle using the same or similar DRM methods they use to play "protected" content.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday August 30 2020, @11:04AM
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