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Linux users are more likely than most to be familiar with Chromium, Google's the free and open source web project that serves as the basis for their wildly popular Chrome. Since the project's inception over a decade ago, users have been able to compile the BSD licensed code into a browser that's almost the same as the closed-source Chrome. As such, most distributions offer their own package for the browser and some even include it in the base install. Unfortunately, that may be changing soon.
[...] To the average Chromium user, this doesn't sound like much of a problem. In fact, you might even assume it doesn't apply to you. The language used in the post makes it sound like Google is referring to browsers which are spun off of the Chromium codebase, and at least in part, they are. But the search giant is also using this opportunity to codify their belief that the only official Chromium builds are the ones that they provide themselves. With that simple change, anyone using a distribution-specific build of Chromium just became persona non grata.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @04:46PM (30 children)
I remember in the 90s that electronics companies kept trying to create an equivalent to updated cable TV network: flashier technology, but still the same control over content and connectivity that media companies had always enjoyed before the internet. Then companies like Yahoo came, and everyone wanted to be your "portal" to the internet: you load up the company homepage and get your news and other info services there. The portal industry failed in its first incarnation, but succeeded in its second with Facebook and Twitter and Google. Now we are back to a few media companies controlling content and connectivity. The early internet was an aberration: a frontier that would be conquered, settled, and brought into the giant corporatist/governmental fold. It was just a matter of time, and anyone who didn't see it coming 25 years ago was a fool. Freedom for any Joe Schmoe to possibly counter the ironclad control of the ruling class was not going to be allowed to stand.
*Twitter has flagged this post as misinformation.*
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 27 2021, @05:58PM (29 children)
This isn't quite true. You can still create your own website, completely independent of Google or Facebook or Cloudflare or AWS. No one is stopping you. You can also create your own social network: Diaspora exists, and I presume someone actually uses it. The internet's underlying protocols have not changed, and there's nothing stopping you from doing the exact same stuff now that you did 20 years ago.
The only problem is popularity: create your own Diaspora node, because you hate Facebook, and then get all your friends to join up and ditch FB too. Haha... good luck with that. So you'll have this great decentralized social network that you can use... by yourself. Meanwhile, all your friends complain about FB, but refuse to leave it, because all their other friends are still on there posting pictures of their grandkids or whatever. Though to be fair, from what I've read FB is much less popular with GenZ; it seems like it mostly gets used these days by grandparents keeping up with their kids, or by Boomers in a far-right-wing echo chamber.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:04PM (3 children)
So, I feel like in all the talk of breaking up facebook, we haven't collectively come up with any plausible solutions to the perverse incentives created by the network effect.
How do you make a platform not automatically better "because that's where your friends are"?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:11PM (1 child)
I have no idea. So far, I prefer to just bash people for being stupid, and say things like "if you hate it so much, then why are you still using it? How stupid."
Seriously, it's not like people can't change: go back to ~2000, and the dominant social network then was MySpace. Facebook was some upstart that only some college kids used. Well, that "that's where all my friends are" factor sure didn't save MySpace from becoming completely irrelevant while Facebook became the dominant network and one of the highest valued corporations in the world. So ultimately, this is due to the people: they give FB its power by continuing to use it, and refusing to use anything else. But as I said before, this may be temporary: from what I've read, the GenZers hate FB and only have (inactive) accounts on there because their grandparents insist on using it to keep tabs on them, and they use other things to communicate.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:49PM
That's the hope, but the reality... well, it's grim [statista.com]
Especially since where the fleers fled to was instagram, a facebook app.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 29 2021, @03:02PM
I think the idea with Diaspora was to create a method for the networks to network. That is, basically make social networking like email.
Sure, everyone is using hotmail as it is the best, but if google wanted to make a competing service, they could try.
If they did, it would be able to communicate with users of hotmail because they share a common communication protocol underneath.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:18PM (9 children)
Parent said:
"You can still create your own website, completely independent of Google or Facebook or Cloudflare or AWS. No one is stopping you. You can also create your own social network..."
Have you been asleep the last couple of years?
The ruling class shut down Gab a few years back and Parler some months ago because they were new competitor social media websites to our current social oligarchy. They also attack competitors at the DNS level and the financial level: pressure domain name registrars to drop your domain and for payment processors to drop you or not take your business irrespective of your creditworthiness.
Gab is back because they got canceled before and understand what they are up against. They are going old school with their own hosting and everything. DNS registrars and credit card companies though really should not be allowed to discriminate based on political basis. That's common infrastructure and economic access that in a free country is accessible to everyone.
Of course a success story like Gab's against political suppression is not to be tolerated and now the ruling class is bringing out the big guns, the government, to threaten Gab with shutdown for any legal excuse they can concoct. This is why the CEO of Gab says illegal activity will not be tolerated and he cooperates with police in shutting it down. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter, sites that enabled organizing of riots and out of control protests, child porn, and child trafficking face no calls to be disbanded. The ruling class owes them as partners in power.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:05PM (5 children)
But why don't Gab and Parler federate with the fediverse?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @10:15PM (4 children)
Gab tried, most of it banned them. Being free speech extremists and super tolerant folk, it was the only option. Then Gab realized Mastodon was rubbish and killed federation so they could excise the mastodon code and replace it with something that can scale to keep up with their explosive growth. Twitter's banhammer is the best thing that ever happened to Gab.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:17AM (1 child)
Mastodon has a surprisingly high portion of trans people, so when Gab started setting up their own Mastodon instances and connecting with the existing community, it did not go well. I don't blame site admins for blocking servers with a user base spamming 10% of their own users with death threats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @07:40PM
oh bs. the trannys and neo bolsheviks were wanting to block gab as soon as they heard gab was getting on the fediverse. they are authoritarian, censorious retards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @12:47PM (1 child)
I thought it was the other way around. Gab blocked freespeechextremist.com which is still well and alive on the fediverse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 29 2021, @05:00AM
They didn't want to lose their members to the competition. But they like to keep pretending that Gab is the only one that is being treated that way, it fits their narrative better. Then again, its not like hypocrisy was invented yesterday.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:38PM (2 children)
"The ruling class shut down Gab a few years back and Parler some months ago because they were new competitor social media websites to our current social oligarchy. They also attack competitors at the DNS level and the financial level: pressure domain name registrars to drop your domain and for payment processors to drop you or not take your business irrespective of your creditworthiness."
and? quit using and supporting centralized, controlled shit. Is everything perfect and finished? no, but that doesn't mean people can't use what's available. host you own sites, or use p2p software or build new stuff. stuff like handshake for dns and monero (and other privacy coins) for currency. if you use the international criminal bankster cartels' "money" and host your shit on amazon, you're a dumb ass slave.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:28PM (1 child)
Doing this from a PC in your home is likely to either technically not work (because your home ISP applies carrier-grade NAT or otherwise blocks incoming TCP connections) or cause your home ISP to stop carrying your traffic in either direction (because the home plan's acceptable use policy bans publicly accessible servers). This can cause harm to people who live in an area where only one or two wired home ISPs offer service.
Doing this using your own domain name and a virtual private server (which doesn't have to be Amazon's) is called the IndieWeb route [indieweb.org]. Say I make articles and videos and host them on my own site. What steps should I go about taking to get my first dozen viewers now that I no longer have the recommendation engines of the big silos [indieweb.org] behind me? And now that RSS/Atom/h-feed readers are no longer widely used nor included with web browsers, how would I go about notifying viewers that a new article is available to read?
What steps should I go about taking to get prospective viewers to install software capable of viewing said "new stuff"?
How does one go about buying Monero, or buying home Internet access with Monero, other than by exchanging "the international criminal bankster cartels' 'money'"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @07:46PM
i don't have time for all these reasonable questions! :)
1). yes, you would generally require a commercial internet connection or self host in a mom and pop-ish datacenter.
2). manual web/traditional marketing and self-built and run mailing lists.
3) marketing
4) sure, it;'s problematic but you can mine monero and you may be able to find debit/cc cards that can be "loaded" with crypto currency. The gatekeepers are a problem but if people would just start using and accepting it we could get tpo a critical mass and force the issue with our governments or route around governments completely with smart contracts, web 3.0, etc. Of course this is all much more difficult than just being a slave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:21PM (1 child)
The other problem is popularity: if you actually manage to create something that gets popular, it can be difficult to keep up with the popularity. You can make a service that scales up without Cloudflare or AWS or whatever... but nobody wants to put in the time or effort to do so.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:08PM
Without DDOS protection, you get noticed by the wrong people, and your site is screwed.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by slinches on Wednesday January 27 2021, @07:42PM (9 children)
And as I have mentioned to you before. There absolutely is someone stopping you from doing that. Namely being delisted by domain registrars, removed from DNS services and blocked by ISPs. So, no. You cannot create your own website without the support of private companies who have the right to exclude you simply because they don't like what you have to say. There is no public right of way and no enforced common carriers that would be obligated to provide such access to the internet. If we want to protect free speech as a fundamental principle, we will need to change that.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:15PM (2 children)
Bullshit.
Proof: stormfront.org still exists. Go look for yourself.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by slinches on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:35PM
That doesn't change the fact that any site could be removed (including that one) at any time on the whims of private entities with no accountability. That some companies are still willing to host all sites regardless of political views, especially objectionable ones, is encouraging in terms of free speech. Although, being reliant on the good will of for profit companies isn't a highly stable arrangement as it could be made unprofitable rather quickly.
My point still stands.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @10:20PM
Stormfront is a Fed honeypot. Of course it hasn't been bothered much. Did have to move DNS to Epik. Now try Dailystormer, Used to be .com until Google seized their DNS record and, against every norm, refused to release it to them to move it to another registrar. After a doze or so such forced name changes they seem to have finally found one that is sticking. Lord only knows how they keep a website up, without Weev it is certain they wouldn't.
The dark day of censorship has come, it crept up a couple of years ago and the so called civil libertarians who were supposed to be manning the ramparts against it were seen cheering with wild abandon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:42PM (5 children)
this is only true if you don't use free alternatives, like tor, loki.network, freenet, etc
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:27AM (4 children)
The goal is freedom of speech, as in, you are allowed to say things in the public square.
Saying it in some hidden corner where 0.0001% of humanity can hear you is admission of defeat.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:41AM (3 children)
..unless you're
alt-rignazi, in which case, being afraid to speak counts as a win for humanity.Nazis aren't interested in free speech. They're interested in death for everyone who isn't them; their support for free speech has murder as its motivation and fades to zero or less whenever some darkie (or jew or trade unionist or slut or...) tries to insist that they are, in fact, a human being deserving of human rights.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:38AM
...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @07:53PM
You're just regurgitating Jew propaganda that has been burned into your head since birth. Even the word Nazi is just a Jew slur against any Whites who stand up for themselves. The fact is, the Jews are terrified of the internet letting out the truth about WW2 and this is why there is a huge push for censorship, along with other established power being threatened by the truth.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday January 29 2021, @05:52AM
Ah, those "alt rig" people, always drilling for oil in unconventional locations...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:01PM (1 child)
Diaspora still exists and has users, but my understanding is that the current most successful federated social network is Mastodon. Supposedly they have 4 million users now. I used it for a while and met all kinds of interesting people worldwide, but none of my friends and family I knew before using Mastodon adopted it. I didn't mind that, I just quit because I found it nearly as addictive as Facebook even without researchers pouring limitless cash into fostering user addictions to the site.
Side note - the Boomers in my Facebook network have a right-wing echo chamber and a left-wing echo chamber, and the two sides scream at each other a lot. It's the reason I only login to the site once a month. I should have quit because their business model is corrupt and because fuck privacy invasions and double fuck advertisers. But mostly I quit because the stream of political lies put my blood pressure into 'imminent stroke' territory. Let's see, most recently... California legalized pedophilia (no), Trump paid off eight families whose children he raped (no), the media covered up that Antifa staged the Capitol riots (no), Putin controls Trump (no)... I would continue but I feel my pulse pounding again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @09:59PM
All that is GREAT for site engagement!
(Score: 2) by Lester on Sunday January 31 2021, @11:41AM
Yes, you can. But if you don't care being irrelevant. As long as you don't care to be part of an underground group that doesn't affect the rest of the world you can create your even your own internet with your top level domain.
But if you want a service with high traffic, 24/7 service 99% uptime, and not devoting hours of your time to maintenance (keeping system up to date with last attacks, exploits, updating software etc) or paying expensive technician to do so, you will have to go to one of those services.