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If Google succeeds with the new DRM policy, will that affect functionality of browsers like firefox which uses a different engine? (feddit.rocks)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 189 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (72 children)

It depends how websites choose to implement it, and how other browsers choose to implement it.

If Firefox et.al chooses not to implement browser environment integrity, then any website that chooses to require strict integrity would completely cease to work on Firefox as it would not be able to respond to a trust check. It is simply dead. However, if they do implement it, which I imagine they would if this API actually becomes widespread, they should continue to work fine even if they're stuck with the limitations on environment modification inherent to the DRM (aka rip adblockers)

Websites will vary though. Some may not implement it at all, others may implement a non-strict integrity check that may happily serve browsers that do not pass the check. Third parties can also run their own attestation servers that will report varying levels of environment data. Most likely you will see all Google sites and a majority of "big" websites that depend on ad revenue implement strict integrity through Google attestation servers so that their precious ads don't get blocked, and the internet will become an absolutely horrid place.

Frankly I'll just stop using anything and everything that chooses to implement this, since we all know Google is going to go full steam ahead with implementation regardless of how many users complain. Protecting their ad revenue is priority 1 through 12,000 and fuck everybody else.

[–] joe 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 children)

I have a weak grasp of this, but a developer working on this responded to some criticism.

If the developers working to implement this are to be believed, they are intentionally setting it up so that websites would have an incentive to still allow untrusted (for lack of a better term) clients to access their sites. They do this by intentionally ignoring any trust check request 5% - 10% of the time, to behave as if the client is untrusted, even when it is. This means that if a website decides to only allow trusted clients, they will also be refusing trusted clients 5% - 10% of the time.

The relevant part of the response is quoted here:

WEI prevents ecosystem lock-in through hold-backs

We had proposed a hold-back to prevent lock-in at the platform level. Essentially, some percentage of the time, say 5% or 10%, the WEI attestation would intentionally be omitted, and would look the same as if the user opted-out of WEI or the device is not supported.

This is designed to prevent WEI from becoming “DRM for the web”. Any sites that attempted to restrict browser access based on WEI signals alone would have also restricted access to a significant enough proportion of attestable devices to disincentivize this behavior.

Additionally, and this could be clarified in the explainer more, WEI is an opportunity for developers to use hardware-backed attestation as alternatives to captchas and other privacy-invasive integrity checks.

[–] gothicdecadence 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If this is the case then what's actually the point of it?

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