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Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2048

Because its cover to allow them to subsume content and serve it solely from google.com, and deny the originating page any traffic or recognition, or swap it out transparently when they feel like it.

This is literally already happening with the info sidebar, the reason signed exchanges matter is so they can throw up the smokescreen about how its cryptographically verified to come from the original page, so why are people upset.

Any site that objects and refuses to implement this stuff will just disappear from the first page which is reserved only for Accelerated By Google sites. (Which is already happening for AMP links on mobile searches).

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As I understood signed exchanges, a correct implementation makes it impossible for the intermediary to inject, alter, replace, or otherwise swap out any part of the page without failing verification. This would mean the original server gets to do all the branding and get all the recognition and integrity in transit that its controllers might wish.

I've clearly missed something. Can you help me?

AMP already heavily restricts what the original page is allowed to put inside, including things like ads, javascript and branding. You can be certain anything google implements around this proposal will have similar very tight restrictions.

That's definitely a scary thought! Can you share any details of what must be public plans to strip everything non-Google of branding? Surely there must be something out there beyond the IETF docs for the protocol, where I don't see any evil plans to Googlify everything in. If anything, it looks like a design intended to allow relaxing the restrictions imposed by AMP.

Perhaps I need to read them more closely.

If you want an honest discussion try toning down the smarmy bullshit.

Yes, as you say, Integrity is preserved. However, Confidentiality is also another important aspect of Information Security. Making a 3rd party appear as a 1st party, is a privacy and confidentiality violation, which is why I do not like AMP and signed exchanges.

Yeah, as near as I can tell signed exchanges are essentially a caching proxy. With integrity checks, so that you don't have to trust the proxy all that much and its agency is much reduced. I'm reminded of apt.

The calculation appears to be that given the chance, some website controllers will choose to trade confidentiality of public pages for better load times. In business terms, this seems a pretty straightfoward win in many cases, so I can see why some would sign up.

The publishers are not mentioning to the visitor they are adding one more third party looking at your data; one that maintains an ad exchange and will be an intermediary on every resource request.

A publisher is free to switch to AMP, but choice needs to be given to the user to agree or leave the site the same way it happens with cookies. I wouldn’t opt in and now I cannot block Google tracking at the DNS level thanks to this.

Publishers can, and should, always make visitors aware of how many third parties are positioned to see all visitor data.

We are, unfortunately, a long way from this being normal. Even as third parties doing things like running CDNs or doing TLS termination for other reasons has been pretty thoroughly normalized. Though offering it as a Firefox extension could be an interesting exercise.

I think publishers view AMP as a question of their sovereignty and choice. Since it's their website that's being potentially served by Google, it's their choice to make. There's absolutely a lot of room to dispute if this is the morally correct stance, but I also think it's not wildly out of line with other questions publishers weigh in choosing what they serve and how.

> I wouldn’t opt in and now I cannot block Google tracking at the DNS level thanks to this.

How do signed exchanges break blocking Google tracking at the DNS level? You already need to have google.com unblocked in order to get a results page that serves an exchange from Google.

> swap it out transparently

> cryptographically verified to come from the original page

Elaborate.

The page results will be a tightly restricted iframe-esque window inside of google results (This is what the Chome "Portals" proposal is about).

There will be no obvious distinction between a search result and google's own website, even though the "portals" will be showing cryptographically signed content (which will almost certainly be in a super restricted AMP-esque format that denies sites much control besides what the text says)

If google swaps one result for another, 95% of users wont even notice.

> If google swaps one result for another, 95% of users wont even notice.

Right so exactly the same way the search results page works today?

> The page results will be a tightly restricted iframe-esque window inside of google results

This is completely independent of AMP. Portals work for non-AMP content too.

> which will almost certainly be in a super restricted AMP-esque format that denies sites much control besides what the text says

So you're suggesting that Google will create a new, even more restricted than AMP protocol to be viewed on the search page?

Isn't that what those meta tags are for so google can quickly show scores, reviews and stuff?

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