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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

This is why a web and ad giant shouldn’t be in charge of the world’s most popular browser as well as the world’s most popular web engine. Huge conflict of interest.

Chrome should be spun off into a non-profit that is barred from Google/Alphabet influence.

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It's worth pointing out that the commit that did this was made by a Microsoft employee who has been working on the clipboard API, not a Google employee.

At a glance and without very much context, it looks to me like this engineer was working on implementing Web Custom formats for the clipboard API [0], but broke the Google doodle sharing while doing so. It appears they were trying to restore old behavior as a temporary measure, but ended up breaking the checks altogether.

Their commit's comment[1] claims that the added variable should only be true if reading/writing a web custom format, but that obviously isn't the case (anymore?).

EDIT: Here is their original commit, which broke the doodle sharing: [2]. It extends the interaction requirement to custom formats, which wasn't true before. Their followup was meant to just undo that part of this commit, but appears to have done much more.

[0] https://chromestatus.com/feature/5649558757441536

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/4d7b74b051a...

[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/a3b96a459cf...

This should be the top comment!

that feels like a rather fragile process for something that is underpinning the internet to permit such mistakes occur so easily.

Yes. For one thing, it looks like there was an automated test that warned the doodle was broken, but no such test for clipboard security features.

And underpinning an increasing amount of desktop software now as well.

Cool cool cool, we're breaking browsers because Google has complained that their daily doodle can't be copied. Not worrying at all.

All changes are approved by chromium devs.

Mozilla did some pretty nefarious things with Firefox as well though, for some marketing campaigns.

Not saying it’s worse, but it may not necessarily be due to Google also being an ad giant, but just corporations being corporations and having the wrong priorities.

I’ve been thinking about switching back to Firefox. Care to share an example?

Probably the Mr Robot thing. I mostly use Firefox (and recommend it), but they do appear to be run by MBAs or marketers— not sure which.

Love the Mr Robot addon.

It wasn't always like that. I think it changed 2 or 3 years ago.

That was such a strange choice by Mozilla, I mean the plug-in was specifically for people who play the Mr Robot game. Even after Mozilla force-pushed it to their entire user base players still had to manually enable it to play. If the whole damn thing required manual intervention anyway why didn’t they just put it in the addon store to start with?!

consider going librewolf instead, if your concern is security. I personally use librewolf for most things and brave for the few things that don't work well on firefox in linux (i.e. playing video from my nvr, my realtor website's 3d floor plan walkout, etc). Floccus and bitwarden keep bookmarks and passwords synced between the two so I barely notice which one I am using.

It was a reality named Firefox.

But then a concurrent solution happened and almost everyone moved to chrome.

The history is sad but true: it's the general indifference to those conflict of interest that led us here...

World's most popular mobile OS too. Used to push said browser, ripped of extensibility (I guess they couldn't blacklist ad blockers specifically).

Google has sunk about $100m into developing Chrome. People need to expect to own things after making big investments. That's how any of this works.

dictate random policies like that and you will watch American capitalism die.

Most of the development work they gave away free under a public domain like license.

If "capitalism" can't survive reasonable consumer protection then perhaps it deserves to die, sure.

Perhaps when make a similar comment in future you could expand a bit and sketch out a possible alternative to that of people being free to to trade things of value with other people under the aegis of a dynamic regulatory system? I guess you mean a specific meaning of 'capitalism' but the nature of that is not clear at all.

Consider:

Option 1: the definition of "capitalism" requires that zero regulation be applied. In that case, abandon "capitalism" and replace it with whatever you'd call the same model but with regulation.

Option 2: a significant amount of regulation actually is enough alone to fatally destabilize capitalism. I do not believe this to be the case, but if it were, then it should very likely be abandoned, but it's difficult to know how other options might behave in this hypothetical universe.

I would argue that capitalism is exactly what the American system is. These terms are descriptive rather than prescriptive.

That's certainly a model one could use, but it strikes me as not particularly useful.

Claiming lofty ideology is not useful because those policies never exist in real life

Increased precision in base concepts makes it easier to measure and reason about the real-world drift from those bases.

That's assuming that those bases are even the goal for the people implementing the policies, which I am not convinced is the case in the US.

If that is not the assumption then we can just make arbitrary claims about anything and calculate "drift"

I'm looking at this from an economics study view, not a public policy view.

Definitions have an inherently arbitrary component, sure. But stable, precise definitions are far easier to reason with than a shifting definition like "whatever the US is doing right now".

The study of economics is not exactly known for its rigor, I'm not sure how much value that has

Gotta start somewhere.

Do you think capitalism can exist without policy and regulation?

People being free to trade things of value is not capitalism. Many other economic systems allow for this.

If that was how the world worked then Blizzard would have lost the rights for Diablo to a hand full of wales.

Dumping a ton of money down the toilet doesn't mean you own the toilet.

Da fuck?

Only 100m?

I would have thought 10x 100m minimum

Ok, so wanting to stop Google from messing with my system is communism?

Depends on who you ask.

That’s not entirely inaccurate.

Capitalism requires that the capitalists (who own for a living) are in control of the state, so it has little incentive to stop Google from messing with your system.

The only certain way to stop them is for workers (who work for a living, the majority of us) gain control of state power through a socialist revolution. Those historically are led by communists or similar.

So if you want control over your computer and ultimately life, join us in conspiring to overthrow capitalism.

The way I see it is that forms of socialism and communism are true democracies in that when everyone is part of the state we should all have equal say, an equal vote in deciding policy

The opposite throughout history seems to be the State becomes both the government, and those who “own for a living”. You go from a mixture of corrupt powers to one corrupt, almost absolute power.

I choose neither. Is there another alternative?

That can happen, but it’s debatable how common it has been historically.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that the capitalists also control the media, school curriculums, academia (including economics and history), etc. It’s not hard for them to portray all socialist countries as far worse than they are, in order to discourage workers from rising up. And of course it is in the capitalists interest to do so.

As someone who has lived in this kind of a system in a country that doesn't exist anymore, I'd be (and am) a lot happier in a capitalist system, where workers can choose anytime to create their own budiness without the government owning it.

I'd be even happier if governments treated small businesses the same as they treat large (mostly by making tax avoidance impossible, and making the large pay the same taxes as the small ones to), but that's practically impossible with the corruption in our governments.

Workers need capital to create a business. They can’t gain capital while the majority of the surplus they create through labour is taken by capitalists.

You’re happier in a richer country, as are many of us Eastern Europeans that have been forced to emigrate. We could’ve been even happier in our own countries while having collective control over the means of production, but the (foreign) capitalists made sure that wasn’t possible through propaganda, coups, sanctions and invasions.

Many, many businesses need very little capital to start, less than a price of a car, that most of the people complaining about that, are currently driving.

I haven't moved, I still live in the same city, the country is the one that doesn't exist anymore.

>you will watch American capitalism die.

That's one of my explicit goals, so good.

So, which system do you recommend then?

I'm from a former socialist country (both former socialist, and former country, since neither exist anymore).

Google has achieved high economies of scale in many areas but mainly in skirting taxation and government regulation. That's corrupt cronyism, not capitalim. The positive quality of capitalism is it's efficiency, good luck finding that inside bureaucratic google.

It's literally just capitalism lmao

Capitalism requires competition and there is little competition in anything google does. That's in large part due to how heavily "subsidized" they became thanks to governments "overlooking" blatant tax avoidance.

Putin has invested much more into owning Russia. According to your logic, we must allow Putin to own Russia.

I mean, for the most part we did.

It was when he wanted to own Ukraine that it rose to the level of significant intervention by the outside world.

Putin has invested significant resources into owning Ukraine, too, so if people have a right to own whatever they invest significant resources into, then Putin has a right to own Ukraine.

Yes, but (continuing the argument) the rest of the world has also invested significant resources into Ukraine to counter his ownership claim (in a way that never really happened while he was solidifying his hold on Russia).

Ooh, that's all I have to do to watch American capitalism die?

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