Google Employee Accuses WEI-Opponents of Being “Criminals”
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Intimidation is bad (and this fact should not need to be stated).
But… this is otherwise absolutely terrible. If he can’t differentiate between “negative feedback, delivered abusively” and “negative feedback, delivered forcefully” then he should not be someone involved in this decision-making process.
I am vehemently against this proposal, and my reasons have nothing to do with criminality. Tarring all opposition as criminals is a really shitty tactic and is pretty obviously done in bad faith.
> If he can’t differentiate between “negative feedback, delivered abusively” and “negative feedback, delivered forcefully” then he should not be someone involved in this decision-making process.
Have you ever managed a large team of people? If so, do you think a good manager would really tell people that part of their job is to accept threats of physical abuse?
It is not disingenuous, it is a plain reading of the words written and it seems I am not the only one who read it in the same way. Thank you for clarifying your thoughts further; that seems like a prudent course of action.
However, labeling a comment as “disingenuous” is somewhat concerning to me. That particular label is typically used when one is trying to suggest that the labeled comment is somehow deceptive. From Merriam Webster’s “Did You Know?” section:
> A disingenuous remark might contain some superficial truth, but it is delivered with the intent to deceive or to serve some hidden purpose.
If that is indeed how you intended to use “disingenuous,” I would note that it serves to undercut any utility your clarification might have served.
I’m concerned you’re very primed to view everything around this as highly suspicious and that those involved have ulterior motives. Speaking as one internet nerd to another: take a break, go for a walk, clear your mind.
> Have you ever managed a large team of people? If so, do you think a good manager would really tell people that part of their job is to accept threats of physical abuse?
Frankly, I don’t see how that matters at all. If you want to make an appeal to authority like that, go ahead - but it’s fairly transparent and I’m not otherwise inclined to engage with it except to say: your team is proposing to dramatically change the internet, which is a concern that extends far beyond your team and your place of employment. Making this all about your team reads as a way to shut down feedback you don’t like under the guise of “abuse.” Your intentions are almost besides the point: as your clarification notes, your employer has burned up just about all trust with the community at this point.
If you have a legitimate concern about threats of physical abuse, I would suggest that there are perhaps other avenues to deal with it other than “ignore all feedback from GitHub.” For starters, I’m fairly certain that’s against their terms of service and code of conduct.
> Have you ever managed a large team of people? If so, do you think a good manager would really tell people that part of their job is to accept threats of physical abuse?
See this, right here, is exactly the problem: Yes, threats of physical abuse are unacceptable. Nobody here is saying otherwise. Pretending that the presence of unacceptable threats somehow invalidates legitimate criticism, however, just makes you look dishonest.
- Jewish physicians were de-certified, and were no longer allowed to treat German patients.
- Jews were not allowed to own gardens.
- All Jewish-named streets in Germany were renamed.
- Jews were prohibited from cinemas, the opera, and concerts.
- Jewish children were banned from public schools.
... it didn't go well for everyone.
P.S. I hereby invoke Godwin's Law ;-)
To me this is definitely not "accusing WEI-Opponents of Being Criminals". I don't support WEI but to claim that's what he's saying here is very dishonest.
Neither seem a sign of sociopathy to me.
From the mayo clinic:
"mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior."
The argument is also foolish. Almost the entire legal system is supported by criminals, it is nothing but a series of controls making it more likely that people don't face punishment. Criminals would _love_ stuff like prosecutors having to provide 'evidence' and juries and whatnot.
Just because criminals are in favour of something doesn't make the thing bad. Criminals can be philosophically correct, just like the rest of us.
That’s a nuance which is lost (deliberately sometimes) when the word unsafe or civil or similar are used. And unfortunately, that means these words are being used to censor, to shut down talk, and to control other people.
It’s paradoxical, because the language of safety becomes the instruments of abuse that they are (in such misuse) only pretending to be against. It’s really the interpersonal individual version of the “public safety! national security! Therefore, you need to give up your rights” manipulation of the public.
And paradoxically it’s actually abusive to the people who are invoking the “I feel unsafe” defense. Because when the nuance is lost (that it doesn’t always mean that somebody else is wrong) then the people invoking that “I feel unsafe” card are effectively surrendering their individual agency to be responsible for their own emotional reactions (and to process, investigate and understand their own emotional reactions), and by surrendering their agency and personal responsibility, they’re actually making themselves more vulnerable and more unsafe. Not to mention, abusing others in the process.
One way this abuse occurs, which is very common today, is incorrectly fake blaming other people for your own emotional reactions.
If anyone finds themselves in such situations and feel stuck or comfortable, I encourage you to move beyond vague terms, like ‘unsafe’ or ‘uncomfortable’, (which strictly speaking are not actual emotions they’re more like unresolved low resolution gestalt impressions that conceal the underlying emotions and) which in their vagueness are more open to abuse.
I encourage you to actually try to figure out what in fact are you feeling and ask you self why you might be feeling that. The basic emotions are: fear, anger, joy and sadness. Start there! You can use more words as you gain more awareness, I guess.
The reason I say that is because I believe that that kind of self-knowledge where people are really being honest with themselves, can only create better situations where they’re less likely to try to Weaponize their own emotional confusion as a way to abuse other people.
So I think it’s just generally healthy to be fully across where you are at, in a particular moment and to be in touch with what your internal sensors are giving you. if for no other reason, than that higher resolution enables you to contribute your unique specific perspective in a more detailed and constructive and useful way.
The "Wheel of Emotions" or "Feelings Wheel" is a useful tool in this regard: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/The_Feel...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Yes you do. Maybe not from the powers that be today, but the recent rise in authoritarism across the world shows that no country is immune to abusing technology.
Just freaking stop making the web user hostile, please. If your advertising model no longer works, great, move on to a business model that works instead of making yourself a target for the FTC and trustbusting.
> Bonus points if you also have suggestions or data on how to actually make meaningful progress on the problem of inauthentic traffic in a way that's fully consistent with the openness of the web :-).
Some things just aren't consistent, and I don't believe that you know what "the openness of the web" means, or really care :-).
> "the problem of inauthentic traffic"
also, the way this phrase (Which does not appear in the Explainer a single time) is used and is somehow the most concrete anything in the entire post, makes me think this is PR-ified.
>I hope you all have a stress-free weekend
Well, this has been stewing for a few days, but I've basically accepting that computing as I knew it for the first 25-ish years of my life is headed for obsolescence. I'm not thrilled, but not stressed I guess.
I certainly could have done a better job trying to convince you of that in that post. Perhaps my follow-up was better? https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_...
FWIW the whole reason I keep working on the web platform at Google is because it's the place I think I can do the most good for openness on the web. See eg. https://thenewstack.io/browser-vendors-aim-to-heal-developer..., https://www.chromium.org/blink/platform-predictability/. "The Master Switch" my Tim Wu is my gospell.
If I and other chromium leads didn't actually care about openness then you'd be able to tell pretty clearly because Chromium would be closed source, we wouldn't have big programs like wpt.fyi, and we wouldn't bother even trying to talk about this stuff on open mailing lists.
https://techreport.com/news/google-tries-to-defend-its-web-e...
I do actually believe you care about this. I think your employer once cared; but now they fundamentally do not (as a whole; I'm aware that Googlers are not a monolith).
There are a lot of people shouting at you that this isn't what an "open web" means, and that it's directly counter to the "open web." I imagine that's a difficult thing to square: your own feelings about the open web, and this proposal. How do you make them fit?
One way, of course, is to label the people shouting as criminals. ;)
If you are feeling that tension like I suspect you are, then sit with it for awhile. Really examine your principles and try to decide if this proposal actually lines up with your values. If you find that you cannot actually align this proposal with your principles - then I urge you to do something about it. Kill the proposal from the inside. You'd stand a lot better chance of doing that than I, an outsider, would.
That only helps if anyone believes you'll listen to anything on the mailing lists. Right now it looks like you publish things there so you can claim community input, and then go ahead with whatever you wanted to do in the first place.
As the expression goes: It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it.
WEI’s purpose is to block out bad traffic. The question isn’t whether all website owners will block non-attesting clients once this is rolled out. It’s whether any can. If they can, some will. The most promising way to address this are holdbacks. But they can’t work, because:
a) if 5% of pageloads fail, users will get used to it and adapt. When the load fails, they’ll reload. Holdbacks can’t reasonably disincentivize blocking non-attesting clients. Some websites really want to, and they will. They won’t care about losing 1-2% of visits.
b) Websites can just tell users how to bypass it: “Authentication failed. Try reloading, or switch to an authorized browser.”
c) Some governments (like the French) are already trying to legally mandate stuff roughly similar to WEI, though thankfully the methods they use are much milder than WEI. You’re opening Pandora’s box, just like Apple did with Communication Safety. Why couldn’t a government legally require all banks to block non-attesting clients? Then, this proposal will have enabled financial discrimination and de-banking, for something as benign as not being able to have an up-to-date browser on an “expired” Chromebook (outdated browsers would presumably fail attestation, and people with old laptops who can’t afford new ones shouldn’t be shut out of the economy).
Holdbacks can’t work. There’s no form WEI can take that wouldn’t cause what (I trust) you’re trying to avoid.
With all due respect, WEI is antithetical to this value and goal.
The question is, will you hear people who don't agree that your proposal will result in an open web, or continue classifying many people who want an open, non-toll-gated web as criminals?
Trying to change the narrative to doxxing and harassment sounds a lot like the classic influencer playbook for dealing with controversies:
1. Influencer/organization screws up.
2. This attracts negative attention.
3. Influencer/organization comes out with a statement that they are being bullied, doxxed, harassed, etc. Often evidence of this is absent or questionable.
4. They use their network and media contacts to make the story about (3) instead of (1).
A manager who cares about their staff should be aware that the only way to deal with harassment and abuse is to publicly ignore it and handle matters internally. Don't give the trolls any attention whatsoever. Any response will exacerbate the issue. If someone has been doxxed and there is a credible threat, put them up in a hotel on the other side of town for a few nights and contact law enforcement.
“Bonus points” for using a completely arbitrary code of conduct to decide what is safe. What a joke.
Of course nobody should doxx him, but I think it’s fair game to criticize somebody who wants to end web browsing as we know it. What he wants is extremely unpopular.
Chromium is popular enough to force feed WEI to the world, and most of users would have no choice but to accept this pure evil.
Imaging that you are planning for a campaign to nudge all chromium based browser users to switch to non-chromium browsers by showing a banner everywhere, the list you could provide as alternatives are literally next to []. (maybe webkit, imagine persuading someone to switch to Apple just for this)
(btw, there's a gecko based browser Waterfox which is awesome)
Always remember that large enough corporations are simply a form of government.
> my suspicion that there is significant intimidation from criminals who are afraid this feature will disrupt their illegal and/or unethical businesses, and I don't give in to criminals or bullies
Note also, avoiding any discussion of the web open or how it entered into the decision to postpone, supposedly. Though, that also wasn't said, just sort of implied with the half-hearted smiley-faced plea for compromising.
I am not emotionally invested because I see this as inevitable and don't care, I'll go live in the woods soon anyway, but this is just icky to read.
Why not, say, the librarians?
So, he chose to speak about a specific thing, and so it's perfectly fair to critique exactly that specific thing, which he chose to highlight.
"Thank you for your comments. We are not going to listen to your comments. We're surprised that not listening to your comments has led to people trying to contact through other means. The only reason I can think of to object to WEI is crime so enough of you are probably criminals that I'm going to mention it in the first paragraph as an accusation."
For a lot of us here in the US, we claim that we would defend our First Amendment right to free speech with violence if necessary. For some of us, the web is where spend a significant amount of effort exercising that freedom. And I know that there are quite a few of us who have looked at the WEI proposal, and are concerned that our ability to exercise our First Amendment right to free speech on the web could be curtailed should WEI be adopted by major websites.
Given what I know about Americans and our love of free speech and guns, I don't find the threats and abuse that Rick Byers claims to be receiving to be ironic at all.
It's also not a new or uncommon reaction when people see something they care about being destroyed but feel powerless to stop it.
For example, this well known quote: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/605697
But this whole attestation thing should be killed with fire.
Companies (or governments) have no business putting anything on machines that you own in order to prove you comply with their wishes.
It probably goes back as far as complex oral communication goes.
However, everyone is the hero of their own story - even those boogeymen thought they were doing some form of good in their sophistry. The WEI devs apparently do too.
Besides black hat stuff, and grey hat stuff like mass scraping, who would that bother?