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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

Reminder not to lower our guard, as they will keep trying, stealthily, using back-handed methods.

Who wakes up in the morning excited to go implement 1984 style attestation? I cannot imagine being empowered with hard engineering skills and then wasting my precious little time on this earth toiling away at something so uninspiring. There are an infinite number of actually interesting problems to solve...go fix a compiler bug or write a cool GPU algorithm and stop fighting against freedom.

Because if you ignore all of the real world consequences of doing so, it does solve some problem. It’s the Jurassic Park issue, and what happens when deeply technical people get so caught up in the fact that they could do something that they fail to consider the externalities of doing so.

Of course in this case it’s a bit more than that, in that Google was deliberately and strategically aiming to use this to further monopolize its position and inweave itself into the fabric of the internet.

Yeah, but I can totally relate to getting lost in the sauce growing a freaking T-Rex (!?!?). Bonus points if it eats management. But even just the word "attestation" makes me want to beat up the office printer in a field.

Well said. Also consider that some people are just trying to make a living while coping with children, aging parents, health, whatever.

It’s easy to preach that everyone should refuse to do work that is “bad” in some nebulous, long term way. Especially if you’re comfortable and can afford to quit as a matter of principle. But not everyone can do that.

Google employees can do that in my opinion. These aren't coal miners in small town Virginia with no options. They are (for the most part) tech elites who could work just about anywhere.

Theoretically, long term, yes. But I deeply envy you if you’ve never had life circumstances that would have made quitting on principle impossible.

I doubt many engineers do. It's all little pieces that add up to fulfill a larger corporate strategy. I'm sure the designers of TPMs etc don't see themselves as part of a large scheme to fully lock down everyone's devices and have corporations decide exactly what people see and share. But their work is required for it.

Well the thing got merged in the first place, so someone wants it.

>a large check appears

It's that simple, really

> Who wakes up in the morning excited to go implement 1984 style attestation?

The problem with 1984 isn't just the power Big Brother wields, but the malevolence with which it is inflicted. Would it be the same story if Big Brother were benevolent?

This is why we want tech people to learn ethics and consider social impact. If you ignore (or are blind to) the massive social consequence of WEI, you can see all the problems it'd solve or help mitigate. Goodbye spam and LLM spam, revenge porn and traffickers can be tracked back, etc.

To be clear, this is not an endorsement of WEI, only that it's very easy to imagine the type of person who can passionately implement it.

>Would it be the same story if Big Brother were benevolent?

Yes. Try Huxley's 'Brave New World'.

Ah, the `Orwell was an optimist’ book.

The same way people work for the military-industrial complex, or for Big Oil: big wads of money. There are plenty of people whose morals are somewhat flexible, for the right price.

You can solve plenty of interesting problems in your spare time when you're able to retire at 40-50.

it's obviously not the engineers that are making the decisions, and if you're being paid $x00,000 a year by Google, maybe you do have some enthusiasm about your work, 1984 or no

Never underestimate the variety of interests and goals in a company of 100,000 people.

I don't doubt this was something somebody thought was a good idea and was willing to invest their engineering career in pulling off. History is full of people who were excited about building the biggest bomb or a gun that could shoot space.

> Who wakes up in the morning excited to go implement 1984 style attestation?

Probably folks who remember trying to play Counterstrike against wallhackers and enjoy that experience.

If you want to run a website today you need to either

1) Implement your own authentication to filter out bots, even if the service could be otherwise public (permanently identifying all your users)

2) Pay some WAF provider like Cloudflare to sit in front of your service and send Captcha's (and while you are at it let them man in the middle all your users traffic somewhat defeating the purpose of TLS).

3) Be rich enough to scale your backend to deal with any DDOS/scraper

A cheap way to throttle or drop non-human traffic and bringing back the option of being able to spin up a couple of VPS's and host a website without involving a WAF seems like a cool problem to me.

Of course its more dubious coming from a company that already has the ability to do 3).

Google Play SafetyNet exists. Almost all native apps have anti-user libraries like this. Pen tests will flag your app if it can run in a jailbroken system or if it detected the user might have root access. The entire rest of computing is in hell world & people spend time actively eroding user rights just because, with no real threat vectors known.

The web is uniquely unblemished, still filled with ideas hope and rfc8890 the internet is for end users optimism. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8890/

Pretty much. This is likely more of a tactical regrouping.

They already have. They're sneaking it in via WebView in Android:

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2023/11/increasing...

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