foobarding

Software systems have bugs. They always do. This includes security bugs: vulnerabilities in code that could be exploited. In any software project I’ve worked on this is always true. We never finish fixing security bugs. That means vulnerabilities are always present even if hard to notice. AI tools are amazing at finding hard to notice bugs. It seems obvious that AI tools will have the capability to escape any sandbox. Ordinarily we design these sandboxes as a countermeasure to human bad actors. But what happens when the bad actor is supercharged? I think it is reasonable to be worried. It’s also reasonable to distrust those building this tech to adequately safeguard. Because how can you really?

Also in case you were curious what tipped me off was seeing just how common it is for Chromebooks to not have Google as their default search engine. Totally not the intended outcome of Google creating Chrome OS.

Yes this is exactly right. There is an industry of chrome extensions that exist to change the search engine to something truly unwanted (yahoo search anyone?) so that the extension author can extract rev share. They often advertise the extension as something else to trick people into installing. The target is often kids. As someone who worked at Google, I was surprised / shocked to see how many kids get targeted by these extensions. “Want to play this cool game? Just install this extension.” It is a really problematic thing without an obvious solution. Google has to fight against unwanted extensions but absolutely shouldn’t hide behind that acting like it is okay to punish competing search engines in the process.

If Android didn’t exist, some other OS would take its place. Samsung would have developed its own most likely, which would at this stage probably resemble something very similar to what we have today. Only difference is that Google would have been in a position more similar to the one it faces with Apple.

I agree also the point you are making. If Apple somehow commanded 90+% of the smartphone market then they would likely face much regulation.

Dealing with SwiftUI recreating Views too often can be a challenge. I would have liked to have seen more details on how this guy setup his models.

In my experience, you definitely have to minimize work done in Views and maybe avoid `@Published` properties on your model in favor of more explicit calls to `objectWillChange.send()` to signal when you really are ready for the Views to be updated. SwiftUI does not seem to do a very good job of coalescing by default.

Neeva has a similar ad-free model. The experience is getting better all the time.

Unlike DDG, Neeva is ad free. It also has a bunch of additional features.

My question exactly.

If used in a third party context, sure.

No. While that was part of it, a larger part was access to device capabilities. Much of those things are addressed now by standard web platform APIs.

Yes, but I think you may be missing the point they were trying to make. This is simply a form of caching for content delivered over HTTPS that preserves the key properties of HTTPS. The browser gets the blob and confirms cryptographically the origin of the blob. It can then show the user that origin information so they can know where the content came from. This is the thing browser UI is supposed to communicate to the user.

This is why Google is analogous to Comcast here. Neither can mess with the content or impact its origin. They are just part of the packet transmission system in between.

Hence this is a huge win. Previously, AMP was served off of Google servers where Google was the man in the middle aware of and even able to manipulate the content. The scripts were running on their origin, etc.

Now with this signed exchange tech, the contract is between browser and origin server. The Google cache is now super dumb, which is a big improvement from a privacy and security perspective.

oh, the irony. clickbait w/ the reward being ad revenue.