I have a 7950X, a pile of RAM, and an unfairly expensive RTX 4000-series GPU. The cursor occasionally hitches for ~400ms whenever doing things like opening task manager or resuming from the lock screen, so that checks out unfortunately.
I went to one of their concerts, and their lead singer, David Draiman, was one of the most wholesome and honest guys I’ve ever seen. Funny headline, but I hope he recovers quickly and without any long-term effects.
Unless something changed in the specification since I read it last, the attested environment payload only contains minimal information. The only information the browser is required to send about the environment is that: this browser is {{the browser ID}}, and it is not being used by a bot (e.g. headless Chrome) or automated process.
Depending on how pedantic people want to be about the definition of DRM, that makes it both DRM and not DRM. It’s DRM in the sense that it’s “technology to control access to copyrighted material” by blocking bots. But, it’s not DRM in the sense that it “enables copyright holders and content creators to manage what users can do with their content.”
It’s the latter definition that people colloquially know DRM as being. When they’re thinking about DRM and its user-hostility, they’re thinking about things like Denuvo, HDCP, always-online requirements, and soforth. Technologies that restrict how a user interacts with content after they download/buy it.
Calling web environment integrity “DRM” is at best being pedantic to a definition that the average person doesn’t use, and at worst, trying to alarm/incite/anger readers by describing it using an emotionally-charged term. As it stands right now, once someone is granted access to content gated behind web environment integrity, they’re free to use it however they want. I can load a website that enforces WEI and run an adblocker to my heart’s content, and it can’t do anything to stop that once it serves me the page. It can’t tell the browser to disable extensions, and it can’t enforce integrity of the DOM.
That’s not to say it’s harmless or can’t be turned into user-hostile DRM later, though. There’s a number of privacy, usability, ethical, and walled-garden-ecosystem concerns with it right now. If it ever gets to widespread implementation and use, they could later amend it to require sending an extra field that says “user has an adblocker installed”. With that knowledge, a website could refuse to serve me the page—and that would be restricing how I use the content in the sense that my options then become their way (with disabled extensions and/or an unmodified DOM) or the highway.
The whole concept of web environment integrity is still dubious and reeks of ulterior motives, but my belief is that calling it “DRM” undermines efforts to push back against it. If the whole point of its creation is to lead way to future DRM efforts (as the latter definition), having a crowd of people raising pitchforks over something they incorrectly claim it does it just gives proponents of WEI an excuse to say “the users don’t know what they’re talking about” and ignore our feedback as being mob mentality. Feedback pointing out current problems and properly articulating future concerns is a lot harder to sweep under the rug.
Thank you for making an informative and non-alarmist website around the topic of Web Environment Integrity.
I’ve seen (and being downvoted for arguing against) so many articles, posts, and comments taking a sensationalized approach to the discussion around it, and it’s nice to finally see some genuine and wholly factual coverage of it.
I really can’t understate how much I appreciate your efforts towards ethical reporting here. You guys don’t use alarm words like “DRM,” and you went through the effort of actually explaining both what WEI does and how it poses a risk for the open web. Nothing clickybaity, ragebaity, and you don’t frame it dishonesty. Just a good, objective description of what it is in its current form and how that could be changed to everything people are worried about.
Is there anything that someone like me could help contribute with? It seems like our goals (informing users without inciting them, so they can create useful feedback without FUD and misinformation) align, and I’d love to help out any way I can. I read the (at the time incomplete) specs and explainer for WEI, and I could probably write a couple of paragraphs going over what they promised or omitted. If you check my post history, I also have a couple of my own example of how the WEI spec could be abused to harm users.
In other posts, I’ve tried to point out how some of the articles and comments around WEI are more speculative than factual and received downvotes and accusations of boot-licking for it. Welcome to the club, I guess.
The speculation isn’t baseless, but I’m concerned about the lack of accurate information about WEI in its current form. If the majority of people believe WEI is immediately capable of enforcing web page integrity, share that incorrect fact around, and incite others, it’s going to create a very good excuse for dismissing all dissenting feedback of WEI as FUD. The first post linking to the GitHub repository brought in so many pissed off/uninformed people that the authors of the proposal actually locked the repo issues, preventing anyone else from voicing their concerns or providing examples of how implementing the specification could have unintended or negative consequences.
Furthermore, by highlighting the DRM and anti-adblock aspect of WEI, it’s failing to give proper attention to many of the other valid concerns like:
I very well could be wrong, but I think our (the public) opinions would have held more weight if they were presented in a rational, informed, and objective manner. Talking to software engineers as people generally goes down better than treating them like emotionless cogs in the corporate machine, you know?
Can’t have a runtime error if you don’t have a compiled binary *taps forehead*
(For the record, I say this as someone who enjoys Rust)
I hope you were being sarcastic, because, ideally, nobody implements this.
Good article. Not clickbait/ragebait, and it explains the specification simply and succinctly, while also demonstrating why it’s dangerous for the open web.
But the real questions is, can we change them?
Imagine this:
I’m not a lawyer, nor do I have the full context of the legislation you’re quoting, but my interpretation of that paragraph is that it only applies to aircrafts that are carrying passengers.
. . . in the air space in possession of another, by a person who is traveling in an aircraft, is privileged . . .
You’re the one who does this for a hobby, though. I’m sure that you know the laws more than I do :)
From what I can tell, that’s basically what this is trying to do. Some company can sign a source image, then other companies can sign the changes made to the image. You can see that the image was created by so-and-so and then manipulated by so-and-other-so, and if you trust them both, you can trust the authenticity of the image.
It’s basically git commit signing for images, but with the exclusionary characteristics of certificate signing (for their proposed trust model, at least. It could be used more like PGP, too).
I glossed through some of the specifications, and it appears to be voluntary. In a way, it’s similar to signing git commits: you create an image and chose to give provenance to (sign) it. If someone else edits the image, they can choose to keep the record going by signing the change with their identity. Different images can also be combined, and that would be noted down and signed as well.
So, suppose I see some image that claims to be an advertisement for “the world’s cheapest car”, a literal rectangle of sheet metal and wooden wheels. I could then inspect the image to try and figure out if that’s a legitimate product by BestCars Ltd, or if someone was trolling/memeing. It turns out that the image was signed by LegitimateAdCompany, Inc and combined signed assets from BestCars, Ltd and StockPhotos, LLC. Seeing that all of those are legitimate businesses, the chain of provenance isn’t broken, and BestCars being known to work with LegitimateAdCompany, I can be fairly confident that it’s not a meme photo.
Now, with that being said…
It doesn’t preclude scummy camera or phone manufacturers from generating identities unique their customers and/or hardware and signing photos without the user’s consent. Thankfully, at least, it seems like you can just strip away all the provenance data by copy-pasting the raw pixel data into a new image using a program that doesn’t support it (Paint?).
All bets are off if you publish or upload the photo first, though—a perceptual hash lookup could just link the image back to original one that does contain provenance data.
Back when I was in school, we had typing classes. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m younger than you and they assumed we has basic computer literacy, or older than you and they assumed we couldn’t type at all. In either case, we used Macs.
It wasn’t until university that we even had an option to use Linux on school computers, and that’s only because they have a big CS program. They’re also heavily locked-down Ubuntu instances that re-image the drive on boot, so it’s not like we could tinker much or learn how to install anything.
Unfortunately—at least in North America—you really have to go out of your way to learn how to do things in Linux. That’s just something most people don’t have the time for, and there’s not much incentive driving people to switch.
A small side note: I’m pretty thankful for Valve and the Steam Deck. I feel like it’s been doing a pretty good job teaching people how to approach Linux.
By going for a polished console-like experience with game mode by default, people are shown that Linux isn’t a big, scary mish-mash of terminal windows and obscure FOSS programs without a consistent design language. And by also making it possible to enter a desktop environment and plug in a keyboard and mouse, people can* explore a more conventional Linux graphical environment if they’re comfortable trying that.
It’s possible that Google doesn’t, although that would be weird since the ability to push apps is probably standardized and baked into the stock Android OS source code.
Or maybe you just used MVNOs that don’t purposefully install anything that isn’t strictly necessary.
Android OS developers or software devs working for cell providers would probably know the answer, though.
Anecdotally, I can confirm otherwise. I bought an unlocked Galaxy phone directly from Samsung, and putting in a SIM card provisioned it for my cell provider and installed their apps.
Thankfully, I’m not on a provider that pushes adware.
Oh cool, there’s a 200mp camera. Something that only pro photographers care about lol.
Oh this is a fun one! Trained, professional photographers generally don’t care either, since more megapixels aren’t guaranteed to make better photos.
Consider two sensors that take up the same physical space and capture light with the same efficiency/ability, but are 10 vs 40 megapixels. (Note: Realistically, a higher density would mean design trade-offs and more generous manufacturing tolerances.)
From a physics perspective, the higher megapixel sensor will collect the same amount of light spread over a more dense area. This means that the resolution of the captured light will be higher, but each single pixel will get less overall light.
So imagine we have 40 photons of light:
More Pixels Less Pixels
----------- -----------
1 2 1 5
2 6 2 3 11 11
1 9 0 1 15 3
4 1 1 1
When you zoom in to the individual pixels, the higher-resolution sensor will appear more noisy. This can be mitigated by pixel binning, which groups (or “bins”) those physical pixels into larger, virtual ones—essentially mimicking the lower-resolution sensor. Software can get crafty and try to use some more tricks to de-noise it without ruining the sharpness, though. Or if you could sit completely still for a few seconds, you could significantly lower the ISO and get a better average for each pixel.
Strictly from a physics perspective (and assuming the sensors are the same overall quality), higher megapixel sensors are better simply because you can capture more detail and end up with similar quality when you scale the picture down to whatever you’re comparing it against. More detail never hurts.
… Except when it does. Unless you save your photos as RAW (which take a massice amount of space), they’re going to be compressed into a lossy image format like JPEG. And the lovely thing about JPEG, is that it takes advantage of human vision to strip away visual information that we generally wouldn’t perceive, like slight color changes and high frequency details (like noise!)
And you can probably see where this is going: the way that the photo is encoded and stored destroys data that would have otherwise ensured you could eventually create a comparable (or better) photo. Luckily, though, the image is pre-processed by the camera software before encoding it as a JPEG, applying some of those quality-improving tricks before the data is lost. That leaves you at the mercy of the manufacturer’s software, however.
In summary: more megapixels is better in theory. In practice, bad software and image compression negate the advantages that a higher resolution provides, and higher-density sensors likely mean lower-quality data. Also, don’t expect more megapixels to mean better zoom. You would need an actual lense for that.
It’s a “feature,” in fact…
Under What to expect on this support page, it says:
The phone branding, network configuration, carrier features, and system apps will be different based on the SIM card you insert or the carrier linked to the eSIM.
The new carrier’s settings menus will be applied.
The previous carrier’s apps will be disabled.
The correct approach from a UX perspective would have been to display an out-of-box experience wizard that gives the user an option to either use the recommended defaults, or customize what gets installed.
Unfortunately, many manufacturers don’t do that, and just install the apps unconditionally and with system-level permissions. And even if they did, it’s likely that many of the carrier apps will either have a manifest value that requires them to be installed, be unlabeled (e.g. com.example.carrier.msm.mdm.MDM), or misleadingly named to appear essential (e.g. “Mobile Services Manager”).
I bought an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer and still didn’t get the choice.
Inserting a SIM card wiped the phone and provisioned it, installing all sorts of carrier-provided apps with system-level permissions.
As far as I’ve found, there’s a few possible solutions:
Unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM that doesn’t automatically install carrier-provided apps. (Warning: This will blow the E-fuse on Samsung devices, disabling biometrics and other features provided by their proprietary HSM).
Manually disable the apps after they’re forcibly installed for you. Install adb on a computer and use pm disable-user --user 0 the.app.package on every app you don’t want. If your OEM ROM is particularly scummy, it might go out of its way to periodically re-enable some of them, though.
Find a SIM card for a carrier that doesn’t install any apps, then insert that into a fresh phone and hope that the phone doesn’t adopt the new carrier’s apps (or wipe the phone) when you insert your actual SIM.
Had to give up at rule 20 because I was using a phone.
As much fun pain as that was, highlighting with a touch screen is nowhere near fast enough to put out the fire.
Would love to see a speedrun leaderboard for this, though.
If that were the case, wouldn’t the mouse jump when the latest frame is presented? For me, it’s more that it just stays still until after Windows stops having a fuss.