I’ve made less than 50 comments on Lemmy and none were very popular and yet I made the list? Maybe some kinda keyword thing. Strange.

That the fossil record is incomplete

https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/Web-Environment-Integrity

This was a proposal a few years ago for how to enforce “trusted web”. Basically, a way for service providers to verify, at a per request basis, that the client is using an unmodified software stack, starting with an operating system signed by a trusted developer. Could absolutely be modified to enforce this shit.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying how this will be unenforceable and so isn’t something we need to worry about.

Except this could be enforced. Google came out with a proposal a few years ago for a method of validating the a request came from a “trusted” (aka, signed and with secure boot enabled OS), ostensibly to combat bot traffic. They dropped it after push back, but it still provides a blueprint for how this could be enforced.

https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/Web-Environment-Integrity

If web platforms are mandated by law to enforce something like this then the web could be effectively restricted to only approved operating systems. There could still be a dark web, but with the weight of the law behind it, once anything gained momentum access to it could be shut down at the service provider layer.

This shouldn’t be dismissed as a threat because it’s “unenforceable”, because it is.

The important distinction here (and I get it, analogies are always imperfect) is that the photograph analogy has “hidden variables”. That is, each half is fixed at the moment of their separation and you just don’t know what’s in the envelopes until you open one. That’s not how entangled particles work though, and which “half” is which is not determined until the instant of measurement, at which point the state of both are known and fixed.