Techrights

They Always Justify Monopoly and Monoculture Using 'Security' (Because "Anything But Us is Unsafe!")

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 29, 2023

Source: Intent to Ship: Deprecate and remove Theora support. (some discussion in this forum, Google Chrome To Remove Theora Video Codec Support)

Dale Curtis: Intent to Ship: Deprecate and remove Theora support.

THERE is nothing they won't say to justify monopoly, including on formats and whole Web browsers, not just Web search. Not watching ads? So we need to check your browser's and system's integrity. Never mind if the ads themselves are the security risk.

Does your site publish material in Ogg format? Ours does. Well, our older material was published in Ogg format, with audiocasts going back to 2010 and other material even further back (Vorbis) and videos in 2020-21 (Theora).

Do you wish to maintain easy access for most Web users? Well, then Surveillance Giant Google is attacking your site's accessibility, taking away support for the formats. All in the name of "security" of course, just like with the a cabal of CAs, UEFI 'secure' boot, and sigStore to name a few. sigStore is primarily pushed by Red Hat and Google under the guise of vendor neutrality (Linux Foundation).

It is a big deal because many browsers just inherit whatever Chromium does and of course Mozilla (Bakersoft) will just do whatever Google does, so count in Firefox and its derivatives/forks too. Watch how Mozilla nearly deprecated RSS support because Google had done so. RSS is bad for pushing ads.

So many sites with Ogg files will struggle to explain to visitors how to play videos, episodes etc. This won't be pretty....

A company like Google only wants "Webapps", Android "apps", and worse things (see the direction YouTube has taken with JavaScript, "attestation", and espionage).

Google does not care about security or standards. They say we need more DRM and they will not support video formats that have been around for ages. Google will continue to add some more back doors (as it did to Linux half a decade ago) while asserting that support for things that are mature and stable is a security risk.

Give Google another decade or so and they will also phase out "old" formats like PNG, GIF, JPG... even if the real security risk is WebP, as we recently saw. Google views open formats as an interference, meddling with the monopolies.

This has nothing to do with security. It is about domination. █