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mholtyesterday at 4:04 PM1 replyview on HN

I never loved the idea of GSB or centralized blocklists in general due to the consequences of being wrong, or the implications for censorship.

So for my masters' thesis about 6-7 years ago now (sheesh) I proposed some alternative, privacy-preserving methods to help keep users safe with their web browsers: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/7403/

I think Chrome adopted one or two of the ideas. Nowadays the methods might need to be updated especially in a world of LLMs, but regardless, my hope was/is that the industry will refine some of these approaches and ship them.


Replies

notepad0x90yesterday at 4:09 PM

Block lists will always be used for one reason or another, in this case these are verified malicious sites, there is no subjective analysis element in the equation that could be misconstrued as censorship. But even if there was, censorship implies a right to speech, in this case Google has the right to restrict the speech of it's users if it so wishes, matter of fact, through extensions there are many that do censor their users using Chrome.

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