Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Save Firefox

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 266 posts

Re: Save Firefox

#181

Post by rtpg »

fpgaminer wrote: post #132

Media DRM is not and never was primarily designed to prevent piracy. Rather, DRM is used by content producers (Fox, Disney, Warner, etc) to assert control over the rest of vertical market. This article is a prime example of this. Thanks to DRM the movie studios force browser vendors to sign agreements to get access to the CDM, and from that agreement they can assert control. They can subtly suggest, for example, "Hey…

Is there real evidence for this? Does Paramount care about ad blocking?

I feel like the simple explanation (DRM is about piracy + a certain worldview about effectiveness about DRM) is a bit easier to believe than a conspiracy.

DRM is being used as a red herring so that movie studios can control web browsers? What?

Re: Save Firefox

#182

Post by [deleted] »

mynameislegion wrote: post #145
caf wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and this - I guess - is where the DMCA issue that the EFF raises comes in. Because sure, you could build a browser that loads Adobe's CRM and fools it into thinking it's been loaded into Firefox - but if you did that, you could well be construed as defeating a technological copyright protection method.

So then, the only way CDMs are acceptable IMO is if they're never given enough information to know where they're running. This should be a critical part of the standard and I'm surprised I haven't heard the EFF pushing for this, specifically. If the CDM has enough information to discriminate, your choice of browser for watching DRMed video is entirely in the publisher's hands. The fact that you may get in trouble for…

[deleted]

Re: Save Firefox

#183

Post by cpeterso »

JBReefer wrote: post #161
icebraining wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I pointed out above, on Firefox they can't "do anything on the host system" as they'll be sandboxed and allowed only the necessary mechanisms to do their job.

They can't call out at all? I have doubts, but would accept a source.

Here is a description of Firefox's CDM sandbox:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-missi...

Re: Save Firefox

#184

Post by nine_k »

azakai wrote: post #44
dasil003 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence is exactly right. Sure DRM is bad, but you can't tell people not to build things a priori like that, and DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants. The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. No amount of technical pressure will make an ounce of difference, because browser makers have literally no le…

> The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. And you greatly underestimate it. Look at the history of DRM in music.

Apple made highly successful hardware, players named iPods. Apple effectively controlled what most users put on these players. The music industry had to consider it. And getting rid of DRM there took many years.

Re: Save Firefox

#185

Post by dwaltrip »

Karunamon wrote: post #17
MajesticHobo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something that DRM isn't preventing you from doing something you're otherwise not supposed to be doing anyways. And what would that be?

Recording it. It's a stream, you're paying $company for the rights to access content over the wire. Recording that isn't a right, legal or moral.

You do recognize that a large percentage of the population heavily disagrees with you about this? The concept of ownership regarding pieces of information or data (music or a video can be thought of as a piece of information or data) is far from settled.

Re: Save Firefox

#186

Post by dredmorbius »

The problem here is capture. W3C has been captured by the digital restrictions management cabal. Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Amazon are playing along. In three cases, they are the cabal.

Re: Save Firefox

#187

Post by bzbarsky »

mynameislegion wrote: post #35
jflatow wrote: post #22

> This system, "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) uses standards-defined code to funnel video into a proprietary container called a "Content Decryption Module." For a new browser to support this new video streaming standard -- which major studios and cable operators are pushing for -- it would have to convince those entertainment companies or one of their partners to let them have a CDM, or this part of the "open" We…

I've read many articles critical of EME and this is the first time I've heard this information. If true, as you said, it is THE issue. It was always my assumption that EME represented a standard way for CDM's to interact with the browser. EME is to CDMs as NPAPI is to plugins. That is to say, a CDM can theoretically work in any browser implementing the EME standard. Is this assumption completely false?

Sadly, the assumption is false.

The EME standard is a standard for a way for scripts on a page to ask the browser to talk to the CDM. The actual interaction between the browser and the CDM is completely unspecified; it just needs to enable the browser to implement the EME APIs.

I think a more apt comparison is that EME is to CDMs more like the 2D canvas API is to graphics libraries. At least in a world in which graphics libraries had very restrictive licenses and you could require, via the canvas API, a particular graphics library to be used for rendering your canvas.

Re: Save Firefox

#188

Post by bzbarsky »

mynameislegion wrote: post #145
caf wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and this - I guess - is where the DMCA issue that the EFF raises comes in. Because sure, you could build a browser that loads Adobe's CRM and fools it into thinking it's been loaded into Firefox - but if you did that, you could well be construed as defeating a technological copyright protection method.

So then, the only way CDMs are acceptable IMO is if they're never given enough information to know where they're running. This should be a critical part of the standard and I'm surprised I haven't heard the EFF pushing for this, specifically. If the CDM has enough information to discriminate, your choice of browser for watching DRMed video is entirely in the publisher's hands. The fact that you may get in trouble for…

> This should be a critical part of the standard

The standard is not at all concerned with the browser-CDM interaction, sadly. And yes, that's a major issue with the standard. We (Mozilla) brought it up repeatedly when the standard was being developed, because it causes precisely the issues you describe, and basically got ignored. Microsoft, Google, and Netflix (the editors for the standard) simply didn't see this as a problem.

Now in practice, Mozilla aims to give the CDM as little information as possible, because we think it's the right thing to do. But nothing in the EME standard requires us to do that, and I can't tell you what other browsers do with their CDMs.

> It means that users are no longer free from browser-discrimination

That's correct. You never _really_ were, by the way: sites can and do use Modernizr-like testing instead of UA string sniffing to detect what browser you're running, so the only way to avoid being discriminated against by a site that really wants to discriminate is to have a browser which responds the same way an "approved" browser does to all API calls... Doable, but in practice requires using an "approved" browser with some tweaks that are invisible to the site.

Re: Save Firefox

#189

Post by bzbarsky »

mynameislegion wrote: post #104
wmf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a CDM can theoretically work in any browser implementing the EME standard Nope, it's the opposite. The CDM API is not standardized and in practice every browser uses a different CDM: Chrome has Widevine, Firefox has Adobe, IE/Edge has PlayReady, and it's not clear what Safari uses.

The CDM API is called "EME" and it is a standard. That's why Widevine can be made to work with Firefox ( https://github.com/i-rinat/gmp-widevine ). EDIT: Firefox now supports Widevine > Beginning in version 47, Firefox desktop also supports the Google Widevine CDM. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm The issue with browser-specific CDMs at this time seems to be only because of varying completeness of EME…

"EME" is the API CDMs expose to scripts, with browser mediation. It's not the API CDMs expose to the browser, which is not standardized at all, sadly.

> The issue with browser-specific CDMs at this time seems to be only because of varying completeness of EME implementations.

No, it's basically baked into the standard, because the editors were fine with having CDMs be browser-specific.

Re: Save Firefox

#190

Post by bzbarsky »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #84
nwah1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla fought harder against EME than any other browser vendor by far. As a user concerned about the open web, using Mozilla products is a way to bolster it.

You make it sound like other browser vendors fought it at all, the EME spec was written by Google , and supported by microsoft and apple. This is not a case of the w3c "forcing standards" upon innocent browsers. The people writing w3c standards work for these companies.

To be fair, there were specific people at Google who _did_ fight the EME spec, including in the W3C discussion; the spec was written by the "youtube" part of Google, and the people who were more in the "open web" part of Google didn't necessarily agree with it. But yes, Google as a whole sure didn't object and didn't exactly delay implementing in Chrome...
Post reply on HN