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Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

techblog.netflix.com

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Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#511

Post by ailideex »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #478
ailideex wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They themselves tend to be pretty understanding of the whole anti-DRM thing and contribute to FOSS technology more than most companies, but they cooperate with DRM content because that actually is the difference between them being in business and not. Is it really though ? I mean ... their content still get pirated. Everybody's content gets pirated, yet most of them are still in business.

My main point is that they're in business because they can get licensed to distribute the content because they'll accept DRM. Try being a DRM-free alternative to Netflix that I think is worth $8 a month. Good luck. It's not that DRM changes a ton with consumers, it's all about getting the producers onboard. For better or worse, most of the best content producers (at least the management) are insisting on DRM. Anecdot…

Fair enough.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#512

Post by Silhouette »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #510
Silhouette wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WPA2 is reasonably secure and has been the standard for home and business WiFi for years. In any case, merely compromising WiFi won't get you someone's Netflix account. The Netflix data itself, including the credentials, are all encrypted. As for taking over someone's PC, that's far beyond the average pirate, and you're talking about serious criminal offences on top of mere copyright infringement at that point. And e…

I can't figure out why you've added this ridiculous "need to use their computer" part, that would be necessary for a successful lawsuit but suing random Netflix users will look terrible even if the court clears them in the end. But OK... WPA2 is reasonably secure, but most home instances aren't set up well. They often have WPS enabled or a guessable password. Plus weaker set ups are still easy to find. Once you're on…

Netflix serves over HTTPS and uses HSTS. Under most circumstances, you aren't going to be able to MITM them and "grab their info" even if you've compromised their WiFi.

You keep coming up with these claims about how easy this is, yet you also keep missing basic technical points about the system actually works. As I've said before, if there is actual evidence that someone's account was compromised then they can produce that as part of their defence in court. However, if content that is watermarked to a specific account turns up all over the Internet, that is evidence suggesting that the person in question has infringed copyright, and that does need a real defence if the rightsholder chooses to take legal action accordingly.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#513

Post by boomboomsubban »

Silhouette wrote: post #512
boomboomsubban wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't figure out why you've added this ridiculous "need to use their computer" part, that would be necessary for a successful lawsuit but suing random Netflix users will look terrible even if the court clears them in the end. But OK... WPA2 is reasonably secure, but most home instances aren't set up well. They often have WPS enabled or a guessable password. Plus weaker set ups are still easy to find. Once you're on…

Netflix serves over HTTPS and uses HSTS. Under most circumstances, you aren't going to be able to MITM them and "grab their info" even if you've compromised their WiFi. You keep coming up with these claims about how easy this is, yet you also keep missing basic technical points about the system actually works. As I've said before, if there is actual evidence that someone's account was compromised then they can produc…

Yes, and people are so great at making sure they access https addresses and never ignore a "this may not be secure" warning.

And you're still ignoring the major parts. What someone actually needs to do is much easier than all this, and Netflix has already lost if they end up in court with an innocent person.

If you want me to prove accounts have been compromised, look at all the account breaches over the past few years, think of how many reuse passwords.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#514

Post by matt_kantor »

dasil003 wrote: post #341
amelius wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been recording the things they watch since the invention of the VCR. DRM will not have any impact on that. Someone will come along, and make a video-grabbing utility that bypasses the DRM. Also, many of the content is already available via bittorrent. DRM is pointless. But perhaps you are right about "browser vendors refusing to cooperate" not being the best possible approach. However, do you know what is…

A lot of geeks are under the misapprehension that the studios don't know this. But actually they are not idiots, they are fully aware of the sisyphean nature and ultimate futility of DRM. The point of enforcing DRM is not to prevent piracy, but rather to flex their market clout and demonstrate control. As long as they put up moderate barriers to ripping, and as long as they have legal sanction to suppress productized…

Spot on. Ian Hickson explained this very well a few years ago[0].

[0]: https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#515

Post by apostacy »

wwalser wrote: post #400
flukus wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla doesn't have as much leverage now that a large part of "the community" has abandoned Firefox for Chrome. If you care about these issues, stop and consider the effect of your choice in user agent. Mozilla still has nearly an order of magnitude more market share than they did when activex was everywhere.

At the time that Firefox started really turning heads, it took an order of magnitude less money to build a better browser. JIT innovations that were once just good research ideas from the Smalltalk world had an open source implementation in Java which then got ported to open source dynamic languages like Python (see polymorphic inline caching & similar techniques). Then Adobe came along and donated a bunch of it's JI…

> At the time that Firefox started really turning heads, it took an order of magnitude less money to build a better browser. JIT innovations that were once just good research ideas...

Is that really how things are, though? Isn't it possible that the underlying software ecosystem was manipulated by Google, so that they would have a problem to solve with Chrome?

Imagine if trends continue, and every website is just an "app" for a js vm. Then Google would really have the advantage. I don't think Mozilla could fight Google on their own turf like that.

Why should we let Google set the direction that our technology goes?

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#516

Post by apostacy »

veeti wrote: post #194
apostacy wrote: post #127

This is the strategy Microsoft tried over a decade ago with ActiveX. And Firefox saved us. It was starting to be normalized, to have to install ActiveX controls to view certain content. Companies like CinemaNow[1] offered Netflix-like streaming movie services using Microsoft's ActiveX based Janus DRM over a decade ago. Thankfully, the community had more of a backbone back then. Firefox and Linux were not broken becau…

> It's only a matter of time until Firefox is just a wrapper for webkit This tired "Firefox is just turning into Chrome because Australis/DRM/web extensions/xkcd 1172" hyperbole simply couldn't be further from the truth. Mozilla is building an entirely new rendering engine with Servo [1], parts of which will be shipping in Firefox this year [2]. [1] https://servo.org/ [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

I like the idea of that, but, Mozilla is absolutely abandoning what made Firefox amazing.

They are embracing this strange thing where they think that they are a for-profit app platform, like Google, when they aren't. So they're locking down their web browser.

It makes sense for Google to do that. Not Mozilla.

Firefox is supposed to be like emacs. Should emacs need permission from some central authority to install an extension?

Many of Google's UX methodologies make zero sense when Firefox implements them.

It makes sense for Chrome to be locked down and customizable. It makes sense for iOS to be locked down. I'm not thrilled about it, but it makes sense to maintain the control and integrity of the platform, for a business perspective.

But there is no reason to do it for Firefox whatsoever. I should really document this, but, I have an entire set of Firefox profile "distros" that I use for some very specific purposes, with Firefox. And they're slowly being phased out. Because Mozilla is a cargo cult.

This would be like if Ubuntu decided to forbid you from using apt to install anything except by authorized repos, in order to be more like iOS. Because people like iOS. So if we superficially copy them, we will inherit some of that magic.

Technical decisions for Chrome are often made pragmatically, like, they will decide to use a native pdf reader instead of a javascript one, purely for performance reasons, even if it is a step in the wrong direction for portability. That is a business decision, and the same as any number of Microsoft's inconsistent implementation decisions for Internet Explorer. You don't have to COPY them. Maybe try offering an alternative?

And let me be clear: at Mozilla, they FETISHIZE Chrome. The sole justification for removing FTP support from Firefox[1] was a single pasted URL from Chrome's bug tracker announcing that Chrome was removing FTP support.

Google doesn't even have to try. They lead Mozilla around by the nose. Google could announce that they were removing the address bar, and the sycophants at Mozilla would have already officially announce that they too were deprecating the address bar as being obsolete, because Google said so.

We've already lost. We have a one party system.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174462

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#517

Post by apostacy »

throw2016 wrote: post #235

I think with open source and standards we lose control the moment things become too complex for a group of open source developers to develop. At this point you need funding, organized efforts or corporate backers who bring their own agendas. Or be on the sidelines for decades while the work is done incrementally like Linux. For web browsers we have long passed that point. The level of complexity and ongoing effort ru…

I agree, but, I think that the reason that things got this bad in the first place was because we let them set the rules for what a web browser should be.

Firefox was the first major browser that didn't include an email reader, a news reader, and all this other crap.

I just wrote in a post a few minutes ago, about how broken Mozilla's design decisions are[1]. They are absolutely unwilling to step out from Google's shadow. Google now gets to decide what it means to be a web browser.

And I remember when Microsoft was in that position.

I honestly think it would be possible to unseat the one party system we have with web browsers. I wish I had the time to invest in it.

If I could though, I think a great place to start would be to just abandon a lot of the crap that we don't need. Microsoft was bloating the standard with all sorts of crap, like css rules for transparency (done poorly), or changing the color of the scrollbars (which everyone abused on myspace). Firefox said no. I think the web is way too heavy. And I'm already used to seeing websites with lots of javascript stripped out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953226

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#518

Post by matt_kantor »

usrusr wrote: post #306
caf wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..which would indicate that the marginal value delivered by the DRM is zero?

Unfortunately, the cost for DRM is also zero for the content providers, as long as they are not distributors themselves.

Netflix creates tons of original content so it is both a producer and distributor. If Netflix really believed that the marginal value of DRM was zero they wouldn't use it on their own content since it has a nonzero cost on the distribution side.

The only other possibility that I can come up with is if Netflix's original content has multi-party rightsholder situations with contacts that legally require them to apply DRM even to "their own" content (IANAL and don't know much about how these things work, but it wouldn't surprise me).

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#520

Post by thomastjeffery »

LeanderK wrote: post #227

What's the problem with DRM from a technical perspective? Why is it hurting the Web? I can't make the link, is it impossible for mozilla to provide an open-source implementation of the DRM standard?

Digital Rights Management is a proprietary method to prevent unauthorized copying. DRM literally cannot be open-source. DRM literally cannot be defined as an open standard. DRM is, and inherently must be, literally closed-source proprietary software.
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