Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
defectivebydesign.org
Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
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Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#2“Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me"
Orwell, 1984 - A very sad day, a very poor decision:
"Today, the W3C announced that it would publish its DRM standard with no protections and no compromises at all, stating that W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee had concluded that the objections raised "had already been addressed" or that they were "overruled."
"EFF understood that the W3C had members who wanted to make DRM, so we suggested a compromise: a covenant, modeled on the existing W3C member-agreement, that would require members to make a binding promise only to use the law to attack people who infringed copyright, and to leave people alone if they bypassed DRM for legal reasons, like making W3C-standardized video more accessible for people with disabilities.
This was a very popular idea. It was endorsed by Unesco, by the Internet Archive, by the creator of the W3C's existing membership agreement, by hundreds of top security researchers, by the competition expert who coined the term "Net Neutrality", and by hundreds of human rights organizations and activists from the global south. The Open Source Initiative amended its definition of "open standard" so that DRM standards could only qualify as a "open" if they protected legitimate activity.
Now, it's fair to say that the W3C's DRM advocates didn't like the idea. After a perfunctory discussion process (during which some progress was made), they walked away from the negotiations, and the W3C decided to allow the standardization work to continue despite their unwillingness to compromise."[1]
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-con...
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#3Ultimately, the actual standard of the web is the behavior implemented by major browser vendors.
Assuming the W3C committee voted down the EME standard, at this late point in the game and with no competing standard to satisfy the use case, what stops Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft from just implementing the standard as-drafted without the W3C's sign-off?
At that point, the browsers will be enabling functionality that browsers that don't implement EME support can't enable, media channels can take advantage of EME-supported encryption modules, users will see less functionality in other browsers and therefore have soft incentive to migrate away from other browsers, and it becomes incumbent upon the W3C to either release documentation describing already-existing browser functionality (as they've so often had to do) or be ever-so-slightly inaccurate as an authoritative source for describing web standards.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#4I can't wait until this gets used by malware!
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#5Ultimately, the actual standard of the web is the behavior implemented by major browser vendors. Assuming the W3C committee voted down the EME standard, at this late point in the game and with no competing standard to satisfy the use case, what stops Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft from just implementing the standard as-drafted without the W3C's sign-off? At that point, the browsers will be enabling functionali…
Nothing stops them, and in fact each of the major browsers have already implemented EME.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#6I can't wait until this gets used by malware!
That was my first thought when I saw the spec for WebGL.
"Oh boy! I'm super excited to be running arbitrary code I downloaded from web sites against an API that was never security-hardened!"
Fortunately for me, my fears turned out to be overblown in that specific instance; there were a few security bugs, but they were patched with relative swiftness.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#7I can't wait until this gets used by malware!
Can you explain how malware could benefit from EME? Note that EME only applies to video.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#8If false DRM initiatives are what it takes to get browsers to implement proper crypto modules, then sign me up.
Obviously it can't be used for DRM, I will just capture the frame and redirect it to a codec to re-encode the stream. Alternately, I can just stream it somewhere else.
On the other hand a secure place to store keys, free from the reach of plugins and javascript would be nice.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#9This truly is the death of the open web. I hope the appeal is successful. Freedom seems to be losing on all fronts these days.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#10I can't wait until this gets used by malware!
That was my first thought when I saw the spec for WebGL. "Oh boy! I'm super excited to be running arbitrary code I downloaded from web sites against an API that was never security-hardened!" Fortunately for me, my fears turned out to be overblown in that specific instance; there were a few security bugs, but they were patched with relative swiftness.
I believe this specific fear is why Safari waited so long before enabling it for everyone (for a long time you had to manually turn it on in the Develop menu).