761–770 of 1001 posts
It's time to abandon the major web standards and start devising our own infrastructure. Better stateless protocol, end-to-end encryption on every connection -- no exceptions! -- decentralized encrypted vaults of cached assets (where every user donates a few or few hundred gigabytes of disk space to participiate -- effectively becoming a node in a decentralized CDN). We've left the corporations run wild for far too lo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today's world. I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before…
You wouldn't need to scrap all of it by a long shot. You could take a small subset of the stack and make something enormously simpler to implement. Start with supporting only one version of HTTP, TLS, (X)HTML, CSS and JS and fork them if necessary. Even drop CSS to start with and finally start relying on semantic markup and good browser defaults. Use existing open source libraries where available, such as for TLS and…
What you are suggesting then, a non-comparable browser experience, already exists and has for years, yet to no avail. You would get niche technologists and die hard enthusiasts only and the rest of the world would trudge happily into the future, DRM and net nutrality distant memories.
What you and I want, what HN and friends want, is not even a debate most realise is happening let alone that it affects them and will affect them profoundly in the future.
The masses are deciding what our internet will look like for they comandeered it years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your points about usage of TPB, less convenience, lower quality, cost being low enough - all of them seem to be from the U.S. or first world perspective. In many other countries, TPB or equivalent is very common across classes of people (not just students but also workers in different non-technology industries). Unauthorized copies are more convenient because most people watch media on a tiny laptop or a small monito…
TPB quality is usually very good, 1GB per hour is common and 4GB per hour is possible for high demand stuff. Plus you get a much better library. A fast internet connection makes the inconvenience of downloading vs. streaming go away.
Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge/Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to…
The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today's world. I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today's world. I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before…
If we want to win that war, we should focus on content not technology, Mosaic got a lead in the game because, despite the 'techies' seeing no use for images, image support was added, with images came the transition of media, users were au fait with articles containing text and images and could now experience similar on line, this alone was not enough, content creators starting creating content that people wanted to c…
Back in the dark ages, when the battle of www vs Gopher was still on, I sided heavily on the side of Gopher because it didn't get in the way of the content. Gopher was a means to navigate the maze of content and most of the content was textual, postscript and neatly typeset. You could sit down with it and read it focused or print it out.
We've regressed to the point where 5KiB of text comes with 2MiB of crap, meaning a noise to signal ratio of 26dB which is insane!
Really Gopher is dead though. We could do with a fresh start. A search engine like WAIS, a menu system like Gopher and a standard document format that allows you to get quality content on everything from your e-reader to paper without having to read some fucked up ebook flow layout conversion. And not postscript. Something you can author by hand.
I've even had enough of building things on the web. It is a horrible horrible thing to have to do. I envy system programmers who never see the pain of trying to keep a very large web application secure at even a basic level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It could be easy to view but hard to save and distribute. Why can't it? > Not really. If it's available to view, it's available. Full stop. Best case: you make it marginally more difficult for a mom&pop computer user to copy your content. Anyone with a lick of understanding and 100 dollars to buy some hardware will be able to get it without any problem. You literally just agreed with my point though.
The issue you are ignoring is that only one person needs to "save and distribute" it, then the pirated version becomes easier to view than the DRMed version. The proof in the pudding is that every TV show and film is instantly available online to anyone who can work a BitTorrent client.
Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge/Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to…
The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today's world. I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big guys know that DRM doesn't work. DRM is about putting "color onto the bits" so people can be sued. Nothing more; nothing less.
> color onto the bits Does that mean (effectively) watermarking? Do pirated releases even come from (defeated) DRM sources these days?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's foolish to think that. Right now, if you wanted to share a video from HBO to your friend (assuming you couldn't give your account), what are your options. There's no easy way for you to just give that content to your friend. You'd have to link them to a third-party site hosting the content, which is not the same thing. With no DRM, it would be as simple as doing a right-click and copy video link.
The recording industry was very hardline with DRM, until one day Apple decided they won't support DRM anymore in the iTunes Store. Thus no music is purchased with DRM from any of the major e-tailers. If the choice is no DRM or literally not making any money on the Internet, content creators will choose no DRM every time. Technologists have all the leverage here. If the web simply didn't support DRM, do you think Netf…
This is not comparable in my opinion. Music was bought, downloaded, stored locally and used on countless devices - from your living room setup, your NAS and media center, to portable players or your car. It made no sense to restrict that kind of content to specific software like iTunes.
A Netflix stream doesnt face the same problems. Compatibility isn't an issue here. Most consumers will never run into problems with Netflix' DRM.
That said, of course if it was possible to buy and download movies for permanent offline viewing, similar to music purchases, it would be absolutely necessary to provide that content DRM-free.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fear is that this makes it far too easy to use DRM for webpage owners. Previously, you had to pull in a slow-ass Flash-plugin or similar, which was very much known to bring all kinds of security issues. Now you just say "DRM this" and it does it, and you have the security issues whether you use DRM or not. As a result, webpage owners might start DRMing things that were previously just not worth DRMing. Like image…
> The fear is that this makes it far too easy to use DRM for webpage owners. Previously, you had to pull in a slow-ass Flash-plugin or similar, which was very much known to bring all kinds of security issues. "Previously" in this case would have been four years ago , would it not? Ever since then, EME has already been reality. If EME has been reality and commonplace since then, what does this W3C decision really chan…
There is no FUD here. The W3C should not be involved in standardizing DRM API. If browsers want to implement DRM it is their problems. Everybody dropped the ball here. Mozilla, the W3C ... they could have just said no, that's not our problem, they were too corrupt to do that, they just signed the death of the open web.