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

W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

boingboing.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 1001 posts

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#801

Post by tudorw »

mirimir wrote: post #796
tudorw wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see any way to win that war. The IP oligarchs have won it. They own the W3C now. But there is clearly a demand for DRM-free browsers. And if the worst fears are realized, and mainstream browsers won't display media without DRM, or become snooping devices for IP oligarchs, that demand will increase. Sure, it'll never be more than a niche, but DRM-free browsers will be there for those who want them.

I've no crystal ball, so looking back, monopolies and incumbent monoliths encounter resistance as they mature, there are more examples of the status quo being that they wither under the weight of complexity, this is certainly not over while consumers consume content, consumers own their time, content creators own their content, everything else is middleman stuff.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#802

Post by imtringued »

pdimitar wrote: post #246

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…

Unfortunately there are only three ways to implement decentralised webapps. Either you have trustless consensus by giving users power proportional to their physical resources where every user only has a small fraction of power. This is called blockchain with proof of work. It's extremely inefficient and therefore many usecases are not possible but it doesn't require trusting in any individual, only in the entire network. It should used for DNS, usernames or other readable identifiers that require global consensus.

The second is federation like email. Everyone has the option to become a provider or trust an existing provider. Of course the problem is that you need to trust your provider and the providers have to trust other providers. Spammers can just set up their own provider to attack other providers, so providers need the ability to block providers they disagree with. Providers don't live forever or they can become untrustworthy, there needs to be a way to export the data and import it into a new provider. You will need digitally sign all your data to prove that it came from you. There also needs to be a mechanism to confirm that user10@oldprovider is the same user as user5@newprovider and redirect from the old identifier to the new one.

The third is the least likely. A full P2P architecture where every peer is equal. Every peer will be forced to store the entire database of the application and run all computation locally. Spam will be an even bigger problem than with federation because you will have to store the spam for eternity too. The dataset will eventually become large enough that a single computer cannot store it.

I'm betting on federation. It's the middle ground between full centralisation and full decentralisation.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#804

Post by thriftwy »

This means I now have an excuse to avoid paying for content eve further.

You didn't want to play nice, so never will I, I will continue to torrent stuff from majors while continuing to participate in crowdfunding and supporting indies.

You wanted that, not me!

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#805

Post by blfr »

tptacek wrote: post #91
barrkel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're discounting the opportunity cost here. In a world where browser manufacturers, as a block, refused to implement DRM, it's seems obvious that sooner or later visual media producers would be forced to the table, to gain access to paying consumers. We could be in a DRM-free world, without the inconveniences of elaborate technical restrictions on pass-through and mutual device compatibility, or black box b…

I see how that gets us to a DRM-free world, but not so much why ordinary consumers would care. To a first approximation, no ordinary consumer uses TPB. Unauthorized copies are less convenient (especially since mainstream playback devices won't play them) and frequently of lower quality. The price point for legitimate copies is low enough that the purchase decision isn't that hard. A standards body is a great place to…

Unauthorized copies are less convenient (especially since mainstream playback devices won't play them) and frequently of lower quality.

HD .mkv files can be viewed on virtually any device, including "smart" TVs long forgotten by their manufacturers which do not support Netflix/Roku/whatever apps, open source devices, smartphones, or regular computers. Usually, you just need to plug in a USB drive and press play.

They can also be of arbitrary high quality. And usually higher, not lower than streaming sources which adjust to network conditions.

It's true that the plans at legitimate distributors are currently very inexpensive. A good seedbox will run higher than Spotify and Netflix subscriptions plus a bowl of nachos but neither the quality, nor the choice, or convenience are even close to piracy.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#806

Post by mozumder »

mirimir wrote: post #796
tudorw wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see any way to win that war. The IP oligarchs have won it. They own the W3C now. But there is clearly a demand for DRM-free browsers. And if the worst fears are realized, and mainstream browsers won't display media without DRM, or become snooping devices for IP oligarchs, that demand will increase. Sure, it'll never be more than a niche, but DRM-free browsers will be there for those who want them.

> But there is clearly a demand for DRM-free browsers.

There is not a demand for DRM-free browser.

I don't know anyone in the real world that demands a DRM-free browser.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#807

Post by floatboth »

mirimir wrote: post #796
tudorw wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see any way to win that war. The IP oligarchs have won it. They own the W3C now. But there is clearly a demand for DRM-free browsers. And if the worst fears are realized, and mainstream browsers won't display media without DRM, or become snooping devices for IP oligarchs, that demand will increase. Sure, it'll never be more than a niche, but DRM-free browsers will be there for those who want them.

This is a paranoid slippery slope.

EME existed for several years already, and was implemented in browsers. Standardization doesn't change much.

And no one except the big movie producers even wants to use DRM. If you don't watch movies on the web, you'll never see DRM.

Firefox is DRM-free by default. It will download Widevine CDM if you start watching Netflix, but you can untick a flag in the settings to completely forbid it from downloading the CDM, if you're afraid of accidentally signing up for Netflix :D

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#808

Post by pdimitar »

rimliu wrote: post #761
pdimitar wrote: post #246

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…

This will solve zero problems for actual web users.

Having dynamic user-hosted CDNs in almost real-time a la IPFS (which are sadly far from real-time) has been proven to work. However, the latency is too big so yeah, so far we've got practically nothing.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#809

Post by pdimitar »

imtringued wrote: post #802
pdimitar wrote: post #246

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…

Unfortunately there are only three ways to implement decentralised webapps. Either you have trustless consensus by giving users power proportional to their physical resources where every user only has a small fraction of power. This is called blockchain with proof of work. It's extremely inefficient and therefore many usecases are not possible but it doesn't require trusting in any individual, only in the entire netw…

Agreed with everything. I'd bet on scenario #3 though (namely IPFS and IPNS for now). You're sadly correct about the spam though. Still, a solution must exist.

I for one am sick of trusting corps only because they can implement software that protects their own servers. We can't be held hostages by spam forever.

(I would even wager spam is partially funded by corps so as to scare the users back to their walled gardens but that's uncertain and not especially likely.)

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#810

Post by gsnedders »

l0b0 wrote: post #716
near wrote: post #710

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…

> Start with supporting only one version of HTTP, TLS, (X)HTML, CSS and JS and fork them if necessary.

The support for different versions that does exist in browsers tends to be minute: ripping out support for older versions would cut out almost no code, because there's basically nothing specifically handling them. (Heck, the only forks in CSS are for quirks and limited quirks mode, and both of them affect very, very little of the layout engine.)

Post reply on HN