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

841–850 of 1001 posts

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#841

Post by dannyw »

near wrote: post #710
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

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…

Should a single developer working full time be able to implement an OS within a year?

The web is pretty much an operating system.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#842

Post by rainbowmverse »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #800
sitkack wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> between content creators and content consumers I think of it as the triumvirate of creators, owners (distributors) and consumers. The owners argue as if they create, the do not, they simply own the rights to distribute and take money. The vast majority of creators are getting shafted as well.

>The owners argue as if they create, the do not, they simply own the rights to distribute and take money. No. Creators are the owners of whatever they create unless and until they sign those rights away. And they sign it away for something they get in return. It may well be that the media industry is structured in a way that puts creators at an unfair disadvantage in their dealings with media companies. If that is so…

This. I think people forget that just because big companies are pushing it doesn't mean everyone who creates and wants limited protections is working under a big company's banner.

For me, streaming is a concession to people who prefer it to owning their music. I don't want them ripping a stream I made $0.004 on (at best) thinking it's a fair exchange of value. My focus is on Bandcamp and other stores that offer DRM-free downloads. Without some kind of friction for copying off streaming sites, if you could just click "download" and not pay me anything, I just wouldn't put my music there.

My belief is someone who goes and pays a fair amount for the music understands it costs money to create, and will encourage the people they share it with under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license to help me make more by buying their own copy (or a subscription).

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#843

Post by chris_wot »

cabalamat wrote: post #791
cjsuk wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. 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…

> 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! Sadly the average clickbait article contains a lot less than 5000 characfters of actual text.

I don't see why these webpages need to be so huge. If websites used HTML5 properly and used CSS more extensively, a lot of the crap I feel could be removed.

Seriously, aside from graphics and video, what is taking up the size of these pages? Mountains of JavaScript?

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#844

Post by chris_wot »

kagamine wrote: post #728
thinkloop wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people want to do something about it, they need to fork the web itself. HTTP, TLS, HTML, CSS, JS ... the entire stack needs to be scrapped and replaced with something sensible with a focus on simplicity. That's flash.

> That's flash Comedy aside, CSS isn't the problem, but if an experienced web-dev can't make a site without learning for 5+ years and then feel like they have no knowledge of web development then we have a problem, and that's where we are now. The problem with the long list of frameworks and libraries available is that there is no easy way to make a web2.0 site without years and years of learning and then the resulti…

CSS makes semantic markup work. CSS is not the issue, the issue is getting a decent graphical editor that does it well.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#845

Post by mfukar »

DCKing wrote: post #253
noir_lord wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they where in the US.

Lots of this stuff is so US focused. Any European nation for one will let you reverse engineer stuff you buy or download to your own heart's content in the safety of your own home. I expect many countries in the world are civilized like that.

> download to your own heart's content in the safety of your own home

Nein.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#846

Post by l0b0 »

ehnto wrote: post #762
l0b0 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not many would be interested in an un-designable web. It bares no comparison to what browsers are capable of delivering for UX currently. 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 memori…

Yeah, yeah, the world is going to shit and nobody cares. How about doing something about it instead of telling everybody it can't possibly work? And why do we need the rest of the world on the bandwagon for it to work? The web was built without the masses, and still is. The open web still vastly outweighs the closed parts in amount of content. A bunch of freedom stealing technologies have died silently over the years despite often resulting in "cool" UX wholly different from plain HTML, such as Flash, Silverlight, and Java applets. EME is a fundamentally different wedge inserted between users and their machines by evil corporations, but not one that is in any way unbeatable. So screw 'em, and let's fork the web!

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#847

Post by bfu »

flukus wrote: post #559
Paul-ish wrote: post #325

My fear is that DRM for video content will quickly become DRM for text content. Say goodbye to adblocking and tracker blocking.

This is what canvas+webASM is designed to do. Legit content and tracking scripts will be delivered to your browser as a single binary blob.

Then use canvas.toDataURL() to convert canvas to PNG image and you can watch it everywhere

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#849

Post by holmb »

masswerk wrote: post #835
alfredallan wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I usually use just lynx.

I may be wrong, but isn't connecting to a web server by lynx illegal (considered "hacking") in some countries? I remember a case in the UK around the time of the London olympic games.

It can never be illegal to use any tool. It is the intent and action carried out with the tool that decides whether it is illegal.

Consider the difference carrying a knife, being a hunter, and carrying a knife being a bankrobber and going into a bank to use it.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#850

Post by mfukar »

sboselli wrote: post #38

Shame, shame, shame. We're losing the internet day by day, if we haven't done so already. I've seen people and posts here and there calling for attention on these issues, but imho it's all too subtle. We should start using harsher terminology for what's actually happening. This is flat out CORRUPTION, and I'm not seeing anyone express it as such. It's probably too late already, and unfortunately, this is merely a ref…

I don't think it's as subtle as it is incoherent. I've yet to see a single article putting together the harm of DRM in terms tangible to a layman.
Post reply on HN