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

881–890 of 1001 posts

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#881

Post by blitmap »

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…

I am hoping feature-testing continues to be a good practice - I don't expect to have webgl, the webusb, or webaudio APIs available...

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#882

Post by holmb »

masswerk wrote: post #857
holmb wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compare Linux Reviews, "Solaris-user arrested by British Police for using Lynx" -- http://linuxreviews.org/news/2005/01/28_0001/28_0001.html.en

That is scary indeed. Was he convicted? Police do make mistakes and one can only hope that they are corrected.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#883

Post by jdmichal »

chrisweekly wrote: post #545
jdmichal wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I love ASP.NET as much as the next guy. But there's no mistaking the large trend from what used to be entirely server-side rendering (LAMP days) to REST services with JavaScript front-ends.

SSR is table stakes for any reasonably modern web application.

No true Scotsman... I would say more, but that's your entire comment so I don't have anywhere else to go.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#884

Post by icebraining »

nindalf wrote: post #860
icebraining wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the benefit to consumers if streaming services abandon the web? 1. It avoids the ethical problem of pushing DRM onto people who just want a browser. (Firefox does offer a EME-free version, but you have to look for it, when you might not even know what EME is). If a CDM module installed automatically by Firefox becomes an exploit vector, they are ethically responsible, in my opinion. 2. It preserves browser…

> It makes it more expensive to use DRM. This misses my point. No one cares about DRM - not the streaming service, or the browser vendors or most importantly, the users. Consumers have voted with their wallets on this - they'd rather watch Netflix than torrent. Maybe I'm being callous, but I don't care much about "the ethical problem of pushing DRM". Nor do I care much about MIPS and SPARC. How many end users are run…

You asked for benefits, I listed them. I don't care that you don't care :)

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#886

Post by ramses0 »

avaer wrote: post #876
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…

It's only insane if you subscribe to the idea that the 5 kibibytes of content is the purpose of a news or other site. Maybe as a user that's what you came for, but from a business perspective the purpose of the piece is to sneak 2 mebibytes of crap into your life. The snr on that is much better. It's only insane if you have the tools to look at what's happening under the hood. Most people don't have any idea.

Hah... the _content_ is the noise in that case!

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#887

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

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…

I think you're right, but only for a narrow definition of "browser". Sure, something that looks and works exactly like Chrome, Safari, et. al. would be a gargantuan effort for a sole developer. But an 'HTTP client' can take many forms and still offer value, even advantages over the existing browsers which serve a very specific remit.

A basic text browser is the kind of thing that's buildable in a year. Moreover, once you start building that, maybe you have an idea for certain features that current browsers don't do well (bookmarking, navigation) or at all (change monitoring, api integration, editing).

I'm optimistic that there is a lot of unlocked potential in the HTTP/HTML platform.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#888

Post by JadeNB »

holmb wrote: post #849
masswerk wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Since illegality is, literally, whatever is contrary to the law, anything at all can be illegal. We can hope that crazy things won't be illegal, and decry their illegality—but, since it's convenient for a government to impose sufficiently many laws that anyone can have some infraction pinned on him or her (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwsLAqjqnxo), to say that any particular thing can't be illegal is probably wishful thinking.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#889

Post by JadeNB »

floatboth wrote: post #873
mfukar wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing? What about computer software? Maybe you meant to type 'the only thing I care about'.

I actually don't care about movies, very rarely watch them at all. The vast majority of video I watch is YouTube. I meant to type "I never actually saw DRM on the web in person". Also, proprietary desktop software is still usually "protected" by just a serial number :D

> Also, proprietary desktop software is still usually "protected" by just a serial number :D

The ineffectuality of most DRM isn't really an argument for it (or even just an argument against arguments against it), though.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#890

Post by jdmichal »

kelnos wrote: post #564
jdmichal wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll repost a comment by mcphage on why this doesn't work, in general. TL;DR is that common ontologies sound great but don't work in reality, because it leaves no room for value-added services from individual providers. (Recipes would probably be OK, because there's just not a lot of value-add you can really provide. Or, alternatively, I'm just completely ignorant about how value could be added.) https://news.ycombin…

Eh, that's not entirely true. To still allow for competition, you define a base feature set and representation, and then you allow vendor extensions. You need some sort of standards body that can promote vendor extensions to standardized, supported things. And clients can choose to support whatever (or no) vendor extensions that they want to. However, I agree with you that it's not very practical, but for different r…

> To still allow for competition, you define a base feature set and representation, and then you allow vendor extensions. You need some sort of standards body that can promote vendor extensions to standardized, supported things. And clients can choose to support whatever (or no) vendor extensions that they want to.

Right. The problem is in the first step. The moment a consumer likes a vendor extension and begins relying on it, they are locked in until the standards body gets around to standardizing it. So all this cooperation to pick a standard and maintain it, and consumers still end up locked in because they like certain extensions more than others. And software providers for consumers still have to write individualized support for all the providers to in order to manage all their extensions.

So all these cycles went to building a standard, and where's the actual win? We still have handlers customized to individual providers. We still have consumers choosing to rely on singular providers.

Post reply on HN