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W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

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Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#911

Post by DCKing »

nilved wrote: post #906
DCKing wrote: post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, everything can be hacked into a video on the web. But luckily that makes your web page unusable, unaccessible, and also un-SEO-able. It would also require you to have expensive DRM authoring tools to have you actually create DRM signatures (it's not just a switch you can flip on). Let me rephrase: EME can only be practically applied to actual audio and video. The point still stands. EME has been commonplace for…

Yep, but that's absolutely what's going to happen. People love to put square pegs in round holes. I'd be surprised if most things weren't DRMed within 5 years.

I don't buy it. People could DRM up the internet - including text and images - much more easily - for years with Flash and Silverlight. People could use the everything-is-a-DRMed-single-frame-video-now hack since 2014. Neither have been a problem. I've never even seen the latter happening, even as a proof of concept (although I suspect someone will point me to one shortly).

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#912

Post by skummetmaelk »

scriptkiddy wrote: post #900
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 only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to try to exclude DRM is Mozilla, and unfortunately, if they do that, the users will switch to the browser that makes watching Netflix easiest. This is the world we live in. People are willing to sacrifice privacy and security in favor of convenience. Sounds a hell of a lot like a book I read in high school. People are so willing to make thes…

It is truly a tragedy of the commons. It makes sense for the individual to consume their content, they're not giving up much by themselves. The problem arises when everyone does it.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#914

Post by cookiecaper »

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.

I'm not familiar with that case, but I don't think an accusation that using a text mode browser like Lynx constitutes "hacking" would stand up to any type of scrutiny. (I'm not a lawyer and I'm in the US; things may differ in the UK).

Lawyers will make the most egregious leaps and grasps to paint the opposing party in the worst light possible, especially in the early stages of the case, because if they don't claim that Lynx is a "hacker's tool" in the initial pleadings, then it may be looked upon with suspicion if they try to raise that point later. So they are essentially trying to reserve as many potentially beneficial claims as they can at once, including (and especially) any claim that may portend that the other party is a devious scoundrel with the worst possible intentions.

Lawyers will thus front-load with every kind of tenuous, ridiculous accusation they can (without presenting a significant risk to the licensing), expecting some of it to get "laughed out of court", just so that on the off chance that it doesn't, it will help their case.

I'm sure a real lawyer would contest that to some extent, and I'm sure there is slightly more nuance to it than that, but that is my layman's assessment and I think it is roughly accurate.

The takeaway is not to take legal pleadings too seriously, because the goal is not to find justice per se. It is for your side to win, to get what it wants, under the assumption that that automatically represents justice.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#915

Post by versteegen »

dannyobrien wrote: post #648
DCKing wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost every country, with the exception of Israel, has implemented the anti-DRM provisions of the WIPO Copyright Treaty using similar language to the United States, or worse. In the European countries, it's embodied in the European Copyright Directive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive#Technologi... That's one of the reason why we argued so strongly that the W3C should include a covenant. Even if EFF…

New Zealand isn't a party to that WIPO treaties [1], but it does have a law implementing restrictions on circumventing Technological protection measures (TPM) [2]. But unlike the DMCA, the NZ law lists lots of exceptions that allow you to circumvent TPMs. In fact it says "Nothing in this Act prevents any person from using a TPM circumvention device to exercise a permitted act under Part 3." Part 3 of the Copyright 1994 [3] is the (very long) part that lists everything you can do with a copyrighted work, including the NZ equivalent of fair use, research, education, archiving, backup, decompiling software, etc, etc.

[1] http://www.copyright.org.nz/international.php

[2] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2008/0027/latest/D...

[3] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1994/0143/latest/D...

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#916

Post by ehnto »

l0b0 wrote: post #846
ehnto wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Forking the technologies that underpin the platform of the web I think tackles the wrong problem. The problem I see facing the open web is the consolidation of users and services into single platforms. Facebook is an easy example. You can build a Facebook alternative with any technology you like, it would take a completely different force to change the social paradigm around it.

The great thing about the open web that you rightly mention is still kicking, is that it's full of places and services that are driven by humans and passionate communities. Nothing about EME stops those communities existing, but nothing about those communities is going to stop Netflix being the most popular platform and using EME/DRM.

If you will excuse my fluffy analogy, the web is a farmers market that has a shopping mall being built right next door. What I think would help the web, is educating people that it's better to go to the farmers market so that we can support entrepreneurial and local community endeavors rather than stuffing corporate coffers and enabling that consolidation.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#918

Post by baddox »

gsnedders wrote: post #824
baddox wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see any new threat from WebAssembly. Isn't the only threat that the same malicious code can run with better performance than JavaScript? As far as I can tell, WebAssembly doesn't provide any additional access to native system features like this DRM spec does.

WASM is strictly less powerful than JS.

Indeed, from what I'm reading it looks like most of the usual JS tasks (like DOM manipulation, listening to input, and network requests) still need to happen by your WebAssembly module calling out to normal JS.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#919

Post by singingboyo »

scriptkiddy wrote: post #901
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! Unfortunately that's what the average layman wants. They want the SPA experience. That's what they want to pay for. What kind of professional am I if I don't give people what they want to pay for? > I've even had enough of building things on the web. It is a horrible horrible thing to ha…

>Seriously, modern web development is 90% chasing down bugs, security enforcement, and fixing compatibility issues.

That's true of most modern development. It might be more painful on the web, I wouldn't know, but systems programming is not really any different.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#920

Post by sctb »

betterunix2 wrote: post #511
phailhaus wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DRM will destroy the web, and the web will fight back. We don't like your spyware, your binary blobs, your control, and we will resist. Your average web user has no idea what those words mean, and all they care about is being able to consume content unimpeded. They can't tell how it's implemented. Your decentralized web is not user friendly, and it will not gain mainstream adoption until it is.

1995 called and wants its falsehoods back...

This site is for conversation, so let's please have one instead of this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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