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W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

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Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#961

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 sen…

> That said, of course if it was possible to buy and download movies for permanent offline viewing, similar to music purchases There's actually quite a few systems which do exactly that. Funnily enough, all use DRM.

I'm not talking about temporary offline access to Netflix movies or buying/renting a movie via iTunes. I meant purchasing a real video file that I can put on my NAS and view in a player of my choice. Similar to music. I'm not aware of any video services that offers that.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#962

Would someone mind helping me understand the debate? I don't watch TV or even movies very often (when I do I use Amazon prime). I never watch movies more than once. I do listen to music multiple times. But AFAIK all the MP3s for sale on major sites are DRM-free nowadays. What are the main specific scenarios involving DRM that people are talking about here?

Have you tried watching Amazon Prime on Opera browser? Most premium content will not play on any browser other than Chrome, Edge and Firefox. If they play, it will be only SD version. This is not because Opera has not implemented some web standards. It is because the major three browsers have all implemented a proprietary system of content protection.

There is another side of this story. Let's say you have to publish content on your website. You do not have any way to publish it as securely as "Amazon Prime" without signing an agreement with Google and Microsoft.

Thirdly, there comes DRM protection rules thanks to team MPAA. In most countries, you can not try to reverse-engineer the proprietary decryption module that comes with browsers without breaking laws.

Because of the above restriction, security professionals cannot break into the proprietary module to detect security vulnerabilities.

Edit: I was wrong about Opera. Opera is in on the DRM bandwagaon for a long time. https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2015/07/opera-developer-32-0...

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#963

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

That's fair. I'm the first to admit that my personal opinion is irrelevant. I made the mistake of saying "I don't care", hoping you'd understand I meant "the vast majority doesn't care".

Could you list some benefits that would be appreciated by more than 0.1% of society?

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#964
post #940

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the worst idea. However not the best. Something between that and markdown.

Markdown is a bad joke.

It's really fine for casual documentation. I wouldn't write a book or a paper in it though.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#965
post #876
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.

It's insane if you're paying for mobile data.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#966

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What do you mean by "make a site"? I made qemu.org last year with 10-years-old knowledge of web development and, apart from the obviously not-done-by-a-graphics-designer theme, it _is_ a decent site, responsive and with a 2010s-ish look. 99% of websites can be done with either a static generator (lean) or WordPress (somewhat bloated, but really mostly standard libraries that can be cached and/or served by a CDN). The…

edit: ignore the huffy tone this came out in, it wasn't meant that way, early morning.

I was talking about work as a professional developer. We can all 'make a site', there exists any number of solutions for that, CMSes like Wordpress, Drupal etc don't count in this argument unless _you_ wrote Wordpress or Drupal from the ground up. Being a wordpress hack isn't being a developer. You won't ever be asked to write something straightforward in enterprise, you'll need to know at least HTML5 & CSS & angular 1.0 & 2+ (or similar) & docker & gulp/grunt & backend & databases & jenkins & MVC & node/npm & version control & bootstrap (or similar) and and and.

99% of sites outside of a company that makes real money and doesn't just serve a page are sites that aren't what developers actually do at work.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#967
post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Win10 + Edge or on ChromeOS. This is due to the level of obfuscation of the keys (hardware-assisted vs software only).

I think we're splitting hairs here. The point cpeterso was trying to make is that while Netflix is a large company that advocated for EME, Netflix is also trying to cater to all audiences. And with their track record of open-sourceing lot she of their internal systems, I feel it's safe to say Netflix as a company isn't nearly as corrupt as some of the other advocates for EME.

I wouldn't be so sure. As Netflix becomes a media giant (it's already bigger than many), they'll adopt their policy for DRM. If not, why don't you have less restrictions on "pure" Netflix Originals content ?

We'll see in the coming months if the Originals mean higher quality on Linux or not. I wouldn't bet on it.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#968
post #964

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is a bad joke.

It's really fine for casual documentation. I wouldn't write a book or a paper in it though.

R Markdown is a joy to use and people even do write books with it!

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#969

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…

It could be combination of #1 and #2, use blockchain for names and federation for actual content, then it will be easy to switch providers, just add new name to blockchain and remove old one.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#970

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could have neither, though.

By what, banning plugins? Now you're asking the anti-DRM people to do exactly what they're angry at the pro-DRM people for doing: preventing people from running a particular kind of program on their computer. It's an incoherent position.

Not banning, simply not providing api for them.
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