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

I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

blog.samuelmaddock.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 632 posts

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#461

Post by snurk »

ktm5j wrote: post #253

I also find the title to be rather sensational.. "I tried creating a web browser" ^ "Google blocked me" implies that Google blocked them from creating a web browser.. which is not the case.

Absolutely. The title isn't just sensational, it's misleading. OP's browser is opensource and uses a P2P-like architecture. It sounds incompatible with current rights management.

OP sounds like he feels entitled to others' work and efforts. If he wants to play videos in his browser, he can make them. Or find people who will make videos for free for him.

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#462

Post by writepub »

The title is totally and completely inaccurate. Google is NOT blocking the author from creating a web browser. Google is apparently unable to license the DRM code/binary to the author.

Just to set the record straight, the author's browser is based off Chromium, funded largely by Google. However, for whatever reasons (and I can see many legal ones for the inability to license a DRM module), Google cannot license the DRM module. The author is free to implement it himself, Google is not "blocking" him.

Another point of note - the author is NOT entitled to widevine, so this pitchforking of Google is simply uncalled for. If the author finds Google to be "blocking" him, maybe asking Apple or Mozilla for WideVine support in a browser that competes with their own offerings is a way to go, and to validate which company is actually willing to work with competing open source offerings

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#463

Post by Reelin »

fixermark wrote: post #278
bad_user wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is repeated ad nauseam but it’s false, all it takes is a torrenting app installed, that’s the only threshold. But back to the point, if Netflix wouldn’t use DRM, it would change absolutely nothing since copyright infringement is still illegal and those DRM protections are completely useless.

Can my torrenting app stream my video, or do I have to wait for a full assembly of the pieces from torrent hosts and enough downloaded to watch it? If the latter, torrenting is plenty cumbersome enough that if the studios are pushing movie-viewing to "Pay us money or you have to torrent it," they're winning.

> Can my torrenting app stream my video

Yes, and this functionality has been built into many of the largest torrenting programs out-of-the-box for quite some time now. In the case of µTorrent, it was added in version 3.0 all the way back in 2010.

Obviously, how quickly the stream will buffer depends entirely on the state of the swarm. Popular items will work almost immediately, while particularly unpopular items won't be streamable at all.

Anecdotally, I have personally witnessed my (very nontechnical) friends streaming 4+ GB 1080p ...popular cat videos... that weren't available from Netflix. They did not struggle with the process in the slightest.

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#464

Post by dingaling »

rjmunro wrote: post #164
jhasse wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, blame the movie studios, record labels etc. They're the one which require asinine DRM support for web browsers. Google/Microsoft/Apple/Adobe want to support media content, but to do so requires towing the line with the media companies otherwise they refuse to license the content (at least in HD+). Let's say Google, Microsoft and Apple announce that they will be removing any DRM from their browsers on 2020-01-01…

Simple: You'd have to install a plugin or a separate special app to watch video, like the bad old days of RealPlayer.

> You'd have to install a plugin or a separate special app to watch video

How is that different from the current state of EME plugins? Other than that proprietary browsers ship with the most popular plugins installed.

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#465

Post by Reelin »

rohan1024 wrote: post #150
Zak wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing about this is I can find a high-quality torrent for anything on Netflix in under a minute.

Torrent is something that I have nothing to complain about. It's decentralised. No big corporation is trying to control it. It's truly by the people for the people. I wonder if more protocols like this will get invented and become mainstream. Or those glorious days are already behind us? Since every big corporation is just trying to grab market share by creating walled gardens for everything.

I assume that policing of torrent networks by the authorities will continue to increase. As a result, I'm hopeful that darknet (ie social connection based) solutions might emerge at some point. Why use a VPN and a tracker (private or otherwise) if I could request things via (anonymized) friend-of-friend-of-friend in a straightforward manner? That way you only trust your immediate network.

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#466

Post by HenryBemis »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #442
samstave wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what pisses me off aboit ads and data consumption pay rates: if i am paying for “1GB” of data, then i should have full control over how that data gets consumed by the content i am accessing over that paid pipe. Period.

but you do have full control... if you don't want to see ads, don't visit sites that use ads to support their business model.

It is not the ads I/we dislike. It is the tracking. If we go to and we would see a laptop as on a laptop related article, that would be ok. But if we then to to Winter-ski.xyz and still see the same laptop as, then we no like!

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#467

Post by krferriter »

yarg wrote: post #458
robertAngst wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few solutions to this. And... they are using chromium. Can I be sympathetic to Google because they have to pay people money to support this?

Sure, but bear in mind that they are paying that price so that they can control the internet.

Yeah they didn't make Chrome in order to "build a better world" or whatever. They saw what Microsoft did with IE, and how it enabled the pushing of products, data collection, platform tie-in, etc. And Google thought they could do even better and make people feel good during the process, unlike how they felt using IE.

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#468

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gsnedders wrote: post #397
geofft wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So that they're not beholden to adversarial corporations. What is so adversarial about these corporations to the browser makers ? What benefit, concretely, do Microsoft or Google or Apple get from being free of the shackles of Disney or CBS? One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy soluti…

Only in the case of Firefox is it really third-party code; both Chrome, Edge, and Safari ship with the EME modules developed by the respective companies, but they still sandbox it. Plugins like Flash, which are the historic answer for DRM on the web, have a huge surface space and can interact in the browser in all kinds of odd ways. These EME modules are much smaller, they are much less powerful (AFAIK they either re…

> Only in the case of Firefox is it really third-party code; both Chrome, Edge, and Safari ship with the EME modules developed by the respective companies, but they still sandbox it.

They still sandbox it because from the user's perspective it's still an unauditable black box, so at least the user can verify the sandbox. But that doesn't actually solve the problem, because the black box code is interacting with black box hardware. If there is a bug, you've done the opposite of sandboxing it -- you've prevented it from being traced and given it direct access to hardware.

> and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash

The solution to Flash should have been to have someone reverse engineer it and publish a 100% open source implementation, including the DRM. Then let them keep publishing using Flash format as long as they like, but no more black box.

Re: I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

#470

Post by deogeo »

kwindla wrote: post #256

Let's add the US Congress and the EU to the long list of parties to blame for the DRM situation. "Reverse engineering" software for the purposes of "circumventing" copyright is illegal. "Circumventing" is much more broadly defined than it should be. It's not just illegal to redistribute copyrighted material. That's the point of copyright and has been the case for a long time. It's also illegal to watch/consume conten…

It's thanks to the obscene profits of the entertainment industry that they're able to lobby to rob us of our rights.

Try not to help them by paying for entertainment.

Post reply on HN