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I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me

blog.samuelmaddock.com

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

#611
post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's the important point. DRM is the price one must pay to consume BIG MEDIA content. there's no getting around it. if you want it you have to play by their rules.

> DRM is the price one must pay to consume BIG MEDIA content. It's just what big media has happened to get away with. If they found themselves without a way for their paying customers to access their content via DRM, they'd drop the requirement on the spot, with little to no financial impact except for DRM scheme licensing fees.

They really wouldn't. They'd just move into proprietary hardware. Several of them already have.

Most studios really wouldn't find blocking all PC access to their content to materially affect them.

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

#612
post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, even if there wasn't a DRM-standard, he still wouldn't be able to build his application, because there would still be DRM.

Hear hear. The parent commenter's I-told-you-so attitude frustrates me because it completely misses the point: Google de-facto controls the web, and the W3C is essentially irrelevant. Trying to suggest that the W3C's opposition would have stopped any of this is completely naive, and only serves to shift the blame.

Yeah, LET'S GIVE UP.

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

#613

DRM is just a huge pile of shit. I mean, if it would actually work I would say okay, at least we have a solution that everyone is somehow happy with. But instead we consumers just loose. To give a few examples: - When I want to watch movies on Amazon Prime Video, there are some movies I can't watch in HD, even if I paid for HD (so the movie obviously exists in HD; probably dependent on the rights holder). The problem…

Nobody cares about pirating, it's when the masses are able to do the pirating easily and get the content easily that is when things break down.

That is what DRM is about preventing.

If some knowledgeable people can copy it and put it low-fi on some competitor of Youtube and Google doesn't show in in search results. That isn't that bad. That means the general public won't easily find it.

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

#615
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what is this DRM supposed to achieve? It's a good point, but I believe DRM isn't just about piracy. It's also about control. I read a good article about this once, but I can't find it anywhere right now so I'll summarize what I remember. As long as DRM exists, if you want to make a Blu-ray player you have to go and ask the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator for their blessing, so that you can…

I think you were probably trying to find this article: https://web.archive.org/web/20190119000840/https://plus.goog...

That's exactly it! I've bookmarked it for future reference, thank you so much! =)

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

#616
I already use chromium for most streaming, and firefox as main browser that i spend 97% of my time on (with noscript of course). If your browser is better than firefox I will switch, but you're not helped by my factor of love for firefox.

As for DRM users, just post a version with the crack somewhere with a tor browser and fake identity and let the streisand effect be.

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

#617
post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear. The parent commenter's I-told-you-so attitude frustrates me because it completely misses the point: Google de-facto controls the web, and the W3C is essentially irrelevant. Trying to suggest that the W3C's opposition would have stopped any of this is completely naive, and only serves to shift the blame.

Yeah, LET'S GIVE UP.

[deleted]

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

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think Steam is a really good (not shitty) DRM enforcer. It may be a good DRM enforcer, but as a UI it's terrible and intrusive. There's no way to turn off all those popup messages and game related alerts. I had to give up on steam once they started doing that.

Well, actually, there is in the steam settings. And to be fair, not every game on Steam comes with DRM attached to it. I have many games I can play without launching Steam itself.

I'm surprised to hear that there are non-DRMed games on Steam. Do you have an example? I thought it was standard that every game released on Steam that doesn't have some awful third-party DRM like Uplay has the Steam launcher code patched into the executable. Valve has some tooling for doing this even to existing legacy exes that can't be rebuilt from source.

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

#619
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? If I have an old player that is perfectly technically capable of playing new media, will it fail to play requires new keys? If so, that's atrocious, and I'm glad I jumped off the physical media train post-DVD.

>If I have an old player that is perfectly technically capable of playing new media, will it fail to play requires new keys? Yes. It will require a soft/firmware update, which won't be available if the device has widely known vulnerabilities which cannot be software patched that would allow for key extraction. HDPC is not limited to physical sources.

I'm not an expert on HDCP but I don't think this is exactly correct. The standard doesn't rotate through new generations of keys; instead, revoked hardware keys are burned into all Blu-Ray disks burned after the time of revocation, and compliant HDCP implementations are required to check their own hardware key against that list before allowing playback. I don't know whether a hardware manufacturer could remediate the vulnerability that caused their key to get revoked and distribute a new key via a firmware update, but that sounds reasonable.

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

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Netflix is buying security for their product by doing this. We may all think (know) DRM is dumb, but DRM is more than just about how hard it is to hack. Sure, everyone could in theory reverse engineer this stuff. But the point is that it's only legally protected as long as it's at least not trivial . Open sourcing would probably invalidate their legal defences against people downloading Netflix movies.

> invalidate their legal defences against people downloading Netflix movies. I highly doubt that. A ToS violation is still a ToS violation (in the case of Netflix, which is expressly a streaming service), and copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. The legal protection that's afforded to DRM itself is something that's literally only useful to you as a content holder if you're looking to abuse copyrigh…

Well, they are granting you a license to download the copyrighted content. That's the consideration you get in exchange for paying subscription fees. IANAL but it seems doubtful to me that copyright law on its own (without the anti-circumvention parts of the DMCA) could be twisted to produce criminal penalties for downloading licensed content in a non-streaming way given that it's legal to download it in a streaming way. And ToS violations are not criminal acts.
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