Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
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Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
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Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#2I'd be interested to see if any content providers actually make use of this; it seems to be missing certain technical requirements they claimed their partners required during the EME design phase. (In particular, a secure hardware video path and robust node-locking support. This design doesn't appear to actually be able to lock content playback to particular hardware at all if anyone makes even the most trivial attempt to bypass it.)
Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#3I understand Mozilla's philosophical objections to the EME, but if the alternative is Flash/Silverlight (and it's pretty clear that is, in fact, the alternative), I don't think Mozilla's mission loses out by implementing the EME.
Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#4and in the near future this should allow us to retire plugins altogether.
I don't see this as a universally "Good Thing".
The Web has evolved to a comprehensive and performant technology platform and no longer depends on native code extensions through plugins.
You mean the Web has evolved into a Doctor Frankenstein's monster like hodge-podge of kluged together hacks, layered on top of layers of other hacks, layered on top of still more hacks, in order to make a Web Browser a poor man's operating system.
So if we can extend our operating systems by installing programs, why shouldn't we be able to extend our poor man's operating system by installing plugins?
I'm assuming this is referring to killing of NPAPI and not other "extensions" mechanisms, but it seems (from what I've heard here and there) that people are mostly proposing to replace NPAPI with "nothing" or with less powerful APIs that would limit plugins significantly.
Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#5Nothing prevents mozilla if they would want to add a warning box similar to self-signed certificates every time a website tries to access DRM code outside the users control.
It would serve the goal of objecting to the EME, while users can continue to access all content they want. It would also put the responsibility to the website if the black box called DRM causes problems, locks up, or cause havoc on the user. Third, it allows users who do not want DRM to hijack their machine to explicit express their approval before such code is executed.
Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#6and in the near future this should allow us to retire plugins altogether. I don't see this as a universally "Good Thing". The Web has evolved to a comprehensive and performant technology platform and no longer depends on native code extensions through plugins. You mean the Web has evolved into a Doctor Frankenstein's monster like hodge-podge of kluged together hacks, layered on top of layers of other hacks, layered o…
> So if we can extend our operating systems by installing programs, why shouldn't we be able to extend our poor man's operating system by installing plugins?
IF we can extend our operating systems. Do not take that for granted, and not for too long.
Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#7>preventing users from saving the content
How can an open source software prevent users from saving the content? If the CDM decrypts to plaintext, it should be trivial to modify the open source sandbox to save the plaintext data. (Obviously the software can prevent saving the content by default).
Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#8I understand Mozilla's philosophical objections to the EME, but if the alternative is Flash/Silverlight (and it's pretty clear that is, in fact, the alternative), I don't think Mozilla's mission loses out by implementing the EME.
In practice, so far the EME implementations that content providers have actually been willing to support have been far more tightly locked down than Flash or Silverlight. The Microsoft one supports hardware-level protected playback paths and unlike Silverlight no-one's managed to get it to run under Wine, and the Google one only runs on locked-down official Chromebook hardware which users can't run any non-Google programs on.
Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#9I understand Mozilla's philosophical objections to the EME, but if the alternative is Flash/Silverlight (and it's pretty clear that is, in fact, the alternative), I don't think Mozilla's mission loses out by implementing the EME.
Flash works on the three major desktop/laptop OS', ChromeOS, all the consoles afaik, and Android. EME will probably result in balkanized DRM that will never work on a bunch of those things (or you'll have to worry about whether the content you want to watch supports your platform).
EME is a step down from Flash for consumer choice. A big fat one.
Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
#10"...Firefox users are at risk of not being able to access DRM restricted content (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu), which can make up more than 30% of the downstream traffic in North America."
While this statement is factually accurate, using the file-size of a type of content as a measure of relevance should be of little relevance to the discussion.