How does allowing a proprietary tech into the browser do anything more than harm the system?. Didn't this just open up the browser to possible secure channels for botnets? Do DRM concerns trump security?.
W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
211–220 of 314 posts
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer EME to not being able to legally access media at all. In other words, you are willing to give up freedom to get--what, exactly? Movies? Music? Eye candy? I confess I simply can't understand this point of view. People are willing to hand over the Internet to DRM and the media corporations because they can't live without the "entertainment" that Hollywood provides? People are willing to have their computers pw…
I'm writing this comment from a Samsung Chromebook. When I use Chrome OS; I'm already giving up my freedom. Chromium itself is open-source, but there are tons of binary blobs on this device: the accelerated graphics driver for the Mali GPU, the ARM build of Adobe Flash, and the EME implementation that makes Netflix work on my device. EME is not new. There are already devices shipping with implementations, like mine.…
When I use Chrome OS; I'm already giving up my freedom.
Yes. Why? (I don't have a Chromebook, and don't use Chrome OS, for this very reason.)
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer EME to not being able to legally access media at all. In other words, you are willing to give up freedom to get--what, exactly? Movies? Music? Eye candy? I confess I simply can't understand this point of view. People are willing to hand over the Internet to DRM and the media corporations because they can't live without the "entertainment" that Hollywood provides? People are willing to have their computers pw…
Dude, having your computer pwned is the smallest thing people will give up for entertainment. Romans were happy to hand their Republic to an Emperor, as long as he kept the circensem coming.
Yes, but the Romans had few other options. Today people have lots of other options.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1 - We'll lose the W3C. We'll have to either create another standards body, or go back to the 90's situation when nobody agreed on anything. We already lost the W3C once for about 10 years. Remember XHTML and XHTML2? Those, and a bunch of special purpose not particularly interesting niche XML standards (P3P? XML-FO?) were pretty much all they worked on for a decade or so. It wasn't until the WHATWG was formed by so…
> W3C realized that's what people were actually interested in So, with XHTML, the main thing is that people just wanted their web pages to work like they always had; they didn't want to deal with adding slashes to make their web pages XML and strict parsers and whatnot. But with P3P, what people want is Netflix and Rdio on all their devices (such as ARM-based Samsung Chromebooks). Frankly, I prefer the sound of stand…
First of all, I think you have gotten P3P confused with EME (or whatever the new term is). P3P, the "platform for privacy protection" was just one of my examples of previous useless stuff the W3C has worked on (it was basically a schema for describing a website's privacy policy, with dubious advantages over simply linking to a privacy policy in the footer).
Second, none of the proposals for EME that I've seen actually address the issue of being able to play the same content across devices. They aren't a standardized DRM scheme; they are merely hooks for proprietary DRM schemes, essentially a way to allow proprietary DRM schemes to hook into the HTML5 media player rather than having to use the plugin interface and implement the media player in Flash or Silverlight. It's basically just a plugin API for plugins that provide only DRM, leaving the rest up to the browser.
Don't think that this is meant to actually increase interoperability; a large portion of the "value" of DRM, for those who promote it, it the ability to have various lucrative exclusive contracts with particular cable networks, hardware vendors, and so on. You're just going to see more "Live NFL - a Samsung exclusive!", not actually be able to get Netflix on any device you want.
If it worked across any device, then it would need to work on open devices as well, but of course if the device is open you can bypass the DRM. So it's always going to be based on licenses, that only certain vendors can get if they promise to implement DRM securely and not give users full access to their own devices.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#215Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> W3C realized that's what people were actually interested in So, with XHTML, the main thing is that people just wanted their web pages to work like they always had; they didn't want to deal with adding slashes to make their web pages XML and strict parsers and whatnot. But with P3P, what people want is Netflix and Rdio on all their devices (such as ARM-based Samsung Chromebooks). Frankly, I prefer the sound of stand…
First of all, I think you have gotten P3P confused with EME (or whatever the new term is). P3P, the "platform for privacy protection" was just one of my examples of previous useless stuff the W3C has worked on (it was basically a schema for describing a website's privacy policy, with dubious advantages over simply linking to a privacy policy in the footer). Second, none of the proposals for EME that I've seen actuall…
> They aren't a standardized DRM scheme; they are merely hooks for proprietary DRM schemes, essentially a way to allow proprietary DRM schemes to hook into the HTML5 media player rather than having to use the plugin interface and implement the media player in Flash or Silverlight. It's basically just a plugin API for plugins that provide only DRM, leaving the rest up to the browser.
Exactly: its a specification for a constrained plugin API focussed DRM, so that browsers don't have to either maintain a common general purpose plugin API (e.g., NPAPI) or, alternatively, have browser-specific APIs in order to meet content-owners demand for a DRM-supporting delivery channel.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#217How will this work with open-source browsers like Firefox? After all, what's to stop somebody from publishing an extension or even a modified version of the browser itself? DRM seems fundamentally unenforceable, after all. Are the people pushing for this hoping it's just too much hassle? These questions aren't rhetorical: I'm interested in what exactly the DRM people are pushing and how they expect it to work. Just n…
In most DRM systems the information is distributed encrypted. The decryption keys are given to technology developers who have specifically promised to obey the DRM rules, as well as to make their technology hard for users to understand or modify so that the users can't easily undo the restrictions or extract the decryption keys. Hence a browser developer or OS developer or developer of whatever software is in questio…
In past years in my career I worked in game development. I can say without hesitation that anything client side can be reverse engineered and hacked. Any limitation built into a browser can be circumvented, and it will happen in a matter of days from release.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there's nothing compelling plugin developers to support all OS/browser combinations, so no, in practice it likely won't be OS-agnostic. This scheme basically just creates a special class of plugins; these plugins clearly won't be OS-agnostic, because they can't -- that's the whole point of the exercise: to restrict playback to devices that are fully authorised/controlled from top to bottom, with the browser pipin…
Isn't this the same with all software? There is never anything mandating that anybody supports your OS or browser of choice. If I want to watch netflix or play GTA5 on my haiku box I'm SOL as it is unless there is a business case to be made for doing the port. This actually makes things easier. For example netflix currently uses silverlight for their streaming, this means that in order to watch netflix you need somet…
Much smaller, I don't think. It will still have to grab the screen and render directly onto it. It's basically the same thing a regular plugin would do except a little bit of identity validation, from what I understand.
Technically speaking it's almost the same as the status quo, but a little bit of DRM principles have now been enshrined in the foundations of our web. Depending on what your view of DRM is, of course, this is good news or bad news; but from a technical point of view, it changes very, very little.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#219I think that many people are drastically underestimating the effect this may have on the open web. The response "oh, well we'll just build a browser that will avoid the DRM" isn't going to work quite as well as one might hope. It's not such a stretch of the imagination that content providers will detect such browsers and refuse to supply any content at all. This would be similar to what many sites do now for users of…
This will have precisely zero effect on the open web (whatever that is).
Amazing number of commenters fail to realise that:
a) nothing that makes web open is removed. Sorry to disappoint you, but HTML will keep working as it did.
b) technology not being w3c standard does not stop it from being implemented in browsers as history shows.
In the end what browser vendors do matters the most, not what w3c thinks. Just look at the history of WHATWG.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#220The EFF has strong words about where this is taking the open web [1]: "A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't "Save As..." an image; where the "allowed" uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively "View Source" on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's…
This news makes me so sad. Also: The more things progress, the more and more sense RMS makes.
Actually RMS makes less and less sense each day (and has nothing to do with this issue at all), and comments of this kind are getting annoying.