And this is exactly why you should never give money to the MAFIAA.
Seems the guys get inspired by Facebook on Stack Overflow.
Oh great, they discovered something more annoying than disabling right click. Please don’t let this catch on. What a big
Oh, but hey here’s a bookmarklet that gets around this:
javascript:delete console
Looks like Google’s already aware and may simply make the behavior Netflix is using cease to exist by making the console independent of what page Javascript does with the console object:
As DRM goes, this is fairly weak sauce(the whole point of magic HTML5 DRM is to move all the interesting bits back out of the browser and back into the not-a-plugin-because-we-call-it-a-CDM-plugin); but it seems like a Very, Very, bad thing that any cute javascript provided by a (potentially untrusted, and probably deserves not to be) web page could modify the browser behavior to that degree. Makes you wonder what other neat little quirks you can twiddle from the inside(even if you can’t actually execute much, UI modification = trivial tricking of the user into doing something they really shouldn’t.)
The HTML5/DRM nonsense is a total disaster as well, don’t get me wrong; but it’s a disaster that’s designed to smuggle the darkest days of platform-specific browser plugins back in, now blessed as Shiny and Standard! With an even remotely competent implementation of the EME, the dev console won’t tell you a thing, other than that a CDM is sitting in the middle of the page doing something unknowable.
I wonder how this works if you compile Chrome yourself? Because users with source could obviously disable this “attack.”
And they wonder why so many choose to pirate movies and avoid the hassles in the first place. Total mystery, it is.
Right, if paying for films helps to support those who will continue to make most Web browsing less secure (by forcing DRM in html5, etc.), then it’s far more ethical to pirate films instead.
I don’t want other people to suffer an inherent loss of security in thier browsers because I selfishly pay for movies that funnels money to a cartel that attacks everyone’s security in the name of greed.
Do the right thing. Pirate movies.
Uhm. You do realize that, if they weren’t asking the browsers to give them an enclosed sandbox to run this code in, they’d be insisting that you download a targeted plugin to run their videos which would impose similar controls, right?
Maybe that would be preferable. It would certainly let them protect their content better, and could prevent the suggested bypasses by using the sort of timestamped encryption that Lucifer pioneered decades ago.
I have much less objection to DRM – especially of this specific type, where the admittedly fragile distinction between streaming and download is what enables a one-time-use market that otherwise could not exist – than to DRM done poorly.
Exactly. In business, as in politics, heavy-handed control freaks create the very type of people that they fear the most.
Have you read the EFF’s page on this kind of topic?
More:
I agree it doesn’t belong in the W3C standards. If it’s to be standardized, it needs to be its own standard.
I’ll just wait here for a link to instructions to get around it. Not that I ever wanted to use the developer console while watching a movie on Netflix, I just want to be able to do it.
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