I think this old talk by doctorow is a reasonable summary of the basic ideas. And if you want a specific case of the harm DRM can cause through being mandatory and non-transparent, the most infamous is probably the Sony BMG rootkit scandal; when Nelsie worries about this making virus detection harder, he’s not wrong.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.
Only one problem, the ISPs work for you and me.
Also, it would be hard for the ISP to know what you’re actually using for a browser. An article on Ars Technica about a week ago tells that IE 11 (currently in development) identifies itself as a Mozilla browser. I would almost bet that if Firefox were banned by an ISP a plugin would suddenly appear that tells the ISP it is Internet Explorer, or Chrome.
Every browser identifies as a Mozilla/#.# browser, it’s a throwback to the days of Netscape. IE11 still identifies itself as itself by including “IE 11.0” inside the user agent. It’s not that hard to figure out what browser is being used (well long as an Opera setting or plugin isn’t telling it to lie to the servers). Though of course it is bad practice to do it that way.
That said, the ISPs don’t truly work for you and me. They work for them greedy selves and anyone who will pay them boatloads of money to do something evil. As evidenced by the ISP oligopolies in North America, the way many do whatever they can do bleed their customers dry, and the US providers happily jumping onto a six-strikes system that is of no benefit to their customers.
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Yes, there’s a problem with seeing the entire internet as being so limited that there’s just one of it. It already IS a network of networks. And if you don’t like what is done with this standard, you get to wander off and do something else.
Seriously - remember a few years ago, when everyone was all amped up about adopting server-side apps? The buzz from Microsloth and others was this notion that they could just sort of ‘rent out’ their core apps instead of us having our own applications. And look how far that got. Instead of renting their stuff, they’ve ended up giving it away by the bucket, just to keep your interest. And better yet, they now compete against one another as to who is going to give you the mostest, free-est to (hopefully) keep your brand loyalty. (Word to those who consistently try to claim ‘free marketplaces’ are not worthy.)
I predict this move will go somewhere similar. Watch some greedy idiots kill their own products off with DRM. A few years from now, you’ll barely remember their names, let alone the names of the performers and production people who fell in the hole with them. Louis C.K. will probably still be around, though - because he actually gets it.
*fistbump*
As someone who is unapologetically the same I’ll just say this: Sell it to me at a reasonable price, unencumbered with DRM and I will buy it (if it’s good). If it sucks or if their company tries to rip me off or play geoblocking games then any gentlemen’s agreement is off: I’ll do what the fuck I want because they’ve shown they’re gonna do whatever the fuck they want.
In any case keeping DRM out of the html standard isn’t about us being able to pirate (bittorrent≠html), this is about guaranteeing that the internet will continue to operate as a predictable, user-controlled space: Not a space where the functions of your and my machines (that we paid money for) are limited by some big douchey company who I may never do business with. Why should a consortium of self-interested companies have ANY say on the function of my possessions?
A thought: isn’t it entirely feasible to crowd-fund an alternative protocol that is based entirely on html up to the latest version, but then splits off at the point where the W3C caves to special interests into its own, fully-independent protocol?
The powers behind the WHATWG are the people who are pushing the DRM. And the fact that everybody cheered WHATWG on and supported their abandonment of process in the creation of HTML5 is what has empowered them within W3C to push this crap through.
XHTML was a nod towards standards compliance and the open web – HTML5 is not. The WHATWG people are not friends of the open web.
Interesting - I didn’t know that.
Anymore? Fanboys have been around for a loooooong time.
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I’m genuinely curious… Has there ever been a DRM system that hasn’t been broken? What’s the longest one ever lasted without a known workaround? (Ignoring the analogue gap, which of course always exists).
This is just a waste of time. It’s going to create a community of hackers that create browser hacks. And I will gladly contribute to this new community.
If anyone has a problem with that here’s my home address: 10880 Malibu Point, 90265. I’ll leave the door unlocked.
I think you must not remember when MS decided it liked its own stuff better and started incorporating non-W3C stuff in its own browsers and content years back. Holy Standards Departure, Batman! It was rumored they intended to run the entire planet, that the common user was forever doomed, and that this was a blow to open source ambitions everywhere. Evil, nasty, profit-hungry dominators were they!
And now, they are one of the most prolific producers of viewers for their own stuff on other platforms, as well as giving away all kinds of cloudspace. They HAD to. They like profits, and the marketplace demanded it. They’ve sunsetted more next-great-thingies than Google has created yet. Annoy,ing at times, yes. Stupid? Only until the cash sends them elsewhere.
There WILL be stupid abuses of the standard, and the sinful WILL judged. All you have to do is believe, sohn! Now, COME to Jay-sus!
Your good buddy ‘Secure Remote Attestation’ would like to have a chat with you about that one… Less competently, and somewhat more immediately-present (especially on things like the more paternalistic university networks) are toys like Cisco’s “Clean Access Agent” (Now marketed as ‘Cisco NAC Appliance’) and Microsoft’s so-called ‘NAP Infrastructure’, both of which deny network access to devices that aren’t running an antivirus-like client (proprietary and with privileges to get its fingers into everything, naturally) or whose systems are not configured in a manner conformant with the network access policy. These are comparatively weak, since they rely on the software agent, compared to SRA; but you might actually see them in the wild.
The really neat one, of course, is the Trusted Computing Group’s "‘Trusted Network Connect’ which bundles up all the excitement, and then some, of what you can do with the above tools, and makes it mandatory and hardware enforced! Thankfully, it doesn’t have commercial critical mass anywhere; but if you were to nominate a technology for ‘How to make connecting to the internet emulate all the worst parts of operating a cellphone’, it would be the one.
I’m sure that it won’t stop them from doing so anyway; but (to my reading) it would look like you could shoehorn absolutely any use case, from simple h.264 stream decryption to an entire application environment into this one ‘standard’.
The capabilities of the ‘CDM’ are wholly undefined (except the few javascript handles they need to have, and the mention that the CDM can either pass decrypted frames back to the browser, or render the output itself. All descriptions of how encrypted video streams should be structured, and how key requests and responses should be structured are also ‘non normative’
Thus, with a little creative abuse of the encrypted video stream format as a wrapper for arbitrary data, and a little creative abuse of ‘key requests’ and responses as a simple client/server message passing system, along with the ability to include absolutely whatever features you want in the CDM, you could implement absolutely anything you felt like, just with the ‘video’ tag replacing the ‘object’ tag as the catch-all for embedded binary horrors.
You could even, relatively simply, build a ‘CDM’ that reuses an entire web browser(with things like copy/screenshots/etc. disabled) and wrap all the network traffic that, in an ordinary website, would be HTTP requests and responses, in suitably formatted encrypted video data or key requests and responses. Your ‘site’ could then just be that ‘CDM’ occupying 100% of the browser window and rendering itself with an engine of the server’s choice, and storing all the site elements inside the CDM blob to protect them from scary hackers or whatnot.
It’d be ugly; and it would be a blatant abuse of the spirit of even this shit standard; but it would be within the letter of the spec…
The Internet is about porn. Other stuff gets in the way, gets swept up and whipped into shape but, ultimately, the Internet is about porn.
I like MFC. I’m a monster but I like people so long as they keep their distance. There are girls on MFC who will SCHOOL you on your perception of porn. Porn vs camming is a thing. You don’t understand? It’s still a thing, just a thing you don’t understand. The difference is women hooked on drugs vs women taking a choice. Post-feminism? You have no idea what post-feminism is going to be.
Talk to RainbowPixie on MFC some night. She’s smart and chock full of opinions. Really smart.
It’s fundamentally incompatible with Firefox’s licensing and Mozilla’s charter, so I’m pretty sure you are right that Firefox won’t support it. Someone may be able to add that support via plugins, just as they add DRM now with Silverlight and Flash, but won’t ever see it in the browser itself.
Now I’m just not sure what the heck you’re talking about. I thought this was the DRM thread?
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