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Hulu Munging HTML With JS To Protect Content
N!NJA writes "Hulu has started encoding the html that they send to people's browsers, and then decoding it using javascript before rendering it. [...] They then run the character stream through a series of javascript functions to convert it back into plain text before pushing it into your browser using DHTML. That's quite a lot of effort just for fun, so I assume that is to stop screen scrapers from parsing content." I really can't understand all this effort. Boxee displayed the Hulu advertising perfectly. I suspect Alec Baldwin is to blame.
That's really interesting. According to Wikipedia: "The DMCA criminalizes the circumvention of access control".
Can obfuscated HTML & JavaScript really be considered access control?? I sure hope not.
If it is, then what's the difference between obfuscated code and horribly written code thats difficult to understand? Or code thats been run through a minifier to make it smaller?
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And to anyone complaining about having to dance through proxies to watch Hulu internationally, it's for the same reasons. What benefit does Charmin see from advertising toilet paper to people in the Netherlands?
All that aside, as someone who has a modded XBOX with XBMC and was living abroad,I can say with experience that all these shenanigans are tiring. Like any arms race where it's content producers vs. the internet, the internet will win in the end.
Maybe they are just doing this to sate the content providers. As long as they appear to be trying to solve the problem, they should get brownie points with the major companies. Considering how popular DRM seems to be with the execs, I'll bet they think this works just as "well".
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If you do decrypt it without authorization, they can claim you're in violation. It's not about the technical merits of their solution, it's about the legal aspect.
EUCD is the EU version, if DVD Jon would have been trialed in the EU it would have been interesting. Because I find it very hard to believe that anyone will ever get convicted for circumventing protection mechanisms, if it wasn't with malicious intent, or for monetary gain.
True story...
Three separate estimates for a project have determined that making a change will take about 1400 to 2800 hours. These were swag by a analyst with 8 years experience with the application, a formal 40 hour estimate by a different analyst with 9 years experience with the application, and an outside estimate by a contracting house (who wink/wink made it clear the 1400 hour estimate was really them lowering their billing rate to get some work- they would be working 20 hours a week unpaid to make the 1400 hour estimate).
The CIO came in and said "I don't see how this can be so hard", drew some boxes on a whiteboard as the "high level design" and said, "this should take 400 hours". (This was after the three estimates kept disagreeing with her wishes)
And *every* VP and senior director in the room, nodded in agreement and didn't say a god damned thing.
One of the ways planned to meet this goal is to assume testing will find no defects and take one week less than normal. That's just one -- there were more.
In the current environment- IT people are seeing some really bizarre behavior by the business types (I have friends at three other companies that report similar experiences).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I don't think the CIO's lack of understanding is caused by her being a "business type". Fact is, unless you've been knee-deep in the code for the system in question, you probably have a very skewed understanding of the time requirements.
Case in point, a client of mine was a PhD/MD. Definitely a nerd, not a business type. He has programming skills, yet he expects me to be able to accomplish 20+ hours of coding in an hour. He simply doesn't understand the amount of thinking, experimentation, design, coding and testing involved for modern web-apps.
More relevant case in point, my boss has a PhD in computer science. About 10 years ago, he was a programmer just like me, but now he runs big-numbers for the business types. He has been nagging me about current project to be done, because back when he was a web developer, everything was server-side CGI. No CSS prettiness to worry about, limited cross-browser issues, and there was no cluster-fuck codebase to wrestle with. If he gave 2-shits about being a better manager, he'd ask "what sort of problems are you having/expecting", rather than "is it done yet?", and then telling me to hurry up to create bug-free code (pfffft what an oxymoron).
Fact is, every manager I have ever had in a technical position has been woefully out-of-touch with the nitty-gritty of their subordinate's work. Whether or not that person had substantial computer/technical background is irrelevant, because they don't understand the specifics of the system/project in question.