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RMS Urges W3C To Reject On Principle DRM In HTML5
gnujoshua writes "In a new article, GNU Project founder Richard M. Stallman speaks out against the proposal to include hooks for DRM in HTML5. While others have been making similar arguments, RMS strikes home the point that while companies can still push Web DRM themselves, the stance taken by the W3C is still — both practically and politically — vitally important: '[...] the W3C cannot prevent companies from grafting DRM onto HTML. They do this through nonfree plug-ins such as Flash, and with nonfree Javascript code, thus showing that we need control over the Javascript code we run and over the C code we run. However, where the W3C stands is tremendously important for the battle to eliminate DRM. On a practical level, standardizing DRM would make it more convenient, in a very shallow sense. This could influence people who think only of short-term convenience to think of DRM as acceptable, which could in turn encourage more sites to use DRM. On the political level, making room for DRM in the specifications of the World Wide Web would constitute an endorsement in principle of DRM by the W3C. Standardization by the W3C could facilitate DRM that is harder for users to break than DRM implemented in Javascript code. If the DRM is implemented in the operating system, this could result in distribution of works that can't be played at all on a free operating system such as GNU/Linux.'"
It's like a secret code, just for us: RMS Urges W3C To Reject On Principle DRM In HTML5
BlameBillCosby.com
So many acronyms! It's a good thing I'm in the industry, or I'd have no idea what that headline means.
I imagine trying to communicate this to my friends and family: RMS (sounds vaguely British) urges WC3 (the successor to Warcraft II) to reject on principle DRM (Dr. Mario) in HTML5 (they've probably heard that buzzword by now)
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
If he's successful in preventing HTML5 from being adopted by Netflix, Amazon, etc., that's a big win for non-open technology like Flash and Silverlight.
Stallman is a good example of what happens if you don't pick your battles carefully.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Oh the conflict, agree with RMS or agree with DRM. It's like voting Republican or Democrat, doomed or doomed.
Keep web tech free of DRM, leave DRM to be implemented in plugins.
There is NOTHING wrong with plugin-based webpages and people shouldn't think this way.
Trying to replace every single use-case for plugins is moronic.
And more to the point, it bloats the hell out of the codebases.
Those can be circumvented through the analogue hole, making DRM only an obnoxious hurdle, not a cure. If you want to give people a sample of something, adopt the Apogee model: give them the first part and end it on a really nasty cliffhanger. If there's no data to copy, there's no risk of it being copied.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
They won't rest until the web is like television. Unidirectional, full of corporate messaging, highly polished emptiness. Think back to the web in the late 1990's. They're already 80% of the way there.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
It's morally less difficult to argue for DRM in this case but technically just as stupid.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'd be quite happy if they'd standardize the DRM in HTML5. That way there would be one common DRM to crack instead of everyone having their own peculiar variant.
Why not incorporate a viewing cost in the standard? Make it a mandatory attribute in the HEAD tag or something, And couple all browsers to MC and VISA right away. That way we're all set to make some real business happening on the Internet! Because this is what is needed to get business happening, right?
What can you do with a bare kernel though? The GNU apps are the best part IMO.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The kernel is Linux. Pretty much all of the software is built with GNU tools (e.g. GCC). GNU/Linux is a label that describes the Operating System (not just the kernel).
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I should have asked him in the Q&A thread, I don't think he'd answer honestly anyways...but I think those are not his real positions on the topics, but he doesn't want those things to be illegal because laws against child porn, bestiality etc. are used as WMDs against software & Internet freedom.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Like anyone gives a shit what some freetard smelly hippie thinks. The fact of the matter is that DRM is *critical* to protecting the commercial interests of content developers in the modern age. If you freetards don't like that, then start making your OWN popular shows like Mad Men and give it away.
Ron Paul 2016. Take back America from liberals, leftists and freetards.
I don't want Mad Men for free, much less for not free.
Ron Paul does have my vote though.
Would linux, the kernel, had any chance to spread out in the world without all the GNU software running on the top of it? I think Linus owes RMS more than RMS owes to Linus and so it goes for linux and GNU.
I consider children sexual attraction to older people impossible because children are de facto subject to so much crap that they can't express their own personality and wishes anymore;
even if we went all back to desert islands, I think consent is not enough for such acts, consent can be easily tricked out of ADULTS, never mind youngsters. So Stallman has done a shallow analysis on the problem, in other words he's terribly wrong.
Yet I don't understand your post. Do you refuse math if stallman writes that 2+2=4?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
"It's like voting Republican or Democrat, doomed or doomed."
Not being able to figure out the difference is what will doom you.
As soon as the publishers get a foot in the door, everything will be a rental with a limited lifespan.
If the DRM is implemented in the operating system, this could result in distribution of works that can't be played at all on a free operating system such as GNU/Linux.
Aren't both of the above the *desired* configurations for closed-source and/or media/content providers - and possibly the government?
[ Now, where is my tin-foil hat? Okay! Who took my frelling hat? ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
As soon as the publishers get a foot in the door, everything will be a rental with a limited lifespan.
I wish I had mod points. The goal of DRM is to force everyone to pay for everything, every time, everywhere.
Not really. The most popular Linux distribution, called Android, uses Java as their userland. Not GNU.
Wait... you promote Ron Paul while promoting the government regulation of markets and infringements of natural rights by enforcing the copyright monopoly?
Hypocrisy much?
As far as I understand it, DRM in HTML5 would be like the Video tag; no actual specific format specified, just a standardized method for declaring its existence. Just as people can put proprietary, patent-encumbered video formats in an html video tag, so too could they with the DRM standard in HTML5. Folks would still have to install or have proprietary DRM blobs/programs of sorts for any of this to work. Ironically, this puts DRM in webpages potentially even less tied to web technologies, as they'll be passed through to OS-provided methods.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
If we standardize it in the browser (HTML5) - we won't have to implement it in the OS.
I don't like DRM either - but I would like my services like Amazon, Hulu, Netflix or whatever to work across all my devices. As much as I would love to have these services simply unprotect all their content - I don't think they'll do it, and I wouldn't if I were them. If they choose to bog-down their services with anti-ad-skipping technologies and nasty things of the such (which Amazon and Netflix do NOT btw) - those service who don't will win out.
Time for a history lesson! Early linux users didn't use GNU utilities. They used minix utilities and ported over the BSD utilities. The FSF had to port their utilities and gnu libc to linux to remain relevant. Today, most Linux users are using android... no GNU needed.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I dare say Busybox has a good chance at edging out Android as the most popular Linux distribution.
I usually find his views a bit extreme but in this case I believe that DRM will be the thin edge of the wedge. Suddenly a huge amount of perfectly open content (say government data) will be DRM'd as a reflex. Plus the DRM will come out on Monday and be cracked on Tuesday resulting in just having a new buggy and useless layer to deal with. So now you will invite a whole new audience to the cracking party. So people will all start downloading FirefoxK'd.
No DRM means no content.
You do realize there was content before DRM was invented, and most content today has no DRM?
DRM is bad for an open standard, as DRM cannot be implemented openly. DRM requires a central authority license anyone who wants to implement the standard. Saying it is good or bad is besides the point. It is something that is technologically incompatible with the purpose of HTML.
This crap is already being done with proprietary garbage like Flash and Silverlight as RMS mentioned. Let it stay that way, keep it out of web standards. If a company wants DRM bad enough, they'll find a way to shoehorn it into their site no matter what. It will still be easily broken to hell and back and effectively worthless--but at least that worthless crud won't be in the standard like (*gasp*) WEP. Not saying that WEP was bad-intentioned, but it's been found to be broken in ways that any HTML DRM will take only a fraction of the time to be broken. DRM practically exists only to be broken.
You're going to get modded down into oblivion for saying it. But it's true. No DRM means no content. So whether it's in the standard or not, it's coming.
That's why all digital music is currently under DRM, as is all Javascript, photographs, recipes, comics, web pages, newspapers etc.
Really... the only content areas still fighting the DRM fight are:
Video
eBooks
software
And software's easing off in favour of a walled garden approach.
No DRM doesn't mean No Content... it means No Content From A Few Rich Content Merchants (not producers). The content will still be produced, just differently. However, with DRM in place, that's no longer an option. Then the content will be produced, but the limit is put on consumption rather than on limiting means of production.
Could very well be the case. One way or another, GNU usage is in minority.
Most people think that DRM is about them as if it is supposed to keep movies from appearing on The Pirate Bay. It's ineffective at preventing this as it takes just one leak, any leak of a cracked or "analog hole'd" to be shared to render the whole scheme as ridiculous. And it is, ridiculous, as evidence by the fact that movies and the like are generally more easily obtained via TPB than commercially.
But that's not really the point of DRM. DRM prevents 3rd parties from being able to make a buck off the content being protected. Companies are extremely averse to liability, and even though cracked content is widely available, trying to make a buck off of it is nearly impossible to do without opening you up to legal liability.
DRM isn't really about you, it's about irritating you in order to prevent other companies from improving your experience with accessory services.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Not just that, as more GNU utilities, such as bash, gcc and so on have gone GPL3, they are like an albatross around Linux' neck, since a lot of companies don't want to touch that w/ a bargepole. Just as FBSD and others have gone to LLVM/Clang, don't be surprised as even Linux starts coming out w/ non GPL components in its userland, just like the recent ZFS-on-Linux. Ultimately, one will see a complete non-GPL non-GNU userland come up for Linux in order to make it yet usable. Even things like BTRFS are neither GPL3 nor CDDL - they are GPL2.
Except... the proposed changes do not actually implement the DRM itself. The DRM itself is still going to be done using external plugins. The changes are to implement a standardized interface for these plugins to connect to, and to authenticate that the browser and operating system has not been modified in any manner so as to defeat the DRM.
You're going to get modded down into oblivion for saying it. But it's true. No DRM means no content. So whether it's in the standard or not, it's coming.
Having done standards-committee work, I'd phrase that differently. The standard is what's out there in the field, that you have to code against. All the committee produces is a document, which you hope enough vendors adopt (and interpret similarly!) to become standard.
Netflix and Amazon video and the rest of the commercial streamers are all contractually bound to use DRM. So it doesn't matter what the W3C says, the significant chunk of internet traffic that is legal video streaming will have DRM. Nothing the committee can possibly do will change that contractual reality. Better to standardize it as best you can then to childishly ignore it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why do we bother posting reporting on RMS.
While I think he's a smelly hippie with no appreciation of reality, he's still an interesting smelly hippie, because he provides a clearly reasoned argument for his (predictable) position for a given issue.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Ask every android device or busybox router what you can do without GNU.
GNU apps are a bunch of incompatible hacks on old tools from real UNIX. They are fucking obnoxious at best as fucktards don't seem to understand their retarded arguments are mostly done otherways already and entirely incompatible with anything other than gnu tools.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
There is nothing libertarian about RMS - he's an extreme Leftist. Just see his site http://stallman.org/ if you disbelieve me - it's full of calls to action on every Leftist pet peeve - real AND imagined - that exists out there. There is nothing satirical about his positions either - that's what he actually believes, whether it's his opposition to national IDs, boycott of Coke for using child labor in Latin America (unsubstantiated), support of the Palis against the Israelis, boycott Apple, Amazon, Skype, Ubuntu, or worrying about the death of honeybees last winter. So yeah, I agree w/ the GP - I too ignore him on principle, and anything that I happen to agree w/ him on is just coincidental. I much prefer a more sane approach, such as by ESR, who doesn't hate everything about the US the way RMS does.
You're talking about DRM-as-copy-protection. Copy-protection has never really worked in the history of computing. (But would anyone pirate an uncontrollable-bitrate stream anyhow, rather than the Bluray?)
But DRM also prevents my ISP from inserting ads into my Netflix stream! Anyone think that companies like Comcast wouldn't do just that?
And DRM also gives the MPAA folks the comforting illusions they need in order to unclench and let me watch the shows I want to watch in some legal fashion.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yeah, Android/Linux is quite popular, what's your point? GNU/Linux is still an OS with a Linux kernel and the most central userland tools being GNU.
Rethinking email
So the proposed changes are essentially "your papers, please" functionality.
Bad is a subjective concept, and DRM can't be it (at least, not for everybody). The following are objective characteristics that do apply to all forms of DRM:
1 - It doesn't disturb pirates in any way
2 - It destroys value for your paying customers
3 - It makes the communication channels proprietary
Rethinking email
You're going to get modded down into oblivion for saying it. But it's true. No DRM means no content. So whether it's in the standard or not, it's coming.
Yes DRM is coming on the web. Oh wait, DRM has been with us since the first days of Flash player, Shockwave player and Real player, Silverlight Player. RMS is against DRM in the standard. The companies can do whatever the hell they want, but the W3C must not endorse DRM in the standard. It's not only a symbolical stance it's a political stance as well.
And a good one at that.
Those that want DRM develop their own solutions. But the W3C should not endorse in any way such developments.
Uhh busybox is just a collection of GNU apps under one binary, itself licensed under GPLv2...and Android? Well, there's a reason I'm using a GNU/Linux phone instead of an Android.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The goal of DRM is to own the channel, not it's contents. The content owners are being played.
It's to make your data useless unless you buy a phone from the market owner, your computer useless unless you buy your OS from the stack writer, and your hardware and the rest of your software from a companies that are his partner.
Oh, and it's also to make documents not leak, to the police, the press of to those pesky hackers on the Internet.
Rethinking email
GNU/Linux is not an operating system. It's something that some distributions call themselves, like Debian. Ubuntu on the other hand is not GNU/Linux.
For nosy ISPs, you just need encryption. (Although given the complexity of the video codecs used for such streams, the idea of inserting content into one on the fly would require a staggering amount of resources—so much so that they're guaranteed to lose money on it, so it's a non-issue.)
And as for the MPAA's comforting illusions, Stallman points out that they'd fall down fast—you wouldn't be allowed to do it on an open-source kernel, so "me" excludes Linux users... and probably Android, which is a pretty darn big market. (Although I might be wrong on the Android thing.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
"Not being able to figure out the difference is what will doom you."
Thinking there is a difference, or that you have choice, will doom us all.
I'm fine with no "big industry" content on the web. User content is far superior.
And those content producers can either write their own damn browser plugin, or app for mobile devices.
See this is WHY it's a problem. So let's say that I buy 2000$ worth of movies, music, ebooks from some BIG CONTENT provider, and then BIG CONTENT provider is bought by another one, and sells off the music business to some other content provider. Now when I visit their site or use their app I no longer have access to the music I already paid for.
THAT is the why DRM is bad and needs to go away.
Where DRM is good is preventing interception and censorship, which can be accomplished by simply encrypting the point to point data streams or the entire file as a whole, and decrypting it when stored. Like I'm sure this benefits China more than it benefits anyone in the US.
On the other hand anything that helps to eliminate Flash is probably a good thing.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
GNU/Linux is not an operating system. It's something that some distributions call themselves, like Debian. Ubuntu on the other hand is not GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is an OS in the sense that Android is an OS - both really describe a family of related OSes. Ubuntu certainly qualifies as GNU/Linux, at least at present. What they call themselves is irrelevant. Samsung doesn't really mention Android in much of its advertising, but that doesn't mean that they don't make Android phones (among others).
Implementing something openly means anyone can implement it. If any user could implement it, then any user could just as easily fake implementing it, lie to the previous block of code in the chain, and immediately divulge the keys to themselves. DRM cannot allow this to happen, thus the keys AND the code must both be protected from the user.
Just because you don't have DRM does not mean users can freely access your system. Conditional access is completely separate from DRM. Conditional access limits initial access to the content. DRM prevents what users can do once they do access the content. DRM is not even to protect against users violating your copyrights by redistributing your content, as time and again, history has shown that all DRM systems will be broken, and broken in short order. People who illegally download content never have to deal with DRM. DRM is merely to artificially restrict how the otherwise legitimate paying customer can consume the content.
Of course it's relevant what they call themselves. Why should anyone else than Canonical and the Ubuntu community decide that? GNU is not important enough to the average Ubuntu user that the operating system should be called GNU/Linux. Ubuntu is Ubuntu. If some other distribution wants to call themselves GNU/Linux then that's fine. Mac OS X has a ton of GNU utilities installed, that doesn't mean that it should be called GNU/Mac OS X.
Of course it should be rejected, you don't include something that doesn't work because it is impossible.
Who cares what tools it was built with? If I build an operating system with MSVC++, do I have to prefix "Microsoft/"? I rather assume I'd get sues by MS for trademark infringement if I did so. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You might or might not like the man, but RMS tends to have a clear view of long-term dangers to personal freedom, as they relate to the flow of information. "The right to read" struck many people as crazy when it was written, yet today it describes a plausible world.
In this case, RMS is right. DRM is all about control, and it should not be the business of the W3C to provide ways to restrict the freedom of web users.
THAT is the why DRM is bad and needs to go away.
Do you even have the most basic idea of what a technical standard is or does? Standards committees do not make moral pronouncements, and do not determine what happens on the internet. They are not priests; they are not lawgivers; they merely hope to describe a set of interfaces that you can write code against.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No reason it can't be both at once. In fact, ad hominem attacks are almost always irrelevant to the subject under discussion: "DRM is opposed by Stallman, but Stallman eats babies and has icky hair, so yay for DRM!"
This whole "standardization" thing is a joke anyway, and I think the people dishonestly referring to it as standardization, ought to be called on their bullshit. They're standardizing an API, and people (even here on Slashdot, where you're supposed to at least pretend you're modestly informed; fake it if you have to)are getting the weird impression this somehow "solves" the problem of Flash, Silverlight and other proprietary nonstandard plugins. That is incorrect: you will still have a proprietary plugin, it still won't be maintained by your browser or OS people, it'll still be unaudited, and it'll still be very specific to dealing with one type of content and incompatible with competing content. You'll still have a bunch of flakey plugins written by the same usual suspects, assuming your computer is allowed to have them. The only thing these things would have in common from a standards PoV is an API.
Saying this is somehow "standardized" DRM is just plain bullshit, and they are doing that only for the purpose of hoping people will draw totally incorrect conclusions about it. It's a lie. Every time some misinformed person says "at least I'll be able to get rid of Flash" as though that amount of flakey code from untrusted-but-you-have-to-trust-them parties will change (it won't), the people who called it a "standards" push smirk, knowing their deception is working.
Furthermore, having W3C involved in this, is truly a mockery. Standards bodies exist to make things work with each other. But the entire purpose of DRM is to make things not work! The whole point of these proprietary plugins is that they can sometimes say NO, because you don't have the right kind of TV or something. If the plugins never said NO and refused to work, then nobody would be trying to make you use them. Keeping things from working, is practically the opposite of the entirety of the rest of the HTML spec.
This is RMS. For RMS, everything which is not (uppercase) Free Software is bad. This includes (non-Free) samples, demos or rentals with a limited lifespan.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The copyright lobby doesnt EXCESSIVELY speak out too? Everyday they are spouting new lies on how piracy will end the human race, and you are bitching about Stallman?
Good-bye
(Although given the complexity of the video codecs used for such streams, the idea of inserting content into one on the fly would require a staggering amount of resourcesâ"so much so that they're guaranteed to lose money on it, so it's a non-issue.)
Given that Comcast already makes a chuck of its money by injecting ads into digital cable streams, I wouldn't put it past them.
Stallman points out that they'd fall down fastâ"you wouldn't be allowed to do it on an open-source kernel, so "me" excludes Linux users
I don't follow that at all. There's nothing stopping e.g. Netflix from using a freely distributable, open source client for their DRM (of course, it would only send a stream to the one it signed, not to your unsigned modified version). Now, you couldn't do that with GPL3 I don't think, but GPL3 seems to be unwelcome in the core of Linux because of such restrictions, and other licenses should be fine.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I prefer the content to be played. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Ron Paul is against *government* intervention and legislation on the internet
Oh really?
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
To be fair there are alternatives to a lot of GNU products these days. On the other hand, GNU still hasn't produced a viable kernel.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
So Stallman thinks that if DRM is a standard part of HTML, it will be "easy" and "convenient" and so smaller time web sites will end up using it. Which they wouldn't do anyway because DRM is hard? Because they didn't think of it? Is it really that easy to piggyback on a standard method of embedding decryption codes? How much cheaper is it really to do this with web standards than with Flash or Silverlight? Cheap enough to make a brand new market catering to all of those video sites that don't already use DRM? Which ones are those again?
What I really want to know is that if these web site owners are so stupid that they will start using DRM because it's more convenient, how much could they possibly understand about DRM? Couldn't we as open source evangelists just make something open source and call it DRM and hand it out to those dumbasses? It doesn't matter that it isn't really secure (was it ever secure in the first place?). It sounds like Stallman's concern is that once DRM is standardized it will become popular. All that being popular means in the technology world is that the name turns into a buzzword and everybody gets to claim they do DRM now.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
RMS doesn't use that word, "open" a lot.
Doesn't use "greed" a lot.
Those are probably your preconceptions of what he says.
RMS usually talks about freedom, as in not giving away your freedom.
DRM requires you to give some other entity control over your devices, more than what you have. That means giving away freedom, and that's why he is against it. I agree with him, also.
Well, so long as RMS isn't a complete fucking moron like you, it's not exactly a baffling logical paradox how one could both support some thing and object to use of that thing for nefarious purposes.
"Oh noes! How can I like fluffy kittens, yet object to murdering people by shoving fluffy kittens down their throat until they suffocate! My head asplode!"
I thought itunes stopped having DRM for their music?
His site is useful for demonstrating what a fringe character he is - for the cultists who worship at his alter. I don't usually visit his site - it's too repugnant for my tastes.
Seriously, the guy has outlived his usefulness by this point, and now I think he's just talking to hear himself talk.
And what userland does Android java run in, and what has it been developed in? I doubt it is written in assembler with raw system calls.
DRM is required to get them fully on board.
Even assuming that were true, I'd rather have no content.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Bullshit. The player manufacturers long ago so the writing on that wall.
Pretty much all of them but sony are easy to defeat (by design).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
By definition, before digital, yeah...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Good morning, it's your three-am wake-up call!
This thought-process seems to be almost universal in defining 'wrong', in my experience. More accurately, I'd probably suspect that people are merely playing at ethics in a thoughtless attempt to have their own way.
Requiem for the American Dream
However, DRM disappeared for these other content categories even though it was available. I expect that won't be any different for video and ebooks.
Yes it is, but do you expect DRM to be "equally accessible" on all platforms--from the major commercial operating systems (Windows, OS X) to the major open source distributions (Linux, BSD), to the potential up-and-coming hobby OSes (Haiku, ReactOS)? I don't; I still fully expect incompatible in the name of "security" (ie. to slow down cracking attempts) by making sure the DRM itself remains closed. Chances are, those companies with money to throw around who hide everything they release in binary blobs will win in the end, as usual. The corporations like Microsoft and Apple who have the "entertainment providers" in their pockets. In this case, you might as well stick with Flash as its use dwindles to nothing more than a DRMed-media playback sandbox program. Flash has already had a nice reduction in use over the years.
"Theft is the issue and all the people that are claiming its about 'openness' and 'freedom' are liars and what they are actuallying saying is 'I want to get content for free'."
That's right, that's how Microsoft and Real and Walmart stole my money by killing their servers holding the DRM keys so I can't listen the music I paid for.
By the time I found the floppy that held my backup, had no drive and couldn't afford to buy one; was also homeless for part of the time when there were emails about changing accounts or whatnot - but that still wouldn't have worked without either the backup floppy or the original key file stored on a drive that died - and yes, my bad, me between backups. The CD that held important docs and files also went West. (One box of CDs got saved by a friend, the other tossed by the landlord.)
You can say that's my problem for being a fuck-up; maybe so, but my stupidity, whatever, changes nothing.
The only way I can listen to the music I paid for is to rip it, which last I looked, was illegal in some places.
Thieves? Most certainly. DRM is a ripoff, from the time I first met it in 1988 to now. As others have sufficiently pointed out, DRM is not an anti-copying measure (except thought so by the naive who've been sucked into that myth) it's a publishers' (not creators') lock down mechanism - one that can conveniently require customers to continually re-purchase a license to listen, view, play, material they had stupidly thought they were buying.
DRM is a weapon against the honest, or those who wish to be so.
You may have a point about the client licensing, although I'm pretty confident your streams would still be safe from Comcast. The codecs used for digital cable sacrifice compression ratios to make that kind of thing possible; typical web codecs rely much more on keyframing and require a delay of a few seconds to re-encode on the fly, which would disrupt service to the user. Also, Netflix would get mighty annoyed and block all of Comcast for advertising on their content unfairly—part of why they want DRM in the first place.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
You do realize that the medium by which that content was distributed did not lend itself to near zero expense reproduction right? Analog to analog reproduction is inherently lossy. It costs as much (if not more) to photocopy a book and bind those pages into a new one as it does to just buy a legal distribution of the shelves. A product loses its inherent value the moment everyone that wants one can obtain a copy for near zero cost. For now this issue only troubles intellectual property. Soon it will affect tangible goods as well when what used to require a manufacturer can be had from a digital scan and a matter assembler.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
John Galt is a character from an Ayn Rand novel that presented the Robber Baron capitalists as innocent victims of evil communists and hero's of the working man. This is the same Ayn rand that is on record as admiring the pure efficiency of a serial killer of her time along with a long string of people she admired that would probably make your skin crawl.
Randian philosophy is the basis for people that call themselves libertarians, but in fact who have more fascist leanings than true libertarianism. The adherents are often at best frat boy capitalists with no concept what capitalism is, how markets work or any sense of empathy for other people. Many of them are from the "me" generation.
Only in the Apple and Microsoft worlds, and even there only in mobile. And that's DRM too, so it's not easing off but ramping it up.
DRM fetishists have a problem with license agreements that assert terms in favor of the end user. This does not surprise me.
Is slow and will always be slow while running from user land.
It has to be, it's part of the Linux kernel.
So let's say that I buy 2000$ worth of movies, music, ebooks from some BIG CONTENT provider, and then BIG CONTENT provider is bought by another one, and sells off the music business to some other content provider. Now when I visit their site or use their app I no longer have access to the music I already paid for.
THAT is the why DRM is bad and needs to go away.
So do you have any objection to DRM on rentals, then?
And those content producers can either write their own damn browser plugin, or app for mobile devices.
The major problem with this stance, which is why it bothered me when RMS voiced it, is that we are increasingly moving towards thin client front ends with cloud back-ends in order to reduce front end costs. You can call this "the mainframe model", if you want a computing analogy, or "the POTS" model, if you want a communications analogy. The evolution of HTML has been strongly vectored in this direction, and continues to be vectored in this direction. The idea that plugins or apps are even supportable on the thinner and thinner client front end is becoming less realistic.
See this is WHY it's a problem. So let's say that I buy 2000$ worth of movies, music, ebooks from some BIG CONTENT provider, and then BIG CONTENT provider is bought by another one, and sells off the music business to some other content provider. Now when I visit their site or use their app I no longer have access to the music I already paid for.
THAT is the why DRM is bad and needs to go away.
This is not significantly different than when singles came out on 45RPM records, and you had to re-buy them on 33 1/3 RPM albums, and then re-buy them again on 8-Track tapes, and then re-buy them again on cassette tapes, and then re-buy them again on CDs.
What has changed with digital, and to be honest, for the music industry, it changed with the CD format, is that the medium on which the digital data is stored is fungible, which means the end of re-buying.
The music industry fought this in a number of ways, and we can easily see that: the DAT standard was perverted to ensure the recording frequency was at a beat frequency of the CD recording frequency to prevent non-buffered direct digital copying from CD to DAT being playable at the original recording frequency without artifacts, there was a Canadian DAT tax, and they were initially successful in causing DRM use on iTunes, but eventually unsuccessful, since CDN requirements meant that DRM had to be handled on equipment under the end-user's control.
The movie industry has been following this same trajectory, with the difference that they got into the game much later. Just as the music industry fought first the 8-Track, and later the cassette, the video industry fought consumer-recordable media in the form of VCRs. They are currently in the midst of attempting to go down the DRM path with Blu-Ray, which is having a difficult time, since forced firmware updates by new Blu-Ray DVDs coupled with running their code on your hardware to decode their content, which is how Blu-Ray DRM works, still has a lot of technical issues that are practically unfixable. On the network connected front, they are attempting to DRM the content streams, and, again, using client-side software under their control, decode the content only for playback.
Having a standard DRM mechanism in HTML5 dooms this effort to ultimate failure in the long term, even if you dislike the short term consequences. By disallowing the plug-in model, at some point, when (not if) the particular DRM is broken, it will be Game Over, just as it was for the music industry. And like the music industry, the movie industry will survive this event.
What is eventually dead, in this scenario, is the re-buy model that the music industry used to rely upon, and which the movie industry is still desperately trying to keep in place, even as the tent they are attempting to prop up turns to chewing gum around them.
If we take RMS' (and your) position, with proprietary plugins, this does two damaging things: (1) it litters the universe with incompatible plugins and transcoded content which is not portable, even should the DRM of a particular plugin be broken, and (2) it deflects the HTML vector from its eventual destination, good or bad (but without corresponding DRM required on the server side, there's no reason you couldn't run your own clo
Which is exactly what the standardized provision for DRM in HTML5 supports. It just allows it to be done in a way which segregates support for DRM plugins from any other plugin support. The main motivation is not to enable DRM (which is already possible, and widely implemented, using existing plugin mechanisms) but to standardize the plugin mechanism for this use case (which is one use case of plugins that browser vendors aren't aiming to replace with non-plugin web technologies.)
But they're pretty useless without a kernel, and that's where Linux kicks in.
I have to say, Android might have its place on cell phones since there's not much better alternative, but I'd take a full Linux distribution with all the GNU tools over it any day. I was hoping ARM-based netbook/tablet computers would have taken off with the "real deal" and use something like KDE's mobile environment, but that never happened. We're stuck with Android and Apple crap. And it probably won't either, because of UEFI's "Secure Boot" garbage (thanks, Microsoft--fucking dickheads).
Wrong.
Android is an OS in the sense that Kubuntu or Windows is an OS; its a particular OS with a specifically-defined feature set controlled by a particular distributor.
GNU/Linux is an OS in the almost the same way that "things in someway derived from the Android Open Source Project" are an OS -- in short, its not an OS at all.
You're right ... but it's still really frustrating. I made a rather mild comment really. And I lose my Excellent Karma status because of the self-righeous ...
... I guess I'll get it back tomorrow.
Sigh
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Ah, here we go again. The myth that technology and technological standards can be politically neutral. A convenient myth, since it we can then absolve ourselves from any responsibility for how that technology is used.
Just because you don't want something, doesn't mean other people don't.
When did I say otherwise? I just meant that if they're going to give me DRM-ridden garbage, I'd rather not have what they offer to begin with. I don't want DRM-ridden games, either.
Life isn't about principles, it's about results.
Maybe that's true if you're a machine; principles and feelings will most likely get in the way, otherwise.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Busybox may well be the most deployed Linux distribution.
But, in terms of actual person-hours of interactive use (as opposed to quiet background service provision), Android would curb-stomp Busybox as the most popular distribution.
Same would apply for most-popular on a brand recognition & loyalty basis. Everyone knows what Android is and it has a lot of actual fans (and fanboys); only a few software and hardware engineers have heard of Busybox.
just because you want content doesn't mean that I and everyone else should have to have spyware and crippleware on our systems.
DRM goes way beyond just playing some stupid videos - it's an integral plank in the war against general purpose computing.
WTF do you think Microsoft's Restricted Boot is for? it's certainly not for protection against viruses - its purpose is to control what you can install or run on your computer.
at the moment, it can be disabled on x86 computers and motherboards, but it CAN'T be disabled on ARM-based Win8 tablets. The Win8 tablets are a trial-run to get people used to the idea that they can't install other operating systems - or software bought outside of MS's app store - on the hardware they've bought.
same for iphones and ipads - you pay for them, but you don't get to really own them, or decide what you want to install or run on them. You can only run what Apple allows you to.
stock android devices are also full of spyware (for google, the manufacturers, and for telcos), but at least it's possible to install software for sources other than Google's app store (either by USB cable or from other app-stores like FDroid), and it's also possible to root them and replace the stock OS with cyanogenmod etc or even a non-Android Linux. not perfect, and they're still spy devices by default, but better than nothing.
and this is NOT just limited to phones and tablets - this is the future for PCs. Apple are already mutating OS X into an IOS style app-store only device, and microsoft is pushing for the same with Restricted Boot.
when you buy hardware with such restrictions you're voting for it with your wallet. you're saying "yes, fuck me over, take my money but retain ownership of what i've bought". people like you would buy a turd on a stick if you were told it was a better hot-dog or that you really needed it for the Full Flavour Experience<tm>
so, yes, life is about principles. partly because principles in themselves are important, but also because principles affect results.
DRM is a way of forcing ALL sales to be rentals.
except, no discount for being just a rental. you pay full price but still don't get to actually own what you bought.
Unfortunately, because RMS doesn't understand the importance of having even a slightly socially-acceptable physical presentation, people dismiss him because, well, that's how humans are.
The only people who pay attention to him are people who were partial to his viewpoints already. He's not a good spokesman because he deals in absolutes and doesn't not care for compromises (in general; his comments about Steam being acceptable so long as it's on a free OS being a notable exception). To most other techies, he's someone trapped in the 60s who eats shit from his foot.
I am thankful that RMS is a zealot devoted to fighting things like this. I know that I and others don't always agree with him, but other times I am profoundly grateful for his good arguments.
ZFS-on-Linux is not the userland FUSE version of ZFS. it's a kernel module port of ZFS and a portability layer ("spl" or solaris portability layer) by a team led by by Brian Behlendorf at LLNL (mostly because LLNL want to run Lustre on top of it).
http://zfsonlinux.org/
It's not slow at all. It's fast.
and it's almost 10 years ahead of btrfs in terms of features, development time, and real-world testing and use in production servers.
ZFS's license is CDDL - free software but incompatible with the GPL. This means that distros can't distribute linux+zfs as a combined work (or should at least be very wary of doing so), but there's no legal problem at all with distributing the linux kernel and a separate zfs-dkms package or similar that automates the compilation and installion of ZFS on the end-user's own system.
installing it is slightly more hassle than using ext4 or xfs or btrfs or some other in-mainline-kernel FS, but not significantly more difficult. no harder than, say, installing the non-free nvidia or fglrx kernel modules on most distros.
My own personal battle against DRM is driven by my anger over not being able to read ebooks visually. Instead, I translate ebooks to audio files using text-to-speech tools. The entire audio path I use, even the TTS engine, is FOSS software, and some of it (the speed-up code) I had to invent and write myself. You wont hear people like me complaining, "Why don't you guys work harder to make our lives better." I'll change the world to conform to my own needs, thank you very much, at least until DRM arrived. DRM destroys my ability to help myself, and I can't even begin to tell you how much that pisses me off.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
It may be that W3C's pronouncements have moral content. That still doesn't mean that they are binding on Netflix and Amazon.
Is that it is simply replacing one set of binary blobs (Flash, Silverlight and a host of dedicated non-web apps on mobile devices, smart TVs, games console etc) with another set of binary blobs (the content decryption plugins).
It does nothing to make the content work on more browsers (the content decryption plugins still have to be ported to a given OS/browser combination). In fact, if those who create content decryption plugins do browser sniffing to block browsers they dont like (or browsers that contain bugs, vulnerabilities or features that could allow access to the decrypted content) it may reduce the number of choices to view specific content.
It will likely increase the number of DRM solutions out there as different content providers will want their own DRM solutions. (e.g. what Netflix uses may be different to what Google or Microsoft or Hulu or Amazon uses).
Where's Tim's outrage at the wholesale corporatization of his creation???
The fact that Tim Berhners-Lee isn't setting his hair on fire over this is telling. He should at least speak out against it in an Op/Ed or on a blog post. Fuck a tweet...anything.
IMHO, TBL did not 'create the internet' and does not speak for those interested in an open internet with cross-platform standards.
Thank you Dave Raggett
From looking at the spec, all it appears to be doing is creating a protocol for the negotiation of third party platform specific DRM plugins. So basically, platform specific third party browser plugins, but now in the standard for some reason. Why is this necessary? It doesn't make it so that the plugins are platform agnostic or open, it just makes it so that the protocol to load and activate platform SPECIFIC, purpose SPECIFIC, binary plugins are part of the standard now... for some reason. This just makes it more complicated and doesn't actually have any upside! These closed, binary DRM plugins will still need to be installed, just like flash or silverlight is, and they'll still only be on the platforms that the movie industry considers trustworthy, nothing will have changed except now we have a more complicated spec to follow in order to make a "compliant" browser.
Rand never claimed that all taxes are evil. She didn't like social programs, but she did support the existence of the state, to defend against foreign aggression, and to enforce contracts and intellectual property claims in courts (yes, she was very much pro-patent and pro-copyright, which is actually obvious from "Atlas Shrugged").
i'm not.
but in the not-too-distant future, there won't be any alternative.
motherboards that allow me to run whatever software I want just won't be available.
there'll still be neat educational and hobbyist toys like raspberry pi, but they're not a substitute for a desktop or server machine.
DRM is the thing that will enable the destruction of the market for open/unrestricted computers.
Fuck man, Eric, Linus and Richard may as well be The Three Stooges when it comes to free/open-source software representatives. Eric's a right-wing gun nut who hates Muslims and believes in 9/11 conspiracies (among other things), Linus is perhaps the most reasonable of the bunch but is far too aggressive against those he believes has wronged the Linux community (whether that be a naive Kernel developer or a company like NVIDIA), and RMS is... well, so out there that virtually no-one pays attention to him anymore, even if some of his points seem reasonable.
No-one in the Linux community (who's contributed something of note) seems to fit the bill as someone who's articulate, presentable and can engage with people and companies on a reasonable level. Even Shuttleworth's become a bit of a dickhead, believing he knows best and disregarding any criticism as being from idiots and "hipsters".
The only one I like is Nixie Pixel, and that's only cos of her physical appearance.
What are you smoking? Standards, like any English dictionary, are descriptive not proscriptive. They do not endorse. They do not prohibit. And there's nothing more useless than an ignored standard - just ask anyone writing web code during the IE6 years how cool that was.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Every political movement needs a well-reasoned extremist. His job is not to convince the heretics to convert, his job is to preach to the choir. It also helps that other open source advocates can appear both reasonable and sanity by comparison!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You seem to have a belief that standardizing a thing is supportive of a thing. How odd. Do you believe that the war on drugs does more harm than good, but support it anyhow because the alternative is the government endorsing drug abuse? Are you pro choice, but support outlawing abortions on principle because the government shouldn't endorse them?
We should not junk up HTML5 with DRM any more than we should junk it up with standards for displaying tic-tac-toe games. It would be a total waste to do so.
If a significant percentage of internet traffic was going to be tic-tac-toe games, and there was a need for client-server interoperability for tic-tac-toe games and this was not trivial, then we absolutely should. The job of a standards committee - the only job - is to get out ahead of what the vendors are going to do anyway, and provide a standard way of doing that that the vendors are OK with.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Ah, but in your post you made a grave error - you said "other open source advocates". RMS is not an open source advocate, he is a free software advocate. The difference is purely politics but RMS would cut you down where you stand (if he could) if you addressed him as an open source advocate.
Are you really lumping Ron Paul and Paul Ryan in the same category? And claiming Ron Paul supports corporate welfare?
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
You support copyright, and DRM. I've read enough of your other statements to know that. It is disingenuous for you to claim that you don't necessarily support DRM, but that, as a totally disinterested party, you nevertheless think it would be a good idea to shove it into the HTML standard.
If a significant percentage of internet traffic was going to be tic-tac-toe games
Are you seriously arguing that anything whatever, such as tic-tac-toe or the Evil Bit, ought to go into the standard, if there's enough Internet traffic plus a few other things? DRM certainly does not meet the traffic requirement. What DRM traffic there is, is unwilling on the part of nearly all users. There will never be enough people using tic-tac-toe, because it just isn't that interesting. So that's a nonstarter right there. But suppose anyway that somehow there was lots of tic-tac-toe activity. It still wouldn't justify adding it to HTML, because it is both trivial and solved. DRM has the same status. Trivially broken, and solved, and not willingly used.
Tic-tac-toe is superior to DRM in at least one respect, in that it is merely trivial. DRM is actually against the interests of HTML users, which is almost everyone. And most people understand that. Adding DRM to HTML makes less sense than changing the HTML header from !DOCTYPE="html" to !DOCTYPEPIRACYISSTEALING="htmldontcopythatfloppy".
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
What a moron is this stallman. Having DRM baked in 'HTML5' is exactly what it needs to get even more aproval and usage, otherwise plugins like flash and silverlight will still be needed.. The advantage of having it standarized in 'HTML5' is that plugins aren't needed anymore so every platform can use it. It's not like you HAVE to use DRM as a webdeveloper.. Otherwise you can also say that stuff like webworkers and videotags should also be excluded from the 'HTML5' standard.
DRM is sadly needed because tons of people are too lame to just pay for content they 'enjoy', in the end all you get it 'america funniest homevideo' like content if nobody pays or you'll end up with 2 hour long commercials..
What real reason would there be for not including a possibility for using DRM, as other unnecessary JUNK has already been approved for the 'HTML5' standard.. As I said, no webdeveloper who doesn't want to use DRM will have any problem with it, and webdevelopers who do need to use DRM (for whatever reason) can use it without the pain of having to resort to external plugins which are not available on a lot of platforms these days (flash for instance isn't available on android anymore (unless you already installed it, but even then a browser like chrome doesn't support it)).
Point of order: there are proscriptive standards, backed up by laws of various kinds, but not so much in the area of online information systems. An example of a set of proscriptive standards is the definition of weights and measures; while many goods can be sold in any quantity, the vendor has to at least correctly describe the amount that is being sold.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
DRM is a way of forcing ALL sales to be rentals.
except, no discount for being just a rental. you pay full price but still don't get to actually own what you bought.
Well, that's utterly dodging the question. iTunes has two prices for most of its movies - £1-5 for a "rental" you must watch in a 30 period, or £8-15 to "buy" and you can keep until Apple go out of business. I kinda agree that the "buy" option is a long-term rental in disguise, and I wasn't arguing against you wanting to remove DRM from it. But the explicit "rental" option does have a considerable price discount, and makes it clear what you are getting (and what you are not getting) for your money. Are you saying that iTunes "rental" option should send a non-DRM movie file, and just ask you nicely not to keep it?
What about something like Netflix? You pay one month at a time, for one month's access to their library. It's explicitly a rental arrangement, and if they go out of business you don't lose anything you'd paid for in the past. Do you think their movies should be without DRM too? How do you stop someone from buying a subscription, downloading enough movies to occupy themselves for a year, and then cancelling the subscription after one month? Or is that not something that should be stopped, and Netflix would have to "just alter their business model" to cope with people doing it?
I'd love to see someone do a project of taking just the Linux kernel, and then putting on top of it all non-GNU userland. Nothing GPL, except Linux itself. Maybe then this idiocy about calling the OS GNU/Linux will end
Including a form of DRM in the standard does not make it's use compulsory. People can still use HTML 5 to publish without rights restrictions.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
By not having a standard scheme, we end up with "Oh, I'm sorry, but you can't watch $CONTENT on $BROWSER because it doesn't support $PROPRIETARY_SHIT_DRM_SCHEME or $GARBAGE_ANCIENT_PLUGIN_FRAMEWORK. Please install an operating environment you'd rather not use (or even overtly hate) and try again."
Because that's clearly worse than having an optional form of DRM in the HTML5 standard, and there has never been any outcry by the Linux community about not having a version of software for their platform that allows them to participate in services equally.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Because you couldn't use standard PKI with certificate revocation?
That's an open standard, used every day with HTML, and could be used as a DRM scheme with very little work.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
GNU is not important enough to the average Ubuntu user that the operating system should be called GNU/Linux.
I'm not saying that it should be called GNU/Linux. I'm simply stating that it IS GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is a set of operating systems that run a Linux kernel with a large number of GNU userland utilities on top (like glibc, bash, etc).
Based upon that definition Ubuntu fits into that category. I could care less whether they want to advertise that or whatever. If you want to quibble over the definition, quibble away. When I use the term "GNU/Linux" that is what it means. Feel free to use it differently if you wish.
For the benefit of anyone who's geeky enough to be on Slashdot and new enough to not know better (an admittedly small demographic):
Actually, it's more like "They built my Jeep with Chrysler parts...it *is* a Chrysler/Jeep"...not that analogies are a good way to describe why GNU/Linux is or isn't an accurate description of the typical Linux OS distro.
I don't actually recall RMS demanding that others brand their distros as "GNU/Linux", but he does indeed point out the relationship by describing them that way himself. So, the answer to your last question is "no", but I'm not sure why you asked it.
On the subject of Stallman and freedom, I'd have to say "Dude, you're an idiot" or "Are you trying to deliberately misunderstand the purpose of the GPL and the meaning of 'Free Software'?", but you posted AC and I have no idea if you'll see this reply.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Just sell it through Amazon: They don't care.
A couple years ago I purchased Disney's "The Little Mermaid" from amazon.com to replace a friend's stolen copy. As soon as the intended recipient saw it they said, "That's not from Disney!" The DVD had a poorly printed cover and DVD art, and significant problems playing.
I reported it to Amazon - not only the problems with the purchase but also the fact that it was obviously a copy and not an original. I've never heard back.
Ooops.... that's a mistake. It's Paul Ryan I was talking about, the Ayn Rand fan, while parent posts talk about Ron Paul. Ron Paul remains my favorite member of the House, in that he votes against almost all bills with funding. When you have the checkbook, and you're spending other people's money, there is a tendency to get a bit carried away, and Ron Paul acts as a tiny counter weight to that. I suspect Ayn Rand would have little negative to say about Ron Paul.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
That is idiotic. The right to copy is a natural right. The law known as copyright is a restriction of that right. It is force exerted by one to control the harmless action of many. This is blindingly obvious to anyone who has any concept of what natural rights are.
GNU/Linux is just a made up word. We could just as well call the combination of GNU and Linux as Fred, that doesn't mean that we have to call everything that combines GNU and Linux as Fred. It's just something that someone made up.
The ever extending copyright term is not limited. Limited copyright in the modern age would be 7 years, possibly up to 14. No more.
The existing copyright laws are a theft of culture that impoverishes us all.
In standard encryption, both the user and the server are trying to protect some shared secret. In DRM, both the application and the server are trying to protect some shared secret from the user. If the user themselves cannot be trusted, then the user cannot be trusted to build a proper implementation, and thus the standard cannot be openly implemented. Running the user's code would be no different from a third party attacker providing your encryption software.
Are you seriously arguing that anything whatever, such as tic-tac-toe or the Evil Bit, ought to go into the standard, if there's enough Internet traffic plus a few other things?
That's what a standard does - assuming one of those "other things" was a need to document for interoperability. The point and purpose of a standard is to describe an interface (API or physical) that 2 vendors can code against and expect to interoperate. As a member of a working group on a standards committee, your job is not to sit there and express a political opinion, but to figure out what needs to happen to allow that interoperability. What's the scope of the standard? Whatever the major players will be doing. What's the content of the standard? Whatever the major players will be doing. This is why the standards committees for most technical standards are made up of representatives from the major vendors (plus a few guys whose whole career has become standards work).
Things that are both trivial and solved are the great for a standard - the text will be short, and everyone will agree what it should say, so minimal effort there. But of course that only comes into play if those things are relevant to interoperability between vendors.
The "interests of HTML users" is an odd phrase. The only "HTML users" that matter here are the people writing code that will run in the browser, whose interest is served by being able to write to the standard and have that work in all browsers. Any time you can't do that, the standard has failed. The HTML standard in the IE6 days is a textbook example of a failed standard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh, if I ever meet him I'll be sure to ask him about open source and thank him for his contributions to VI (and if he's still able to speak, ask why he didn't contribute to Linux since he likes that open source stuff).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, OK, that's an important point but worth remembering that NIST doesn't write laws (it's a "non-regulatory agency"). Totally separate from NIST, some laws say "if you sell something measured in inches, you have to mean NIST inches", or in England "if you sell something measured in inches, we will throw you in jail".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Which other 'free' kernel is there? By 'free', I mean one that is under GPLv3?
Standards committees should not waste time on things of zero or negative value. Can you agree on that at least?
It is not political to observe and state facts. DRM is worse than worthless, it has negative value and that's a fact, not an opinion. You seem to be stuck on the thought that DRM has some positive value.
The ease of an idea is not that relevant to the question of whether it should go into a standard. An idea should not go into a standard if it is not useful, or known to be just plain wrong, no matter how easy or hard it is. And by wrong, I don't mean immoral, I mean incorrect. DRM does not belong anywhere, same as Creationism has no standing as a credible theory equal to evolution. Earth is not flat, the solar system should not be modeled with Earth at the center and the orbits of the other planets described with epicycles, the elements are not the 4 called air, earth, fire, and water, and DRM should not contaminate any standard.
"HTML users" are all who use web browsers, not just web page designers and programmers. Just because many people don't know or care about what is under the hood doesn't mean they don't use it.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
GNU/Linux is just a made up word. We could just as well call the combination of GNU and Linux as Fred, that doesn't mean that we have to call everything that combines GNU and Linux as Fred. It's just something that someone made up.
I never said you had to call GNU/Linux GNU/Linux. I just said that Ubuntu is GNU/Linux, er, Fred.
Stallman makes more sense than people give him credit for. Web standards should be open and not subjected to any form of proprietary control just to appease content providers.
DRM can be implemented openly. However, to prevent "fake implementation" from impersonating the open one, the entire stack would need TPM-esque verification.
In other words, everything would have to be verified and signed by a central authority before it could be allowed to interact with other elements of the system. Thus, one could not implement it openly.
Cool, as long as they don't harm me in the process.
No. Common guys, this is not gonna work. Do we need to register thewebsitebay.com so soon? If all people where smoking marijuana and living in peace, sure DRM would be wonderful. Unfortunately some a greedy, they just want your worthless money, ya. DRM would only cause another type of software piracy. I am a web developer, and i think we will come out with other type of "convenient" ways to protect our software. but thanks.
It is not political to observe and state facts. DRM is worse than worthless, it has negative value and that's a fact, not an opinion. You seem to be stuck on the thought that DRM has some positive value.
That's just asinine. Netflix has already signed contracts stating that the terms under which they can distribute content include DRM. Doesn't matter whether that's good, bad, or stupid - it's reality. Do you think any of the devs at Netflix think their DRM makes it impossible to copy a stream, or even care?
The value of DRM is that it is currently contractually required to stream MPAA movies.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You talk like you believe in the MPAA's sobriety, good sense, and sincerity. Their expertise is in movies, not technology. Just because they use a lot of technology does not mean they really understand it. Those among them who do understand the hopelessness of DRM ever fulfilling its stated purpose actually have ulterior motives, such as driving Netflix out of business. And people like you are the "useful idiots" for believing their stupid propaganda.
The MPAA can contractually require that water flow uphill and the sun rise in the west all they like, it's not happening. We should not heed their demands that we all make worthless changes, to prop up their stupidly dark vision of how they think the universe should work, but does not. The way reality actually works is much nicer than their vision. You can be sure that if Netflix agrees to anything, they will include an out so that they will not be sued when DRM fails again.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
You seem to be entirely missing the point here. As I've said, the job of a standards committee is to standardize what the big players will be doing - they in no way control what the big players will be doing. The big players in streaming movies will be using DRM. It doesn't matter what you or I think of that. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether DRM works, or what the MPAA's motives are, or any of that - all of that is beside the point.
DRM for streaming movies is and will continue to be common. Therefore it should be standardized. That's what a standard is for. Why would you even care, unless you're writing streaming media clients for Nexflix or Amazon or one of those players? I think you're fixated on the false idea that removing DRM from the standard would somehow mean less DRM.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.