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Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Approve Work On DRM For HTML 5.1
An anonymous reader writes "Danny O'Brien from the EFF has a weblog post about how the Encrypted Media Extension (EME) proposal will continue to be part of HTML Work Group's bailiwick and may make it into a future HTML revision." From O'Brien's post: "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 a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the 'Web' technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable."
How does this affect open source browsers like Firefox? If something is open source you surely can't enforce any sort of DRM restrictions; someone can just build a hacked version of the browser.
Is this possibly the beginning of the end for open source browsers?
Why in the hell are they even THINKING of approving this bullshit?
So fucking sad
Just take a deep breath.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
html 5 is a world with real applications, not to say that traditional html did not have real applications but with html 5 now having so many uses and access to hardware acceleration, I think the only next logical step to gain more commercial popularity was to give companies a way to protect their programming investment. I know my self I worried about using html 5 as a valid alternative to some programming I am doing because of the seemingly easy nature to steal and reproduce something I want "closed source". Don't get me wrong here, I love open source and hope this isn't something that is mandatory. But I also see some benefit of being able to protect my code. The real question will be how easy it will be to get around it.
Please, lets wrap the entire Web up in DRM, this will ensure that all innovation stops. If you want progress, this is not the way.
I only ever visit a website once if things on that website don't work. For example, I run a couple of browser plug-ins that reduces tracking and advertising. Some websites don't seem to work with that. I don't go to those websites anymore. If nobody visits DRMed websites I think the whole thing will sort itself out.
Putting in the very fabric of the web a point of obscurity, just when we have to figure how to deal with security after the death of trust=. We are in the risk of breaking internet into country-sized pieces, and with this W3C is hitting it with a big hammer to see if it stands.
I imagine GNU's Firefox fork (IceCat) will probably not have any part in this nonsense and will refuse to implement it. Hopefully, it will at least be an option (disabled by default?) on the more popular browsers.
Please tell me that Tim Berners-Lee is only declaring it as in-scope so that it doesn't get worked on by some other group, so it can be killed as it should be.
Even if this does get included in the HTML 5.1 spec, it will be twenty years before it sees the light on Internet-day. Hell, a pretty huge chunk of the web doesn't even use HTML 5 and that spec isn't even finished. Even if 5.1 supports DRM individual site owners have the option of making use of it. And those sites will revel in the shit-ton of complaint emails and unsubscribers. Let them try it I say.
I remember when MS started protecting system files, denying permission for you to delete them. Viruses found ways to put that to work for them, increasing their rooting ability rather than decreasing it. You could even track down its files and the OS would forbid you from deleting it. Or killing its process.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The problem, as staunch DRM opponents see it, is that the universe of "non-EME content" would dwindle to an edge case once all legitimate providers of popular media adopt EME.
I only ever visit a website once if things on that website don't work.
So what do you do if one of the websites that doesn't work is the website that a government requires you by law to use, such as the site for filling in your tax return?
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;
I hope the Merchants of copywritten content aren't resting their laurels on this EME thing, as long as something has to be rendered on the client side people will figure out way to copy it.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Yes, I know I will be flamed for this, but I think the thing that is getting lost in the conversation is that we've all be using DRM for years, and the point of this is to increase interoperability. How many of us have netflix or amazon movie streaming? Buy kindle books? Use steam? Even the books downloadable from my library use some form of protection. Most people don't care, because those protections don't impact our typical usage patterns. But all of these services live in their own separate worlds, because they are not interoperable. Adding support for a common protection standard doesn't suddenly make it possible to encrypt movies or harder to download images on the net because that already exists today (and has for years)! The point is to end the balkanization of media players and let everything work in your vanilla browser. That sounds good to me.
Not a problem: Hyper Tyrannical Markup Language and Hyper Tyrannical Transfer Protocol. They can just drop the "s" after http, as we all know that's a joke by now too.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
This will free the internet from corporations. If you want the free internet use brwoser a if you want corporate internet use browser b.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
And EME is Encrypted *MEDIA* Extensions. It works on the HTML media tag, for encrypting audio and video, not HTML. It has nothing to do with HTML, nothing to do with copying and pasting or saving text or documents.
Encrypted video support in browsers is going to happen, or rather already has happened since EME support is shipping in most browsers used today and is in active use on the web, whatever the W3C or Slashdot users think about it, because there is a huge amount of demand in the real world from users and content providers. If it's going to happen anyhow, shouldn't it at least be standardized?
SMART People will use browsers and websites that don't use the DRM tech, and "big media" will wonder why 1% of their traffic dropped off... must be the pirates!
And the other 99% will use will go on using whatever is handed to them.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
Tech-savvy people will use those browsers and sites. The vast majority of people on the internet have no idea that this issue even exists or why it's important.
Technoli
Signed binaries running from a signed kernel, booted on UEFI Secure Boot hardware you can't legally compromise.
Alan Cox explained this 12 years ago.
That is the dream these people have.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
It was THE WEB.
There's a difference you know.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The web sucks in so many ways, this will just be more crufty crap to help fracture it. The Internet will prevail, but the web will fail.
This shit has been under influence by the state and corporations for too long. My browser WILL NOT support DRM modules. I WILL NOT have encrypted data coursing through my applications or CPU. I WILL see all the data that comes into my home domain, no one has proven I can trust them to hide such things from me. We have the technology to build a better web. Mankind will only suffer evils so long as they are yet sufferable.
If it's going to happen anyhow, shouldn't it at least be standardized?
No. Let these retarded users and greedy, evil content providers wade in their own filth.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
Because I guarantee that the #1 browser 10 minutes after this becomes common is the OSS spinoff of Firefox that ignores all of that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
and Tim Behrners-Lee did not "invent" the world wide web (but that's another post for another time...)
The W3C opposed HTML5 every step of the way in its development.
The W3C's standards have not been the industry standard for years...it's all WHATWG
HTML5 would have never been implemented without the WHATWG
You don't have to be a web developer to see what happened. The W3C has clout b/c of CERN, and they have done alot of good stuff...but the W3C consistently has tried to sneak in some sort of DRM or block development if they can't...
That's what happened with HTML5....the W3C's "industry partners" wanted some sort of DRM and the WHATWG had to form to circumvent it and develop HTML5 and get it deployed.
This is DRM, it is evil, and Behners-Lee and the W3C are not on our side in this
Thank you Dave Raggett
It wasn't all that long ago that browsing the internet with Linux was seriously crippled
Many sites in the early days used Active-X, Microsoft's "answer" to Java, which was only readable by IE and IE for Mac.
I remember not being able to use government services and banking sites because of this.
Because of the huge installed base of MS products, many govs and businesses just rolled out MS-centric solutions without any care for Unix, Linux or Mac.
Trust me, you don't want the web to go back to that.
It may not be MS at the helm this time, but it's easy to see that if there is a content-restrictive standard instituted for the web, there will be great pressure for it to be applied (even in places where it may not be needed!) and the collateral damage is inestimable.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Due to slowness and creating other "less ideal" conditions, the W3C is quickly becoming an irrelevant marginalized nothing. They've their control over the HTML5 spec long ago; all browser manufacturers follow the HTML5 spec that's maintained by WHATWG (which, coincidentally, was formed by those browser manufacturers out of discontent with the way W3C managed it. Apparently they've learned nothing from that since this DRM stuff will marginalize them even further. Nowadays, W3C approving stuff has just about nothing to do with what browsers will support or what the Internet will look like in the future.
0x or or snor perron?!
hey thanks for the comment...I agree that the IEEE would do a better job w/ standards
so, I'm a web developer now, and I'm wondering if you can tell me, specifically, what about HTML5 is "madness"?
what particular aspect about the HTML5 standard makes you say that?
also, about "semantic"...
without getting into semanti...um...arguments of definitions of terms...I thought the whole "semantic web" concept had been ditched into the "hype" bin along with "Web 2.0" and other unnecessary recursive abstractions
seriously...I thought "semantic web" went out when "web 2.0" got flushed...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Ever try to copy and paste text from the web based Kindle reader? No new DRM extensions needed. I couldn't copy and paste. Even inspecting elements I couldn't find the text. I didn't try disassembling the JavaScript.
All I wanted to do was copy a list from a self help book I purchased into something could actually use the list on. :-(
Hopefully this means the *AA cartel can build their own "consumernet" where they can carry on with the obsolescent rent seeking business model with the masses and the rest of us can get along using our newly usable (hopefully fully encrypted ad vastly improved) internet again.
Of course when the "consumernet" gets no customers they'll bribe some more law onto the various statute books of the world but hey ho, c'est la vie.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
There is something that bothers me about your comment. I fail to figure out what. Can you give me a hint?
I think it's this part: last I heard, most people don't care about the earbuds they use and can happily live with 128-256kbps music. If they are happy with that, in theory market forces should not push people to something better. After all, that is good enough (although cheaper ways that bring improvement will come, but hey). By that same logic, if we had somehow decided years ago that the computer technology back then was good enough (and that shiny algorithm to predict weather? Yeah, that's not important enough -- o wait) we would not have what we have today. Humans are driven to want something better (or at least a percentage of the population). And part of that bother enough to learn to know just how much better it can be (and here the better is rather subjective: if you think open = better, then replace better with open, etc) then turns into seeing things that go against that as taking a turn for the worse. And since it doesn't matter to the general public (because for them it is good enough) it somehow isn't important?
I'm sure there are cases for elitism and narrow-minded views. And I'm sure there is a fallacy somewhere. But just because other don't want better, it doesn't mean I shouldn't want better. Nor that I shouldn't work towards it (be it talk about it with others).
That doesn't mean, of course, that this isn't a good opportunity to try to improve a little the situation towards standard (and then try to work towards open). But I suppose the current political climate kinda reinforces the idea that don't give them anything because they will take a mile.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
For now. The demand will inevitably be made for it to cover everything.
Yup, those same content providers who buy congressmen and manipulate our laws entirely in their favor and abuse the DMCA with no repercussions.
It isn't standardized. It still requires proprietary, arbitrary blobs and works on all of two OSes.
With this hypothetical example the areas to target would be the output container (think Fraps capturing the entire window, or a portion)
Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 include a Protected Video Path that encrypts video even over the PCI Express bus. I'd imagine that Microsoft anticipated programs like CamStudio and FRAPS and blocked API calls like PrintWindow() and GetWindowDC() and glReadPixels() for a window displaying DRM restricted video.
or capturing audio via your speakers (the audio stream itself isn't encoded at this point).
Audio is already routinely watermarked using Cinavia technology.
hey, I am new to web development, and I felt like I didn't do a good job explaining why the div element needed to be replaced by HTML5's section elements...
I found this article: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/18/the-importance-of-sections/
and it actually explains where I'm coming from...look down in the article at the examples...how h1, h2, h3 actually were used as section headings with dangling #footers that could belong to any of the h's...then everything gets wrapped in div's...it was an ugly mess!
look at the development of HTML5...the W3C fought to keep the div like it was their 'precious'...really getting rid of the div nonsense as decribed in the article was absolutely necessary dont you think?
Thank you Dave Raggett
What I want is the ability to paywall my eyeballs. A browser that won't download advertising unless it includes some bitcoins.
Here's a thought. Anyone wanting this crap, should start their own internet from scratch with their filthy DRM. Leave our internet alone. We've got enough stuff on the internet that doesn't work, without having people actually engineering it to not work.
Tim has been hanging around far too many people who have far too much money, and as the so-called inventor of the web, he's finally decided to cash in. Another casualty of society's gross inequity. A great example of how such gross inequity perverts people's motivations. In a more just society, Sir Tim wouldn't feel so left behind, and would have an easier time sticking to the principles that made his work important in the first place.
Its a web I will highly avoid... even to make a point. I normally ignore the "survey" pop ups that happen. If I come across these sites that use this crap... I will totally spam that survey with negative (but valid) crap to the point that they will stop having surveys (I doubt they will stop the DRM).
now you're showing your ignorance...
essentially, you're criticizing HTML5 from the perspective of a person who is biased towards the W3C
you're biased...otherwise you'd never say this:
HTML 4 was a competing standard to HTML 5....HTML5 and common sense prevailed...
no...i & b are not 'depricated' in the current version of HTML5
also, your counterpoint to the div fix makes no sense...its an inherently different way to layout the entire page
don't respond...I'm done with this...you're biased and you're trolling and you obviously are NOT AN ACTIVE WEB DEVELOPER
Thank you Dave Raggett
I do this occasionally, when my internet connection is too flaky. I don't know anybody else who does. I'm sure less than 1% of youtube's users has ever saved a youtube-video to disk. I doubt google notices any impact from this at all. The reason for any arms race is paranoia, not actual risk.
What I and a much greater (but still small) number of people do, which probably *is* noticable for google, is to block advertisements on youtube. It works perfectly out of the box, and removes not only the general advertisements on the page, but also the video advertisements. I was disgusted recently when I tried to use youtube on a friend's computer, and had to wait through 10 seconds of an obnoxious, unseekable commercial before getting to the actual video.
Needless to say, I don't feel bad at all for using youtube this way. This is like a restaurant which gives you a side dish of heroin even though you didn't order it, and then gets upset when you leave it behind and only eat the main dish. Sure some people like heroin, but sensible people recognize that it is unhealthy and detracts from the experience of the real food.
If enough people start blocking advertisement in youtube for google to shut it down, then that would be a loss - I think youtube is filling an important niche. But it should be possible to fill this niche in other ways too. BitTorrent demonstrated how peer-to-peer distribution can scale cheaply for a relatively low number of relatively large files. It is not suitable as a youtube-replacements, but it would probably be possible to design a different distributed system that is. Something like freenet, but without the huge overhead of anonymous routing. That isn't necessary right now due to youtube filling the niche. But if youtube were to go under, the niche itself wouldn't disappear.
This was one of the most insightful comments I've read on slashdot.
And the success of kickstarter shows that we don't need a huge change in people's mindsets for this to work right now. (Too bad that most kickstarter projects still insist on enforcing copyright even after they have been fully funded from the beginning, though. They could at least add "free software" as a stretch goal.)
API calls like PrintWindow() and GetWindowDC() and glReadPixels()
glReadPixels, on a directx buffer? ID3D11DeviceContext::CopySubresourceRegion is a similar DX11 method.
That's what I meant: the DX counterpart to glReadPixels.
If the system is so foolproof how come so very little media uses it 6+ years after it was introduced?
Because the system was introduced in Windows Vista, and presumably, video distributors are waiting until April 2014 for Windows XP to leave extended support.
Does the water marking matter to most people (or you, if you're not distributing)?
Watermarked audio will mute itself on some players, including the PlayStation 3.
Ultimately why not just rent the thing/watch it on tv and rip it?
One can't rent movies older than about a year (or TV series at all) at Redbox, and I'm not aware of any mechanism to request that a particular video be shown on television.
It's not self-importance. It's the exact opposite. We might know more and understand the issue better, but I seriously doubt that there are enough of us, or that we are close enough to the public eye, to make a difference.
Technoli
Seriously disappointing. If anybody needs me, I'll be using Gopher.
The point I was trying to make are that there are people that regardless will view anything that enables DRM as being wrong and will oppose it. They pursue this with an almost religious fervour and are out of step with the real world.
My post was in response to one such post where the real world was being dismissed because it didn't fit with the world view of the poster. In an ideal world we wouldn't need DRM, we also wouldn't need locks on our doors, passwords on our accounts, etc etc. However we don't live in such a world and need to face up to that. As technologists we should strive to deliver the best we can, to push the boundaries, but we shouldn't dismiss those that don't understand the technology as being somehow less than we are. In short we shouldn't get lost in our own self importance.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
It's not self-importance. It's the exact opposite. We might know more and understand the issue better, but I seriously doubt that there are enough of us, or that we are close enough to the public eye, to make a difference.
I don't think so. I think its self importance. Because we understand the issues we place ourselves above those that don't. We make decisions on their behalf because we know better than they do. The issues around DRM on streamed content take on an almost religious aspect with those that opposed without reservation. They believe that all DRM is wrong and nothing will convince them otherwise. The ordinary user doesn't really care as long as they can view the content.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Thank you! That does indeed clarify your comment.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.