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FSF Supports Today's Boston March Against DRM In HTML5 (defectivebydesign.org)
Atticus Rex writes:
A small artist-led group called Ethics in Tech is joining the long-simmering struggle between streaming video giants and Internet freedom activists over whether the Web should include Digital Rights Management in its technical standards. This Saturday, Ethics in Tech will lead a march on the W3C, the body -- led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee -- that decides on Web standards.
The Free Software Foundation is promoting the march, and their "Defective By Design" site is sharing this quote from the march's organizers. Dear W3C: we demand you comply with UNESCO and international civil and political rights. Halt EME -- ensure the protection of a secure, accessible, and open web. Make ethical standards or stand on the wrong side of history.
The Free Software Foundation is promoting the march, and their "Defective By Design" site is sharing this quote from the march's organizers. Dear W3C: we demand you comply with UNESCO and international civil and political rights. Halt EME -- ensure the protection of a secure, accessible, and open web. Make ethical standards or stand on the wrong side of history.
I was taking call one night, and woke up at two in the morning for a “general surgery” call. Pretty vague, but at the time, I lived in a town that had large populations of young military guys and avid meth users, so late-night emergencies were common.
Got to the hospital, where a few more details awaited me — “Perirectal abscess.” For the uninitiated, this means that somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the asshole, there was a pocket of pus that needed draining. Needless to say our entire crew was less than thrilled.
I went down to the Emergency Room to transport the patient, and the only thing the ER nurse said as she handed me the chart was “Have fun with this one.” Amongst healthcare professionals, vague statements like that are a bad sign.
My patient was a 314lb Native American woman who barely fit on the stretcher I was transporting her on. She was rolling frantically side to side and moaning in pain, pulling at her clothes and muttering Hail Mary’s. I could barely get her name out of her after a few minutes of questioning, so after I confirmed her identity and what we were working on, I figured it was best just to get her to the anesthesiologist so we could knock her out and get this circus started.
She continued her theatrics the entire ten-minute ride to the O.R., nearly falling off the surgical table as we were trying to put her under anesthetic. We see patients like this a lot, though, chronic drug abusers who don’t handle pain well and who have used so many drugs that even increased levels of pain medication don’t touch simply because of high tolerance levels.
It should be noted, tonight’s surgical team was not exactly wet behind the ears. I’d been working in healthcare for several years already, mostly psych and medical settings. I’ve watched an 88-year-old man tear a 1-diameter catheter balloon out of his penis while screaming “You’ll never make me talk!”. I’ve been attacked by an HIV-positive neo-Nazi. I’ve seen some shit. The other nurse had been in the OR as a trauma specialist for over ten years; the anesthesiologist had done residency at a Level 1 trauma center, or as we call them, “Knife and Gun Clubs”. The surgeon was ex-Army, and averaged about eight words and two facial expressions a week. None of us expected what was about to happen next.
We got the lady off to sleep, put her into the stirrups, and I began washing off the rectal area. It was red and inflamed, a little bit of pus was seeping through, but it was all pretty standard. Her chart had noted that she’d been injecting IV drugs through her perineum, so this was obviously an infection from dirty needles or bad drugs, but overall, it didn’t seem to warrant her repeated cries of “Oh Jesus, kill me now.”
The surgeon steps up with a scalpel, sinks just the tip in, and at the exact same moment, the patient had a muscle twitch in her diaphragm, and just like that, all hell broke loose.
Unbeknownst to us, the infection had actually tunneled nearly a foot into her abdomen, creating a vast cavern full of pus, rotten tissue, and fecal matter that had seeped outside of her colon. This godforsaken mixture came rocketing out of that little incision like we were recreating the funeral scene from Jane Austen’s “Mafia!”.
We all wear waterproof gowns, face masks, gloves, hats, the works — all of which were as helpful was rainboots against a firehose. The bed was in the middle of the room, an easy seven feet from the nearest wall, but by the time we were done, I was still finding bits of rotten flesh pasted against the back wall. As the surgeon continued to advance his blade, the torrent just continued. The patient kept seizing against the ventilator (not uncommon in surgery), and with every muscle contraction, she shot more of this brackish gray-brown fluid out onto the floor until, within minutes, it was seeping into the other nurse
Trump is a madman!
Even if you cannot go to the march you can support the cause by messaging, spreading the news and letting fellow citizen know the issue.
Engage on the issue with your friends, it is not useless, it is our world.
Of all the issues with the world, I'd say DRM in HTML5 is pretty low on my priority list, and certainty not something I'd bother going on a march for. If media companies wish to drive users to piracy by making their product so restricted that it's unusable, then that's their decision.
They can sell me a DRM free file, or I'll download one for free. They can do what they want and I'll just go with the flow. I get the same result either way so I just don't care.
The FSF can't win this one. There is too much money on the other side. You have Google, Netflix, every major web browser, Microsoft, and even the inventor of the web himself. What is going to stop that kind of support? the clueless public that doesn't have the slightest concept of how any of this works? Some FSF march that will be lucky to get a small number of geeks? No.
The open internet was a quirk of history. It was doomed from the start. It may have started as a wild west, an open digital frontier, but control over it is being re-established step by step by step.
If you don't like, how the content is sold to you, then do not buy it . Very simple, eh?
But, no, as a good "Illiberal" — and you can't be one without an Authoritarian screaming inside you — you have to make sure, no one else can buy it either.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
regardless of whether it was intended to be sold or not. Artists will just have to adapt to the new economy.
And BTW, when are we going to end the H1-B program? It's totally unfair for US IT workers.
I hate it when people making purely subjective, moral arguments disguise it as being factual. There is no right or wrong "side" of history one could be on.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I wish I could be there to laugh at the handful of geeks who will attend and be ignored by everyone.
"I'm right, therefore, everyone else is not only wrong, but also they're Hitler."
A woman was promptly laughed at by several police officers when she reported a man publicly masturbating in front of her workplace in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah recently
In a Facebook post that has since gone viral, the woman revealed that the man actually asked for her permission to "jerk off" inside her gallery. When she obviously denied his request, he did it outside instead, staring at her as he did so.
The man, believed to be in his 20s or 30s, allegedly "whipped out his dick" and asked for the woman's permission to enter her gallery (located in Lorong Dewan) so he could pleasure himself. She told him to go away and called for her male colleagues - who were out at time - to "rescue" her. Then the alleged pervert took it to the next level.
"If he had been humiliated by my decline, he gave no indication and instead sat outside of the gallery and poked his erection out and rubbed it feverishly, his eyes boring into me. A few minutes later he charged forward, vigorously masturbating and came right in front of our main entrance, his semen all over the floor and scampered away in fear or excitement," she wrote on Facebook, adding that she chased him away with a pair of chopsticks.
Standardization of DRM in web browsers is a great thing. It provides a standard, that means as soon as wide spread support is available, it will be impossible to change without f-ing up billions of devices. The standard will have to be something that can be supported on any device or else it will fail. Then you just have to crack it once and we're done with it.
This is a total non-issue.
I have read the standards proposed and all of them seem to have clear vectors of attack to exploit weaknesses. This isn't like DVD where the main problem was that the encryption mechanism was unknown without licensing which required stepping through code to crack it. These DRMs are ridiculously simple to exploit and impossible to patch.
If you want actual DRM which actually works, it is best to implement it in web assembly and OpenCL and can be changed often and easy. This standard is functionally closer to OMA DRM which also was a joke.
Once camel has nose in tent, rest of camel soon follows. End game is transfer of control away from end user. Presently end user controls display of web content: ad blockers, tracking blockers, blocking scripts trying to disable right click menus or "save as", blocking popups, all possible today. The DRM-on-web goal is partly about streaming content but end game is DRM for all page content, to deny local control and thus local ability to block ads, tracking, and script imposed limitations.
The web where the end user was in control was not acceptable and is being reeled back. Goal is TV 2.0. Goal is clawing back control temporarily in the hands of end user after web caught certain interests off guard. Neither govt neither corporations want end user control of web browsing experience. If a few will find a way around it does not matter: the majority will follow the herd. It suffices to steer the herd.
I generally think DRM and standardized DRM is not a good idea. But hell would freeze over before I would support any group called "Ethics in Tech", no matter what their position may be.
People who use terminology like that are saying clearly that they are unwilling to engage in open, honest debate with other people, and instead want to verbally beat up anybody they disagree with.
Note that a group of "developers, thinkers, artists, and digital citizens" calling themselves "Ethics in Tech" might well come down on either side of the DRM debate, since many "creative people" believe that copying their works without their permission is "unethical".
And should be moved to Cuba.
They're what you get when one man drinks the Marxist kool-aid in college and decides to apply that philosophy to computer software development and project governance, of all things.
Of course, it's no surprise rms looks like a hipster. He was a leftist cuck before it was cool.
The next war is never like the last war.
But try telling that to the general birthed in the nineteenth century who builds the impenetrable defense wall that can be easily outflanked by a fast-moving tank or an aircraft. The admiral whose big gun ships will fall victim to the submarine, the carrier or the guided missile.
The app is built into every device that has an Internet connection. The 4K UHD TV on your living room wall. The smart watch on your wrist. No Netflix. No sale. No content protection. No Netflix. No add free music service with 26 million tracks in all genres.
The app doesn't have to conform to the conventions of the generic web browser or appease the FSF. If the geek wants the browser to remain competitive he has to be realistic about what the alternatives in the app world have to offer.
money for nothing, and your chicks for free.
** DRM software has removed the rest of this post. **
But how is flash worse than the current plan? Sure, it's unsafe, but it's safer than a different closed box EME written by some retard ore concerned with protecting their "property" over yours and replicating the same work scores of times, all of which mandatorily have to be secured against you, the owner of the computer, and able to forbid the computer and audit it to check it is "safe" to play with.
How is flash WORSE?