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Tim Berners-Lee Approves Web DRM, But W3C Members Have Two Weeks To Appeal (defectivebydesign.org)
Reader Atticus Rex writes: A high controversial Web standard has received a seal of approval from Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and its chief technical decision-maker. Opponents like the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation say that the standard, Encrypted Media Extensions, is a step backwards for freedom, privacy, and a host of other rights on the Web.
There's still a two-week window in which members of the W3C can appeal the decision, and the Free Software Foundation is asking people to email and encourage them to do so. Update: The W3C has announced that it would publish its DRM standard with no protections and no compromises at all.
There's still a two-week window in which members of the W3C can appeal the decision, and the Free Software Foundation is asking people to email and encourage them to do so. Update: The W3C has announced that it would publish its DRM standard with no protections and no compromises at all.
Who would you have decide this? A standards organization, and a standards committee, headed by a person who has the responsbility to announce the decision? With an appeals process?
Ok. The W3C. The Advisory Committee on Encrypted Media Extensions. Tim Berners-Lee, the person who pretty much set up the the involved standards. With an appeals process and W3C member vote.
Not that you care about any of that. Any process that doesn't produce the outcome that you want is the product of death and appointment to Godhood, it appears.
Your concern is well-placed. The answer will depend on how much bullshit the public will take before leaving.
To start with, you're thinking in terms of an application stack. The Web was meant to be a series of documents linking to each other. Everything else was tacked on by one half-asser or another; Brendan Eich's Javascript, Microsoft's XmlHttpRequest object, Mozilla's plugin system, and Adobe's Flash (which worked on said plugin system) all contributed to the mess that today's Web is.
Cut away all that bloat, and you get HTML+CSS. What can replace those? ...Gopher's a good start. However, it needs a security layer on top if we want any privacy or verifiability. But it has everything it needs: text and links. A gopher client could be made to show content in any way the user wanted, because gopher is pretty much pure text. Links to MIME-types that aren't already plain-text can be opened in other programs that the user already has: image viewers, video players (even streaming!), the sky's the limit.
This also keeps gopher clients small and clean, and leverages UNIX philosophy by allowing each program to do the job it needs to.
Will this be for everyone? Hell no. And I don't care that it meets their needs. The public allows so much bullshit in their lives, they deserve it when the curtain falls. They were warned, and they didn't listen.
As a developer, gopher is extremely simple and easy to validate. The tooling has been mostly untouched, so there's a ton of opportunities to make better clients, etc.
Businesses aren't interested because there's only IP addresses to base things on. No cookies to track you with, no cross-site scripting, no ads that look like content, no bullshit at all. Just Plain Text with links. Gopher, as a community, is very anti-corporation and anti-app. You can't sell anything to those people aside from maybe hosting, so businesses will only waste their time and money by building on gopher.
This. The corporate takeover of the internet has been unavoidable from day one. I'm amazed it lasted so long. Future historians will wonder - if they will ever be allowed to do this kind of research - how a decentralized and essentially free tool of communication that put everyone on the same level ended up centralized, subverted and locked up with just negligible and ultimately ineffective opposition. There will never be another chance, corporations and governments will be on high alert to swoop down and nip in the bud any future attempts to create anything like that. We blew it. It's over.
ISO? you forgot how ISO ignored all of there own standards when approving the Microsoft Word data format as a standard without need for technical review and allowing thousands of Microsoft affiliated parties to become a temporary member and vote on a standard proposed by Microsoft. ISO will make any pile of shit an official ISO standard as long as someone is willing to pay for temporary memberships.