In general terms, Digital Rights Management isn't necessarily a bad thing, and used properly can be very helpful.
Here you go so wrong already, no need to comment on the rest.
DRM is Digital Restrictions Management. It puts restrictions on what a user can do with content (which are often euphemistically called "rights"). But it's not about giving rights, it's about taking rights away. Restricting what a user can do with its content.
Currently Windows is still the standard. People who're too cheap to pay for Windows won't likely pay for movies either.
So by supporting Windows only they catch already >90% of the market, with support of Microsoft to help them with their schemes. Starting to support Linux et.al. would make them lose that support and cost a lot in terms of developing and supporting additional plugins, for maybe 1% more viewership.
DRM cannot be open-source, for an obvious reason: If it were, you could just comment out the 'don't copy' line and recompile.
You are suffering from a delusion - you believe DRM works.
You don't have to believe DRM works to know it can not be implemented as open source. It's the nature of the beast. It completely depends on being proprietary and closed-sourced.
DRM is obtrusive, or it doesn't work. DRM = Digital Restrictions Management, it puts restrictions on what a user can normally do. If it's not obtrusive at all (i.e. allows anything the user wants to do with it), why bother at all?
So by nature DRM gives a worse user experience than restriction-free content. And there's no way around that. Apples PlayFair (wasn't it called like that?) had very limited restrictions, and as such was accepted by the users. But it can't have been very effective in preventing casual copying or piracy...
Reject DRM in total and you will see a gradual decrease in the number of new movies which require millions of dollars to produce. I'm pretty sure crowd funding might not do the job.
Multi-million-dollar (per episode) production Game of Thrones seems to do quite well, despite being the most pirated TV show on the planet.
So imagine Firefox implements it, and manages to become approved.
Within hours someone will have stripped the restrictions from the DRM scheme, allowing FF to play Netflix movies without restrictions on say saving the content to disk.
You could write a standard DRM, that was published publicly, and still have it secure.
Impossible.
The reason being: DRM by nature requires to give the keys to the locks to the end user. There are arbitrary restrictions on what a user can do with certain data, restrictions that the software is supposed to enforce. However the software has the keys, and there is nothing stopping it from unlocking (i.e. decrypting) the data with the provided key, and subsequently ignoring the requested restrictions.
To prevent just that from happening, the only option is to use "approved clients" only. That are then clients that are closed source, and contain some kind of secret key to authenticate against the server for being approved. And then there is effectively no difference with the current DRM situation.
DRM is more than just encryption. Plain encryption sure you can do securely in some standards compliant, open-source manner. However in that case you don't put additional restrictions on the use of the decrypted data like DRM tries to do.
It's supposed to be HTML5 - but is this really a standard?
If so, what is stopping other people (e.g. some Firefox extension developers) to build the exact same thing, allowing Netflix videos to play in other browsers?
And: how're they going to stop such plugins from not following the restrictions asked for by the DRM?
Then they give good results. If I use a search engine to search for search engines, I'm not interested in the search engine I'm searching with to show in the search results, as I found that one already. So that's six searches in one sentence:-)
First result for Melbourne: the Wikipedia page. First result for Moscow: a news link about Snowden transiting the city, then the first web search result is the Wikipedia page.
I think the vast majority of people on this planet will argue that Lynx falls short of having "the features you need". For starters it won't play Flash, so how can you ever use Lynx to watch the latest funny cat videos on YouTube?
Some of AV vendors that receive such vulnerability information are foreign companies. Yes. Some of those AV companies are Chinese.
Is it not reasonable to afford the NSA the same advance warning? The advance warning is a few days before the patch is made public, around the same time that the public receive advance notification (with less details than the AV companies and NSA). It is not like they have months to exploit it.
They probably have many years to exploit it, considering how lazy most people are when it comes to installing patches and updating their AV signature files.
And besides: the NSA need the exploit only once. After that they have all the information they need to log in as if they were a regular user of the system (of course they'd probably give themselves full permissions in the process of creating that user).
And that's the trick: storing large quantities of electrical energy and having this available quickly is not possible with current technology.
You mean like every cordless personal electronic device has been doing for 40 years?
That are small quantities of power that are not available quickly.
A phone battery is around 5 Wh. A car battery 50 kWh. 10,000 times larger.
A phone battery can charge/discharge over a period of hours, not minutes (without damaging the battery). Now we're looking to charge a battery 10,000 times as large in 1/100th the time. For a grand total of six orders of magnitude difference than your measly phone battery.
You seem to have come up with problems that have been solved for decades; even centuries if you're talking pure energy storage solutions.
I'd love to see an electrical energy storage solution that existed decades years ago, that can be charged from the grid (speed doesn't matter), store it for some time, and then supply 500 kW of electrical power for at least 10 minutes before being depleted. You seem to know so much about it - so where can I find such devices? Let me make it a little easier, it doesn't have to be from decades ago. Just something that's working now.
Last time I was driving with a co-driver, which admittedly is over a decade ago, we STILL had to stop to switch seats. Unless car technology has really changed over the past decade, I believe that is still an issue.
Grid is not a storage facility. You don't actually store power there.
It may act like that for small-scale applications like such solar panels that don't give off that much power anyway, a fraction of the draw of one of those superchargers. That's insignificant for the power plants.
Having six cars pull into the bays at the same time, plugging in 540 kW of electrical power in one go, that the power plants start to feel. Do that over a bunch of stations, and they really need to start to ramp up production - without warning.
To me, battery = "device that stores electrical energy". What technology they use is irrelevant - chemical like current lead-acid, Li-ion, etc, or physical like supercapacitors. The key problem is the peak of power demand needed for fast charging. You will need a large supercapacitor at a charging station that charges constantly to provide a fast charge boost to the smaller supercapacitor in a car (with smaller being relative, of course).
I don't doubt fast charge will happen (supercapacitors, recently a story about Al based batteries, whatever). It's just not there, and doesn't mitigate the simple fact that we need to roughly double electrical power generation if we want to run all our cars electric.
And sure, lots of idle power overnight. After midnight, when everybody is sleeping - not at 18:00 when they come home and plug in their car to charge overnight. Of course that can be solved again (timers on the chargers or so), it's not that straightforward either. And charging 50 kWh in say eight hours means a power draw of 6.25 kW. 27 amps at European 230V, or about 60 amps on US 110V. Many houses don't have that much power available, and even if they have, the cables in the street are not up to everybody actually using that much, so that requires expensive upgrades of the local distribution networks.
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In general terms, Digital Rights Management isn't necessarily a bad thing, and used properly can be very helpful.
Here you go so wrong already, no need to comment on the rest.
DRM is Digital Restrictions Management. It puts restrictions on what a user can do with content (which are often euphemistically called "rights"). But it's not about giving rights, it's about taking rights away. Restricting what a user can do with its content.
Currently Windows is still the standard. People who're too cheap to pay for Windows won't likely pay for movies either.
So by supporting Windows only they catch already >90% of the market, with support of Microsoft to help them with their schemes. Starting to support Linux et.al. would make them lose that support and cost a lot in terms of developing and supporting additional plugins, for maybe 1% more viewership.
You are suffering from a delusion - you believe DRM works.
You don't have to believe DRM works to know it can not be implemented as open source. It's the nature of the beast. It completely depends on being proprietary and closed-sourced.
DRM is obtrusive, or it doesn't work. DRM = Digital Restrictions Management, it puts restrictions on what a user can normally do. If it's not obtrusive at all (i.e. allows anything the user wants to do with it), why bother at all?
So by nature DRM gives a worse user experience than restriction-free content. And there's no way around that. Apples PlayFair (wasn't it called like that?) had very limited restrictions, and as such was accepted by the users. But it can't have been very effective in preventing casual copying or piracy...
Reject DRM in total and you will see a gradual decrease in the number of new movies which require millions of dollars to produce. I'm pretty sure crowd funding might not do the job.
Multi-million-dollar (per episode) production Game of Thrones seems to do quite well, despite being the most pirated TV show on the planet.
So imagine Firefox implements it, and manages to become approved.
Within hours someone will have stripped the restrictions from the DRM scheme, allowing FF to play Netflix movies without restrictions on say saving the content to disk.
Won't happen.
DRM does not require obscurity.
You could write a standard DRM, that was published publicly, and still have it secure.
Impossible.
The reason being: DRM by nature requires to give the keys to the locks to the end user. There are arbitrary restrictions on what a user can do with certain data, restrictions that the software is supposed to enforce. However the software has the keys, and there is nothing stopping it from unlocking (i.e. decrypting) the data with the provided key, and subsequently ignoring the requested restrictions.
To prevent just that from happening, the only option is to use "approved clients" only. That are then clients that are closed source, and contain some kind of secret key to authenticate against the server for being approved. And then there is effectively no difference with the current DRM situation.
DRM is more than just encryption. Plain encryption sure you can do securely in some standards compliant, open-source manner. However in that case you don't put additional restrictions on the use of the decrypted data like DRM tries to do.
I'm sure they every now and then turn the engine around to compensate for this effect.
It's supposed to be HTML5 - but is this really a standard?
If so, what is stopping other people (e.g. some Firefox extension developers) to build the exact same thing, allowing Netflix videos to play in other browsers?
And: how're they going to stop such plugins from not following the restrictions asked for by the DRM?
No-one managed to build an un-approved plugin yet?
Then they give good results. If I use a search engine to search for search engines, I'm not interested in the search engine I'm searching with to show in the search results, as I found that one already. So that's six searches in one sentence :-)
Not likely as most kids simply don't know better than what's being told to them by adults (primarily parents and teachers).
First result for Melbourne: the Wikipedia page. First result for Moscow: a news link about Snowden transiting the city, then the first web search result is the Wikipedia page.
I'm in Hong Kong, apparently makes a difference.
Kids in school get used to Google, will use it at home. Potential for money for Google.
Kids in school get used to Bing, will use it at home. No potential money for Google.
I think the vast majority of people on this planet will argue that Lynx falls short of having "the features you need". For starters it won't play Flash, so how can you ever use Lynx to watch the latest funny cat videos on YouTube?
I think the crux of the complaint is that IE is has inconsistent buggyness over its versions.
Some of AV vendors that receive such vulnerability information are foreign companies. Yes. Some of those AV companies are Chinese.
Is it not reasonable to afford the NSA the same advance warning? The advance warning is a few days before the patch is made public, around the same time that the public receive advance notification (with less details than the AV companies and NSA). It is not like they have months to exploit it.
They probably have many years to exploit it, considering how lazy most people are when it comes to installing patches and updating their AV signature files.
And besides: the NSA need the exploit only once. After that they have all the information they need to log in as if they were a regular user of the system (of course they'd probably give themselves full permissions in the process of creating that user).
I was hoping for something in human readable form...
Yes, and a very simple one: how do they do it?
And that's the trick: storing large quantities of electrical energy and having this available quickly is not possible with current technology.
You mean like every cordless personal electronic device has been doing for 40 years?
That are small quantities of power that are not available quickly.
A phone battery is around 5 Wh. A car battery 50 kWh. 10,000 times larger.
A phone battery can charge/discharge over a period of hours, not minutes (without damaging the battery). Now we're looking to charge a battery 10,000 times as large in 1/100th the time. For a grand total of six orders of magnitude difference than your measly phone battery.
You seem to have come up with problems that have been solved for decades; even centuries if you're talking pure energy storage solutions.
I'd love to see an electrical energy storage solution that existed decades years ago, that can be charged from the grid (speed doesn't matter), store it for some time, and then supply 500 kW of electrical power for at least 10 minutes before being depleted. You seem to know so much about it - so where can I find such devices? Let me make it a little easier, it doesn't have to be from decades ago. Just something that's working now.
Last time I was driving with a co-driver, which admittedly is over a decade ago, we STILL had to stop to switch seats. Unless car technology has really changed over the past decade, I believe that is still an issue.
Grid is not a storage facility. You don't actually store power there.
It may act like that for small-scale applications like such solar panels that don't give off that much power anyway, a fraction of the draw of one of those superchargers. That's insignificant for the power plants.
Having six cars pull into the bays at the same time, plugging in 540 kW of electrical power in one go, that the power plants start to feel. Do that over a bunch of stations, and they really need to start to ramp up production - without warning.
Same solution, different problem. No surprise it's already done as it's technically simple.
To me, battery = "device that stores electrical energy". What technology they use is irrelevant - chemical like current lead-acid, Li-ion, etc, or physical like supercapacitors. The key problem is the peak of power demand needed for fast charging. You will need a large supercapacitor at a charging station that charges constantly to provide a fast charge boost to the smaller supercapacitor in a car (with smaller being relative, of course).
I don't doubt fast charge will happen (supercapacitors, recently a story about Al based batteries, whatever). It's just not there, and doesn't mitigate the simple fact that we need to roughly double electrical power generation if we want to run all our cars electric.
And sure, lots of idle power overnight. After midnight, when everybody is sleeping - not at 18:00 when they come home and plug in their car to charge overnight. Of course that can be solved again (timers on the chargers or so), it's not that straightforward either. And charging 50 kWh in say eight hours means a power draw of 6.25 kW. 27 amps at European 230V, or about 60 amps on US 110V. Many houses don't have that much power available, and even if they have, the cables in the street are not up to everybody actually using that much, so that requires expensive upgrades of the local distribution networks.