10 ms·

Browsers' bid for relevance is turning them into time-bombs

226 points by wallflower 10y ago

jkot 10y ago
> makes it a crime to circumvent an “effective means of access control” that sits between users and copyrighted works US had always legal troubles with cryptography. In past programs like PGP, TrueCrypt etc were developed outside US. That can easily happen with browsers.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Huh? PGP was developed in, and published from, the US. Hence the criminal investigation.
  - drxzcl 10y ago
    It's was split off at version 2.6.3(i) into an "international version" that was exported by printing the source into several large books and scanning them in, and then further developed outside of the US. I believe most current PGP versions are descended from the international branch, but I could be wrong.
    - effie 10y ago
      That sounds interesting. What was the point of printing source and scanning it back into computer? Did that bypass the export law back then?
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/ http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/ > However, the Export Regulations only covers software in electronic form (e.g. on disks, or via the Internet).
millstone 10y ago
This is the first time I've heard of EME. This caught my eye: > Although some of the biggest tech corporations in the world today support EME, very few of them could have come into being if EME-style rules had been in place at their inception. Why is that? It looks like EME is just about streaming video - how would this have prevented Apple/Google/Amazon etc from coming into being?
- tempestn 10y ago
  "EME-style rules" meaning similarly restrictive rules on the core browser functions of the time, not streaming video.
  - millstone 10y ago
    I understand the case that EME makes it more difficult to create a browser, but none of the biggest tech companies got their start by writing browsers.
    - rocqua 10y ago
      Perhaps it is building the backend that is considered to burdensome? A youtube competitor would need to serve DRMed video and thus be able to do EME.
      - nsgi 10y ago
        No they wouldn't. YouTube doesn't use EME, at least for user-generated content.
    - Sylos 10y ago
      Somewhat of a quip, but I suppose technically still true: Without the creation of new browsers, we'd still be in the Internet Explorer age, and we can all imagine how much potential revenue would have been lost for internet companies, if that was the case.
- frivoal 10y ago
pdkl95 10y ago
re: Cory Doctorow & DRM I highly recommend watching his talk[1] month ago at the Internet Archive about fighting DRM. Unlike many previous talks, this time he focuses on supporting ourselves and our fellow engineers by taking bad options off the table before they become temptation. It's a lot harder to allow a "little" corruption of open standards if that kind of option is forbidden with a Ulysses pact. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlN6wjeCJYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlN6wjeCJYk
symlinkk 10y ago
playing the devil's advocate - without EME how would movie studios agree to letting you stream their movies on Netflix?
- slavik81 10y ago
  Netflix has copy protection and yet movies are still all readily available on pirate sites. What difference does EME actually make to the movie studios' bottom line?
  - wodenokoto 10y ago
    That argument hasn't made them change their mind on copyprotection for decades. Why now?
  - frivoal 10y ago
    The answer you're looking for is here: https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2 https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2 (no, seriously)
    - lisivka 10y ago
      The answer in link is already answered years ago. Publisher cannot stop piracy because it cannot control user device, because user has full access to device. So the only solution to problem is to gain full control over user device, which is impossible, because user device is in hands of user.
      - dingo_bat 10y ago
        Except it's not impossible. Look at iphone and increasingly android. The device is locked down so hard that even the user doesn't have root access. Gaining root can be seen as a negative, borderline criminal thing and you lose warranty and repair service from the manufacturer. You also lose the ability to use some apps (Android pay, snapchat, etc.) just because you have root access. The only ones with true root access are Apple and Samsung/Google.
dasil003 10y ago
> The browser ecosystem is weaker than it’s ever been This kind of hyperbole undermines the whole argument. The browser ecosystem was weakest when Microsoft released IE6 and then decided to not update it for half a decade. Today, by comparison, we are living in a land of plenty. Even on the DRM front, the situation was no better in the past when you had to use Flash or Silverlight for DRM. At least now there is a clean interface to just the video decryption without requiring a whole bloated proprietary plugin. I don't quite understand the ideological bent that EME corrupts an open standard, but the same result from NPAPI is somehow less objectionable? If the hope is that by standards bodies rejecting DRM on principle they will somehow strong-arm Big Content, I can tell you unequivocally that it ain't gonna happen. Cory Doctorow has not spent the last 10 years building a feature film streaming service and negotiating with rightsholders, but I have. In fact I spent most of that time fighting against DRM on a UX basis and trying to find loopholes, which works for small distributors but not for the studios. The torrent crowd would have you believe it's because they're stupid, but Big Content is anything but stupid. They know that there is no such thing as guaranteed copy protection and that there will always be an analog loophole. The reason they insist on DRM is as a means of control. They just need enough roadblocks in front of casual piracy to prevent devaluation of their content. If they were unwilling to accept any piracy they wouldn't stream to PCs at all. Which, BTW, is exactly what would happen if we succeed in outlawing DRM on PCs. They would literally pull the content, and say if you want to watch go buy an Approved Device. Customers wouldn't bat an eye either, because people prefer to watch on a television anyway; cheap streaming boxes / smart TVs are the future, not general purpose web browsers. Making a huge issue of EME is just asinine and belies a complete ignorance of the market forces at work here. The studios have all the power, browser makers do not have any leverage. And in any case, if rightsholders want to play a cat and mouse game with DRM that should be their prerogative, but customers should also have the freedom to circumvent those measures. Where we need to focus our lobbying efforts is against the DMCA and infinite Copyright extension which broadly impacts consumer rights and the public benefit.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  I don't understand why people think the Web needs Hollywood's video content. Let them build proprietary set top boxes or whatever, who cares if it's not in a browser? It's certainly not important enough to undermine the Web's principles of openness, interoperability, free access to knowledge, etc. As far as I see it, EME would only be a loss for the Web and browser makers like Mozilla; in a similar way to, for example, losing the ability to "view source" would be a loss. I think the real threat is from commercial entities who want EME for entirely separate reasons, i.e. Apple, Microsoft and Google, who also just-so-happen to make browsers. They can embrace/extend/extinguish the Web, by building an encryption standard into their particular browsers which none of the countless others are able to do (Firefox, Konqueror, Dillo, Netsurf, W3M, Lynx, EWW, Elinks, etc.). EME seems like an attempt to preempt such a situation, but I don't see how it can do anything to prevent it. This is a much worse situation than some set-top box scenario, since it will bleed users from all browsers to those few with EME+plugins, and the Web will become yet another Microsoft Office document format.
dredmorbius 10y ago
And if we call the MAFFIA's bluf and strip video and audio from browsers, where it never should have been, and create a unified multimedia retrieval, queueing, and playback system? 1. No more fudging autoplay anything. Win. 2. Media interface can be DRMd (if you're a fool / slave to the boss) or free. 3. Instant DRM-free ecosystem.
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  I'm totally fine with this. Almost all the video I watch over the Internet is Youtube and Facebook. Let them both create native apps. The browser doesn't need to be able to stream video inside the page. You can always follow a video link and open it in an application of your choice. This is actually great.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I'm actually going one step further. For _text_, tabs and such somewhat make sense. For audio/video, they almost never do. I can _listen_ to one stream at a time. I might be able to watch 2-3, but only one's going to be getting any attention, the others are, say, monitored for intrest (something software should be able to do far better than I). I've argued for some time[1] that "the browser" should be divided into about 4 distinct apps. It's already partway there. 1. Reading / commenting / research. Essentially _no_ remotely-imposed style. Support front/index, gallery, article, and discussion formats, possibly a few others, _whose rendering properties are defined locally_, by the user. Pocket, Readability (which appears all but dead), Instapaper, and Pinboard all fit this model. Arguably emacs as well. 2. An app framework. This is where Chrome is headed, possibly Firefox too. 3. A dedicated commerce app. Privacy, security, feedback, etc., within it. We've got a few candidates in iTunes / Apple Store, Google Play, and Amazon Store. I'd prefer an open version, not sure we'll see it. 4. A multimedia app. Podcasts, streams, and media downloads, with scheduling, queue management, high-level and consistent playback controls (fast/slow, fwd/back, skip), etc. The idea being that only one damned item at a time would be played, and you could control your media from one damned place. I've been exceptionally dissatisfied with the State of the Web since ~2009. _______________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...
tehabe 10y ago
The only issue I'm having with Cory's piece is, that it seems that there is a solution outside of politics. Even so I kinda know that he aware of that. Only politics can change the way copyright is working. Sadly in the last decades, it mostly listend to the copyright holders and transformed a limited monopoly right into a property.
legulere 10y ago
The bigger problem of web browsers is the standards really. There are many issues with them and the browsers need to maintain backwards compatibility. Those standards are hacked together like javascript, underspecified, feature bloated and only subsets are supported. And it's only getting worse. The SVG path grammar for instance will get even more complex in SVG2 even though many implementations for parsing it are buggy.
ryanmarsh 10y ago
The web is fucking fine, you know what isn't fine? Email. Email is a fucking mess.
aerovistae 10y ago
Confession, I didn't read the article. A title implying browsers are losing their relevance, when I and most people I know are on them multiple hours per day (if not most of the day, for work), just screams "this article is stupid."
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't post comments that react to nothing but a title. Those aren't substantive.
azakai 10y ago
> some of the biggest tech corporations in the world today support EME Not just support, Google and Microsoft invented it: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ The best way to fight back against EME is to put pressure on those companies and their browsers.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

226 points by wallflower 10y ago

jkot 10y ago

> makes it a crime to circumvent an “effective means of access control” that sits between users and copyrighted works US had always legal troubles with cryptography. In past programs like PGP, TrueCrypt etc were developed outside US. That can easily happen with browsers.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
Huh? PGP was developed in, and published from, the US. Hence the criminal investigation.
- drxzcl 10y ago
  It's was split off at version 2.6.3(i) into an "international version" that was exported by printing the source into several large books and scanning them in, and then further developed outside of the US. I believe most current PGP versions are descended from the international branch, but I could be wrong.
  - effie 10y ago
    That sounds interesting. What was the point of printing source and scanning it back into computer? Did that bypass the export law back then?
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/ http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/ > However, the Export Regulations only covers software in electronic form (e.g. on disks, or via the Internet).

millstone 10y ago

This is the first time I've heard of EME. This caught my eye: > Although some of the biggest tech corporations in the world today support EME, very few of them could have come into being if EME-style rules had been in place at their inception. Why is that? It looks like EME is just about streaming video - how would this have prevented Apple/Google/Amazon etc from coming into being?

tempestn 10y ago
"EME-style rules" meaning similarly restrictive rules on the core browser functions of the time, not streaming video.
- millstone 10y ago
  I understand the case that EME makes it more difficult to create a browser, but none of the biggest tech companies got their start by writing browsers.
  - rocqua 10y ago
    Perhaps it is building the backend that is considered to burdensome? A youtube competitor would need to serve DRMed video and thus be able to do EME.
    - nsgi 10y ago
      No they wouldn't. YouTube doesn't use EME, at least for user-generated content.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Somewhat of a quip, but I suppose technically still true: Without the creation of new browsers, we'd still be in the Internet Explorer age, and we can all imagine how much potential revenue would have been lost for internet companies, if that was the case.
frivoal 10y ago

pdkl95 10y ago

re: Cory Doctorow & DRM I highly recommend watching his talk[1] month ago at the Internet Archive about fighting DRM. Unlike many previous talks, this time he focuses on supporting ourselves and our fellow engineers by taking bad options off the table before they become temptation. It's a lot harder to allow a "little" corruption of open standards if that kind of option is forbidden with a Ulysses pact. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlN6wjeCJYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlN6wjeCJYk

symlinkk 10y ago

playing the devil's advocate - without EME how would movie studios agree to letting you stream their movies on Netflix?

slavik81 10y ago
Netflix has copy protection and yet movies are still all readily available on pirate sites. What difference does EME actually make to the movie studios' bottom line?
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  That argument hasn't made them change their mind on copyprotection for decades. Why now?
- frivoal 10y ago
  The answer you're looking for is here: https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2 https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2 (no, seriously)
  - lisivka 10y ago
    The answer in link is already answered years ago. Publisher cannot stop piracy because it cannot control user device, because user has full access to device. So the only solution to problem is to gain full control over user device, which is impossible, because user device is in hands of user.
    - dingo_bat 10y ago
      Except it's not impossible. Look at iphone and increasingly android. The device is locked down so hard that even the user doesn't have root access. Gaining root can be seen as a negative, borderline criminal thing and you lose warranty and repair service from the manufacturer. You also lose the ability to use some apps (Android pay, snapchat, etc.) just because you have root access. The only ones with true root access are Apple and Samsung/Google.

dasil003 10y ago

> The browser ecosystem is weaker than it’s ever been This kind of hyperbole undermines the whole argument. The browser ecosystem was weakest when Microsoft released IE6 and then decided to not update it for half a decade. Today, by comparison, we are living in a land of plenty. Even on the DRM front, the situation was no better in the past when you had to use Flash or Silverlight for DRM. At least now there is a clean interface to just the video decryption without requiring a whole bloated proprietary plugin. I don't quite understand the ideological bent that EME corrupts an open standard, but the same result from NPAPI is somehow less objectionable? If the hope is that by standards bodies rejecting DRM on principle they will somehow strong-arm Big Content, I can tell you unequivocally that it ain't gonna happen. Cory Doctorow has not spent the last 10 years building a feature film streaming service and negotiating with rightsholders, but I have. In fact I spent most of that time fighting against DRM on a UX basis and trying to find loopholes, which works for small distributors but not for the studios. The torrent crowd would have you believe it's because they're stupid, but Big Content is anything but stupid. They know that there is no such thing as guaranteed copy protection and that there will always be an analog loophole. The reason they insist on DRM is as a means of control. They just need enough roadblocks in front of casual piracy to prevent devaluation of their content. If they were unwilling to accept any piracy they wouldn't stream to PCs at all. Which, BTW, is exactly what would happen if we succeed in outlawing DRM on PCs. They would literally pull the content, and say if you want to watch go buy an Approved Device. Customers wouldn't bat an eye either, because people prefer to watch on a television anyway; cheap streaming boxes / smart TVs are the future, not general purpose web browsers. Making a huge issue of EME is just asinine and belies a complete ignorance of the market forces at work here. The studios have all the power, browser makers do not have any leverage. And in any case, if rightsholders want to play a cat and mouse game with DRM that should be their prerogative, but customers should also have the freedom to circumvent those measures. Where we need to focus our lobbying efforts is against the DMCA and infinite Copyright extension which broadly impacts consumer rights and the public benefit.

chriswarbo 10y ago
I don't understand why people think the Web needs Hollywood's video content. Let them build proprietary set top boxes or whatever, who cares if it's not in a browser? It's certainly not important enough to undermine the Web's principles of openness, interoperability, free access to knowledge, etc. As far as I see it, EME would only be a loss for the Web and browser makers like Mozilla; in a similar way to, for example, losing the ability to "view source" would be a loss. I think the real threat is from commercial entities who want EME for entirely separate reasons, i.e. Apple, Microsoft and Google, who also just-so-happen to make browsers. They can embrace/extend/extinguish the Web, by building an encryption standard into their particular browsers which none of the countless others are able to do (Firefox, Konqueror, Dillo, Netsurf, W3M, Lynx, EWW, Elinks, etc.). EME seems like an attempt to preempt such a situation, but I don't see how it can do anything to prevent it. This is a much worse situation than some set-top box scenario, since it will bleed users from all browsers to those few with EME+plugins, and the Web will become yet another Microsoft Office document format.

dredmorbius 10y ago

And if we call the MAFFIA's bluf and strip video and audio from browsers, where it never should have been, and create a unified multimedia retrieval, queueing, and playback system? 1. No more fudging autoplay anything. Win. 2. Media interface can be DRMd (if you're a fool / slave to the boss) or free. 3. Instant DRM-free ecosystem.

dingo_bat 10y ago
I'm totally fine with this. Almost all the video I watch over the Internet is Youtube and Facebook. Let them both create native apps. The browser doesn't need to be able to stream video inside the page. You can always follow a video link and open it in an application of your choice. This is actually great.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I'm actually going one step further. For _text_, tabs and such somewhat make sense. For audio/video, they almost never do. I can _listen_ to one stream at a time. I might be able to watch 2-3, but only one's going to be getting any attention, the others are, say, monitored for intrest (something software should be able to do far better than I). I've argued for some time[1] that "the browser" should be divided into about 4 distinct apps. It's already partway there. 1. Reading / commenting / research. Essentially _no_ remotely-imposed style. Support front/index, gallery, article, and discussion formats, possibly a few others, _whose rendering properties are defined locally_, by the user. Pocket, Readability (which appears all but dead), Instapaper, and Pinboard all fit this model. Arguably emacs as well. 2. An app framework. This is where Chrome is headed, possibly Firefox too. 3. A dedicated commerce app. Privacy, security, feedback, etc., within it. We've got a few candidates in iTunes / Apple Store, Google Play, and Amazon Store. I'd prefer an open version, not sure we'll see it. 4. A multimedia app. Podcasts, streams, and media downloads, with scheduling, queue management, high-level and consistent playback controls (fast/slow, fwd/back, skip), etc. The idea being that only one damned item at a time would be played, and you could control your media from one damned place. I've been exceptionally dissatisfied with the State of the Web since ~2009. _______________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...

tehabe 10y ago

The only issue I'm having with Cory's piece is, that it seems that there is a solution outside of politics. Even so I kinda know that he aware of that. Only politics can change the way copyright is working. Sadly in the last decades, it mostly listend to the copyright holders and transformed a limited monopoly right into a property.

legulere 10y ago

The bigger problem of web browsers is the standards really. There are many issues with them and the browsers need to maintain backwards compatibility. Those standards are hacked together like javascript, underspecified, feature bloated and only subsets are supported. And it's only getting worse. The SVG path grammar for instance will get even more complex in SVG2 even though many implementations for parsing it are buggy.

ryanmarsh 10y ago

The web is fucking fine, you know what isn't fine? Email. Email is a fucking mess.

aerovistae 10y ago

Confession, I didn't read the article. A title implying browsers are losing their relevance, when I and most people I know are on them multiple hours per day (if not most of the day, for work), just screams "this article is stupid."

dang 10y ago
Please don't post comments that react to nothing but a title. Those aren't substantive.

azakai 10y ago

> some of the biggest tech corporations in the world today support EME Not just support, Google and Microsoft invented it: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ The best way to fight back against EME is to put pressure on those companies and their browsers.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]