6 ms·

The other option was forcing browsers to have to make this part of the tech stack convoluted and painful for those using DRM, perhaps diminishing the appeal of

The other option was forcing browsers to have to make this part of the tech stack convoluted and painful for those using DRM, perhaps diminishing the appeal of using it -- not irrelevance. We had plugins in the early days of the web, and the W3C was entirely relevant at that time despite the dominance of flash.

ramesh31 4y ago
>The other option was forcing browsers How, exactly?
spankalee 4y ago
You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that just work? Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since EME. And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me you also don't pirate their content.
- mmastrac 4y ago
  > You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that just work? Yes. > Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since EME. No, I'm still a happy Netflix subscriber. And they would have done just fine in a plugin model. > And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me you also don't pirate their content. Your logic is just so bizarre here I won't bother with a response.
  - PurpleRamen 4y ago
    > No, I'm still a happy Netflix subscriber. And they would have done just fine in a plugin model. Wouldn't that include disadvantages for the users? Plugins are usually a black box, working independent and lacking any way for customizing. The solution now is narrow enough that customization is possible for users on the harmless parts, without touching the DRM-part. By which I mean things like play-settings, the interface, behavior. There are many different types of extensions for changing the user experience on Netflix and such, stuff which did not exist for Flash&Co.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      I spent years authoring plugins. Anybody who cares about end-use security should want plugins out as quickly and completely as possible. They literally ran in the same process as the browser. Full access to the memory itself. No security at all, and many of them were closed source. The DRM standard was a strict improvement over the status quo.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  EME only works with proprietary plugins anyway. A <video> tag with EME is functionally indistinguishable from a fully proprietary <embed>. But the W3C decided to endorse EME as the "open" solution for completely spurious reasons.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    8.1 CDM constraints in the EME is a pretty big deal relative to the plugin standard that hooks the <embed> tag. Plugins generally ran unsandboxed in the browsers' memory and therefore were a massive security hole. EME unblocked killing Flash and made the web more secure.
    - mmastrac 4y ago
      > EME unblocked killing Flash and made the web more secure. Neither of these are correct. Flash was dead on mobile long before EME, and the code running behind EMEs is an unaudited, black box (and having worked on decompiling the Mediatek secure enclave code, it's absolutely horrendous). The only thing I'd consider to be marginally secure is Firefox's sandboxed DRM provider, and that could easily be a vendored extension on the window/media object.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        > the code running behind EMEs is an unaudited, black box It's an unaudited black box that isn't running in the same process as the browser itself. It can certainly do risky things in that context, but one of those things isn't "scrape the user's bank password directly out of the RAM it's sharing with the tab showing the bank's web site."
        mmastrac 4y ago
        I'm not going to defend plugins as they were (a plugin-based DRM solution would not necessarily rely on the <embed> tags), but they were migrating to run in sandboxes before flash died. Chrome shipped flash-as-locked-down-process from early in its history. EME code, however, can have deep hooks into the OS, especially on mobile.
- account42 4y ago
  > You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that just work? Yes. > Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since EME. I don't. > And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me you also don't pirate their content. Not since I got out of school. But it's also irrelevant as file sharing is not overly affected by DRM since it only needs to be stripped once.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  I dont consume any of them in a Web Browser. I watch them from a Roku Device on an Actual TV, where TV and Movies should be consumed, not in a web browser
- mattl 4y ago
  I'd much rather have plugins. I don't want to watch any of the services you mentioned on my computer. I have a dedicated hardware device for watching these things, attached to my TV.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Plugins are a massive security hole.
    - mattl 4y ago
      Make a native app for Windows and Mac or something then... keep that stuff out of the browser.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        Why? The browser is a far more convenient deployment solution for the end-user: high-security via sandboxes and partitioning by default, temporary, no installation step required. Are we pro-web here? Because if the answer to hard problems is "make it native then," we might as well declare the HTML stack a dead-end technology.
        mattl 4y ago
        I'm pro-web. I'm also pro-watching TV things on a TV.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        I don't own a TV and I don't know what a "TV thing" is. I do have a pretty large monitor on a wall patched into a desktop PC via HDMI though.
        mattl 4y ago
        If I want to watch Netflix, etc I watch them on a TV with a dedicated remote. I’m not watching those things on a desktop computer attached to a big screen.
- blendergeek 4y ago
  > Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since EME. I can oppose DRM and still (regretfully) use DRM'd streaming services. DRM was not necessary for any of those services. Piracy still exists despite DRM. DRM is about controlling the end-user experience, not preventing piracy.
zokier 4y ago
> The other option was forcing browsers to have to make this part of the tech stack convoluted and painful for those using DRM, W3c had and has zero leverage to force browsers to do anything
PaulHoule 4y ago
It was a masterstroke how Macromedia managed to normalize cross-platform video with Flash. Circa 2000 you had a number of vendors pushing incompatible video and audio plugins such as Apple, RealMedia, Microsoft, etc. If you wanted to publish media and have it work for everyone you had to support at least three formats. Everybody thought Flash was about games and vector animation and there was no pushback when Macromedia had gotten a working video player into almost all web browsers, which made YouTube possible. Oddly Adobe bought Macromedia at that time and it was downhill for Flash after that... I think primarily because web browser vendors quit fighting over video formats and ganged up against Flash. Had Microsoft, Apple, and others really known Flash was going to win the video war they might not have bundled it with their browsers. Ultimately HTML 5 killed off Actionscript and today Adobe Animate is alive and well not because people output Flash or even Flash-emulated-in-HTML 5 but because people output cross-platform video with it.
- mattl 4y ago
  Flash also had a terrible security history and was seen as a battery killer on mobile.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  Besides the notorious security issues, flash had abysmal accessibility, cross platform support was nominal at best if you weren't on windows, and despite this it was being used in all sorts of places where it was completely unnecessary, like what seemed to be nearly every restaurant website. There were websites with navigation menus written in flash for no good reason at all, just because whoever made the website thought it would be cool to use more animations or something. The whole thing was a disaster. Nominally cross-platform video playback was hardly a consolation.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I remember getting involved in an argument with somebody over this back when it was called 'FutureSplash' and before it was bought by Macromedia. This guy was a political activist and we were working with him to put Noam Chomsky lectures online long before there were podcasts but he thought people would connect better w/ animation-heavy interfaces. I thought it was a good case study in how somebody who is worried about corporate power when it affects the workplace or foreign policy can be indifferent to corporate power over technology. My friend Harel and I felt pretty firmly that a web based on open standards was going to be good for 'ordinary people' having venues for self-expression. I think Mike Albert's viewpoint is closer to the mainstream though, where most people perceive ease-of-use as more 'liberating' than personal control, like that 1984 ad by Apple. Today I think it is funny because I like animation-heavy interfaces in video games and think, hypothetically, it would be nice to see some more of that on the web, but I develop a lot of 'intranet' applications that consistently avoid the SPA boondoggle where the one thing I really can't do is animate transitions. I guess I could use HTMX and push the animations out to a 'frame' around the 'pages' that get loaded but that is unappealing to me because I'd like to have completely integrated animations and not a library of dissolves, fades, wipes and loading indicators that are much less necessary if you are loading a 25k 'screen' as opposed to 2.5 MB of Javascript.

ramesh31 4y ago

>The other option was forcing browsers How, exactly?

spankalee 4y ago

You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that just work? Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since EME. And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me you also don't pirate their content.

mmastrac 4y ago
> You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that just work? Yes. > Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since EME. No, I'm still a happy Netflix subscriber. And they would have done just fine in a plugin model. > And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me you also don't pirate their content. Your logic is just so bizarre here I won't bother with a response.
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  > No, I'm still a happy Netflix subscriber. And they would have done just fine in a plugin model. Wouldn't that include disadvantages for the users? Plugins are usually a black box, working independent and lacking any way for customizing. The solution now is narrow enough that customization is possible for users on the harmless parts, without touching the DRM-part. By which I mean things like play-settings, the interface, behavior. There are many different types of extensions for changing the user experience on Netflix and such, stuff which did not exist for Flash&Co.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    I spent years authoring plugins. Anybody who cares about end-use security should want plugins out as quickly and completely as possible. They literally ran in the same process as the browser. Full access to the memory itself. No security at all, and many of them were closed source. The DRM standard was a strict improvement over the status quo.
zozbot234 4y ago
EME only works with proprietary plugins anyway. A <video> tag with EME is functionally indistinguishable from a fully proprietary <embed>. But the W3C decided to endorse EME as the "open" solution for completely spurious reasons.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  8.1 CDM constraints in the EME is a pretty big deal relative to the plugin standard that hooks the <embed> tag. Plugins generally ran unsandboxed in the browsers' memory and therefore were a massive security hole. EME unblocked killing Flash and made the web more secure.
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    > EME unblocked killing Flash and made the web more secure. Neither of these are correct. Flash was dead on mobile long before EME, and the code running behind EMEs is an unaudited, black box (and having worked on decompiling the Mediatek secure enclave code, it's absolutely horrendous). The only thing I'd consider to be marginally secure is Firefox's sandboxed DRM provider, and that could easily be a vendored extension on the window/media object.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      > the code running behind EMEs is an unaudited, black box It's an unaudited black box that isn't running in the same process as the browser itself. It can certainly do risky things in that context, but one of those things isn't "scrape the user's bank password directly out of the RAM it's sharing with the tab showing the bank's web site."
      - mmastrac 4y ago
        I'm not going to defend plugins as they were (a plugin-based DRM solution would not necessarily rely on the <embed> tags), but they were migrating to run in sandboxes before flash died. Chrome shipped flash-as-locked-down-process from early in its history. EME code, however, can have deep hooks into the OS, especially on mobile.
account42 4y ago
> You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that just work? Yes. > Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since EME. I don't. > And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me you also don't pirate their content. Not since I got out of school. But it's also irrelevant as file sharing is not overly affected by DRM since it only needs to be stripped once.
phpisthebest 4y ago
I dont consume any of them in a Web Browser. I watch them from a Roku Device on an Actual TV, where TV and Movies should be consumed, not in a web browser
mattl 4y ago
I'd much rather have plugins. I don't want to watch any of the services you mentioned on my computer. I have a dedicated hardware device for watching these things, attached to my TV.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Plugins are a massive security hole.
  - mattl 4y ago
    Make a native app for Windows and Mac or something then... keep that stuff out of the browser.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Why? The browser is a far more convenient deployment solution for the end-user: high-security via sandboxes and partitioning by default, temporary, no installation step required. Are we pro-web here? Because if the answer to hard problems is "make it native then," we might as well declare the HTML stack a dead-end technology.
      - mattl 4y ago
        I'm pro-web. I'm also pro-watching TV things on a TV.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        I don't own a TV and I don't know what a "TV thing" is. I do have a pretty large monitor on a wall patched into a desktop PC via HDMI though.
        mattl 4y ago
        If I want to watch Netflix, etc I watch them on a TV with a dedicated remote. I’m not watching those things on a desktop computer attached to a big screen.
blendergeek 4y ago
> Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since EME. I can oppose DRM and still (regretfully) use DRM'd streaming services. DRM was not necessary for any of those services. Piracy still exists despite DRM. DRM is about controlling the end-user experience, not preventing piracy.

zokier 4y ago

> The other option was forcing browsers to have to make this part of the tech stack convoluted and painful for those using DRM, W3c had and has zero leverage to force browsers to do anything

PaulHoule 4y ago

It was a masterstroke how Macromedia managed to normalize cross-platform video with Flash. Circa 2000 you had a number of vendors pushing incompatible video and audio plugins such as Apple, RealMedia, Microsoft, etc. If you wanted to publish media and have it work for everyone you had to support at least three formats. Everybody thought Flash was about games and vector animation and there was no pushback when Macromedia had gotten a working video player into almost all web browsers, which made YouTube possible. Oddly Adobe bought Macromedia at that time and it was downhill for Flash after that... I think primarily because web browser vendors quit fighting over video formats and ganged up against Flash. Had Microsoft, Apple, and others really known Flash was going to win the video war they might not have bundled it with their browsers. Ultimately HTML 5 killed off Actionscript and today Adobe Animate is alive and well not because people output Flash or even Flash-emulated-in-HTML 5 but because people output cross-platform video with it.

mattl 4y ago
Flash also had a terrible security history and was seen as a battery killer on mobile.
LarryMullins 4y ago
Besides the notorious security issues, flash had abysmal accessibility, cross platform support was nominal at best if you weren't on windows, and despite this it was being used in all sorts of places where it was completely unnecessary, like what seemed to be nearly every restaurant website. There were websites with navigation menus written in flash for no good reason at all, just because whoever made the website thought it would be cool to use more animations or something. The whole thing was a disaster. Nominally cross-platform video playback was hardly a consolation.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I remember getting involved in an argument with somebody over this back when it was called 'FutureSplash' and before it was bought by Macromedia. This guy was a political activist and we were working with him to put Noam Chomsky lectures online long before there were podcasts but he thought people would connect better w/ animation-heavy interfaces. I thought it was a good case study in how somebody who is worried about corporate power when it affects the workplace or foreign policy can be indifferent to corporate power over technology. My friend Harel and I felt pretty firmly that a web based on open standards was going to be good for 'ordinary people' having venues for self-expression. I think Mike Albert's viewpoint is closer to the mainstream though, where most people perceive ease-of-use as more 'liberating' than personal control, like that 1984 ad by Apple. Today I think it is funny because I like animation-heavy interfaces in video games and think, hypothetically, it would be nice to see some more of that on the web, but I develop a lot of 'intranet' applications that consistently avoid the SPA boondoggle where the one thing I really can't do is animate transitions. I guess I could use HTMX and push the animations out to a 'frame' around the 'pages' that get loaded but that is unappealing to me because I'd like to have completely integrated animations and not a library of dissolves, fades, wipes and loading indicators that are much less necessary if you are loading a 25k 'screen' as opposed to 2.5 MB of Javascript.