3 ms·

What's wrong with it is it drives people out of the browser and onto insecure plugins which end up hosting botnets, or it drives people off the browser entirely

What's wrong with it is it drives people out of the browser and onto insecure plugins which end up hosting botnets, or it drives people off the browser entirely and into a tablet app. I don't think getting people in the cultural habit of going to the App Store for all of their needs is beneficial in the long term for the Web. The more you keep people in the browser, the better for the Web.

shmerl 14y ago
>What's wrong with it is it drives people out of the browser and onto insecure plugins which end up hosting botnets, or it drives people off the browser entirely and into a tablet app. Again, what's wrong with that? DRM shouldn't even belong anywhere to begin with. Now suddenly one needs to worry that DRM mechanisms imply security risks because of some native plugins? DRM is insecure and malware/spyware prone by its own definition! You can't have a "healthy" DRM. So there is completely no point to worry about a minor sickness (native plugins), while there is a major one in place (DRM).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
cromwellian 14y ago
If people are set on doing bad risky stuff, having a safer way of doing it is a social good. I don't do heroin, but if people are going to do it anyway, I support giving out clean needles for them.
- shmerl 14y ago
  It is not social good to support unethical things in any way. And needles analogy isn't even proper, since DRM won't become magically more "secure" with EME. EME doesn't remove native DRM code - it just makes the interface with the browser JavaScript based and standard. Black box native DRM code will still be present and will still remain the same security and privacy risk.
- cromwellian 14y ago
  (reply to below). Only if you consider DRM unethical. I don't consider non-free software, or DRM software unethical. I consider it shitty, and I am free to ignore it if I want. You don't have any "right" to non-DRMed content. I say this as a person who hates DRM and who spent most of my youth cracking copyright disk protection on 8 and 16-bit software. I don't have a single atom of love for it, but software producers are perfectly within their rights to do it and you are perfectly within your rights not to buy or consume their content.
  - shmerl 14y ago
    I consider DRM unethical, but even besides that, it by definition implies privacy and security risk. You can't have safe DRM. I'd say producers aren't within their moral rights to push preemptive policing on people. That's where the unethical aspect comes in.
    - Silhouette 14y ago
      You can't have safe DRM. I'd say producers aren't within their moral rights to push preemptive policing on people. It's hardly preemptive. People have been illegally ripping off content since forever, and they've been doing it on a potentially business-destroying scale since the Internet became popular. The official law enforcement bodies conveniently sidestep the whole issue by making copyright infringement a civil rather than criminal offence in most places, which also transfers the burden of enforcement onto the copyright holder in most cases, and then the costs of actually bringing a case to court over someone ripping off a $10 movie are prohibitive. The normal mechanisms that are supposed to protect someone who has been wronged under the law have failed. The content producers are now saying that if you want their content, you have to let them include technical measures to protect their rights because the legal system mostly doesn't. What other choice has society left them? You are still free not to consume their content and the accompanying DRM by buying something else... assuming, of course, that there is a viable business model to produce that "something else" instead.
      - shmerl 14y ago

shmerl 14y ago

>What's wrong with it is it drives people out of the browser and onto insecure plugins which end up hosting botnets, or it drives people off the browser entirely and into a tablet app. Again, what's wrong with that? DRM shouldn't even belong anywhere to begin with. Now suddenly one needs to worry that DRM mechanisms imply security risks because of some native plugins? DRM is insecure and malware/spyware prone by its own definition! You can't have a "healthy" DRM. So there is completely no point to worry about a minor sickness (native plugins), while there is a major one in place (DRM).

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

cromwellian 14y ago

If people are set on doing bad risky stuff, having a safer way of doing it is a social good. I don't do heroin, but if people are going to do it anyway, I support giving out clean needles for them.

shmerl 14y ago
It is not social good to support unethical things in any way. And needles analogy isn't even proper, since DRM won't become magically more "secure" with EME. EME doesn't remove native DRM code - it just makes the interface with the browser JavaScript based and standard. Black box native DRM code will still be present and will still remain the same security and privacy risk.
cromwellian 14y ago
(reply to below). Only if you consider DRM unethical. I don't consider non-free software, or DRM software unethical. I consider it shitty, and I am free to ignore it if I want. You don't have any "right" to non-DRMed content. I say this as a person who hates DRM and who spent most of my youth cracking copyright disk protection on 8 and 16-bit software. I don't have a single atom of love for it, but software producers are perfectly within their rights to do it and you are perfectly within your rights not to buy or consume their content.
- shmerl 14y ago
  I consider DRM unethical, but even besides that, it by definition implies privacy and security risk. You can't have safe DRM. I'd say producers aren't within their moral rights to push preemptive policing on people. That's where the unethical aspect comes in.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    You can't have safe DRM. I'd say producers aren't within their moral rights to push preemptive policing on people. It's hardly preemptive. People have been illegally ripping off content since forever, and they've been doing it on a potentially business-destroying scale since the Internet became popular. The official law enforcement bodies conveniently sidestep the whole issue by making copyright infringement a civil rather than criminal offence in most places, which also transfers the burden of enforcement onto the copyright holder in most cases, and then the costs of actually bringing a case to court over someone ripping off a $10 movie are prohibitive. The normal mechanisms that are supposed to protect someone who has been wronged under the law have failed. The content producers are now saying that if you want their content, you have to let them include technical measures to protect their rights because the legal system mostly doesn't. What other choice has society left them? You are still free not to consume their content and the accompanying DRM by buying something else... assuming, of course, that there is a viable business model to produce that "something else" instead.
    - shmerl 14y ago