What's ridiculous about everybody bending over backwards for the Netflix usecase is that Hollywood isn't letting Netflix have the content anyway because they want to control and destroy yet another medium. Hollywood is a corrupting evil in our technical, legal and political systems and should be shunned, not accommodated, as much as possible.
Netflix can't excuse itself for being a mere conduit for evil DRM lobby. No one was forcing them, it's their own choice to be that conduit. And for that, they can be blamed not less than the DRM lobby itself. Since Netflix helps proliferation of DRM in a big way.
Users can vote with their wallets in order to reverse the sick trend of publishers who push DRM everywhere, but it's not as effective as distributors voting with their wallets. And Netflix clearly votes for DRM, not against it.
I don't really get the resistance to DRM in the Netflix case. I'm against DRM on any media that is represented as a purchase. But you're not buying movies from them, you're renting them, and it's never represented as anything else. DRM seems not only acceptable in the rental case, but probably necessary.
Mostly because it's entirely pointless, technologically. Netflix isn't even a particularly good source of digital video for piracy; the free-love internet video sharers are going to rip from the higher-res, sooner-available, better-library, non-DRMed commercial pirate versions.
The only people likely to rip video from Netflix are casual copiers, digital information hoarders, and people with legitimate compatibility/access issues.
It's kind of baffling that anyone making money off this business would want to drive these paying customers into the arms of Bittorrent, YouTube, etc.
Assuming the CDM used by the (possibly open-source) browser is open-source, you can just save all the decoded frames.
Someone will do that, big media will be mad, we'll have more laws, browsers will be forced into having a binary blob in by default, avid Netflix watchers will be so happy.
Resistance to DRM should be in each and every case IMHO. Why should Netflix suddenly be excluded? Renting of digital data is a stupid idea to begin with. And using DRM to enforce the renting aspect (since without it, "enforcing" it is not possible) is even more stupid and unethical at the same time.
All this comes from some paranoid and unhealthy urge of publishers to restrict copying (even legal copying).
Renting of digital data is a stupid idea to begin with.
I think that the millions of happy Netflix customers, including me, are going to respectfully disagree with you on that one. I don't illegally download media, but I don't want to have to commit to purchasing every single show or movie that I watch.
What would change for you, if Netflix will change the terms from renting to buying? I think you confuse convenience of streaming service with benefits that renting of physical goods provide. Streaming service doesn't have to be equal to renting. See below.
Netflix (as it is all streaming and not really "renting") isn't the greatest example. For some things that I can't stream on Netflix, I often rent from the iTunes store. The cost is much less than a purchase from the same store. The only difference is the understanding that the digital media I'm renting will no longer function after a well-understood period of time. I'm an adult, I can make informed consent to that arrangement.
I wouldn't be happy with this being the only media option, but I like having that as one of the many options in the media ecosystem.
I see no valid reason why the expected price should be higher in the case of a purchase for digital data. As was discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6496579 the main reason why rent price is lower for physical goods, is because it's based on reusability of the object. The reason to limit the time of using it is pretty straightforward as well - to allow the next user gain an access to the object.
All these reasons have completely no application to digital goods. So what's the point in renting them, or making the purchase price any higher? I see none, except someone's potential greed may be.
You can say, that renting an object more often produces more profit, in case when one time fee is charged for each renting, so that's the reason for the time limit. But then again, this is only valid when the resource is limited (physical object), and each user prevents others from renting it. In case of the digitial data which costs nothing to duplicate, the resource is unlimited, so this reason doesn't apply. And if we are talking about the same user renting it again and again, then what's the point? Purchase makes more sense again.
The bottom line, I think that renting of digital goods is a pointless idea. And since as we see it causes DRM in result - it's a bad idea too.
Price of goods, especially digital goods, aren't based the cost of those goods. You don't expect to pay less for a low-budget indie film than a 300 million dollar blockbuster.
The price of something is instead based exclusively on willingness to pay for it. The market has proven that people are willing to pay more for digital goods that they own and can consume over and over over digital goods that they have a short-term access to.
> Price of goods, especially digital goods, aren't based the cost of those goods. The price of something is instead based exclusively on willingness to pay for it.
There is a lot of misconception surrounding this principle.
To oversimplify, in the short term, price is determined by the interactions of supply and willingness to pay.
However, in the long term (in a competitive market), new suppliers will enter the market if existing suppliers are making supernormal profits, and existing suppliers will exit if they are making subnormal profits.
This means that, in the long run, price will converge to the average total cost of production, in a competitive market.
Of course, Netflix is not operating in a perfectly competitive market, but that distorts the price in a different way. It's not quite technically correct to say that price is based exclusively on willingness to pay for it; even in noncompetitive markets (true monopolies, as opposed to monopolistic competition), one can just as easily say that price is determined by the quantity that the monopolist wishes to sell.
Prices are based on cost at least in part. But with logic similar to yours, ISPs for example explain why they charge crazy prices for normal quality plans, and charge "normal" prices for junk ones. "Willingness to pay" when there aren't better alternatives is quite a slippery basis for any conclusions.
Anyway, ask anyone if they prefer to buy and not to overpay, rather than rent. Just because someone devised an idea of renting digital goods for no reason except their own greed is not a reason to say that it's a good idea. It gives no benefits for the user and can be used as an excuse to drive prices up on purchases as you said yourself.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of basic economics. The market always sets the price. If the price that is set by the market is lower than the cost to produce that item, then you just don't have a viable product to sell.
The basic real-world reason that renting of digital media exists is because some people are willing to pay more for the added value of being able to watch it over and over while some people aren't.
This is rather devoid of meaning. What is the market if not a label we use to reference the extremely complex interactions of individuals with varying degrees of information and rationality in an adversarial system? Of course the actual price to produce a product influences what people are willing to pay for it! This is why companies fight so hard to keep that information secret. This is why I refuse to buy a typical cell phone plan that charges absurd amounts for data and text and stick to prepaid. I influence the market because of my knowledge of how much it actually costs to send a text. The market absolutely reacts to the actual costs of products.
Not a defence of DRM or overcharging, and more of a statement on how pricing works in real-life.
Very few people have the time and knowledge to do a supply chain or BOM analysis before they buy anything. Hence, there is little incentive for companies to price products based on cost. Cost is a factor only when analyzing profits.
Hence, cost is usually whatever the market is willing to pay. Saying it is unethical or wrong does not change reality.
That's why stronger competition usually makes it more fair, since competitors can lower prices while still being profitable. Overcharging is usually not an indication of "willingness to pay", but an indication that the market in unhealthy (no competition, monopoly and so on).
Agree with you. In general, overcharging does mean the market is not fair.
However, even in the presence of competition, cost is not the major factor in pricing :). Competition may drive prices down but does not eliminate greed.
eg: In India (where I live), mobile services cost a fraction of what it typically costs in US/Canada. Even here, texts are priced at 5x what it costs the operator :(.
> What would change for you, if Netflix will change the terms from renting to buying?
I don't subscribe to Netflix, but in my opinion if Netflix allowed downloading, what many people would do is make a list of movies they wanted to see, subscribe to Netflix for a month, download all the movies they could and then cancel. Then spend the next year or so watching the movies at over the course of a year or so. You don't get Netflix's recommendation features and everything's dated, but you could download many more movies in a month than you would want to watch. If people who were currently Netflix subscribers switched to this method, then Netflix would see its subscription rates drop. Since their costs would remain the same, they'd have to raise prices significantly. One of the advantages of Netflix is the low price, so many people would cancel outright, but first they'd want to build up a store of all the movies. Maybe some people would be willing to pay for a continuing subscription based on convenience, but I think that for the most part Netflix's user base would turn into one-month bulk downloaders.
Instead you subscribe to Netflix, wait a few months to watch what you wanted to watch, only to find it was taken down.
Most subscribers would still subscribe to a DRM-free Netflix, because it's considerably easier than maintaining a failure-prone array of hard drives to store everything you want to watch.
there are already copies with better quality than netflix available to everyone to download. and netflix is still in business.
i still have to download those better copies in less than 2 hours when i want to watch something not on netflix or hulu. and i now hate it. i used to love when there were no convenient way to pay for it.
so, quit the nonsense as it even goes against factual evidence
There are two separate issues: what is legal and what is possible. The downloadable copies you're referring to are certainly available, but downloading them is illegal. For many people, that makes a difference. The post I replied to specifically asked what would happen if Netflix changed its terms from renting to buying. I assumed that this meant that Netflix subscribers would be able to legally and conveniently download as many movies as they like during the period of their subscription. I continue to believe that such an option would lead to spiral of bulk downloading and Netflix price increases, but it's not an option that exists anywhere, so it's hard to say.
Now, a different and more interesting question is what would happen if Netflix maintained the legal requirement to only view movies through streaming and not to store them, but eliminated the DRM. This would make their model comparable to Amazon's MP3 store, except with for video rentals rather music purchases. Netflix certainly think that such a model wouldn't work for them, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. You can point to MP3 stores such as Amazon's to say it would work, but it's interesting that even though MP3 purchases are widely DRM-free, music streaming is still DRM-protected (as near as I can tell: correct me if I am wrong).
the whole point is that netflix and others have zero decision power in this.
so i cant create a content distribution company that allows you to download and convert the movie to some format you need tonwatch on some roadtrip because the middle man says i have to sell it to you via streaming.
Since nobody has come up with a DRM system that doesn't depend on a central service that can go away or change its terms, all DRM-based content is effectively rented. What is unethical about renting something? If you claim that your customer is "buying" something, that they will then "own", then yes, that's outright fraud. I am absolutely against that. But if it's a service, what's the big deal? You can sign up for the service or not. You don't have a supported platform? I guess you can't do it. Nothing new or surprising there. Find a different service, or find a different way to entertain yourself.
If you want to talk about the death of ownership and the rise of rental, and how that might be damaging, that's a fine an interesting topic, but I don't see how it's about ethics.
I'll point out I have "purchased" movies and TV shows from Amazon which I can no longer watch, because they were removed from Amazon's libraries.
Online games that require validating with a central server after being downloaded? Try not to get a virus downloading a crack after the company goes under.
> Since nobody has come up with a DRM system that doesn't depend on a central service that can go away or change its terms, all DRM-based content is effectively rented.
If we consider anything that works to prevent media from being copied in violation of copyright, then there is one solution that does not have a central service, and is not rent-based: watermarking.
Every purchase is watermarked for the specific customer. If they give someone else a copy, it is detectable from who they received it, so legal action is possible. But fair use is never prevented, as copying is always technically possible.
(Yes, it is possible to remove watermarks, but it is also possible to get around DRM - all of these schemes are continuously escalating arms races.)
Watermarking is a great idea and I would really like to see it replace DRM snake-oil but I think the real point was simply that nobody has successfully commercialized such a service. I think there's a need but it'd require deep pockets and good negotiators to get off the ground unless you had some sort of solid all-indie play
If you buy content for personal use, like you buy an episode of Game of Thrones, you aren't allowed to sell it to anyone. But you can copy it between your own devices as you see fit.
DRM doesn't hurt people who work around it, it ONLY restricts the people who use the service as offered! It isn't about piracy, it's about abusing customers.
Excuse me, I read your response. You seem to misunderstand that people have preferences. If you think you can ay $3.99 for every thing you want to watch on Amazon or Youtube movie channel, go ahead. I don't think it is valid to call it useless because millions of us are happy to pay $7.99 a month to watch multiple movies at any time we want.
Your whole arguments abut price and overpay don't make sense. I call your arguments closed-mind and invalid. From a consumer's standpoint, there is nothing cheaper than being able to choose any movie you want to watch, unlimited at a bargin price like $7.99.
That being said, I and millions of other users think Netflix should have more movies. More newer movies but that's really impossible because stupid Hollywood movie companies like WarnerBrother won't sell them to any streaming company simply because they want to sell the DVD.
If the price you are paying for that is your privacy and security (i.e. proliferation of DRM), then the price is not $7.99 a month. You are just fooled to believe it's such. It's the same misleading perception people have, when they say that Facebook is "free". No, they are paying with their personal data for it.
So, the argument that it's "cheap" is invalid, and a separate question to ask is, how much do you value your privacy?
Are you saying my data is being sold/used by Netflix for millions of dollars? Are you saying that Facebook should run a charity? I can understand and I do think FB should be more respectful (hell to LinkedIn) to user's privacy and security preference, but even average users can understand that true free services don't really exists. You think Github is free? Well, they store your repositories and your issues and your commits. They store a lot about you as a professional. But why do people use it? Because they don't sell your data to corrupted companies out there mining? Well, a lot of search engines are mining repo data. A few startups out there are mining github data to make profits.
I am paying $7.99 and I am happy to tell Netflix my preference (my ratings) because doing so do help refine results show up in my dashboard and also gives netflix an idea what people like XYZ. There is an equal opportunity for both users and the service to improve.
I am paying $7.99 for unlimited service. I can watch at any time, resume at any point, re-view at any time. I can always watch - downtime is statistically low. The streaming / connection is usually very good even for poor internet access. I am not giving up a lot of personal data to be honest. If I don't want to watch the movie / tv show after 20 mins I am still paying $7.99. I am not charged per movie. I can actually stream with my girlfriend instead of paying another $3.99 on Amazon for us to watch a movie together.
Tell me if this is not a bargain.
This is a purely a decision people can make. On the other hand, I never said FB isn't exploiting users' privacy to gain more profit. But if the argument is free services comes with a cost, well, "no shxt Sherlock."
Let's look at it this way. Do you think free software are truly free? Some people release free software in order to provide a premium version later time. Some people provide free software to build their skills and reputation. Some people provide free software to benefit everyone, and that's cool!
Do you think docker.io being an open source project really is free? How much $$ can dotCloud save by open-sourcing it? How many more customers will they get after releasing docker? How many people will now trust dotCloud now? There is a price and a gain, even from a pure altruist view.
Running any DRM code is giving up your privacy and security, or to say it more properly increasing risks of their breach on your system. Since DRM is never trustworthy. It's like voluntarily running some malware.
You keep saying that, but fail to provide any reasons it has to be so.
DRM by nature is little different to public key encryption - it's a method of proving you are who you say you are. Usually there is some component that makes it resistant to tamper, but that in itself doesn't have to increase risk of breach.
You may raise the Sony rootkit debacle, and I say so what? That says more about Sony's failures as a consumer friendly company than anything about DRM.
You make points about how DRM implies contempt for the consumer, but I don't see why that is the case at all. DRM can be a technology that enables more choices for consumers, and that implies respect for consumers, not contempt.
I'm no fan of DRM, but it seems to me you are overreaching in your arguments, which is making your point weaker.
I see no place for DRM in the open web, but at the same time I want the open web to be able to compete with other platforms. I don't know what that means the best choice is here.
> You make points about how DRM implies contempt for the consumer, but I don't see why that is the case at all.
Simple. Do you think placing surveillance cameras in everyone's home is an acceptable crime prevention practice? Or may be attaching a camera to each person right away? That's what DRM is. DRM is invasion of people's private digital space. And if you don't see it, it makes it even worse, since secret and massive surveillance is even more unethical, since people get "comfortable" with it. So all this "unobtrusive" DRM is actually even worse.
> DRM by nature is little different to public key encryption - it's a method of proving you are who you say you are.
No. DRM by nature is a way to restrict what user can do with the data, or if it goes further - reporting tool for those paranoid groups who deploy DRM. By its own nature, DRM implies surveillance and contempt to the user.
DRM (and abusive surveillance) does not enable any choices. All it does is taking away people's privacy and ability to exercise fair use to the data they bought.
You can say that about any software. By that logic you could denounce indie games or word processors or to-do list software. Even if it's open source it could have been built with a contaminated compiler that installs backdoors that root your system and report all your network traffic to the Freemasons.
In theory - any of course. But we are talking about the level of the risk here. DRM gives you more reasons to expect it to be malicious. Because it's built on contempt towards you (the user), on treating you as a potential criminal by default.
I've used a lot of software that was obviously designed with contempt towards the user: Lotus Notes, ClearCase, and Xilinx ISE to name a few. Netflix's streaming software is not one of them.
Netflix runs custom clients to make sure I'm authenticated and authorized before streaming video to me and streams it in a format that only their software can decode. Sometimes these clients are built into my TV and other times they are written in Silverlight and are built into my browser, but that doesn't automatically mean they're a rootkit any more than Lotus Notes is a rootkit. The only reason it seems otherwise is that you have this weird manichean worldview where any DRM is morally equivalent to the Sony rootkit.
The view I have is that DRM is always prone to be a malware, because it always treats users as infringers. Sony rootkit just proves the point. Trust should be mutual, otherwise it's not trust. If they treat users as potential criminals by default, users should treat them as potential criminals by default as well.
DRM is unethical not because it's always a rootkit. But because it's overreaching. The fact that it's prone to be malware just demonstrates the potential for abuse of overreaching preemptive policing.
Why not? Untrusted code running on your computer is a clear security risk. And you still didn't explain why DRM should be trusted, when it doesn't trust you.
It's the question of the level of trust. Some code is trusted enough to run it. DRM is never trusted enough to run it (IMHO). You seem to be saying that since there is always risk, one shouldn't care about anything at all.
Do you support the sale of digital content in general? If so, isn't there a moral issue in allowing one person to have for free what another person had to pay for? (Unless you're implementing some kind of "pay what you can afford" system.) Isn't that theoretically "stealing"? What's the solution?
> Renting of digital data is a stupid idea to begin with.
I don't think it's stupid. I think it allows consumers flexibility; they can pay more and fully own digital content, or they can save money and pay less for temporary access.
I support sales of digital data. I don't support using unethical methods to prevent violation of renting terms, which always comes out of the mere idea of using rental for digital data.
May be you have ideas how to enable renting of digital goods without resorting to unethical preemptive policing? Until anybody comes up with such, renting of digital data will remain a bad idea.
To put this in perspective. When you rent physical goods, do you find it acceptable to be tracked while you use them with some hidden surveillance mechanisms?
But I honestly consider renting of digital data stupid anyway, since it's pointless. There is a valid reason to have renting for physical goods - it allows reusing of the same object and removes the need to make another one which is costly. So it lowers the price for the user of the object as well. Digital goods have none of these issues at all. They cost nothing to duplicate. So renting them simply has no point whatsoever, and is used to reduce usability and out of paranoid fear of piracy, not because it's making anything cheaper and reusable.
I always want to agree with the viewpoint that digital copies cost nothing, and thus should be free.
I just can't though. You're not paying for a copy, you are contributing towards it's creation.
Creation of content, digital or not, costs money. Sometimes it's an excessive amount (e.g. Blockbuster movies) and sometimes a sane amount (e.g. "regular" and indie moves).
Continuing with the movie examples... Most cameras these days record digitally. Do you expect that, since copying a digital file is free, that the movies should be free? It's entirely digital after all.
I'm hoping you don't, because otherwise you place zero value on the time and effort spent by the crew producing the film and that would be bordering(?) on unethical.
I didn't say they should be free for anyone who didn't pay for them yet. I said they cost nothing to duplicate, therefore there is no need to resort to renting for those who are already paying.
It certainly is making it cheaper for the user, because the publisher is more inclined to make it available cheaply if there is a time limit. But more than that, neither you nor anyone else has yet made an actual argument for why DRM is unethical per se, in all cases.
As I said, in case of digital goods this inclination has no valid basis.
I already explained multiple times why DRM is unethical per se. In short - it's overreaching preemptive policing, that's why it's unethical. DRM in digital sphere is akin to making a police state to prevent crime. Sure, some desire such stuff, but I find it unethical. That's why massive surveillance and DRM issues always converge.
There is a massive, massive difference between NSA surveillance and Netflix using technological measures to ensure you're not copying their content. You have a real, honest choice whether to do business with Netflix and subject yourself to their tracking. They are not an essential service, and they're not even the only provider of video entertainment. You cannot escape the NSA. And you're STILL not actually making an ethical argument, you're just restating your position in different terms.
> There is a massive, massive difference between NSA surveillance and Netflix using technological measures to ensure you're not copying their content.
Massive? I don't see a major difference. You accept running some black box surveillance software which exists because of the mere reason of some publishers considering you a potential criminal (infringer) without any warrant and probable cause, based on them by default not trusting you. Now, why are you suddenly supposed to trust them in return that they aren't going to abuse that?
> When you rent physical goods, do you find it acceptable to be tracked while you use them with some hidden surveillance mechanisms?
Ah, so you're also against most car rentals? They are often GPS tracked to enforce rules about leaving the country and such. I see no problem with this. It is their property, and they want to know where it is.
I'd say, such tracking is not appropriate as well. Except that car example is not like your personal computer. It all depends on the level of the breach of your privacy for the sake of enforcement.
Boycotting is a tool used by advocates to bring up media attentions and raise public awareness.
Its surely a useful tool, but not the only one. We can still say no to Hollywood when they try to attain ownership of our private owned hardware, our software, our networks.
It is quite ridiculous that in a very capitalist oriented society the consumers end up owning nothing. Not even the movies they payed to watch, or the smart-phones in their pockets are really their property.
Well, "the intellectual property" which prevents me from selling a copy of movie or book I bought, seems to supersede private property.
I miss the old days when my money could actually buy things and I could trade with the goods and services that I bought.
Now they want to take ownership of my user agent, my browser, they want to impose their intellectual rights on it, instead of mine.
Try buying your smartphones from China, from places like AliExpress.
I just bought a Samsung Mega clone, 1.2 GHz quad core, 1G ram, 16GB storage, 2 sim cards, 2 batteries. Camera's even better than the Samsung offerings too. $200 US. And they come unlocked and prerooted, ready for your hackings and exploits.*
You just have to be smart where you do business. Our US dollars really are an effective weapon to wield against other entities. Especially in cases of locked devices, there are answers we can respond to. You just have to be aware that those choices exist, rather than say the Galaxy Note 3 with region SIM locking.
And I also have 0 problems with piracy, at all. I haven't a problem with paying for content and services. I've paid for a fair share of DVDs, VHS, CDs, tapes, and other forms of media... many times over. And then, they want me to pay for it again just because it's in another format? Nope. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I take matters in my own hands.
Any concern that your device might include some not-so-ethic Chinese software? Chinese companies have no pressure from consumer organization, let alone government, to push them to protect their user's privacy, so they happily track you as much as they can.
I wouldn't be surprised if the phone included a modded version of some Android components so that your web traffic go through Chinese servers, you know, just to "enhance" your user's experience with better ads.
There was no cracked software on this device at all. And also, there were absolutely NO ads, until I installed a few apps that introduced some AdMob ads. But I knew about them. You know, informed consent and all of that.
Although I did run a packet sniffer on my router to see if there was Chinese server contact, and there was. That was because the GPS config had NTP servers polling from China. I kind of expect that for a device sold to the Chinese, so it didn't exactly set off buzzers in my head.
Once I changed that, no more talkey to China. I guess there could be a few packets of UDP per week that I'd not catch, or cell-only data transmit. But tell me: how's that any worse than say Motorola?
I'm not familiar with Motorola but I used China Telecom's 3G dongle and was amazed by the amount of sneaky tracking they were doing. Frequently, I could see (in Chrome web inspector) that random pages were wrapped in iframes, with extra JavaScript for tracking. The JS was pinging Chinese servers and sending visited pages, clicked links, and who knows what.
Any Chinese software you install will do something similar. You install one software (for instance, a popular messenger like QQ or some online banking software) and get half a dozen processes and services running all the time with admin privileges (which they've asked during installation).
It's a mix of carelessness and greed, and there's no limit to it since consumers here don't have much power to change anything. That's why I'd be careful with a Chinese smart phone.
Sure. It's the profile (except thickness) of a Samsung Mega. The actual viewable screen size is smaller than a mega but larger than the Note 2. You need to see it to understand how exactly big this phone is. It's by far one of the biggest phones I've seen (and used). I paid extra for expedited shipping, and the total was $213, and got it in 6 or 7 days.
It comes with 3 cases: a standard back, a snap-on hardcase for the back, and a back with a cloth-hard flap lid. I use that third one so it protects the screen. If you want 3rd party equipment for this, AliExpress does have _some_ n7889 stuff, but nothing like the OtterBoxes. The phone itself feels sturdy, and not like a bootleg. Also note, there's no samsung logos anywhere (unlike some of the fake iphones that have peel-off stickers of the apple logo).
The first thing I noticed is how buttery smooth everything is. I like that mushroom live wallpaper, and I've never seen a frame drop or lag at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not much of a gamer, but Angry Birds is also perfect too. Everything just is so fast (faster than my few year old laptop). Do note, that the screen is a BIG battery eater. Then again, it's a big screen.
There is a GPS on the device, however weirdly there is no compass. So the Google skydome does weird behavior. But that's not a big deal to me. Also, the stylus is NOT a S-pen. It's just a capacitive touch end, and the stylus does NOT work on the touch 'Back' and 'Home' buttons. I'm not sure if they do or don't work like that on the Note's, either. However, the screen can take up to 5 inputs (that does surprise me). You can see that with mobileuncle tools and go into engineer mode.
The device DOES have an FM radio, unlike Samsungs. And you can record FM channels (coooool), but you need headphones hooked in. I also notice better antenna and cell strength than my previous iPhone 3GS. And about the Cell: there's 2 sim cards. The first slot supports 3G AT&T frequencies, and the second slot is a 2G. The idea is you can do calls on both, and fast data on the first slot. There's a sim manager in the settings that you can do cool stuff like bind a user to a certain SIM.
It also supports Miracast, or "Wireless Display". Went into a Best Buy and demoed that out. Evidently, the Samsung phones cannot handle miracast when you change orientation. This phone can. Ive never seen this before, and it was DAMN sweet :P Ended up playing Psy's Gentleman (it was a HD video I grabbed and threw on there to see the quality of the screen).
It's running Android 4.2.1 and uses MTK chipset. I don't think it'd be terribly hard to update the rom, as there are 2 3rd party rom mods for this phone. Phone model is Haipai Noble n7889
True, but I do wonder about the future of that. It's a licensed Google product, and I'm sure Google Services would have little trouble detecting unlicensed devices.
I don't think Google would have any reason to prevent the services from running on a random device, would they? Seems like the more endpoints running their applications, the more data they collect and the more ads they can serve.
Yes, but just like Microsoft did in the 90s, they'll happily let people "pirate" them to reach a dominant position. Once they have >90% of the market, they can introduce Genuine Advantage.
Do you know of any sites that give a good list of phones to buy? The 6" one you linked to is a little large for me, but I'd be interested to see what 4.3" phones they have... but without buying a clunker by mistake.
The Chinese ones are hard to figure out. My own 'trick' was to find a reputable dealer (using an escrow, like AliExpress) and use Youtube to look at the phones. There's usually _someone_ who has uploaded a video of a phone you're interested in.
Also, be extremely careful in buying "clones" that don't care about trademark. Word on the websites I deal with are they are the ones that don't care about quality. The 'mostly clones', that don't mind attaching their own name to the product are usually pretty solid devices.
The guy who I've been buying from is http://www.aliexpress.com/store/108763 , ELE Team. I have a phone from them, as did a buddy here in the office (I work at Indiana University IT). He got the same model just shipped in a few days ago. We both absolutely love the phones. I've also been eyeing the ELE Team's $200 retina Android tablet. Pretty crazy cheap tech.
The other big trick is to check which frequencies the phone uses. If you use a TMobile or subsidary, you're getting 2G because of the whole lack of 1700MHz.. But that's because TMob chose a pretty much oft used GSM frequency.
Movies are probably the most easily justifiable for DRM. They aren't the sorts of 'products' that people watch over and over again (unless they get a cult following).
A single viewing of a movie reduces the value to a point where it may not be purchased. That's why distributors release them in as many stunted, protected, phases as possible - they want a return on their investment before it becomes relatively worthless.
Media distributors have all the right to modify their works in any way they feel like. It is after all their property and they should enjoy the Property rights associated with it. If they want to encrypt it, scramble it, create CDs with strange sectors, they are completely free to do so.
My hardware however is not theirs, it's mine. I should have the same property rights to my property as they should have to theirs. Goods that still are controlled by the manufacturer has thus been designed to infringe on my property rights after ownership has been transfered. It is wrong, and should be illegal.
DRM is a technical design to corrupt property rights. The actual owner has none of the rights in "Bundle of rights"¹. One losses any of the control associated with property rights². It removes the concept of private property in ways we should never allow. It is simply a worse crime in history than eminent domain, mostly because everyone nowadays carries it in their pocket.
If you (the collective "you", not you specifically) did not subvert their property rights through piracy, they would not feel the need to subvert yours through DRM.
It's a mistake to think that content creators are in the business of selling bits and bytes, and then complain about not being allowed to trade those bits and bytes as you would physical property.
The reality is right there in the name: it's called "intellectual" property. What you think you paid for, the disc or the bandwidth or the bits, is simply the medium used to deliver that which what you really paid for.
"Intellectual property" is weasel words made up by those who most benefit from it. There is no such thing. There are exclusive rights, given by We the People, and not for any other reason than to advance science and the useful arts. Anything else is selfish egotistical aggrandizing.
> "Intellectual property" is weasel words made up by those who most benefit from it. There is no such thing.
Yes, there is.
> There are exclusive rights, given by We the People, , and not for any other reason than to advance science and the useful arts.
No, they're given by Congress. The power to give those rights is given to Congress by the people via the Constitution, but Congress is the one giving the exclusive rights. And that limitation applies to the subset of intellectual property which is dependent on the copyright clause in the US, which isn't all of intellectual property.
But, in any case, even where that applies, it illustrates the existence of intellectual property, since an exclusive right with regard to something protected in law is what property is.
Real property is an exclusive right protected in law with respect to land.
Tangible personal property is an exclusive right protected in law with respect to some tangible object not permanently affixed to the land.
Intangible personal property (of which intellectual property is a subset) is an exclusive right protected in law that is not attached to land or to some tangible object.
So you mean if you make use of other's "intellectual property", you derive no benefit from it? If not, why do you make use of it? Maybe there's a reason we as a society have accepted the concept of Intellectual Property
Also: if you don't make use of it, why do you care what they do to protect it? Firefox and Chrome are open source, and as the refrain goes, you can always remove any DRM bits you don't like and use that.
Lets not forget the laws against reverse-engineering.
Lets not forget that people were seriously wondering if "jail-breaking" their iPhones is illegal or not. Thats how far it has gone. Its a disgrace to anything that a democratic liberal society is.
What is next, you are not allowed to run a certain program on your devices? Then it will be illegal to access certain web-sites with your devices. Then perhaps it will be illegal to have read a text on a print-out. Watch out, citizen, what you are writing is illegal, you are not allowed to do that!
Remember Eben Moglens talk on the war against general purpose computing.
It is already illegal to access certain websites. It's just that those websites are generally considered morally abhorrent. I'm not necessarily arguing against your point, except to say that slippery slopes are generally more complicated than the people warning against them think they are.
If you're referring to "the children," I can't recall a case when someone asserting that we were starting down a slippery slope after some child-protection legislation had been passed has been wrong.
All of these national level DNS website blocks were sold as kiddie porn blocking.
"What is next, you are not allowed to run a certain program on your devices?"
That's what software licensing decides. I can have perfectly valid executable binaries on my computer but if I don't have a license to use them, then it's technically illegal to ./execute
Thats is true. Im no angel but I do not have pirated and unlicensed software on my computers, thats one of the reasons I only use Linux and pay for IntelliJ. At least with software we have an option.
I was saying that more in the context of oppressive regimes, sorry I mean safe democratic governments, that some programs are illegal to write.
> Movies are probably the most easily justifiable for DRM. They aren't the sorts of 'products' that people watch over and over again (unless they get a cult following).
Children watch movies VERY MANY TIMES. They also manage to destroy the physical media.
I'm not sure what the law is about making a backup of the disc (is backup exempted, or am I circumventing an effective copyright measure?) but morally I think it's okay to make a back up of a DVD.
Having said that, I'm on my 3rd DVD of Despicable Me.
These kids are destroying property that does not belong to them. This is a felony punishable by prison time and hard labor. You'd better turn them in at the nearest police station before Hollywood finds out and sends their hired thugs after you.
What? I mean, full marks for hyperbole, but even DIVX never tried to claim the buyer didn't own the physical medium. It's the ownership of the bits stored thereon that's under discussion.
Making backups as such is legal under general global copyright laws. In USA however, if a content seller makes it very difficult to make a backup, then distributing devices to circumvent that may be illegal under DMCA.
Are they scratching the disks to cause the damage- or are they actually wearing the disks out??? (Just curious- I agree 100% that you should have the right to make a backup of a DVD in case it gets destroyed.
I dislike DRM in all of its forms, and hope that Mozilla does take a stance against having it in FF, but I agree with this sentiment.
I don't want to own a movie, I want to watch it.
I don't want to own music, I want to listen to it.
What I don't agree with is the assumption from content producers that DRM is particularly useful. If the content is displayed on a screen or played out speakers, DRM isn't going to work.
Except if you don't own it you may be told you can't watch the film with more than 2 friends or on Friday evenings or Christmas Eve. You may be told you cannot listen to your music if travelling to another country, or copy it to your new $10,000 hi-fi so you can really enjoy it.
Nothing is justifiable for DRM. Even if you don't watch movies over and over again, you can watch them once in a while. Good movies have good replay value. And bad movies won't get any more sales, just because they'll use DRM for some reason.
So is it "a viewing" that is being sold? Are they buying my eyes, am I selling? How much do other companies pay for my eyes to see their shit advertisement even though Im not selling? And I dont get or see any of that money.
I already payed for the bandwidth to see the movie, it was already on my private property, it is my right to save it and to re-sell it or to mix it with other movies. But no, the intellectual right of the creator supersedes private property, and even my own intellectual creativity - no remixing.
Send intellectual property and rights to the trashcan, write into the constitution that anything written and created is available for remixing and redistribution by any means.
Though enforcement is a gray area as long as it's a noncommercial release and is not a realistic substitute for purchasing the original copyrighted content. Even the RIAA never tried to sue DJs releasing free online mixes they made.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree... And that it has the potential to blow up in Firefox's face.
Remember what happened to html5 video. Everyone but Firefox was pragmatic, and implemented h.264 -- primarily, but not only for hardware acceleration reasons. Years later, Webkit-based browsers are ubiquitous, and Mozilla is developing a phone OS nobody will care about, in a desperate effort to become relevant again.
Imo, Mozilla ought to spare itself another embarrassment by being the only guys in the room with the contrarian opinion. Take the issue to the W3C directly -- or for that matter vote for your local pirate party. HN and other tech news venues might be the correct places to recruit support, but you ultimately want to lobby your case directly.
What drove me to Chrome at the time was the resource hunger and the inferior UI of Firefox, not the video thing. If DRM is the consensus, Mozilla should (and probably for technical reasons must) have the contrarian opinion. It would be enough to make me switch back, actually.
I like Chrome. I think it's a better browser than Firefox. Having to switch back, after several years settling into Chrome's extensions and configurations, would really piss me off. But I'll do it if Chrome implements this bullshit and Firefox doesn't.
Wonder if I've still got tabs saved from the last time I seriously used Firefox, years ago. Probably not...
I use both browsers regularly, but Firefox out of preference. It amazes me at how under performing chrome has become over the years. Font rendering, for one. The fact that they STILL don't have DirectWrite font rendering on Windows, something that has been with IE and FF since FF 3.6, amazes me.
Good luck trying to get a webfont to render the same (or look any good) in Chrome as it does in IE and FF on Winderps. The sheer fact that it isn't IE for once...
The font thing, while somewhat recent in usage, should have been in Chrome ages ago. Not going to bother getting into Chromes other more critical flaws as I feel like these threads devolve into this kind of shit too easily.
Just sucks that Chrome has gone from this cool browser that actually is progressive, to some kind of Ad-friendly extension of Google that just qualifies as "better than IE!".
Methinks you should jump on FF, it's better, and not because it may not support some arbitrary HTMl5 spec that we wont see for half a decade.
It seems many Chrome users have last used FF 3.6 and still compare Chrome to that. Meanwhile Chrome has gotten slow and annoying. The old "boiling frog" anecdote comes to mind.
Yep. I remember Chrome was blasting fast when I switched to it when it appeared. I switched back to FF few months ago and I like it better, especially on Android.
Indeed, with firebug for debuging and firefox sync, ever single feature I liked in Chrome is done as well or better in FF. Add the bonus that it performs faster and is leaner on memory, and I dropped Chrome some time ago.
The thing about Chrome is that while the font rendering is horrible the dev tools are super awesome. At work I end up using FF for reading text and Chrome for inspecting/debugging.
- You can't disable the browser cache from FF devtools, which really sucks when you are trying to debug a broken redirect.
- When inspecting an element in FF devtools, :before and :after CSS properties will not be shown. I wasted many hours debugging a CSS refactor because of this (imagine going up the DOM, comparing computed CSS properties until you reach the root). Both Firebug and Chrome devtools will show :before and :after properties.
I think Firebug and the Chrome devtools are comparable in quality.
Can you even debug a web worker with Firebug? How about SourceMap support? The times when I've had to switch to FF devtools have been pretty painful. The profiling and tracing tools in chrome also seem lightyears better.
The responsive design view is very handy. It switches the size of the view port without changing the size of the whole window. I still use firebug most of the time, but there are some issues with firebug you have to be careful of. See this post for an example http://perfectionkills.com/understanding-delete/#firebug_con...
I would switch back to FireFox if I could figure out how to remove the titlebar so that my tabs properly lined up with the top of my screen. (Running under Linux Mint Cinnamon).
I switched from firefox to chrome because of firefox's chronic memory leaks, and decided to live without extensions. Now I've switched back because firefox won't attempt to load tabs until you actually focus them.
+1, switched to Chrome with regret, because of Ff's bloating UI in 3-3.6 and its accompanying slowness.
-1 to the logic of switching "if they implement drm": If your drmized content isn't available in FF, you'll have all incentives to come back. Unfortunately.
> -1 to the logic of switching "if they implement drm": If your drmized content isn't available in FF, you'll have all incentives to come back.
No I won't. I'll either find an uncrippled version of the content -- for example on TPB -- or I simply won't look at it.
DRM is a perversion of the WWW, and Berners-Lee is wrong to allow his invention to be sullied in this way. The web has been successful because it consists of open standards which means anyone can build on it. Just as tcp/ip is an open standard and Berners-Lee didn't need anyone's permission to build http and html. Take away that openness, and you'll be destroying something very valuable.
If the MAFIAA don't like the open web and want a locked-down system, let them build their own. I'm sure it'll be every bit as successful as Windows RT or the Ford Edsel were.
I think aragot was using 'you' to mean 'the user'. While you may be motivated to find uncrippled versions of the content, you can rest assured that the vast majority of users will not, and will just switch browser.
You're probably right, although having said that I know lots of people who don't have an IT background who use BitTorrent because it is less hassle than DRM.
Please consider switching back to FF, at least for the same reasons, if not for all the other ones (FOSS, no backdoors and so on). If you want the same look as Chrome, try the UX nightlies. Butter smooth too. Best browser ever.
Does it finally have good flash and JS blockers? Regardless, i hate the tab system and address bar search in Chrome, wish it was like Firefox's, then I'd switch because it's faster...
I switched back to Firefox when Chrome's performance slid to the point where it was unusable after a day. I forgot what it was like to have middle click work correctly.
I'm probably the only guy here that never switched to Chrome.
I wasn't impressed by it's lack of functionality when it launched and didn't think giving up functionality i use for speed was a good idea.
Then Firefox became faster and now i got the best of both worlds though Chrome did grow over that time and now they have everything I would need but I have no reason to switch.
I really hope Firefox puts its foot down and refuses to implement DRM I mean it's an open source browser this should be unacceptable.
I switched back to Firefox from Chrome a few months ago (I still use Chrome for Gmail) because I found that the resource consumption issue has been turned on its head.
What did happen exactly? The desktop is still not playing Html5 video, Flash is still used. I still can't go fully with Html5 on YouTube.
On Android mobile phones, Firefox had a rough time not because of Html5 video, but because they were slow to develop a usable version. The first versions I tried were very unstable and ate too much memory compared to the stock browser. But you know, it's evolving and on Android right now I think it's better than Chrome, minus one or two annoyances. Plus, they took the pragmatic approach, as they fall-back on the operating system's support for H.264 - remember open-source projects cannot bundle H.264 by themselves. Chrome is not open-source, while Chromium is and Chromium does not come with H.264 (although you can make it work on Ubuntu at least by installing the necessary code packages).
How is Html5 video related in any way with Firefox's marketshare?
> Years later, Webkit-based browsers are ubiquitous, and Mozilla is developing a phone OS nobody will care about
You're probably speaking about mobile web browsers. People here forget how big the desktop is and it's not going anywhere. And the WebKit browsers you're talking about are incompatible with each other. As for Firefox OS - personally I care about it, because it's tackling a market that has been ignored by both iOS and Android and because it leads the way to new Web APIs. So there you have it - you can't say that nobody cares about it, when clearly I do.
> Mozilla ought to spare itself another embarrassment by being the only guys in the room with the contrarian opinion
Maybe you should spare yourself the embarrassment of not recognizing that Mozilla made the web better precisely because of its contrarian opinion.
VLC even ships with everything to "crack" DVDs. Those tools are flying under the radar, but Firefox probably won't (with two direct competitors being part of MPEG-LA).
Firefox makes money (through the search engine integration at least), VLC et al do not.
It might also help that VLC is a french project. Laws and patents are sufficiently different that it takes effort to build a case, while for US cases the MPEG-LA + members have probably a template on file where they only have to fill in the victim.
They are, but redistributing them in certain jurisdictions may be illegal, which prevents many from actually exercising the rights the license grants them. For example, until not long ago, Debian would disable those codecs in their ffmpeg package.
Firefox can't afford to play fast-and-loose with patent liability.
Actually Mozilla did the right thing and theora and webm are as widely available in browsers (by count).
The only two companies that blocked free codecs are the companies part of the MPEG-LA! Which means the get money from h264 content.
It still sucks very much that the W3C did not force a codec in the standard, the current situation is awful!
How does the W3C force a codec in the standard? Apple and Microsoft had outright stated that if the standard said one MUST support Ogg/Theora/Vorbis they would simply chose to violate the standard.
I dont unerstand. So the right way to form a standard is to follow the biggest corporation and implement their formats rather then create fair chances for everyone, is that it?
Nobody follows standards the W3C publish just because the W3C publish them. Indeed, if they have a good reason (or sometimes not so good reason) not to, they won't.
Publishing a standard that says "the user agent MUST support Ogg/Theora/Vorbis" doesn't change anything until you motivate the company that implementing that standard is more important than anything else. And as long as IE, Safari, and Chrome all supported H.264 (etc.) anyway, most web developers would just use H.264 thus giving MS, Apple, and Google no (external) motivation in terms of site-compatibility to support Ogg/Theora/Vorbis, and if the market (i.e., browser users) don't care about it — they won't add support.
Are you saying Firefox lost users because they refused to support h.264? That's bull. If they did lose users it was for completely different reasons. I remember being very disappointed with them for choosing h.264 in the end, but even more disappointed with Google for not making VP8 the default codec in Youtube, to have Mozilla's back (with fallback to Flash).
So what if MPAA goes to Mozilla next and tells them to adopt whatever auto-DMCA/censorship schemes they come up with next. Is Mozilla supposed to just accept it because "all the others are doing it"? I sure hope they wouldn't.
Are they? All the corporate guys I know that jumped on Chrome jumped to (..) IE10 now.
Everyone else still uses Firefox around me and wonders why someone would ever install a browser from an advertisement company.
Have you used Firefox on Android? I've to admit that running Aurora is kind of hardcore (daily updates..?), but - wow. It's not just a really good browser, it's beautiful on top of that.
I'm really looking forward to see devices with that OS nobody will care about - because all alternatives suck or died (WebOS was promising, so was Maemo/Meego. I'm also interested in sailfishOS).
Your whole comment is weird. Your claims make no sense from this point and I have to disagree with literally every single line you wrote here.
My hope is that FF/Mozilla _will_ pledge not to implement any of these idiotic ideas.
I was mostly talking about the desktop, other people already commented on the 'forced' Webkit market share on mobile devices.
Firefox around me: From technical people to guys that use mostly Excel, everyone here uses FF (apart from the IE10+ guys at work). Heck, I learned about some of these strange 'take FF, compile it for amd64 and call it "optimized"' FF derived browsers through people that .. are average not-into-computers-really joes.
The only people that DO install Chrome around here (I know, I know, nothing but anecdotes to back this) are elderly family members that click that annoying huge 'You should really download our browser, it's teh best thing ever' button on Google - and get back to launch IE again the next day, because they didn't understand the whole thing, really.
I don't want to take Chrome away from anyone, I just dislike the 'Meh, FF OS is useless anyway, their browser is becoming obsolete and they just meddle with politics' dismissal in the original comment. A 'desperate effort to become relevant again'? Why (and in what world) would they be irrelevant in the first place?
Anecdote: Literally no one in my office uses Firefox except when we need to copy paste a numbered list from a wikipage, and for some reason Firefox copy paste retains the numbering where nothing else does.
Everyone uses Chrome here, and we're not a fancy new tech company or anything, we're a pretty conservative shop that's been around twice as long as many HNers have been alive.
Who are these nontechnical users who see Google as a ad company? I would think people who don't know about chrome would first think of google search, gmail, maps, google apps, google news, Android, Glass, and so forth.
WebKit powers the highest percentage of browsers, more than any other rendering engine. Not saying these stats are authoritative, but they are typical and similar to my own sites: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
It might blow up in Firefox's face, a long time from now.
For now, there isn't even any standard for how the decryption algorithms should be implemented as plugins, so it's hard to see how Mozilla could implement it in the first place, let alone be pressured into implementing it.
Also, H.264 was already dominant on the web when the video tag was introduced, it was far better than Theora, it's slightly better than V8, and as you mention, it has hardware acceleration - all strong reasons for people to use it regardless of their opinion on patents. EME's support is mostly limited to a small number of companies that want to use it and doesn't seem inevitable at all. The situations are very different.
> Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) form the basis for a whole bunch of silliness, from proposals to prevent us viewing JavaScript source, to not being able to view text because of a font specification.
That's what you're backing. It may sound odd, but I imagine a large number of folks on HN disagree with you.
The vast, overwhelming majority of video watched since then has been H.264 via Flash (since it was more "pragmatic" to do so), so I struggle to see how that would have affected Mozilla in any major way. If flash had adopted VP8, (like they said they would) then things might have been very different.
And if your talking about mobile browsers, smartphones are dominated by two platforms, each owned by the corporate parents of two webkit-based browsers, one of whom doesn't allow you to install other browsers at all.
> one of whom doesn't allow you to install other browsers at all.
Nitpick, you can install other browsers on iOS. Don't think you can make them the default handler for URLs from other apps however, but most apps still ship their own web view inside the app making that a mostly moot point in my experience.
Yes, that's an issue too but what I specifically meant by that was mainly that you can install wrappers round the provided Webkit, but not, for example, Mozilla's gecko, Opera's presto, or Google's Blink browser engine or even your own spin on Webkit. So saying that Webkit is ubiquitous isn't saying as much about webkit's inherent quality or Mozilla's mistakes as it would if there was a free choice in the matter.
Nitpick the nitpick, you can install applications on iOS that are forced to use the not-as-up-to-date-as-Mobile-Safari WebUIView. They are not allowed to roll their own engine.
DRM can't be properly implemented in free (as in freedom) software. Either you will not be able to run any modified version not signed by the vendor on your device, or any version you build yourself will lack DRM support. DRM is all about restricting the user control over their devices.
DRM-enabled Firefox would be effectively non-free software: you could not modify it and rebuild it from source while retaining the DRM functionality.
You're right about DRM implementations in general, but note that the W3C standard isn't actually a DRM implementation, it's (afaict) a common API that allows web pages to supply their own DRM implementations.
An open source browser can conform to the W3C DRM standard ("Encrypted Media Extensions") and remain open source.
No, it won't allow websites to provide their own DRM implementation! The proposal only provides an interface to the HTMLMediaElement to be used by the website to talk to a restrictions module inside the browser. It does not specify how the restrictions module is implemented.
It also does not define a common API to load such a module in a browser. In fact the module can also be built into the browser. Which is exactly what Microsoft will be doing with their PlayReady for the Internet Explorer.
An open source browser would have to rely on the DRM module to do all the video decoding and rendering. If the module handles the unencrypted stream back to the browser then one could simply change the browser to dump the stream. A browser would also have to make sure that other JavaScript can't access the unencrypted content. So no more funny graphic effects with videos rendered onto canvas or WebGL textures.
This proposal will destroy the open web and make it rely on closed source binary blobs. A free software browser will end up being useless because it will be excluded from most of the content. Who would want to use Firefox or Chromium if they can't access YouTube? When we start to add DRM for media elements then how long can it be until publishers demand DRM for text and image content? And what argumentative position would the W3C have to refuse it?
With Firefox market share decreasing and proprietary browsers like Chrome, IE, Safari increasing we are in a really bad position. Microsoft can simply push their PlayReady in IE and provide plugins for Chrome and Safari. Netflix is already using PlayReady. So no change for them. And then Firefox is fucked. Linux is fucked.
And how long until Google moves YouTube to DRM? Google is involved in the design of the DRM proposal. If DRM is in HTML5 then it's just a simple step for them.
That's why we have to oppose DRM in HTML5 and keep the web open. It is sad that Tim Berners-Lee has given up on the open web. But I won't and I hope Mozilla won't and I hope you and others won't either.
> That's why we have to oppose DRM in HTML5 and keep the web open. It is sad that Tim Berners-Lee has given up on the open web. But I won't and I hope Mozilla won't and I hope you and others won't either.
The only way to stop this DRM proposal is to have it not be implemented in browsers. The only way to stop that is to convince Google and Microsoft to stop pushing it.
> With Firefox market share decreasing and proprietary browsers like Chrome, IE, Safari increasing
Opposing EME will simply keep Microsoft and Adobe uncharged of the web video market and keep that market smaller thB the Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. stores.
The last time someone took a “principled” stance like this and blocked H.264 in Firefox, remember what happened? Flash got many extra years of life and Firefox lost marketshare.
I'd prefer we stop pretending this is anything other than a minor shift in the status quo and focus on the larger anti-DRM campaign. The right place to focus is the bottom-line: educating consumers about the restrictions and supporting alternatives. As long as people are paying billions of dollars through native apps, you're fooling yourself to believe that this EME opposition is doing anything but supporting competitors to the open web.
Except they need to implement Content Decryption Modules, which are not standardised and which may use features (or DRM systems) that are only implemented on particular systems. Ultimately, this extension could tie particular content to a particular system. Say, for instance, you could only watch some content on a Windows 8 system because it requires a Microsoft specific DRM system implemented only on Windows 8. A system that could ultimately be badly documented (or not documented at all) that makes it hard for competing browsers to use the CDM.
Frankly, this system would only work if you standardise in a DRM system. The W3C may claim "only the simple clear key system is required to be implemented as a common baseline" [1], but that's highly misleading IMO.
The idea is that currently most video on the web plays in either Flash or Silverlight, which are poorly supported plugins which offer a huge amount of extra functionality and – more importantly – attack surface.
This is really only about replacing a huge proprietary blob with a much smaller one.
This has exactly nothing to do with reducing the attack surface of a browser.
What this is about is letting people like Audible and Netflix encrypt their content in a special way that means that only browsers that support the DRM api can decrypt it; by including the closed source binary blobs provided by those vendors.
Don't want to do that? Sorry, our website doesn't work on your browser.
...but to the main point:
This will in fact catastrophically increase the attack surface of browsers, as they are forced to bundle unmoderated, unreviewed binary code blocks (Content Decryption Module, from the spec) that can do whatever they like into the browser code.
AFAIK, there is nothing in the current proposal about forcing browsers to bundle CDMs. The CDMs could be part of the OS, installed separately, or simply not there at all (in which case you have a browser that won't play DRM video, but is otherwise fully functional).
That's no different from the current situation with Flash and Silverlight. You're not forced to use them, but some content is only accessible if you do. If we can replace Flash with a CDM, the attack surface is decreased, because a CDM is less complex.
Without the EME standard, it seems highly unlikely that media companies would decide to distribute videos DRM-free. They would simply continue to build and use non-standard solutions. EME is just a standard API for what they'd be bound to do anyway.
It's irrelevant whether the CDM is part of the browser, part of the OS or an installed plugin like Java.
The browser must invoke the closed source, vendor provided CDM by pass a binary stream from the server.
Certainly, it's no worse than what we currently have, but current plugins have, shall we say, a rocky security history wouldn't you say? (>_> java)
Worse, every content provider is going to have their home written CDM, because they certainly aren't going to share. Once a CDM is compromised thats it, it's useless.
It's going to be a nightmare of install-all-the-plugins. Most likely major browsers will bundle the most popular one to reduce the burden on the user.
Look at the security track record of all plugins. Notice how few of the vulnerabilities are in the actual content decryption code as opposed to the code duplicating things the browser does natively? Also consider how sandboxes the CDM interface can be if it's just passing data through to decode.
What fantasy world are you living in where he/she said that non-DRM HTML 5 video was the status quo for paid content?
What was said was that it is there, and services are choosing not to use it, even accepting that using it would be suicide for their business. It's not the responsibility of http to preserve the business models of those companies rather than a free and open internet, though it's understandable that those businesses are fighting for it.
I don't have Flash or Silverlight installed on my system. Trust me when I say that approximately zero commercial video is available with these plugins.
Even half of the ad-supported content on YouTube isn't available.
As an implementor, until mozilla finished shipping native h.264 support I have to either use Flash as a fallback for IE8 and Firefox (mediaobject.js is great!) or encode all of my video twice and double my storage bill. Guess which one is more appealing?
You're talking semantics. Sure, the branding is non-free (you can't distribute the same version obviously), but your four freedoms aren't diminished in any way [1].
Firefox is non-free due to trademark protection, but that's VASTLY different to being non-free due to being a paid download, or being closed source, or patent licensing, or restrictive licensing terms, and so on. It's almost irrelevant to the parent poster's comment to claim that.
It's not really a big deal, but the trademark restriction does mean you can't just redistribute Firefox as-is. Whether you count that as non-free is subjective.
I agree there's some subjectivity but "you can't just redistribute Firefox as-is" is NOT subjective. That is flat out wrong. You can redistribute Firefox as-is. What you can't do is redistribute modified Firefox and keep the name.
Can some of the more involved please explain the consequence of a choice like this? If Mozilla chooses to not implement this spec, will the effect be that:
* Firefox is the only browser that can't play certain content
* Firefox is the only browser that plays all content
?
I would assume the first, because it should be easy for a content provider to just block a certain browser entirely (and that block could be circumvented, but the majority of people won't do that). People will blame Firefox, not the content provider.
In the short to medium term, Netflix, etc. will just fallback on delivering streams through Silverlight of Flash. That's what they do know and those plugins will keep working. There's precedent for this in the way that many websites would deliver H.264 encoded HTML5 videos to browsers that supported those, but used Flash when Firefox didn't support H.264.
In the longer term, Silverlight is abandoned and Flash is on its way out. I think it's unlikely that Firefox holds out against EME in the long term, but it could be that it slowly gains a reputation for being bad for many streaming sites. The Flash fallback is buggier and less featureful than the streaming in other browsers, maybe slower as well. At some point, people upgrade their computers and find it hard to get a Flash plugin that works and so they eventually give up and switch browsers.
I'm not sure how technically possible it is, but another option is that Netflix and similar companies will write their own plugin for Firefox which supports DRM. Presumably they will try to make a plugin which is not a platform like Flash, but only serves the purpose of doing the DRM. An equivalent, but probably techincally superior, option is to put the DRM into an asm.js blob.
Some people in this thread believe that the lack of support for EME will put pressure on media companies non-DRM streaming options. This strikes me as wishful thinking. In the short-term, the existence of Flash and Silverlight fallbacks mitigates the pressure on Hollywood and streaming providers. Again, see the H.264 story. In the long-term, Hollywood's smart enough to realize that if there exists a DRM solution for Firefox today, then it will be technically possible in the future as well.
That's why I don't see the point of boycotting EME. If it could plausibly lead to DRM-free streaming options, that would be an improvement, but I don't believe it will happen. On the other hand, from a binary blob perspective, EME plugins are strictly better than NPAPI plugins, and second, users who don't want DRM can always not use it. All boycotting does is reduce the options for users who are willing to accept DRM.
> from a binary blob perspective, EME plugins are strictly better than NPAPI plugins
DRM can't be implemented in a simple binary plugin since the user will still be able to copy the protected content by e.g. modifying the video driver. All system layers from EME module in a browser to hardware will need to be restricted from modification. Do you believe that Secure Boot was created just for malware protection?
The mere fact that this works every day for billions of people demonstrates that you're wrong. Flash/Silverlight are easy hacked and yet the content cartels have decided they're enough.
Even if the OS starts becoming as locked down, you're still technically inaccurate: a CDM could just be a shim which pass data through to an OS media API which handles the actual playback.
> The mere fact that this works every day for billions of people demonstrates that you're wrong. Flash/Silverlight are easy hacked and yet the content cartels have decided they're enough.
Flash and Silverlight do not provide any real protection and they are certainly not enough for content cartels. That's why DRM solutions are being developed. As soon as the major software vendors will provide complete DRM implementation restricting all levels from user agents to drivers and bootloader, content providers will start to require it.
> Even if the OS starts becoming as locked down, you're still technically inaccurate: a CDM could just be a shim which pass data through to an OS media API which handles the actual playback.
But that shim will not provide any real content protection if the OS is open for modification. For example, someone could make a version of the OS's media API implementation that will allow users to save any media stream decoded by CDM. Thus, the OS will have to be locked down to support DRM, that's what I am trying to say.
Any browser that doesn't implement the EME spec won't be able to play content protected using it. So if large video streaming sites were to use it those browser would be locked out. Internet Explorer 11 can play netflix videos using EME without plugins for example [1]. Browsers that don't support EME would need to use plugins for as long as the site supported that.
Internet Explorer 11 can play netflix videos using EME without plugins for example
While technically true, it's certainly stretching the truth a wee bit.
Saying "Internet Explorer 11 can play netflix videos using EME without using additional plug-ins because it ships with specific DRM-implementations built-in" would be the more correct version.
I mean... Chrome can play Flash-content without any plug-ins, because the Flash plug-in is built in. When you put it that way, it doesn't sound so impressive any more, now does it? Further extending the browser will require plug-ins.
The special about this thing, is that it's a plug-in architecture deliberately created to enable DRM, to take control away from the user. That's legitimizing DRM as a concept in a supposedly open standard.
That's as just madness and 100% self-contradicting.
That's not entirely the full story. Any browser that supports EME will still not be able to play content unless a Content Decryption Module (CDM) is built for it.
2) Firefox could be the browser that allows you to go around all DRM'ed content through 3rd party plugins (they probably won't be able to condone the activity themselves).
The sad thing is the content guys will start yelling from the rooftops afterwards that "Mozilla is facilitating piracy and content theft" or something like that, even though they would keep the browser just like before - the "open web" we all wanted.
But because everyone else will have sold their soul to the content corporations, that sort of censorship will become the status quo, and now Mozilla will be the enemy.
Instead of "open web" being the status quo, I fear that "DRM'ed web" will become the status quo.
Firefox couldn't display those files/streams, but it would notice and could cope, eg. by displaying some informative message instead that lays the blame where it belongs to: the website.
Since FF is still popular enough in certain regions, that it (plus legacy IE versions) could kill EME before it gets popular, except for certain special use cases like Netflix on Chromebooks (where, honestly, a fully custom plugin solution would work just as well).
> by displaying some informative message instead that lays the blame where it belongs to: the website.
Surely the website will detect FF and instead of serving an encrypted stream, display some informative message laying the blame with Mozilla and link to a DRM-enabled browser download.
Of course they're free to do that, like they are now.
So instead of installing a plugin, the user is now expected to install a new browser (with different UI and everything) _and_ a plugin for the DRM implementation. That surely helped the DRM vendors' cause.
A browser that refuses to implement EME is an inferior set-top box. Question is if becoming Hollywood's set-top box is really Firefox's (and Mozilla's) mission.
Just because a browser implements EME doesn't mean it can still play content. It needs a CDM written for it first. What if that CDM requires an underlying DRM system that only runs on one OS?
They don't have to install a new browser. Most users already have IE on their system and it'll work just fine with no effort at all except clicking on the blue e.
Probably the first one, if the content ever became available.
But don't forget that implementing something like this will have negative consequences as well. By dodging these consequences Mozilla could - at leas in theory - gain an upper hand.
It's bad enough that governments are starting to restrict the Internet all over the world [1], almost in unison, why should the last bastions of freedom on the Internet fall so easily, too?
I see the corruption of W3C (because that's what it is) by corporations almost as bad as the corruption of NIST and the security standards by the NSA.
And for what exactly? The apparent "convenience" of not having a 3rd party plugin, but instead a "native" plugin in the operating system, that will only work on certain operating systems and browsers? HTML and DRM are incompatible in principle, and will be incompatible in practice, too. It won't give you any convenience, and will potentially make things worse in many other ways.
And all of this because we're starting to buy into the idea that the content companies are right and piracy is hurting their sales? I guess repeating a lie long enough, does make it true in the end - even though it probably isn't [2].
So once again, why are you letting our Internet freedom slip away without even a fight?
The W3C is an industrial consortium — its direction and what it produces is down to its membership, so obviously it will follow what corporations want, because that's what industrial consortia do.
I wonder if this will finally kill Firefox? Imagine a world where FF can't play YouTube or watch Netflix? What if DRM content becomes so prevalent it FF will render most websites like Lynx?
That world would really suck. We must do everything we can now to prevent it. Berners-Lee and the W3C don't dictate the web, they have been ignored and overridden before.
As far as I'm aware, Firefox doesn't support h.264. They support codecs provided by your operating system. Firefox can't include h.264 decode because they would be violating patent law.
I'm still trying to figure out how we go from "UA streams encrypted content to EME plugin -- oops, sorry, 'extension' -- and EME extension streams decrypted content back to browser" to 'View Source' being prohibited, copy-paste of text demanding micropayments to complete, dogs and cats marrying each other, and Satan going to and fro on the earth.
I'll deal with what I wrote only, not the rest of your silliness :-)
The basic argument is that those who want restrictions to content have been attempting to chip away at what is essentially an open platform. While the W3C's argument is that it is an "extension" to the HTMLMediaElement, and while the draft goes to great pains to state that it is not a DRM system, in actual fact it goes a great way towards allowing for a DRM system.
If you review the diagram in the draft [1], you will see that it covers playback of certain content. Currently, it is restricted to media files. But you can see that once this is adopted, it would then lower the barriers for media companies and other interested actors to push for encryption mechanisms for individual elements.
Even worse, note that the Content Decryption Module (CDM) is a "part of or add-on to the user agent that provides functionality for one or more Key Systems". In other words, these will probably need to be implemented as binary blobs which are add-ons for browsers. They may need to use specific technologies that are part of particular operating systems.
What does this leave us all with? Well, it leaves us with the promogulation of a bad idea (restrictive DRM) implemented using a variety of browser specific extensions that may need to utilise the specific technologies of a particular operating system.
As an example, you could be forced to use an add-on for Internet Explorer that can only be used on Windows 8.
So in other words, the plan is a bad one for technical reasons, and for political reasons it lowers the barriers to campaigning for more restrictive measures leaking nto the rest of the standard.
I'm still not finding much value in the slippery slope arguments I lampooned in (parent (parent)), and the overheated rhetoric around the subject shows no sign of cooling off since my prior comments, some of which admittedly were not well considered.
That said, I was not previously aware of watermarking as a viable alternative with meaningful industry support, and it has consequently replaced the (relatively clean) DRM interface under discussion here as the value bound to 'least-harmful-option.
How is this different from the status quo? All you appear to be arguing is that we should stick with the status quo where you are required to use something supported by Flash or Silverlight.
The option I'd like, where video is watermarked or otherwise not encumbered, isn't on the table and much as I'd like that to change, the security realist in me would like a web without Flash even more.
So the way we get there is that there are existing constituencies pushing for those things. And now they would be able to point to EME and say "Hey, video gets this, why don't we?", strengthening their bargaining position.
Yeah, good luck the the DRM crap - it worked over so well with music (not) and I'm sure it'll fly super fine with video too. Tim Berners-Lee has sold his soul somewhere along the line. Following bit from Florian Bösch comment on article sums it up brilliantly:
"The W3Cs (and Tim Baner Lees) support of EME shows clearly that once again, the W3C has gone down a blind alley (like with XHTML) and is not interested to serve the real needs of the web. The WhatWG was the result of W3Cs stagnation on addressing real world needs. And once again the W3C is more interested in stagnation than real world needs with EME. It has to be expected that the relevancy of any W3C standard will substantially diminish in the future."
Mozilla wouldn't implement EME in the browser. It would come in the form of a plugin. It's absolutely incredible what a few uninformed blog posts will do to an otherwise very smart group of people.
I wrote pretty much the same thing in the comments on the blog post yesterday when people were freaking out about this then. EME is a plugin spec for implementing DRM, not something that would get baked into browsers.
Everyone put their logic pants on and stop freaking out for a second. This is might be a silly spec for implementing a stupid premise (DRM), but it's not the end of the open web.
First of all, making a bug-ticket for something that doesn't exists yet isn't going to solve anything. Second of all, why do you oppose DRM? It's been around for years. Games, DVDs... Nobody really had troubles with it until the bad (not so user-friendly) implementations came around. But, with W3 standardizing the spec for it, we get a win-win: We can watch all our (streaming) video without Flash (which was previously used for DRM), and content providers can be sure that the content we're watching is payed for.
By making it a part of a "standard", you help spreading the disease. Right now, the fact that DRM is implemented via Flash paints it as 'painful-to-use'. Once you implement it without the pain that is Flash, you have removed the barrier that is slowing the spread of DRM.
Actually, DRM systems prevent me from seeing content I'm willing to purchase. I tried to buy the Dragon Book on Kindle some time ago, but I couldn't because I live in Australia.
It's called geoblocking. The Australian Senate held hearings into it. Fun fact: I was looking to buy Cowboy Bebop and Star Trek: The Next Generation on iTunes. Not available, but definitely available in the U.S. App Store.
Even before streaming, the media publishing industries have been into segmenting the world into different markets for the same product: For example: books separately published in the US and the UK, DVDs and Blu-Ray disks with region codes that prevent playing on the other region players (providing they're players which obey this flag.)
But unlike most other media there's no other way to purchase them. I can't buy DVDs of Kindle active content, I can't get it off ebay.
I guess they mustn't consider the international market worth the trouble of solving whatever legal issue is stopping them from selling them to other countries.
My publisher pays me and all their other authors and uses no DRM on e-books. They sell more e-book because it isn't a hassle to move them around. They are a big enough publisher that if their sales and revenue significantly diverged from industry norms they would rethink that policy. On the other hand, I don't know of anyone going out of business for lack of DRM.
Except it will hurt things a great deal. DRM already causes a great deal of harm, helping to propagate it into a standard to make it more widespread will cause a great deal of harm.
The argument that as something has been around for long time makes it acceptable was neatly deflated by a counter example of something awful that has been around for ages that is definitely not desirable.
Plus, it was funny. Absurdity often highlights problems in arguments.
I had a problem with it years ago when I couldn't watch DVDs on linux (until the DRM was cracked). More recently I had a problem with it when flash DRM broke on linux (if you didn't have HAL installed and tried to use amazon's video for certain DRMed shows).
And in the future I expect more pain with proprietary, closed-source, non-interoperable (and, almost certainly, non-linux-supporting) CDMs, which are where the meat of the DRM will be implemented under the W3C EME proposal but which themselves are not being proposed for standardization.
We can only watch the streaming video if the DRM provider wants to provide a plugin (following the EME spec) for your platform.
That will make Firefox on Haiku less functional than Firefox on Windows. (and if the plugin were able to run everywhere, it would be trivial to work around: Just run on a system without a protected AV path)
They're all equally evil, since they're all equally useless on non-Win/OSX platforms (which are the only ones providing a reliable protected AV path), and since they're all very similar in that they need a plugin.
IMHO If anything EME is more evil than the other options in that it standardizes (and this way implicitely mandates) a special plugin interface for DRM purposes only.
Users still have to install plugins, and now browser vendors get the blame if things fail (since the user will be hard pressed to identify plugin issues in "that website doesn't work").
I fail to see where it's the W3C's, browser vendors' or web users' responsibility to make the DRM vendors' lifes easier. And that's all EME does.
Good point. On the other hand, DRM will come to HTML5 anyway, whatever we try. So, I think it's better to give it a spec, and have one, unified and well-known way for the DRM to operate, instead of 20 different implementations.
Specs are supposed to make things simple. I'd rather have DRM vendors struggle with the problem individually at every step (and that includes browser integration)
For one, because they'll fail in the most hilarious ways (and each one separately), so there will be backdoors, or at least a good laugh or two. But also because it drives up the cost of DRM, hopefully making it less attractive.
Should DRM manage to get hold even despite such problems and Amazon notices that they can reduce the price of their media package by 1$/month if they drop the DRM, the resulting massacre will be great to watch.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the proposal: it standardizes only the interface. It promises nothing about forcing interoperability — only a focused, more secure replacement for NPAPI.
It's not entirely reasonable to expect everything to work identically well when you're comparing the most widely installed client OS on the planet with something even most developers on niche-of-a-niche toy OS projects probably haven't heard of.
This is fundamentally opposed to personal computing. The goal of this DRM plugin is to stop your computer from doing what you tell it to do, in favor of doing what a corporation tells it to do. If this is given to them in the W3C spec, they will demand more in the future, until a PC is nothing more than a cable box that only allows the user to do what has been explicitly outlined as acceptable.
Well I'm not really trying to do personal computing, I'm just watching TV on my screen really. I want to watch a game that there is no chance in hell that the rightsholders will will release on the internet without DRM. They'd rather just not air it and opt for just using the normal outlets like cable/satellite if that was the case. This would mean I couldn't see it at all. You could argue that letting DRM into html is evil, and I agree, but I don't really care about evil if I can get rid of the current crap implementation which is flash on one site and silverlight on the next.
DRM has shackled the content and the industry for years. Who know where we would be without it? Who knows what cool, innovative solutions never saw the light? Who knows all they ways they could have made money had they taken another attitude..
