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posted by takyon on Saturday July 08 2017, @11:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the implementation-is-voluntary dept.

Tim Berners-Lee approved Web DRM yesterday, but W3C member organizations have two weeks to appeal. This was the controversial Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) standard for the WWW known as Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). The last opportunity to stop EME is an appeal by the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). An appeal would then trigger a vote from the whole Committee to make a final decision to ratify or reject EME. As an added difficulty Tim Berners-Lee heads the Advisory Committee.

Also at Techdirt and EFF. W3C's "Disposition of Comments for Encrypted Media Extensions and Director's decision".


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:58PM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:58PM (#536511)

    It will be a gigantic kludge of binary modules even if it is included. The whole point of DRM is to be as opaque as possible. Give or take a few years and this will be activeX all over again. Just this time every browser will support it.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:25PM (8 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:25PM (#536517) Journal

    Just this time every browser will support it.

    Why does the browser have to support it?
    Look, even emacs - that aspired to include... nay, to be the OS** - didn't include video-streaming functionality, why would a browser?

    (grin)

    ---

    ** ever heard the "The Emacs operating system needs a better editor" saying?

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:42PM (3 children)

      by Jeremiah Cornelius (2785) on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:42PM (#536541) Journal

      But why the FUCK is he the Autocrat of Browserstan?

      If there's a body that supposedly functions, the W3C, why hasn't he been "Vint Cerf'ed" into obscure board-director status?

      Unlike Linus, who manages active function of kernel development, TBL does meetings and reviews documents. His autocracy is a LEGACY, not a continuing MERIT.

      No wonder they knighted this bastard! He runs a little model of the UK Parliamentary system, which models superficial aspects of a republic, as concession granted by royalty.

      --
      You're betting on the pantomime horse...
    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:44PM (1 child)

      by butthurt (6141) on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:44PM (#536542) Journal

      > [...] even emacs - that aspired to include... nay, to be the OS** - didn't include video-streaming functionality [...]

      Emacs /ˈiːmæks/ is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility.

      -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMACS [wikipedia.org]

      EMACS by itself doesn't do much; many extensions are available for it, including one called EMMS:

      EMMS (Emacs MultiMedia System) is media player software for Emacs.

      --
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMMS [wikipedia.org]

      See also
      https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/ [gnu.org]

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:47PM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:47PM (#536552) Journal

        EMACS by itself doesn't do much; many extensions are available for it, including one called EMMS:

        Dammit, emacs [xkcd.com]

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:03PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:03PM (#536543)

      Because it's in the spec, and "standards compliance" tests will be testing for it. Just like the whole whining about Firefox and derivatives not supporting CSS-color-link-spying and failing standard's compliance tests has led to wave upon wave of whining (and by extension added to the dominance of chrome due to the loud and incessant whining by said hipstard web designers).

      Sure you can build a browser without it (Palemoon for example will never support it according to the author), but all the major browsers will support it and most derivatives/forks will be too lazy/ignorant to remove it.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:07PM (#536544)

        PS: Once it becomes a commonplace thing that exists in all major browsers sites will begin using it for far more than just video streaming, they could find some ass-backward way to bend it into an anti-adblock mechanism for example (or the spec will be expanded to allow for it because Google pretty much owns the WC3 and writes the spec themselves nowadays), at which point anyone visiting the site will require it --- and rest assured, this kind of crap will find its way into commonly used frameworks and CMS (the same way shit like jQuery is everywhere now despite serving no actual purpose other than bloating pages by virtue of devs being too lazy to write their own code).

        To fix the internet a parallel internet will need to be created.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:21PM (#536537)

    That's the thing right there. The general trend has been away from DRM for some time now for other things. DRM free games, DRM free music and DRM free books are all things that are widely available. DRM really only makes sense in the case of media that's being rented for a short period of time. If the store is a store and claims to be selling things, then there better not be any DRM as that's fraud.

    Including a standard way of hooking DRM up to a browser is just encouraging bad behavior. Plus, we know perfectly well that it's not going to be the same DRM on each platform, so you'll have to have some sort of plug in or special code on the computer anyways, which means that Linux and any OS that isn't Android, Windows or OSX is likely left out in the cold.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:41PM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:41PM (#536567) Journal

    The whole point of DRM is to be as opaque as possible.

    Are you sure?
    Because that strategy hasn't worked that well in most segments of the DRM world. People find a way around it.

    I suspect the whole point of DRM is to make it obvious when it is hacked/defeated, so that prosecution is easier.

    I bet it ends up being more like Like the Dye-Pack in the stack of bills than the armed guards at the door.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @06:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @06:34PM (#536600)

      While I suspect HDMI may do something like that, your prepostion relies on secret watermarks.