Chrome 57 Will Permanently Enable DRM
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
If you look at the actual bug report [1], a replacement option to disable Widevine has already been implemented.
This isn't some evil plot, it's just fallout from Chrome removing support for third-party plugins and thus the plugin management UI (chrome://plugins).
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=686430
So instead it's just a fallout from an earlier plot that is no less evil than this one appears to be.
W3C is more to blame that all of them, as they have violated their mission statement with EME and DRM
If something is standard complaint it should work for all platforms that support the standard not just the Billion dollar corporations that paid to get their technology included into the standard
Blame the media industry for forcing it.
If Google was only implementing DRM to tick boxes, they wouldn't be implementing "extracurriculars" like hardware-based DRM on ChromeOS devices.
They wouldn't own the very DRM company whose product they're peddling, a company which advertises to the very industry which is supposedly forcing Google's hand. http://www.widevine.com/
Take a look at this page and search for 'HW_SECURE_ALL': http://www.widevine.com/product_news.html
Now, what exactly is the point in implementing a more secure DRM variant (which as far as I can tell uses remote attestation) if content remains available to more 'vulnerable' platforms? We even have a potential lockin motive by Google here, too. I can see it now: "Only available on ChromeOS."
No, I'll blame the ad company pushing it into the browser.
Don't get me wrong, my beloved firefox is not better. It wants me to install dev edition to be able to install anything.
We made a mistake somewhere along the way.
The browser vendors then get to take all the "credit" for that. Their decision to remove support for external plugins is absolutely reasonable.
That being said, I wish there was a way I could use unsigned plugins easily, without reinstalling firefox.
The modern browser 1. is its own OS, but 2. doesn't have any concept of a privilege-level separation. That means any random program running as user X is free to install an extension into user X's Chrome or Firefox profile without needing to ask permission. And then said extension can harvest your social-network profiles, replace ads with their own, etc.
Modern operating systems have a concept of users, groups of users and dedicating one of these to the role of administrator. I see no problem in not enforcing signing rule for the extensions installed by administrator (at system-wide locations, not user profile) - they are read only for the rest of the users anyway, so they couldn't be installed by drive-by malware. Power users are happy, naive users are protected.
If there is a malware that looks like installed by administrator, you have much bigger problems anyway. That malware could patch the firefox binary in the same way as it could deploy the extension, so you gained exactly nothing.
But the current situation just makes power users unhappy. This policy killed some extensions that were shipped by Linux distributions.
I though this change was only about Windows? Chrome on Linux lets me load unsigned extensions just fine.
Apparently the major browser vendors' solution to the problem of things running as users breaking the browser is to remove the ability for users to do things. This is a bogus solution.
See: Firefox's chrome-ification of the plugin system.
The feature was actively abused my malware so I guess this does makes sense.
Making it opt-in would be a terrible user experience.
Remember that next time you start up Chrome. You helped Google do this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#Digital_rights_managemen...
There is a real need for DRM, people and companies are asking for it, it's not going away.
As it stands, it is now legally impossible to create a fully standard-compliant web browser without paying licensing fees. That's a huge problem.
What I meant was that there's no reason that there couldn't be a form of DRM that wouldn't require "licensing" in order to use it. It would indeed still have to be a closed-source binary blob—because, like you said, Netflix wouldn't accept anything less—but it could be a freely-redistributable closed-source blob, that any browser would be legally in the clear to include without seeking out a licensing arrangement.
Re: "it's not about patents"—while other IP laws (e.g. copyright) determine whether you have the right to just redistribute a copy of the DRM blob, patents determine whether you can reverse-engineer the original blob to make your own blob with the same ABI that embeds the same keying material, or whether that's also illegal. Patents, thus, are the ultimate difference between a blob you have to pay to license, and one you don't.
I'm afraid you are asking for unicorns there.
Adobe Acrobat is also for-money product. You probably meant Adobe Reader, which is similarly positioned to Acrobat like Flash Player to Flash.
Silverlight was and Edge is a way for Microsoft to prove value of the Windows platform, and in case of Silverlight, also of Microsoft developer tools.
Isn't Uber, the app, a way to sell services? Doesn't Netflix for iOS sell Netflix subscriptions?
Isn't Google Maps, together with all Google apps, a way to keep people online, use Google Search... and provide Google audience for ads?
Neither of these would be true for a free DRM. Just like Flash player was financed by selling Flash, Reader by selling Acrobat, Silverlight by selling Visual Studio, Edge by selling Windows, Uber and Netflix by selling services, Google apps by selling ads - what would you be selling in order to provide freely embeddable DRM binary? And tangent question, how would you build your brand?
Not legal to distribute though, I think.
It is likely a much better issue that H.264 is the dominant video standard used, and that requires paying licensing fees.
where? No sarcasm, genuinely interested
What would happen, if these companies would not get what they are asking for?
- Would the companies go back to distributing disc? Hardly.
- Would they make their own clients? Probably yes.
And the difference wrt today situation would be what?
1) The browsers and standards would remain clean - unlike today.
2) Only supported devices and platforms would be able to play videos - Just like today.
3) If you wanted to play DMRed video, you would have launch separate application. In my eyes, that's acceptable price to pay for 1)
I don't think DRM is great (hate it, actually), but I do understand why the content companies would want it. If I were a content owner I would want to use some sort of DRM system as well, even if it's easy to circumvent.
Does it really matter whether DRM is enabled in Chrome? It has to do with ease of use more than anything. I don't like it, but I don't see how not including EME is good for the end user, if the alternative is having to install a secondary app.
You should want the whole process to be as frictionless as possible, even if that means giving up "amazing code quality" or "a beautiful standard". You can have great code and a crappy app. I don't think the world needs more crappy apps with great code.
From my POV, DRM enabled Chrome matters. It matters, because
- it makes browsers that do not include DRM uncompetetive (especially those who have another business model or do not have bizdev capabilities of Google, Microsoft or Apple).
- it taints the standards and,
- sets the expectations or baseline for having the DRM available.
If the alternative would be to install a secondary app, things would be more obvious:
- that there is a price in developing, maintaining and supporting DRM,
- that price would have to be paid for those who wish the DRM,
- having DRM available would not be seen as automatic,
- you could not use bizdev capabilities in DRM to be able to push your browser - i.e., only Edge supports Netflix in FullHD (Chrome only in 720p). Yes, the official excuse is that Edge supports DRM X and Chrome only DRM Y, but in the end, it is only a business deal that DRM X is deemed acceptable for FHD and DRM Y is not.
How is another browser different from a "secondary app"? It's the same thing.
Some of the motivation for EME is a power-play to kill Flash while replacing it with something browser vendors have control over (and therefore the exploit surface, quality of implementation, etc).
The DRM-ed content would gain an image of being something obsolete, with association with Flash. It would be something to get rid of eventually.
Meanwhile, with EME, it gets an image of modern, something to keep for the future.
It's a price I'd be willing to pay, but as a Linux user, one that I usually can't pay because few organizations care enough to write applications for Linux. Before it was supported by Chrome, If I wanted to watch Netflix, I had to use a brittle set up that involved Wine, a dodgy PPA, Silverlight, and a fake User-Agent string to pretend to be Windows. I jumped onto Chrome Canary to get Netflix support DRM at the earliest opportunity. I have no idea what I'd do today since Silverlight has been discontinued.
I can understand why people wouldn't want to use Chrome with DRM, but I cannot understand why anyone would say it shouldn't exist/no-one else should use it. A sufficiently motivated person belonging to the first group could possibly create and maintain a patchset to keep Chromium DRM-free.
DRM will never go away. Licensing and access is a core part of distribution and even more important now with digital everywhere.
It is far better to have a central standard and streamlined experience today rather than try to maintain a "clean API" which nobody cares about while continuing the terrible performance and security of external plugins.
>it's not going away
"Powerful people are forcing it on everyone, therefore it's good."
Sorry, not buying it.
The EME standard is only a JS API for launching arbitrary and deliberately non-standard DMCA-protected Content Decryption Modules (which are like plug-ins, but bundled with the browser).
In this regard EME is even more closed and less standardized than Flash and Silverlight were. The de-facto NPAPI was at least known and could be used by anyone. Now the CDM API is a vendor-specific DMCA-protected secret.
If the alternative is installing a secondary app, I'll take embedded DRM any day of the week.
You used to be able to integrate playback with any browser you like. Now you can only watch Netflix in browsers that have a contract with a Netflix-approved CDM vendor. Netflix now has both legal and technical means to control what browsers are allowed to do, and they can prevent you from using an open-source browser to avoid it.
The reason people don't take advantage of the time when my door is open is because of the active security measures at that point. In particular, I am present, I represent a reasonable amount of security just by being present, and the law is also present. The reason that theft is rare is because theft is illegal, and confrontational, not because theft is hard.
It's not fair to put all the blame on Chrome users. I don't want to use Chrome, but I really don't want to use Chrome's ugly sister Firefox. I held out on Firefox 28, faking a later version in the user agent, as long as possible. Eventually too much of the web no longer worked, so I had to abandon ship.
All major browser vendors are in a race to the bottom to remove as much flexibility and configurability as possible from their users.
We can't win no matter which browser we use, so it's only going to keep getting worse.
Now they are removing their strong advantage (extensions) in order to improve their weakness (perceived speed) at full speed. I fully expect them to succeed at first and fail at the second, bleeding users in the process.
List of misfeatures off the top of my head, in rough order of annoyance:
* Australis GUI (Chrome clone) [1]
* Loss of tabs on bottom (Chrome has this issue too) [1]
* Ads on home screen [2]
* Forced integration of extensions I don't want (Hello, Pocket) [3]
* Plans to kill XUL extensions and instead use awful Chrome extensions
* Forced code signing to install extensions (Chrome has problems here too)
* Support of EME, or DRM (Chrome has this issue, too) [4]
* Bloated dropdown list of matched sites when typing in URL bar [5]
* Removal of option to not keep download history [6]
* Burying of countless options (like Javascript permissions) into about:config
[1] I won't even be able to use Classic Theme Restorer once XUL extension support is removed.
[2] I hear these may be gone now, but that it was ever implemented concerns me. I do not want adware in any software I use.
[3] I hear Hello is gone, but Pocket is still there.
[4] I don't care about Netflix. Mozilla betrayed their promise of an open web by caving on this front.
[5] It used to take one line per match. Now it has this multi-line mess that takes up far more screen space to display the exact same amount of information. Oldbar extension restores this, but will break like Classic Theme Restorer soon.
[6] unless I also turn off no browsing history. But I want browsing history. There used to even be an about:config option you could add (browser.download.retention) to restore this behavior, but they removed it.
Overall, it's just the complete and utter disregard by the Firefox dev team for their user base. Every single issue I've mentioned has had lots of bug/feature requests, begging the developers for options to do things the old way. All of them shot down completely.
If Firefox wants to keep turning itself into Chrome, then I might as well use Chrome. At least Chrome is faster and doesn't ship with Pocket.
However, given that Mozilla is hellbent on breaking all addons (really the only thing they have going for them) because newer is better or something, I can't really blame anyone for deciding their time is too valuable for staying with a demonstrably insecure browser with questionable development direction.
I really want to stick with FF but when text fields lag and Amazon pages take 10 sec to load it's just not a good choice.
Most sites added version checks and would bounce you to an "update your browser" screen, but most worked just fine by faking the user agent version.
Sites like Dropbox, Patreon, etc would fail to render though. The version hack had the sites trying to use features it didn't really support.
Version 29 was the first to turn the UI into a Chrome imitator, and "Classic Theme Restorer" never got close to matching the actual look and feel of version 28. Especially not on Linux/BSD. I also resented having to use a bulky extension (that will stop working when Firefox drops XUL extensions) just to change really basic UI options like "don't put refresh on the right-hand side of the address bar."
I want a regular title bar in my application with the full title of the current tab.
I don't want rounded curves on my tabs. I'd rather they just look like normal tabs.
I want the tab bar beneath my address bar. Australis removed tabsOnTop=false.
I want back and forward to be separate buttons, and not integrated into the address bar.
I don't want the refresh button on the right-hand side of my address bar. I want it after the back/next buttons.
Firefox 28 with tabsOnTop=false is what I want. Classic Theme Restorer gets me there, but with rendering issues, especially on Linux/BSD. And Mozilla already has plans to kill it when they remove XUL extensions.
None of the Australis changes increased usability. They just changed things for the sake of it, and took away a lot of flexibility in customizing the UI layout. I have a lot of difficulty changing up the way I use programs. I've had the same browser layout for 15 years. Nothing wrong with it. I don't want to retrain muscle memory all the time because some designer at Mozilla was bored.
Firefox 28 is from March 2014. I don't remember sites suddenly stopping working at any time, so it could be that I'm not using some of the features you started missing. Which features did Firefox 28 remove or which missing ones in FF went mainstream on so many sites 3 years ago?
Firefox 28 release notes https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/28.0/releasenotes/
I really don't remember any "update your browser" prompt with Firefox since when web sites were insisting to support only Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox was starting to take off.
>Remember that next time you start up Chrome. You helped Google do this.
For some reason you left out Microsoft who was also part of that gang who lobbied for EME... next time you boot windows and load up Edge, remember you helped Microsoft do this...
Of course the real demand for DRM comes from the content owners, aka Hollywood etc, who for some reason seem to think it has an effect on piracy, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
What does seem to have an effect on piracy is to give customers decent offers, like the netflix model, a fixed affordable fee that gives you access to a great library of content when you want it.
if it's affordable, that means they aren't maximizing value extraction! Think of the unpaid dollars the company could've been receiving, if they only can charge as high as the consumer can afford!
I left them out seeing as at the time they had less than 1% market-share. They did not represent the muscle or deciding-factor which caused Netflix to proceed as they did.
And I did clearly not isolate Google as the sole responsible party. I said they were "one of" the enablers.
All in all, I think my comment holds up well.
> next time you boot windows and load up Edge
Which is why I don't use Edge either. That was easy.
Guys, let's keep in mind that the old days of the Google motto "don't be evil" are long gone. This isn't anymore a battle between good corporations and evil corporations. It's corporations on one side - all of them, including Google - wanting to maximize their profits (which is reasonable) at the cost of reducing people's freedoms (which is not), and common people here.
No freedoms have been harmed. Saying that they have doesn't make sense.
Assuming DRM restrictions match, and always grant, actual legal rights, you'd be right. For instance, you should be able to break DRM to exercise your legal rights, such as education, quoting, ... In practice, you couldn't be more wrong.
For instance, please show me how DRM would allow me to quote a DRM protected video stream and replay it in court because, for instance, I was personally defamed in said video stream. Or I want to use a Disney movie scene in a video editor to include short quotes in an online course about storytelling. That won't work without the DRM being broken entirely off at my request, but it is my legal right.
What you're saying is a bit like pointing out that every homeless man has the right to do anything Donald Trump or Bill Gates are allowed to do. In theory, yes.
Excessive rights have been given to rights holders, such that the song "Happy Birthday to You", first published in print in 1912, entered the common domain in the EU this January 2017. 105 Years.
Patents last 20 years to ensure innovation continues. At some point creative works belong to the society that enabled them, not lucky rent seekers.
This makes it hard to keep an archive.
If DRM existed in a world where copyright rules were entirely sane, where would its disadvantages would outweigh its advantages?
(Not defending DRM. DRM is garbage. If you have the ability and resources to break DRM, it is practically immoral of you not to do so.)
(you sue the person who benefits from defaming you, not (necessarily) the one doing the actual act. For example, if CNN had paid some homeless man to say I beat him up, I would sue CNN, not the homeless man)
How is this different than any other protected-access evidence material?
And of course, people cheat. Asking the defendant to show this material enables them to cheat. Where do people get this attitude that courts are either capable, or even interested in being the final arbiter of truth in society ? They are not, they have no interest in doing so. They exist to keep the peace, and to keep situations from spiraling out of control. They only enforce the law in a very limited fashion, and this whole absolutist faith in the justice system that so many people have is a fantasy.
People do cheat in court. For two reasons :
1) hubris. Usually, if a case ends up in court it indicates there is more than a bit of ego involved on the defendant's side.
2) the punishments for lying to the court (esp. if it's manipulation along the lines of "we have 5 versions of the requested material, and yes we picked the least bad one), are far less than people think.
> How is this different than any other protected-access evidence material?
The complainant always, always, always, always brings the material and shows it to the court and the defendant.
So it's very different, and very unlikely to work at all otherwise.
I don't know what this means. Rights are not the same thing as opportunity.
Getting access to DRM content under legal rights is the same as getting access to any other protected content, through legal means. Licensing a copy, writing a subpoena, or numerous other options. While it may not be convenient, I still don't see where freedoms are being harmed.
Licensing is the name of the legal act where the rights holder confers additional rights to the user. There is no licensing involved for all the examples I gave, and no permission from the rights holder because I already have those rights. I don't need to license anything to exercise those rights.
DRM is taking away the means for me to exercise rights I already have.
It is like me placing a fence around your car, then claiming you need permission from me to open that fence, to which I can then attach conditions. For you to drive your car you need to go through me, even if it's not all that convenient. No, not even to "make sure it's legal".
This is not reasonable, and you expecting anyone to be happy about such a thing is insane.
The access to the content requires additional work, that is all. The fact that you still have your rights is what allows you to request that access for whatever situation you're in.
And yes, that's exactly how insane you sound. If you limit my "access to my rights" you have definitely taken away those rights. Stop spouting bullshit.
eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7058004
This is exactly why 'slippery slope' arguments are not as fallacious as people make them out to be. Humans are not rationally acting robots. Spreading out an unacceptable change into a series of gradual and individually acceptable changes does work (even though logically it shouldn't), because it slowly shifts people's baseline expectations.
"Slippery slopes" are only fallacious when you don't actually describe a mechanism from reaching the top of the slope to the bottom.
"If we let women vote, next thing you know there will be gays in the military." That's fallacious because there's no connection at all between women's sufferage and gays in the military. Many slippery slope arguments take that form.
"If we allow DRM plugins, we will eventually have DRM in the browser always on," could be considered fallacious because it's not made explicit how one gets from DRM plugins to DRM always on, even if it may be implicitly obvious.
"If we allow DRM plugins, we will eventually have DRM in the browser always on because that is the endgame Netflix et al wants and they are spreading out the implementation of their evil master plan to gain compliance" isn't fallacious as a slippery slope because the mechanism is made explicit.
"Slippery slope" is, by itself, a mechanism. It means exactly what you're describing in your last paragraph, except it does not require someone explicitly planning the progression.
"Spreading out the implementation..." does not improve the argument because it's just restating the definition of "slippery slope". The statement that Netflix has some "evil master plan" is an assertion without proof and doesn't add anything to the argument, either.
The premise that Netflix is acting with mallace could be false or true. If that premise is stated and false, then the argument is valid yet unsound because it has a false premise. Valid meaning, the conclusion would follow from the premises if all of them were true.
If you remove discussion of the mechanism from the argument, so that it reads like the arguments stated in the first and second paragraphs, then the argument is invalid because the conclusion does not follow from the premises. That's what a fallacy is.
This makes perfect sense, and at the end of the day those who produce there content have a right to choose the conditions of how it's distributed
Sure, but also Netflix and other distributors have right to choose what they distribute and what they don't distribute. So a few movies would not be available, until the studios do the math and stop insist on DRM.
Instead, they managed to outsource the support burden for their wish and it is financed by third parties, who don't care about DRM at all.
They are solving it by making their original content and there surely is not DRM enforcement by third parties.
In the end, it is about who can persuade the other party about their own relative importance in the business.
On which I call bullshit. They still use it for their own productions and series.
Why? DRM adds cost and complexity to Netflix's operations. I bet a not insignificant number of customer support issues are related to DRM (e.g. bad drivers).
> They still use it for their own productions and series.
Because that's what their platform is. The vast majority of their content remains licensed, and that licensed content requires DRM. They'd have to run a largely different platform just for their own content to be DRM free and now have customers with inconsistent experiences depending on which content was displayed.
I've been a Chrome user since its earliest releases. I remember switching away from Firefox at the time because Chrome seemed faster on my old PC, and I also loved the minimalistic design. Now I feel Firefox has an edge again, and I also get to supported a company whose values are apparently more aligned with mine. Go Mozilla!
I use Safari most other times. Never Firefox though
however, if DRM is built-in to the browser, users no longer have a gate to cross, and so DRM media will become the norm.
Like WebRTC? That finally allowed me to uninstall Skype?
Watermarks with detection in cameras and scanners, be it the simple EURion constellation[1], ContentArmor[2] or the watermarking techniques developed by Denuvo, these things exist.
Some directly prevent you from photographing the content or filming it, others tell the camera to add identifying information steganographically. Even others are only used for ContentID. All of them work even if the material is going through analog copying.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation [2] http://contentarmor.net/
But either way, let's say you couldn't disable it...and that it was also the case in Chromium. Couldn't someone fork Chromium and put out a new browser with that disabled? Chromium is all open source, yes? So what's stopping someone from doing that?
However, adding any encryption covered by DMCA makes it the law, and allows you to use the police to enforce your file format's specification.
With everyone crying and complaining about Firefox on this thread, why not all get together and fork THAT browser too? There have been forks of software before...some MUCH bigger than a browser. Take MATE forking off from Gnome 2 when people didn't like Gnome 3 at the time. Look at LibreOffice. Why should Chromium or Firefox be any different?
I see no technical reasons for why Chrome shouldn't be able to do the same.
I guess Google has an active interest in promoting DRM, and as such making DRM cumbersome to use is counter to that goal.
Missing is "Ask" and a whitelist.