Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed a rather disturbing trend of thought in technology that's been showing up more and more recently with things like this: "Make it harder for users to know how things really work. Make it harder for users to explore, make mistakes, and learn. Make it harder for users to become developers. The less the users know, the easier it'll seem to them, and the easier it'll be for us to stay in control. Keep them ignorant and consuming. Lock them in a walled garden and tell them it's all 'for your security/safety'. Because knowledge is power, and we don't want that in the hands of the users."

Netflix doing this is one of the more obvious manifestations, but they are not alone - many other companies and even open-source, free-software projects are taking this approach, Google included.

View on HN

Yes, the bottom line is that Netflix is sending you code executed on your own machine. You, as the user, should have full access to inspect the executed code. Obfuscated or minified code should only be used as a bandwidth saving device, and not to hide the true functionality from the user. If the browser is seeing it, why can't the user?

Disabling a feature of the user's browser is absolutely absurd. If you want to hide from the user whats going on then that code needs to run on the server.

Can you imagine opening an image in Photoshop and because of some flag half the tools disappear? Yeah, me either, and images don't even run code.

Have you ever tried scanning in a picture of a US Dollar? ;-)

HOLY SHIT. I never knew about this. Makes me wonder though if someone decided to prevent the scanning of every single currency out there and the developers had to code in a shitload of recognition patterns into the scanners firmware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurion suggests currency has some common features.

Works perfectly fine on Linux (scanning with SANE, editing with Gimp and printing with HPLIP).

Disabling features of user's browser is nothing new. "no right click" scripts, arguments to window.open that remove parts of the browser UI, etc.

Of course, that isn't a defense for disabling the developer console (which should be considered a critical security issue): all of those were as stupid and immoral and indefensible as this.

Don't blame the web page so much as the user agent that respects such silly things. Use a better browser.

I don't use Chrome (I don't use Google products) and I wasn't defending it. It's a critical bug in the browser, but that doesn't mean it's okay for Netflix and Facebook exploit it.

Can you direct me to the button in Photoshop which opens the source code viewer / debugger for the program? Thanks.

It's a great side effect of the web that a good chunk of an app's source code is open to be viewed and learned from. It's fun to explore another site's code and discover how they pulled off their tricks.

Netflix may claim they're doing it for "security reasons" but I could see other companies hopping on the bandwagon "to protect their intellectual property" and that'd be a sad day for the internet. Hopefully this doesn't turn into the crazy right-click-blocking craze as another poster mentioned.

In some cases, it's a speed bump that just ensures that you can do a search and read simple instructions. For example, if you want to turn on Android developers tools, you can find out by searching on "turn on Android developer tools".

Basic literacy and ability to search the web is not that high a bar. There are lots of other gotchas you'll have to overcome to be an Android developer; it's not really a nice programming environment for beginners.

This is part of a larger trend where programming environments are getting increasingly creaky and complicated. Java started out simple, but it's not anymore. The web started out simple, but it's not anymore. Every so often, development environments need a reboot and I think we're long overdue.

There's also the question of whether all this increasing complexity is actually needed - not everyone needs enterprise solution platforms or scalable web application architecture frameworks. Some people just want to write a few webpages to share information with others, and browsers made it easy to get started. Just because we have some really idiotic users and the page source might contain "exploitable" things like cookie values and session IDs doesn't mean we should remove "View Source" and make it a developer-only option. (If the trend continues, I can actually see this happening in the not-so-distant future...)

Similar situation in the 90s it was like "don't right click and view my HTML." They had a point maybe about copyright but the passive aggressive notes, comments, and general behavior hasn't changed. This also exists on online forums a great deal where admins believe that their users understand their concept of ownership and control.

Whenever Congress wants political cover to pass a law, they focus on how it affects kids ("think of the children!") - child pornography is often a convenient excuse, as it was during SOPA/PIPA.

In technology, the excuse is usually either "security" or "better user experience".

Like preventing child pornography, these are both worthwhile goals, but they are often used to cover up goals far less noble, as you note.

And if you don't agree with them, you get called a pedophile or terrorist. Paranoia does funny things to people's brains.

It's a very old impulse and not really limited to corporate group-think. "I'm gonna obfuscate my code and encrypt my data so nobody can STEAL my work!!!" said the programmer of previous decades, oftentimes experiencing a fit of egotistical paranoia over a relatively small personal project.

The same kind of mindset that thinks that the world would operate better if everyone used Bitcoin and trusted no-one.

Often it seems to simply be out of complete delusion about the value of what they've done. I interviewed a guy once that brought in a disk with a horribly crappy little mail client for Windows he'd written that was totally uninteresting to us.

I took one glance at the code, and it confirmed what we'd learned during the interview (he was turned down).

Yet he was terribly concerned with getting the disk back to ensure we wouldn't steal his mail client code. The interview was at Yahoo - it's not like we didn't run a vastly more complicated and advanced e-mail system. And not like there weren't dozens of open source mail clients that were far superior to what he brought in if we for some bizarre reasons should have wanted to "steal" code for a desktop mail client.

Some people are trying to make a more user-usable/programmable computer. See e.g. http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284

I don't have netflix. If everybody does the same, they'll go out of business. Or are you all addicted to TV?

I think you totally missed the point. We don't want Netflix to go away. (Actually, Netflix is one of the most important technology companies in existence at the moment). We want better behavior.

Why is it one of the most important?

Because before Netflix, legally streaming copyrighted movies to your computer was a pipedream and now we have several successful providers including Amazon, Vudu, CrunchyRoll, YouTube Live, Hulu, as a part of Hulu various television networks. The Superbowl was on the internet this year. That's kinda big.

It's partly responsible for bringing options to people with regard to what they see.

it's providing a service that will hopefully lead to a more open future. instead of being forced into buying bundled cable packages, maybe one day we'll be able to have more specified choices. i'd say services like Netflix, Hulu, etc. are all things that push towards that. at least i hope

I still don't really understand the importance of this. Also rather than being open, isn't Netflix still locked down with DRM? I seem to recall there is a Netflix DRM plugin built into ChromeOS.

DRM is what some content creators want right now and so that's what they'll get.

And the importance is the presence of competition where there otherwise wouldn't be any

It's not. I don't watch TV. It's not relevant in my life.

I watched a little bit of the Olympics (my wife made me) and while the ladies figure skating was ok, the rest, and especially the commercials, made me feel dumb.

I had to go read a good book (Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger) to boost my mental processes back to normal.

Stupid TV.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com