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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

If we should train our guns somewhere it should be at the W3C; the guardians of web standards. W3C shouldn't have legitimized this feature by bringing it into standards discussions. The media companies would have had to comply eventually. They had no future without distribution over the internet. Now of course, they have hope.

Mozilla had no chance once Google, MS, Apple and everybody else decided to support EME. Most users don't care if they fought for open standards. They are probably just going to say that Firefox sucks.

If you ask me, Mozilla could be the most important software company in the world. The stuff they are building today is fundamental to an open internet for the future. It is important that they stay healthy for what lies ahead.

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The HTML working group at W3C has clearly rejected Google/Microsoft/Netflix proposal on both technical and ideological grounds, but the decision has been overridden by group's Chair, and further objections have been bypassed by forming a new, pro-DRM working group out of public view.

The EME spec draft has been published almost unchanged, even though it has known significant flaws, e.g. most of the spec is non-normative and it's been acknowledged (without a fix) that the key diagram is factually incorrect (shows that the browser is trusted).

It seems like corporate interests within W3C are much stronger than W3C's integrity.

I suspect it even goes farther than Google and Netflix using their market share and influence to pass the spec — they've probably been blackmailed by MPAA & co. that would pull the plug on Netflix and Google Play if they didn't do what they've been told to.

The W3C doesn't really have any power as was demonstrated by the failure of XHTML and the ultimate triumph of WHATWG. The history of the web has shown since the <blink> days that those who write the code to the popular browsers set the standards. The last 10 years have been a miracle of openness after Mozilla wrestled the web away from Microsoft, but now they are becoming powerless in the face of a Google-Apple-Microsoft industry alliance. Mozilla's desperate attempt to to stay relevant by distributing a closed source blob will fail. The closed source future will be increasingly anti-user. Personally I blame Larry Page, the old idealistic Google would have allied with Mozilla and could have stopped this.

Personally I blame Larry Page, the old idealistic Google would have allied with Mozilla and could have stopped this.

Huh? I think it is more complex than that.

Obviously it's complex.

Larry Page still failed to do a single thing to stop it (that I know of) and he is probably the single person with the most power to oppose this.

EME is not on the top of my list though, though this claim reminds me of this incident: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3106555&cid=41288357

Blaming Mozilla's decreasing influence on a vague and alleged "Google-Apple-Microsoft industry alliance" isn't really accurate.

While the corporate players involved may just happen to have interests that might align somewhat in this case, Mozilla has made its fair share of mistakes that have driven people away from Firefox. A browser with fewer users results in less influence for its creator and users, obviously.

Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox before version 4 were generally excellent releases. This was back when Mozilla innovated and put out offerings that benefited users. These versions truly made people better off, and much of Firefox's rapid adoption was due to direct word-of-mouth recommendation.

Then around Firefox 4, they decided to imitate Chrome, rather than leading the way. The release schedule changes caused broken add-ons for a very long time. This drove people away. They've also repeatedly made harmful UI changes, to the point where Firefox today is almost visually identical to Chrome. This has driven more people away. Meanwhile, there has only been minimal progress when it comes to improving the performance of Firefox, and reducing its memory usage. This, too, has driven more people away to browsers that manage to perform better, with fewer resources. (Spare us the are-we-fast-yet-style benchmarks that just don't seem to match the actual browsing experience.)

Nobody but Mozilla themselves made Mozilla act in such a manner. Nobody but Mozilla themselves are responsible for driving away so many Firefox users.

And so here we are today, with Firefox at perhaps 15% to 20% of the browser market, if even that. This is a far cry from their peak, when they were above 30%. They no longer offer an appealing product, which causes a decrease in the number of people using it, which directly results in the unfortunate lack of influence that we're seeing in this case.

At the point they decided to (as you say) imitate Chrome, they had _already_ lost quite a bit of market share to chrome, and the market share loss seemed to be continuing.

Whether their choices to 'be more like Chrome' were appropriate responses or not you can debate, but dating their loss of influence or market share to after they decided to 'imitate Chrome' is a mistaken timeline.

Personally, I'd say their loss of market to share from Chrome came from a few things:

* Google's ability to promote Chrome was huge, since so many people look at google every day. This is huge, and perhaps we could just stop there, but...

* Firefox had become bloated and slow and a bit crashy. It's just true. Google had the resources to write a high-quality new browser (which is pretty huge), and their browser was really really fast and really really stable compared to FF. (It is no longer so stark a difference, cause FF has much improved on speed and stability, and Chrome, as it continued to be developed got the inevitable bloat and bugs that software does. Although Google writes pretty good software, and Chrome is no exception).

* FF just wasn't innovating much anymore in features, for users or developers. There wasn't a lot of (non-ideological) reason to use it, if something else came along. Developers matter because they influence other users (in part by designing their sites with certain browsers as their main testing environment), and developers aren't influenced as much by the fact that google.com tells them to download Chrome. But I think FF lost significant dev market/mindshare to Chrome too, in part because Chrome's dev tools were way better than FF's at that time.

Now, if Mozilla made the right or wrong choices to try and recover, we can argue (I think overall they've made a lot of the right choices for the hand they were dealt), but at the point they changed to be 'more like Chrome', it was a reaction to already having lost a huge amount of market share. If they had kept on the course they were on, I think they'd have lost even more by now.

Yes, I agree that some Firefox users had moved to Chrome early on, and that Google does have the potential to market Chrome more forcefully than Mozilla can for Firefox.

I don't think that the timing is all that relevant, though. This has been a gradual process over several years now.

The main point is that it wasn't so much what the other browsers and their vendors did that reduced Mozilla's influence, but rather that it was what Mozilla did (or didn't) do that has resulted in Firefox's decline.

Mozilla stopped leading, and instead decided to follow Chrome. While doing this, they've bungled major Firefox features, ranging from automatic upgrades to the UI design, time and time again. They've neglected to sufficiently resolve long-standing resource usage problems. They've ignored feedback from disappointed Firefox users for years now. They've ignored that this direction obviously isn't helping to prevent users from leaving Firefox, while at the same time it's driving a lot of users away, and furthermore it isn't really bringing in any new users.

In my opinion, Mozilla has been its own worst enemy these past several years. They've inflicted more harm on their own cause than any external opponent or competitor could have ever hoped to do.

Don't you get tired writing variations of the same comment over and over again?

The W3C and major tech corporations aren't separate entities, the people sitting on the W3C boards WORK for these companies.

Don't fall for the smokescreen.

>I suspect it even goes farther than Google and Netflix using their market share and influence to pass the spec — they've probably been blackmailed by MPAA & co. that would pull the plug on Netflix and Google Play if they didn't do what they've been told to

Add to that Youtube being able to now use EME to stop downloader extensions and get more streaming deals and it helps explains why Google pushed Netflix support on Chromebooks as one of the first real world implementations of EME.

Everyone keeps repeating the claim that "most users don't care" but I think the more accurate characterization is "most users don't understand". Teaching people is much harder than blithely complaining about their motives, so I can understand the appeal to HN commenters, but I would have expected Mozilla to see above that.

Without responding to your specific point, many people say "people who disagree with me (just) don't understand," but in reality the people who disagree often have just as good an understanding of the basic facts, yet disagree anyway.

Put me in that camp. I did care about DRM at one time, but that's tapered off quite a bit over the years.

A lot of this probably correlates with my having become something of a cord cutter. It's hard to get worked up over concerns that someone might be threatening my "right" to disposable content that I've decided I don't need, usually don't want, and tend to think of as having a net negative impact on my quality of life. Perhaps it's my jaded brand of libertarianism showing: I'm inclined to say that media companies have just as much a right to make it hard for me to give them money as I have a right to continue not giving them money. Ironically enough, we're actually working toward a common cause.

(edit: A response would be more edifying than a drive-by downvote, y'all.)

> Perhaps it's my jaded brand of libertarianism showing

The big catch is that it's an uneven equation because it's illegal to circumvent DRM due to the DMCA. If users could legally undo the DRM, I think you'd have a valid point: media companies are free to use whatever DRM they wish, and end-users and circumvent it if they are able. It would create an arms race which I believe the media companies would quickly lose. Instead, there's no legal weight in favor of the media companies, with no one standing up for end users' rights.

I think you're missing my point. My freedom to not give them money isn't about being able to easily copy their media. It's about my freedom to not consume that media whatsoever.

To put it in language that's less easily interpreted as being pro-DRM: If HBO wants to use digital rights management to sink Game of Thrones into a cultural black hole, I'm more than happy to oblige them on that one.

> my freedom to not consume that media whatsoever

But this freedom is bounded in that it comes with a cost. If you don't consume their output then there is a segment of popular culture which you are excluded from... the social distance between you and friends and family are increased. It might be a black hole from your perspective, but lots and lots of the people around you are opting-in.

There are ways around this— there are many more things that its possible to have in common with others, and its possible to leverage your ignorance to create conversation— I'd rather hear a summary of a TV series from a friend than see the series. But it isn't as simple or free of a choice as you seem to be making it out to be.

Yep. That segment of the population being people who are hard-pressed to carry a conversation that doesn't revolve around a subject that I don't enjoy talking about.

Believe it or not, that prospect doesn't actually depress me.

> [ I don't like that content ]

But how will you know? You can't judge the content if you haven't seen it..

I thought like that in my 20s, but as I've gotten older I've decided life is too short to give everything a chance. I'd like to be really sure I'll like something before I give it a chance. Ironically, the Internet, which has probably decreased my access to content because of its role in the creation of DRM, has also increased my ability to see what's worth spending my time on.

Perhaps I lose out on some serendipity, but it's worth it so I don't feel like I've wasted my time.

Which brings us back around to the point about DRM. There's so much I can consume where my rights as an owner are respected that I don't often feel the need to bother with anything else. Hell, I can even get Game of Thrones on DVD if its that important to my social life.

And he didn't say he wouldn't enjoy it, he said he doesn't enjoy talking about it. Probably because he hasn't seen it. But the idea that one's under some obligation to see it in order to engage in conversation probably means one needs new friends.

I believe he's referring to the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKMbdfbpWvg

It's an interesting observation imo, you should watch the entire thing because when it starts out it doesn't seem as if it's relevant to this conversation.

having said that, I haven't watched television or cable in probably a good 15 years. If I find a show I really enjoy, I'll purchase the DVD/Blue-Ray and watch the entire thing mostly ad-free. And I prefer it that way.

There is a crazy abundance of things to do and content to consume, and life is short. I don't avoid DRM free books because I don't like them, I avoid them because there are other books that I'll have a great time with.

You could argue that most of the works available on Netflix are pretty superfluous, but this isn't really a reason to dismiss the reasons not to use DRM. For one, the issue extends to much more media than just video. Ebook DRM is way more scary.

In the case of any DRM though, it just so happens that not using their services is probably the only reasonable solution. So you're spot-on in that regard. The very existence of DRM is proof that these companies are on life support anyway.

>Ebook DRM is way more scary.

I'm curios about your use of the term "scary". First of all, is the assumption that ebooks are a more valid form of information transmission or artistic expression than video? If it's purely a question of information, then I'd argue that ebook DRM is largely irrelevant because the Internet has surpassed books as the primary information delivery tool (see: Wikipedia). [side note: I think it's curious that as our access to some content has become more restricted, are access to other content has exploded. A person would never have had access to something like the Wikipedia outside a library 20 years ago, now you can get it on your phone wherever you are].

And it's not like print books have gone away, nor like they will in the near future. Indeed, publishers are desperate to continue to sell them to you because they have more control over the distribution chain. This applies to video as well, for that matter.

I care when it is included in the browser. DRM usually needs to fingerprint the device it is on. DRM is essentially introducing another vector for track you, even if you don't consume DRM protected content.

First they DRM'd the videos, and I did not speak out— Because I don't watch TV and Movies.

Then they DRM'd the music, and I did not speak out— Because I have a nice vinyl collection.

Then they DRM'd the ebooks, and I did not speak out— Because I still use public libraries.

Then they DRM'd the news, and I did not speak out— Because I don't read the news.

Then they DRM'd me.

The reason the slippery slope is considered a fallacy is because if you're not careful about the validity of your logic, it would apply equally well to any ill.

That would therefore mean that all bad things must be stopped with full force, because "First they $VERBd the $GROUP[i], and I did not speak out" would apply for the union of VERBs, GROUPs, and possible {i}s.

E.g. in this case you literally end with "Then they DRM'd me". Are you seriously trying to claim that the end state of Mozilla supporting EME is that DRM is used to physically hurt people?

>Are you seriously trying to claim that the end state of Mozilla supporting EME is that DRM is used to physically hurt people?

Of course not. That last line is clearly meant to be absurd. I wanted break the slippery slope argument.

What I was trying to do was poke fun at the idea that DRM is okay as long it doesn't affect you directly. You should speak out against DRM, not because it is a slippery slope, but because it is wrong and it hurts people. The reason I think you should speak out against interning socialists is because it is wrong, not because of the slippery slope that it entails.

Fair enough. Poe's Law and all, it's hard to tell nowadays. :)

many people say "people who disagree with me (just) don't understand," but in reality the people who disagree often have just as good an understanding of the basic facts

I have yet to meet anyone who disagrees with the theory of evolution through natural selection who actually understands it well. Security, privacy, and cryptography are complicated subjects where the most potent effects are often epiphenomena. I don't have studies to back me up, but my impression from talking to most non technical people, is that they have only a hazy idea of what is involved.

To further the point, when 2 people diagree about facts (they disagree less often about morality), then at least someone is doing it wrong.

Might be you, might be me. Either way, contradictions are still false.

Did you just place scientific theories and political opinions in the same epistemological category?

And here I thought postmodernism was dead.

No. Scientific theories with cryptography and security. Both of those are closely associated with politics, but have verifiable truth.

but in reality the people who disagree often have just as good an understanding of the basic facts, yet disagree anyway.

Really? I hate to be the elitist asshole, but if people don't understand that making bits uncopyable is not in the realm of reality, then I would argue they don't understand basic facts. See Schneier's commentary on "making water not wet" and copy protection, eg https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0108.html#7

It's impossible to make bits uncopyable, but it's easy to make them less convenient to copy. That's the purpose of DRM.

It's not easy to make them less convienient to copy.

It is easy to outlaw it, though.

Yes, it's exactly as with the mass spying issue. Most may even say they don't care, but only because they don't really understand how far NSA's power can go and how it can be used. Once you sit them down and explain it to them properly, they usually start understanding and realizing how dangerous it is.

What if people don't want to be teached? Honestly, if you talk to most users about this they'll just say they'll use Chrome if FireFox is broken on a movie, and if they have to pay for the movie they'll just use BitTorrent or Popcorn Time or whatever pirate app is popular right now.

Could an analogy be drawn to other issues where consumers have no hope of understanding all the issues and influencing the market, like medicine and automotive safety? There are decisions consumers aren't expected to make because of the enormous hidden complexity combined with powerful entrenched interests. Why, then, do some use consumer apathy as a sign that it's okay to force DRM onto everybody for the sake of a relatively small industry, or to charge extra to turn off intrusive deep packet inspection (AT&T)?

>Everyone keeps repeating the claim that "most users don't care" but I think the more accurate characterization is "most users don't understand".

Certainly. But look at the people here on HN, who do understand. How many have them have stopped using browsers and OSes that ship EME?

The people that would educate the "average" user, that doesn't yet understand, are HN-type people. But while there is lots of hatred for DRM in the comments here, there simply is not enough interest in actually fighting it. It we did want to fight it, we wouldn't use products with EME and we would get our non-techie friends to do the same.

>It we did want to fight it, we wouldn't use products with EME and we would get our non-techie friends to do the same.

I think if I tried to do this, I would have way fewer friends. I don't get invited to many parties to begin with.

Yeah, I'm guessing that is pretty common, and it's why EME is winning.

It seems to me that people view and treat the same as politics: your voice is supposed to matter but collusion, corruption, relationships, lobbying etc. seem to matter more.

It is actually both. While it is true that many users don't understand, there are many users who understand and still don't care.

I don't think people do care in an ideological sense. But they probably do get annoyed if they have to install Silverlight, or can't play a purchased movie on Youtube because the DRM has failed. If we are to continue having DRM to watch videos then it might as well work.

People don't care about this stuff until it bites them in the ass. Then they care a whole lot.

Most users don't care to understand. They just want you to quit spouting your nerd shit and give them their TV shows.

How about: it's unrealistic to expect most users to understand enough to care, in the foreseeable future. Therefore, free software organizations need to make a choice of mass appeal vs free software purity. I'm of the opinion that you're never going to get all those users, so why cater to them? Also, if you don't get them on your own terms (avoiding proprietary software), what's the point?

smartest comment on the thread

The media companies would have no issues whatsoever with continuing to use outdated, insecure and otherwise broken technologies to ensure that their content is delivered with some form of DRM. Those technologies already exist, and already ensure the media companies have a future of distribution over the web.

Creating some form of standard around the use of DRM is the lesser of two evils when compared to the use of a multitude of proprietary decoders.

I find this funny...

Today there are 2 decoders, Flash and Silverlight

with EME we are moving to a minimum of 4, and possibly a crap load more decoders... Adobe DRM, MS PlayReady, Apple FairPlay and Google Widevine.

How is that better?

Ohh and calling them extensions does not magically make them better than plugins.. they are still binary blobs running closed source code interfacing with the browser using an api. a plugin by another name is still a plugin

Today, there are two main browser plugins required for watching DRM Video on the web. These plugins are not decoders, they are merely platforms on which the decoders themselves can run, alongside any other code that the site may supply. The problem with this approach, as I see it, is that these platforms create an inherent security risk for the user alongside the current issues regarding free software and ethics. The use of Flash/Silverlight also slows the adoption of other, more open, web standards.

By switching to EME, you're switching out the Flash & Silverlight platforms for a set of closed binary blobs which take an encrypted stream from the browser and produce unencrypted video/audio for the browser to display instead of executing arbitrary code. Now, I'll admit I'm not terribly well versed on the issue, but to me that seems to increase user security, promotes the use of other open web standards over Flash/Silverlight and keeps the media companies happy. The only people losing out in this situation are those that find DRM conceptually abhorrent.

Functionally, as far as displaying video goes, there is very little difference between a Flash Video player, and a Adobe CDM Video Player.

Sure it might have a slightly smaller attack surface because it does not have all the other flash "features" that are not really used any more, but do not fool yourself, it is still executing arbitrary code that is beyond your control, and any attempt to control what this code does could be considered a violation of DMCA.

It however in no way promotes the open web, I do not know where you get that from. This is the exact opposite of promoting the open web

As to who loses out, it is not just people that find DRM objectionable. Will Adobe DRM work on ARM for the various SBC system like the Raspberry pi? Doubtful.. Will there be a CMD for midori? Ice Weasel? or any of the other less popular browsers? Doubtful. With the Adobe CDM work well, and bug free with out killing system resources under Linux x86? Doubtful (it will probably work, just not well)

So we are back to a world where only "approved" platforms are allowed to use the web fully, this is direct opposition to W3C's stated mission.

I imagine that playing videos is the Flash Player's primary use case. With EME supporting only video decoding, we can sooner phase out support for Flash Player and everything else it drags along.

If Adobe's CDM can run while completely sandboxed from network and file access, then what if it was implemented in asm.js? Then "CDM.js" could be portable across all browser platforms and architectures. I'm not sure how well Firefox's JIT would optimize obfuscated asm.js code generated from obfuscated C++ code. :)

Disclosure: I used to work on Adobe's Flash Player team and I now work at Mozilla, so I have many conflicting personal and professional biases. :)

>If Adobe's CDM can run while completely sandboxed from network and file access

I'll admit this isn't my area of expertise, but how would this be possible?

The CDM and the server runs some sort of secure key exchange with the browser doing the actual network traffic. The browser is eavesdropping on the communication but that's what Diffie-Hellman, STS etc are solving. Then the browser gets the encrypted stream, hands it to the CDM which has some ties to the OS to be able to draw on the screen. Only tie to the OS is required, no files, no network. The browser can handle those.

The EME spec is designed to make this feasible at least in principle: the browser hands the encrypted video bits to the CDM.

In the case of Adobe's CDM and Mozilla, this is one of the points that was explicitly negotiated: the CDM will be running in a sandbox.

produce unencrypted video/audio for the browser to display

That's the silly example used in all of the pro-EME propaganda, but the standard also allows content providers to demand an encrypted path all the way to the video card, IIRC, thus bypassing the browser's ability to save content, and exposing a potentially insecure video driver to the CDM blob.

This is my real objection to DRM: it fundamentally either is just a show (turning over the unencrypted message to the browser, anyway) or requires that I be locked away from the computation happening (has direct access to hardware and security features to keep me out).

So either it doesn't work by design, or it's a rootkit's wetdream since all hardware is designed to be able to lock me out.

Is a bank vault "just a show" simply because no one has ever invented one that can't be penetrated with a sufficient application of high explosives or a plasma torch?

The goal of making Joe-Average choose between the official channels or some malware laden underground site is a perfectly pragmatic one on the parts of the licensors. They don't need to block the ilicit copying completely to see a benefit...

Especially when the costs of their 'protection' are predominately externalized onto the users (in the form of restricted freedoms, closed software, spyware, etc).

In my terms, a bank vault would protect my valuables by fundamentally denying me access to them, except on terms dictated by some external trusted party. This is the case of DRM using entirely encrypted paths (which can be broken with the big guns, like in your analogy), not the case of it being "just for show".

> The goal of making Joe-Average choose between the official channels or some malware laden underground site is a perfectly pragmatic one on the parts of the licensors.

Uh... what? The problem with DRM from a practical standpoint is that the effective technical means serve as an impediment to Mr Joe Average using his computer for perfectly allowed purposes - including at times playing the game. (Look at any major game launch recently for thousands of upset players because the DRM servers are overloaded.)

Secondly, you presented a strawman, since there are lots of non-malware-laden copies available online.

I'm not really against DRM per se, if there were some magic solution. Nor am I arguing that partially effective security measures are meaningless. I'm arguing that having encryption protected computing channels which deny the user override (or inspection) access are dangerous (duh! they go on malware laden websites, as you point out), and that any DRM which doesn't use such hardware level (or even low-level software) is no more effective than just setting a metadata flag saying it's copyrighted.

I get why companies want DRM, but that doesn't mean that I think giving in to their wishes is a good idea, when it both creates worse computer security problems and fails to solve the problem at a technical level.

A lot of people pirate things precisely because DRM is such a hassle.

Incomplete or inaccurate, but "silly"?

sh... brainless devs just want to bash flash... that's why.Most of them didnt live the time when you had to install 60 plugins to read videos.

There is no "standard" around DRM. Google, Microsoft and Apple each will have their own different DRM platform. If you're outside of those 3 platforms, tough luck. Their only hope is to have a popular enough 3rd party DRM platform, like from Adobe, to be able to play those videos if their OS isn't from Google, Microsoft or Apple.

How will Jolla Sailfish play these DRM'ed videos? They cannot. Unless they implement the Adobe DRM, too, which can only be implemented as a plugin, into these non-Google/Apple/MS solutions.

So now instead of just Adobe's flash , and a Silverlight that was dying anyway since Microsoft deprecated it, we'll have at least four different DRM platforms. Yay for the "HTML5 DRM"!

> Creating some form of standard around the use of DRM is the lesser of two evils when compared to the use of a multitude of proprietary decoders.

I have nothing against the media and proprietary software companies getting together to make a DRM standard. It would have precisely zero impact on my life, since I already avoid all forms of DRM.

I don't see what that has to do with Web standards though, since their goals are completely incompatible. EME shouldn't exist.

For now. If this spreads to being able to DRM images and text, or they use it on YouTube/whatever other video site, you will be affected. That's the real danger to my eyes.

Open standards (and free software as well) do not directly fight closed distributors (both media and software) or ask them to change their ways. But what they do is give a more open upstart a significant advantage; an advantage that helps them offset some of the other shortcomings they have.

So if my company had average content that could reach 2 billion people against Mediaflix's 50m with closed silverlight, I'd still survive. Once I start making better content, Mediaflix is forced to do something or they'll slowly die.

So if my company had average content that could reach 2 billion people against Mediaflix's 50m with closed silverlight, I'd still survive.

Your company is called YouTube, and it's doing just fine.

Where are the latest Hollyood hotness on YouTube? I only found teasers, third party fair use, and deleted videos and accounts.

Hence "average content". The studios are the reason Netflix has to serve their content with DRM, and they're fairly unanimous about it.

The real fight here is about mobile and all the other platforms like Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Sony, wearables, cars, etc. Netflix and co. don't want to have to develop for all these platforms, they want to hijack the web to do the cross-platform dirty work for them. Especially since Adobe already gave up on running Flash on all the platforms after Apple blocked them on iOS.

We're rather talking about Youtube going under DRM than Netflix.

Youtube without DRM was an advantage for a couple of hackers: They could download vids for offline viewing (iPod/iPad and p2p-sharing after takedown).

Youtube with DRM could change the game. The impact of a movie being pirated on Youtube is much more contained if users can't download it.

But they will. If the video player can decrypt the content, so can any youtube downloader transparently for the user.

Adding DRM to youtube simply doesn't make sense to me. The majority of content is added to youtube because the publisher wants people to view it and share it as much as possible. They aren't monetising the content directly.

It's really only big media companies that are in the weird position of wanting many people to view their content but only under specific constraints.

Some videos on Youtube are already using DRM, in the form of RTMPE.

Sadly, I think you're right. Silverlight is effectively dead now, but still in use for a lot of streaming video. Netflix et al will probably only ditch it when it can't even be installed on many computers any more, and will probably go for some other third party framework when they do.

> The stuff they are building today is fundamental to an open internet for the future

How exactly and what's the point of Mozilla, if they aren't following through on their principles? If they do whatever Google and Microsoft do, then they are just as bad as them, and not something I can put my hopes in to protect an "open Internet". They proved that yesterday.

Mozilla could stick to their guns on this, but it probably wouldn't have much practical effect, and the users they'd lose give them that much less leverage to fight the next battle. We already have the FSF to make ideological points with no compromise, so I'd much rather Mozilla pick battles where they can make a difference, and compromise to maintain relevance when they can't.

> Mozilla had no chance once Google, MS, Apple and everybody else decided to support EME.

Given Mozilla always brags about their mission and openness, that somehow looks like as if someone had a public resolution about staying away from alcohol, but then... well... the circumstances were so unfortunate... and just one shot wasn't such a big deal... and it's not that person's fault - it's his friend who had brought a bottle.

That's unfortunate and not respectable.

Oh, and it's not like I say alcohol is something bad. (Grabs some ale.)

That is a complete misrepresentation of the situation. This is almost literally a case of "choose your poison" for Mozilla. Abstaining is no way to win. There is no way to win this for Mozilla, damned if they do, damned if they don't.

However, at least with Mozilla you get the benefit that the DRM piece is as contained as possible and you are not leaking information to the content providers. Something Mozilla fought for that neither Google nor Microsoft gave anything about.

Also, Mozilla doesn't brag about its mission. What does that even mean? That Mozilla is pointing out the difference between itself and the other players in the market? It's vital that people are aware of the fact that Mozilla is a mission driven organization. That is the reason d'etre of Firefox.

> Also, Mozilla doesn't brag about its mission.

Really? Maybe that's just my perception, but I'd say their homepage is almost all about their mission and principles (and then about their products that are said to be driven by those). And their "about" page is the same. If that's not bragging - I'm not sure what bragging really is.

Then, their manifesto is very anti-DRM by nature, all promoting openness and end-user accessibility and control. So, it seems that they had already chosen their position and part of it was to abstain from the consumer restrictions.

Now, when their targets (bringing their products to everyone and promoting openness) started to seriously conflict with each other, it was clearly shown that the dark side is more seductive.

My old firefox tshirt says "Take back the web" across the back in big letters. Now that they have "given the web back", Im not sure I can wear it anymore.

Definition of brag [1]: 1. a pompous or boastful statement 2. arrogant talk or manner: cockiness

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brag

No it's a perfect analogy.

Mozilla have added an attack vector on users. They fought for the right to be the people adding the poison. That's not noble or unfortunate.

It means that there is no difference between Mozilla and the other "players in the market". Except that Mozilla are lying to themselves about it.

And where does most of Mozilla's funding come from? Google. As long as that's the case it can never be truly independent.

I wish they found an alternate source of cash that allowed them to get rid of those Google hypocrites.

Disclaimer: I work for the arrogant Google hypocrites.

I don't think Google has anything to do with it. Any realistic source of funding for Mozilla is going to be proportional to market share.

Unfortunately, the principled path is not tenable for Mozilla in this position. They were seriously damaged by their refusal to implement H.264 due to its patented nature, which they gave up recently. Mozilla has the choice of taking their lumps by swallowing this piece of crap and continuing to survive or becoming obsolete. If users can watch videos without a struggle in Chrome but can't watch in Firefox, what's the effect going to be? Firefox is already on the ropes, they can't handle another H.264 debacle.

You stand by your principle or you don't have one.

"We 98% stand by our principles but at the end of the day, if it is important enough, we will cave like we did before"

Is not an inspiring message.

Mozilla should stop the whole "We are Mozilla Doing good is part of our code", "Different by design" shtick because it is no longer true, they are now just another software house that makes a browser.

But they are not healthy. They have been corrupted by Adobe.

We need software freedom to be healthy, not organizations that attack that health.

They're wearing protection!!

If GNU can follow an alternate path, then Mozilla too can

There can be multiple alternate paths. I would much rather see Mozilla live to fight another day and GNU and FSF fight the battles.

Many important battles are fought with multiple tactics and multiple loosely aligned parties with a common goal.

"The stuff they are building today is fundamental to an open internet for the future" Citation needed, what is that fundamental stuff they are building?

Well, I suppose there is no fundamental stuff for the web build by Mozilla then.

Why the mod down and not an answer? coward.

How would targeting W3C change anything? Browser vendors have a final say, and at the end of the day it matters what they've implemented, not what W3C wrote in some document. Frankly, all those cries that having DRM somehow destroy open web are at the same level as the claims that homosexuals are destroying families.

Who are exactly are the W3C if not the big three, with Mozilla, Adobe and Yahoo etc tagging along?

I can't stand naive comments from those who complain about standards bodies when the standards bodies are the big companies and/or their proxies.

It is like Javascript and HTML5. They've both been inadequate from day one, and are still going to be inadequate in their future incarnations, yet every company blames the standards body as though they are not the standards bodies themselves, Mozilla included.

This is where Mozilla's disingenuity comes in.

Javascript and HTML5 are generally inadequate, and Flash if open and bug free would be a whole lot better. Mozilla then decides to implement Flash in Javascript, which is an underpowered language and difficult for large scale programs.

This is the problem with Mozilla. You sit on a board which devises an inadequate Javascript language, then you decide to implement Flash in the same inadequate language, then you go and make an agreement with the original creators of Flash for your EME/DRM implementation, because your implementation doesn't look like it is going to do too well.

Why didn't you create your Flash replacement, even a superior superset of Flash, in Nimrod, or even C, then make it the plugin standard, rather than have to go cap in hand to Adobe for some closed implementation, and top it off with some reassuring comments to Adobe's board from your CEO?

This what happens when Mozilla executives are beholden to the competition for their income. Expecting Mozilla to take a strong stance is like expecting the SEC and banking regulators to tackle TBTF banks effectively. It ain't gonna happen.

It is time to tidy up/clean up/restructure/refactor/rearchitect their code base, document it properly, hand it over to the any interested hackers, then prepare to close down, else go on to make a better browser which will have all the users and content providers flocking to your implementation

for those who don't know Nimrod I like to think of it as my favorite language du jour. C and C++ are so meh

> You sit on a board which devises an inadequate Javascript language

No board devised JavaScript.

> then you decide to implement Flash in the same inadequate language, then you go and make an agreement with the original creators of Flash for your EME/DRM implementation, because your implementation doesn't look like it is going to do too well.

EME has nothing to do with Shumway.

I mean they sit on a board responsible which is taking years to make Javascript a tractable language, and at this rate it looks like that is never going to happen.

Shumway has everything to do with EME not on a technical level, but on a business level because a superior Flash replacement games developers and other content providers found more dependable than the original Flash would put them in a stronger bargaining position vis-a-vis the other majors.

Good technical execution is Mozilla's strongest bargaining chip and if they fail at that they make themselves less relevant.

Flash is written in actionscript. Actionscript is Javascript (ECMAscript) with some additional functions added. Implementing flash on a highly optimized JS JIT is probably better than Adobe's buggy and insecure VM.

May I ask when the highly optimized JS JIT is going to arrive? My question is why they are implementing a Flash replacement in Javascript when C or C++ would be better.

Adobe's problem with Flash is that it is not open source and its bugs can't be tracked down.

An open source Flash replacement might as well be written in a faster language. It is the open source nature that matters, not the language it is implemented in.

> My question is why they are implementing a Flash replacement in Javascript when C or C++ would be better.

Using JavaScript reduces memory safety problems, and interfacing with the Web APIs from JS is simpler than for C++.

I suspect I've rubbed a few redditors the wrong way.

Why does should the announcement of acquiescence to DRM have to mention Adobe? They could have announced that they have capitulated first, and they are sorting out the details later. Oh no, Adobe had to get a mention. Why are some redditors in such denial?

This is really about a deal between Mozilla and Adobe in which Adobe becomes the Mozilla preferred vendor for those who seek to use DRM in Firefox, for whatever Adobe offers in return. It isn't just an announcement of acquiescence to DRM. Quite a few content providers will have to be dealing with Adobe and Mozilla will probably get a share of the income stream. Denial is not a river in Egypt.

I am not concerned about what deals Mozilla does, but they will have to deliver technical superiority faster and better and make their browser the one developers recommend to their clients if they are to survive in the long term.

Since people who understand the issue understand that Mozilla is incapable of developing a Hollywood-approvable CDM, if we had just announced the intent to do EME, it would have raised a big unanswered question: Where is the CDM going to come from?

Instead, whe chose to talk abour EME when we were able to answer that crucial question.

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