Save Netflix
eff.orgMany companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016.
The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store).
Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.
I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.
I'll be fine as long as my old machines survive - but how are businesses going to produce mass market software when all the popular hardware is locked down?
Just to pick an arbitrary example - how does a project like Bitcoin take off when all we have are tivoized devices that won't run un"trusted" code? The community of a few hundred hardware hackers isn't big enough.
Not only that, despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. It's a deliberate design decision to force the use of the network.
The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step?
> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.
Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind.
> What's the next step?
Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally.
All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now?
> All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now?
But this isn't an absurd question at all: Fast food and packaged food have dramatically changed the way people eat, for the worse.
Fast food has some undeniable short term benefits, which the lizard brain considers more important than long term benefits. It's no wonder why a lot of fast food chains are massively profitable. The same can be said for walled gardens.
Following that reasoning, there are other substances that have similar short term benefits. Like cocaine.
Many things have both short and long term benefits, in addition to their both short and long term detriments... Like Cocaine.
This is just the marketing hypnosis speaking. Fast food tastes awful.
> Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone.
Sadly, that's an increasingly large segment of the population. Anecdotally, many of my extended family only have mobiles, maybe a tablet, and maybe a videogame console -- no laptops or desktops to be found. Many friends have similar stories.
To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings.
Anecdotes are just that. I wont take yours to represent society as a whole, as you shouldn't take mine to either.
Compare your experiences, though, to that of the developing world. Many hundreds of millions of people have gone online for the first time this decade and almost all new Internet users only have smart phones. This huge population never owned a PC and may never need to own one, especially as apps get better and better.
Yeah, but these people with such great apps are also consuming stuff (like apps) created by people with more expensive hardware. A Pakistani friend of mine just received a laptop from a government program and he seemed like he was about to burst with joy. Now he has more power to create.
For the foreseeable future, the guy with the laptop and phone will be able to do more than the guy with just the phone.
And any person with six monitors stacked, a nice keyboard, a mouse, an office chair, large desk, dedicated office phone, large screen TV, new gaming console, cup full of pens and a pad of paper (all these are technologies) plus a laptop and a smart phone will probably tell you the people in developing countries are missing out if they want to experience what he experiences, let alone compete with him. This is why all that stuff is still on the market, and people are really pessimistic and fearful about whatever weird plans Apple has for an iOS/OSX merger.
The whole point of my comment was that anecdotes are by definition not universal. Maybe you missed that?
Phone with SSH client, Bluetooth keyboard, Chromecast to TV, digitalocean Ubuntu droplet.
No computer != can't write code. What millenial had access to anything close to that nice when they learned to code?
While this is nice, I could never use something with such high latency for editing code or interactive sessions. You've just added latency all over the place. Delayed input and output plus networking across the world.
Remove the extra step going from Phone to Chromecast (plenty of phones have HDMI OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client) and this a great solution with minimal latency. Anything remotely comparable in the 80s/90s would have been totally out of reach on a student budget.
Serious (I hope!) question: how does one run the SSH client on the Chromecast? Are you proposing installing Linux on the Chromecast, or is this something available out of the box?
Totally agree with your point about HDMI, I overlooked it because my phone doesn't support it.
You can cast your whole screen from Android or a Chrome tab to Chromecast (now called Google Cast). That includes any SSH client you have running there. (There are SSH clients for both Chrome and Android)
If you look at my GGP comment, you'll see that mirroring to the Chromecast is what I initially suggested. I was specifically asking about the statement "OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client".
I suggested this because I've tried it, and it works well if you have no privileged reference frame to which you're comparing it. A new Precision with a Xeon and 32GB of ECC RAM is nice. Not necessary for the vast majority of development jobs.
That's a 'cool trick', but it's not 'nice to code'.
Compared with what? If you're stacking it up against what Western first-world developers use (macbook with an SSD and more RAM than my first dev box had HDD) then of course you're correct. That's also emphatically not the use case I was addressing.
Stop arguing from extremes. A $300 notebook is better to code on than that phone-tv-remote-machine-via-ssh setup. For a start, you can use an IDE that isn't terminal-bound. You can also code at a desk (or wherever) instead of tied to wherever your TV is, at watching-the-TV angles and postures. You're also not going to lose your session and potentially your unsaved edits because the network interrupts. Yes, you could use tmux or similar, but now you've changed the standard keyset (and screwed normal scrollback), and are increasing the requirements to entry.
A cheap notebook is also a much lower barrier to entry - in order to have your own droplet, you need to know how to set up a cloud machine and connect to it properly. That's not trivial knowledge to a newbie (nor is it relevent, unless they're coding for servers), even though us old hands can do it in our sleep. Similarly, you need a way to pay for for the online subscription.
Why would u want to carry so many things if you can have a cheap laptop that packs everything nicely?
Weight and battery life.
Laptops are not exactly heavy these days anymore
That seems far more Heath-Robinson than even the old days of plugging a computer into the TV and saving programs on tape.
Mind you, I learnt to program BASIC before I had reliable access to a computer too, so I programmed on paper. I wouldn't reccomend it for any but the most determined student.
> To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings.
But will that always be the case, especially when the "next Netflix" comes around?
I'm in the same boat as you, everyone I know has both a laptop and/or desktop as well as a smartphone and possibly tablet.
However, less and less of these people I know are buying new laptops/PCs because for the average person... why do they need those?
You're absolutely right -- it is just an anecdote :). hk__2 further down points out that these are possibly people who've never owned a computer, and that this should be viewed as a step forward -- hk__2's right! The devices they own are cheap (or at least: are much more affordable than a laptop has ever been) and limited, but having them is still better than having no device.
With that said, I'd argue that selling at these (absurdly) low prices is creating a new market segment. I guess I wanted to express my concern at dismissing the part of the population that "don't use more than a smart phone". They exist!
A friend of a friend saw me working on my NAS a few weeks ago and said "I didn't know anyone used those anymore."
I said "What do you mean?"
"Computers, I didn't know anyone used computers anymore."
Arguably the people using restricted mobile devices exclusively would have never used PCs. These are the same people that 10 years ago where buying DVD players, PlayStations and other limited appliances for their living room, because PCs are way too complicated for some people. And you can't really blame them. Just the other day I cleaned my father's computer of viruses.
I also believe the market for content producers that need general purpose computing devices is bigger than ever, and growing. It's just that it's being eclipsed by the market of content consumers. Plus upgrade cycles have gotten much longer, 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine. And speaking of phones, dumb phones are dead, the smartphone is the new norm, yet how many smartphone users are heavy Internet and apps users? I bet it's not that many.
> 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine
Especially content producers can easily use up all hardware enhancements for rendering and such, so they do appreciate a newer machine.
I'm a software developer, so I'm arguably a content producer. I have a 4 year old laptop that's still fine for software development, even though I'm using heavy tools to do it (e.g. Scala, IntelliJ IDEA), I only had to replace its battery.
Producing content doesn't necessarily mean 3D rendering. It can mean just writing Word / Excel / PowerPoint documents.
I struggled to find a single short description for activities that can easily saturate a modern PC's processing power and I/O, but I couldn't really. Let's not get hung up on naming here.
I guess in your case you are more of a content input, rather than producer. Or perhaps producers should be called content farmers/hackers.
Content, noun:
Producer, noun:1. the amount of a particular constituent occurring in a substance. 2. the material dealt with in a speech, literary work, etc. as distinct from its form or style. 3. information made available by a website or other electronic medium.
Maybe we are not speaking the same language.1. a person, company, or country that makes, grows, or supplies goods or commodities. 2. a person or thing that makes or causes something.
A lot of the people who now own a smartphone didn’t own any computer-like device (i.e. laptop/desktop/tablet) before; I think that’s a step forward, not backward.
Agreed. Getting hung up on percentages is anxiety inducing for early adopters, probably of every stripe. At some point you have to look at raw numbers.
Yes, I agree (and for the people I'm talking about you're absolutely right).
I think it is largely the same segment of the population that before didn't use computers anyway, or used them as dumb browsers or e-mail clients.
>> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.
> Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind.
I don't see why (if we're talking 10 years time here). Cameras comes with wifi, Photoshop and other software is rented in the cloud, arguably it's easier to have your data in one place, close to the processing -- publishing is done in the cloud (even if the end result is a photo print, it's likely that you use a third party to do the printing).
Games streaming is already a thing. Granted, there are some hard physical limits on latency (speed of light roundtrip) -- but I see no particular well-founded reason to believe all our computing privileges can't be locked up in "the cloud".
It's much more feasible for a small team to produce an entire computer today (as in instruction set, volatile and non-volatile memory, i/o etc), than it was in the 70s - but it's still fantastically more expensive than buying off the shelf hardware. Which means that if the majority of the market truly moves to locked down devices, everyone will have to move to locked down devices.
>> What's the next step?
> Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally.
I think how Apple handled Final Cut Pro is a great example of how dangerous tivoization of an entire platform for computing can be.
Funny enough, home kitchens used to not exist in Roman times as far as I know.
And home computers didn't exist in the 60s. What's your point?
What's yours?
The trend has been towards locked down hardware and software, and that trend is starting to encroach on even desktop systems.
"Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016."
I've often thought all web search engines would be considered grotesquely illegal if they hadn't been there since the beginning, but only started today. It is at times a fragile existence as it is even so.
You're right. In germany there is a law called "Leistungsschutzrecht" that makes it illegal to publish snippets of news stories of the big publishing houses especially in search results such as google news. After some months the publishers realised that now they weren't getting as much pageviews as before (go figure) and granted google an exclusive license to publish their stuff. So now there is a law that would require any new search engine to make deals with every major newspaper in germany. On the other hand we do not have such a thing as fair use, so I imagine that image search is an endless ongoing lawsuit in germany, as every image thumbnail is illegal publishing of copyrighted material.
Gosh, don't even get me started. Some laws here in germany are basically hostile towards web-development projects. At least the ones where you either have: user generated content or aggregated content from other services, sites or sources. Not that it would be illegal per se, but you would have to take care of so many things, that you would always wander on a very small grate grate between legal and illegal.
The "Leistungsschutzrecht" is really only the tip of the Scheißberg.
Well I'm slightly proud to know there's at least one first world country with dumber copyright laws than my own.
Being second from the bottom probably is nothing to crow about though...
Well, it seems stupidity abounds in a lot of countries when it comes to copyright. The supreme court of Sweden just ruled that taking a photo of a piece of public art (as in art in an open and public space, not even a gallery or museum mind you) and posting online infringes on the artist's copyright.
Oh, at least thirds. Spain is even in worst situation; Google News closed Spain service[1] since they considered unacceptable to pay for providing links.
Spain has had a bunch of "interesting" laws for copyright protection. Like having to pay a tax for any HD, DVD (whatever thing you use to store stuff and per MB) as a preemptive pirate protection. And I think that other European countries shared this strategy[2].
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/enrique-dans/google-news-leavi... [2] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/digital-tax-opposed-sp...
Oh, yeah, Sweden got that too. A "nice" organization called copyswede that tries to claim that all digital media is used for storing music, so we must pay a tax, per MB, for all storage media. The irony of it all, since Spotify, a Swedish company, we're not even storing music anymore.
There are various countries with that kind of tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy .Somehow Austria is missing on this List but I'am pretty sure they already have it ( http://futurezone.at/english/there-is-no-right-to-private-co... ).
Lots of countries, including the US, have a similar tax on certain blank media The tax collected by the govt, and distributed to content producers. What a racket.
New Zealand banned Software Patents
The publishers were worried about Google getting too much power over them, so set up a system that effectively prevents any new aggregators competing with Google. Classic. The publishers in Spain did something similar.
It reminds me of something Paul Thurrott said soon after Apple brought out the iPhone: They must look at these bumbling boobs that are their competitors, and they must be as happy as can be.
I'm just curious, did you mean that Germany really doesn't have fair use or not safe harbor?
No, germany really doesn't have fair use. Which is a golden opportunity for some lawyers to make some cash.
While they don't have a single rule similiar to fair use they do have a long list of exceptions to copyright, including educational use, technical necessity, written and spoken political commentary, citations, and private use. In some cases more usuable than fair use, in some cases not.
Before the recent introduction of the Leistungsschutzrecht, Google News was completely legal to operate.
IANAL but I doubt that it was completely legal. See this case for an example of a non-google news aggregator pre "Leistungsschutzrecht": http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/start-up-offline-verlage-...
This is more of a case of legal bullying than anything. The Paperboy and Perlentaucher decisions have been rather clear on that matter. There have been also decisions that 10 word snippets or so are fine under citation rules.
(Ok, "completely legal" was a bit of an overstatement. It's not explicitely allowed and you would probably need large enough legal fund to defend yourself.)
Same with public libraries, for that matter. Can you imagine the hue and cry that the major publishers would raise if someone were just now suggesting buying one copy of a book for the express purpose of lending it to hundreds of readers? Or worse, having the government pay for it?
They'd be burning up the telephone lines to Washington and hiring lobbyists by the trainload.
Just imagine how big their outcry would be if it was new thatyou could lend a friend your book by just giving it to them in person. Now suddenly he and his friends will not buy that book and read its content for free. That would also be considered piracy and surely forbidden as well. Some digital laws are just ridiculous.
Yes but there is enough friction with public libraries that that was never an issue. Also noting that many expensive books (or directories) have a market in selling to public libraries. Plus remember that only one person can take out a book at one time (unless multiple copies) and books take time to read so the impact is not the same as with digital works (you have to get to the library to take the book out and there are limits to how many you can borrow is another factor).
Another example might be robodialers if they hadn't been preceded by actual people making calls, which was preceded by people not being able to dial that many calls (rotary phone dialing is slow) and before that even needing an actual operator to complete a "sales" call.
All of the above certainly made it less annoying than it is today. Noting that there is no "do not call" list for businesses.
I think the use case has been well cemented into "free use" & "transformative" in the US now, especially post Google Books. In the EU, however, there's nothing to suggest to me that a search engine would be legal. Here's a report about content mining in the EU http://www.scienceeurope.org/uploads/PublicDocumentsAndSpeec...
I may sound way too off-topic, so I expect a lot of down-votes, but I think one should learn at least a little bit about hardware and how to design it manually. For example how to create FPGA designs by writing them in VHDL or Verilog.
In some sense it's like in the 70es or 80es. Big Corporations, (almost) monopolies, prehistoric laws...and a bunch of tech-savvy kids refusing to bow down ;)
I'm doing that with my kids. Hardware has never felt so open. I'm loving the RISC-V project!
You're asking this of a population whom think that setting the time on their microwave oven is too difficult?
> I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker...
On the contrary, the slowdown of Moore's Law means the future has never been brighter for open hardware. Someone could actually design something for a process that hasn't been obsolete for over two years and still have a hope of getting it manufactured before it becomes that way.
> I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.
Thing is that ever since the first PC, "personal" computing has really been about business computing. Heck, visicalc basically sold Apple IIs. This because it allowed accountants to not argue with sysadmins about mainframe time.
Secure boot and ME is Intel and MS responding to business needs.
Thing is tough that flexibility/usability will always be the enemy of security. A building is more usable when the door are left unlocked, but at the same time you can't use said building to store valuables.
PCs could ignore security for the most part back in the day, because they were airgapped.
Frankly the most secure thing a home user can do is to pull the plug on the router when they are not using the net. But then what is not using the net these days?
ME is a huge net negative for security though
From who's vantage point? The end user, or the corporate sysadmin managing a fleet of desktops and laptops?
Either - it's a massive added convenience, but in a corporate security setting an attacker invisibly having remote access to screen, input devices, and data is a security nightmare, and a single compromise can grant access to the entire fleet.
Couldn't agree more. One of the really annoying things about the mass popularization of tech is we seem to always choose the sexier products over the more practical ones.
On the hobbyist side of things, I wonder what it would take to get like, say, a kit ATX motherboard developed; one with modular parts that could gradually be upgraded or repaired over time, and designed to last at least a decade or two.
It's always been the software. VHS beat Beta, both beat V2000. V2000 was the best quality by far. VHS took a long time to get close. VHS had the most films.
Same with PCs - the software done it. MS Office, Wordperfect, etc. Lots of more interesting, more sexy machines in the market became also-rans.
I'm glad cars never quite got to the same homogeneity or we'd all be driving a Datsun Sunny or something equally horrific.
I wish the market had settled for 5 or 6 different PC / phone / chip architectures, as I think the progress would have been more interesting, and much much further. Damnit Motorola should have kept making 680x0s, they were much nicer than Intels to program.
> I'm glad cars never quite got to the same homogeneity or we'd all be driving a Datsun Sunny or something equally horrific.
Well, cars are incredibly homogenous ( https://medium.com/swlh/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d#.mu5k... )
Some niche markets exist, but 98% of what's being bought is a completely interchangeable middle ground compromise, made by huge companies that are only looking at maximizing short term profits, without care for technological, economic, or sociological advancement.
In every industry that requires large up-front costs for economic mass production, this is true. Hopefully, 3D printing and its sister technologies will make manufacturing many things on a smaller scale more affordable, and disperse the (mass-) consumer-producer dichotomy once again, in favour of local on-demand production of everyday items.
Only with such a level and flexible playing field can you expect innovation to thrive: if it becomes affordable to buy (or create) the best tool for the job, instead of relying on mass-produced mediocrity because one-off items increase one or two orders of magnitude more in cost than in marginal utility.
That's bullshit. Tight margins plus physics (aerodynamics and safety) plus minimum fuel standards with lower SUV standards yield "crossover" vehicles that look the same. If we could still buy station wagons, we would; they died out with higher fuel efficiency standards, but by now they'd all look pretty similar too.
That Chevy Volt concept is awful. The actual car is tremendously improved; the blind spot of the concept could obscure the Sun it's so large and that's just one obvious failing. There's a reason you don't see weird shit: cars now are really good, so variances are most likely worse.
Last rant: the New Beetle. Same cost and size as the VW sedan, but less room inside, because the design is space-inefficient and a gimmick.
Very interesting link, thanks. I'd always presumed that much of the blanding and corner rounding going from concept to production was about crash and person impact regulations. I'd also assumed that was the reason Citroen lost their French idiosyncracy etc.
I never understood the appeal of crossovers either - ugly, pointless things in my eyes. Especially the Porsche Cayenne, a VW something with new badge and much higher spares prices.
There's still just enough small players to keep some interest, though it's an ever dwindling number.
Buy an old PC-XT motherboard and you'll have essentially that, except for the form factor.
At one time, most people didn't use computers at all. The people who did were the hacker minority. Machines were not portable or networked - you'd only pack them up in your car to take them to the local computer group.
We may go back to that. There may be a hacker community using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Android phones and Chromebooks running in developer mode.
That's still going to be a lot more than a few hundred hardware hackers. Look at how many people bought Raspberry Pi alone.
There's a big middle ground between mainstream and utter obscurity.
HTML5 service workers allowing near parity of web apps to native apps could easily change all that. If my web app on a phone can receive push notifications from my server even when it isn't running, there's not much I can't do.
> Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016.
Is that bad or surprising?
Companies are very much dependent on timing, opportunity, seeing things as they are vs where they should go, and moving things in that direction.
Example: Android — hardware companies didn't want Microsoft to dominate desktop AND mobile OS — huge opportunity for someone to act on this market reluctance to accept MS.
Once the timing is gone, so is much of the opportunity.
> Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.
funny you mention that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422531
The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play
I can happily install whatever I like on my stock Android device.
You need to enable untrusted sources hidden away in a settings menu somewhere, and click past a nasty warning informing you of how dangerous outside software can be.
ME is one thing (though given the hoops one must jump through to set it up, I'm inclined to believe most of the vitriol directed at it is the paranoid FUD variety),
..but secure boot? What possible reason could you have for being against a system that prevents bootkits from pwning your machine? You can load your own keys and boot whatever OS you want on all but a tiny subset of appliance-like locked down hardware nobody cares about.
In general, code signing is a Good Thing, so long as the control remains in the hands of the user.
"..but secure boot? What possible reason could you have for being against a system that prevents bootkits from pwning your machine?"
The fact that I can do the same thing with firmware on a cheap ROM write-protected with a jumper. Additionally, the fact that there's competing I.P. in FOSS and corporate sectors for firmware that does trustworthy boot while leaving what's allowed in my control.
"In general, code signing is a Good Thing, so long as the control remains in the hands of the user."
With Microsoft and Intel style secure boot, it remains in the hands of Microsoft and Intel. And so on. Which is why we're against it.
Except that "Setup Mode" exists and every serious computing device that uses Secure Boot provides it, because big business customers wants it.
What is "Setup Mode"? It's "load your own root of trust and wipe any preinstalled keys". Nothing, nothing says that the root of trust has to be from Microsoft or Intel (and Secure Boot specification that is tested for Windows Logo certification would reject such system unless manufactured by Microsoft or Intel).
The difference with jumper is that you have standardized APIs etc. for the signing process, including a standardized "jumper".
The fact that I can do the same thing with firmware on a cheap ROM write-protected with a jumper
Except secure boot isn't about firmware, it's about the code loaded on DASDs.
>With Microsoft and Intel style secure boot, it remains in the hands of Microsoft and Intel.
As long as you can program your own keys into it, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion.
As long as you can program your own keys into it
Is this not the definition of gatekeeper?
A system where you have to ask permission, but that permission is always granted is inherently different from a system where no permission is ever needed.
Among other things, that permission can be revoked at any time for any reason.
but that permission is always granted is inherently different from a system where no permission is ever needed.
Indeed. And that system, the one we've been using for a few decades leaves you vulnerable to bootkits in such a way that you'll never know you've been owned.
The PKI has to have a trust root anchored somewhere for the concept to work, and it can be anchored under your control using your keys.
No, we've been using a shitty system that's a legacy holdover from days and companies that don't care about security at all. You could just as easily design a system that had a safe, vetted firmware with nonvolatile storage inside. With a jumper or secret, you can put in new firmware you designed yourself or trust from others. That gets stored in there for later stage in a multi-stage boot process. That initial part is immutable means you can always reset if something happens. Secret can be generated on device and displayed to you via a dedicated serial port if you want.
Many possibilities. The idea that trusted boot can only work if Microsoft controls the secret and says a third party I.P. is allowed is ludicrous. Disproven by other implementations that didn't require them. Worst case, the root of trust is put in during first initialization with antifuses burning it in and pre-wired stuff reading results back out as maybe a hash. You can always know what you're starting with via a hash and it can't change after being set that first time.
For some reason, you're limiting yourself to only third-party, PKI solutions with high TCB and trust issues. The stuff I described has been immune or resistant to bootkits since the old mainframes that required you to physically insert write-protected firmware:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC_4000_series
Today, that could be a disk, SD card, USB drive, or smartcard you made yourself.
I'm still not sure why we're talking about firmware in the context of secure boot. The firmware isn't changing and isn't vulnerable to being rewritten by something with system permissions (excepting microcode updates and the like) - the boot sector is, which is exactly the thing that secure boot cares about.
"Among other things, that permission can be revoked at any time for any reason."
BOOM! They can charge you for it and they can revoke it. Many companies did "open" platforms or software that later closed things off. Plus, they get more information about you than they even need.
So, we can choose between a security standard that's in our control or theirs. And by theirs, we're talking about companies with a history of real scumbaggery. The design should default to us with no asking for permission. Numerous ones in CompSci and I.P. markets can do that. No excuse except Microsoft and Intel's profits and schemes.
> The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store)
So true. You can sideload on Android though. So all is not lost.
I can. You can.
The general public can whilst the 'allow untrusted sources' box exists.
But once that box goes, the vast majority of the audience for software outside of Google Play is gone. F-Droid is already tiny as it stands!
I think what OP is talking about is even though we know how to get over the walls of these gardens, the average user would not. :(
And with Xcode 7 you can deploy apps to your iOS devices with a free dev account.
Which is fine, but if I write a piece of software that I want to distribute outside of the app store, then everyone that wants to install it needs their own Mac, right? I don't think that's quite comparable to side-loading, which can be done from the device itself, without any external account or hardware.
There's nothing magical in Mac. iOS apps use standard cryptographic algorithms for their digital signature, so one can write a crossplatform client which will generate developer certificate for user, sign any given binary using that certificate and install it onto iOS device. For user it won't be any harder than typing "iport install things" (or click button with some fancy GUI).
I'm surprised that this idea wasn't implemented yet.
Because when you do, Apple will require you to pre register devices and sign builds online from Apple servers, or do something else that blocks this
Still requires an external Laptop/PC, you would not be able to install custom software using only the device itself.
It would require an enterprise cert or Laptop/PC to bootstrap, but theoretically you could build an on-device store. I'm still waiting for someone to build this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BsOd4PXQ0SfsdMP0n30Ud_Aa...
> despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots.
I'm sure there's different speeds and other variables to consider in flash storage, just as prices vary for RAM and just about everything else really. The exact tech in an SD card may not be suitable for your phone or tablet's permanent storage, and definitely not suitable for an SSD, otherwise everyone would be installing their OS on SD cards.
> The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step?
Something that envelops everything we do in our daily life whether we want it or not; sounds a lot like online advertising and social media!
What is there in Bitcoin that requires running untrusted code?
Think they were talking about "untrusted" as in not reviewed by/available in an "app store"
Okay, but I'm still not getting it. I mean, what's keeping anybody from getting their bitcoin wallet or miner on an app store? The Apple OSX app store has at least one wallet on it.
(Not that I agree with the "lock down everything" approach tech companies are taking, that is.)
"I mean, what's keeping anybody from getting their bitcoin wallet or miner on an app store?" That's the problem, nobody knows for sure if you can get any piece of software into the app store. I worked on an app that was in the app store for several years. During the last attempt to update, which did nothing but add new icons and startup screens for the new line of devices, the review team decided the app didn't do enough to warrant being it's own app and some more functionality should be added. I tried fighting it but eventually gave up. Now it still sits in the app store targeting iOS 7 and is still happily used, until someday Apple drops support for some deprecated bluetooth API.
Because Apple can ban apps from their store for any reason. Bitcoin wallets have been banned once if I remember correctly. Also, smart watch apps have also been banned on the Apple Store when Apple released their Apple Watch.
With all the positive sides of the App Store, this is really dangerous in terms of freedom.
Yes, Apple banned all Bitcoin apps for a while. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235986
The article is specifically talking about the 'next Netflix'. I'm talking here about the 'next Bitcoin'.
Perhaps the current one is fine. What about the one after that?
What about the 'Bitcoin' that launches in 20 years? Do we have any mass market free platforms left then?
Workstations may always exist - servers may always exist - but right now, the masses have general purpose computers on their desks, in their messenger bags. I want that to last.
Actually, for a long time, Apple did not allow Bitcoin wallets on the app store and repeatedly removed them. http://www.wired.com/2014/07/blockchain-back/
Some bitcoin users even smashed their iPhones in protest: http://www.wired.com/2014/02/watch-working-iphones/
I think it's more to do with the creation of cryptocurrencies in the first place, not just using them. A thin client with no level of user control (i.e. everything you do with it is managed on servers controlled by your provider) cannot be used to create something as low level as a cryptocurrency, or indeed any form of low level development.
Of course, this kind of thing is why we will always have some form of generic, user-managed-hardware market. If you take away the tools used to create the apps and services controlled by the gatekeepers, you won't have any apps and services. To put it another way, Apple doesn't want to be responsible for creating the millions of apps in their store, they just want to be the ones in control of those apps. The workstation is not going away.
> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe
Just pulled my old punch cards out of the attic and dusted them off, hoping I can use them again!
This was so light on technical information that I am more puzzled than before I read the article. Haven't the browsers standardized on a few DRM schemes already? Does that have anything to do with what the W3C is doing now, and if not, just what is the W3C up to that is offensive to the EFF? Are they talking about protecting data streams, such as movies? Why would you compare that to what Netflix was doing with physical DVDs?
I think it's all about EME: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/
Yes they have, yes it does, they think the world would be better if everyone Just Said No to DRM and the W3C isn't going along with their grand plan, yes, and because they (correctly) think it'll sound convincing to the target audience (mostly other Just Say No-ers, probably consisting mostly of the EFF and Mozilla. And that's it.)
I'm really getting tired of what seems to be the EFF's somewhat-newfound mission (it's been getting steadily worse over the last couple years) to push the limits of "shrill squawking about nonsense" to new heights.
I'm generally a fan of the EFF's work but I completely agree when you call this "shrill squawking". The lack of any coherent argument or details in this statement reminds me of some the "rally the mob" emails that I receive from Fight For The Future. It's a shame that they take their audience for granted and feel that it's enough to rile people up to send angry emails using nothing more than an appeal to their own authority. That may work for a while but at the expense of their credibility.
Agreed though I'd put it in slightly less harsh tones. Rhetoric from EFF and FFTF is light on the informative side, and heavy on the FUD side.
At the title is pure click-bait...
I don't know the right solution to the HTML5 DRM thing. I hate DRM, I don't really support its use, but I also use Linux full-time.
Without the HTML5 DRM, I don't think I'd be able to watch Netflix on my laptop, without some Wine wrapper, and really, is that much better? I don't see the studios signing off on Netflix without the use of DRM, and since Silverlight doesn't work on Linux, I selfishly don't have a problem with HTML5 DRM...most of the time.
That said, ethical-me totes does have a problem with DRM being part of the otherwise-open web. Relying on stuff that I can can't break sort of makes my inner-Stallman sad.
>I don't know the right solution to the HTML5 DRM thing.
Easy. If they want content protection, they should build it in JavaScript. Doesn't threaten the entire existence of the Open Web, any sufficiently decent scheme will prevent casual copying (dedicated pirates will always find a way, if nothing else then via screen capture), and it's actually cross-platform (unlike EME, where "cross-platform" is entirely up to the creators of the black box DRM plugins, so if Netflix et al wanted to say "sod off, we're not making our DRM plugin available on Linux" then you'd be totally out of luck).
Sadly, of course this isn't actually enough for the people demanding heavy DRM, since it's not just about "protecting the content" but about controlling the whole platform, which is what really makes EME such an existential threat for the entire Open Web. That's why I can't approve of it, and why you shouldn't either.
But content protection through JavaScript? Totally fair game, I say. Assuming that it's for a catalog rental model like what Netflix offers, anyway. Content protection has no place in any individual (media) products you buy, those should be DRM-free - otherwise you're not really buying them, just renting them for an undefined period.
(On a final note, I also practice what I preach here - I work for a comic publisher and am in charge of most things digital distribution, including the content protection scheme for our catalog rental subscription service. It's developed in JS and I'll do my utmost best to ensure we never ever touch EME in any way. Should be more cost effective for us that way anyway!)
But if the DRM solution is implemented through JS code in the browser, it is trivial to pirate. I know DRM is always broken, etc., but at the same time it is hard to take an argument at face value that discounts the security differences between these approaches.
JS is trivial for anyone moderately skilled to crack - you're sending content in the clear from the browser through the stack.
DRM solutions enabled by EME can be much more robust and difficult to crack.
Similar to other commentators, I struggle with the issue, but just saying "put it in JS" is not a very compelling argument. The current EME approach of a publically defined API that any DRM solution can plug into feels like a pretty reasonable compromise here.
>it is trivial to pirate.
As long as it isn't trivial for the casual user, I wouldn't call it much of an issue. As I said, dedicated pirates will find a way regardless, even if comes down to screen capturing. That's how people are pirating Netflix content at the moment. Of course, this does lead to some level of quality loss, since you're doing a lossy re-encode of a lossy source.
On that note, if we consider "wannabe pirates must re-encode the video to share it around" as a decent video content protection goal, then you can definitely do that with HTML5 video and some JS without resorting to any kind of EME trickery.
Anyway, at the end of the day, it is definitely true that JS content protection schemes will be inherently weaker compared to black box DRM plugin solutions enabled by EME. But why on Earth should we compromise the very nature of Open Web to enable this rather than make Big Media compromise on their platform control addiction to have their content on the Open Web? And if they're unwilling to do that, then well, they can stick to their Flash and Silverlight all they want in my opinion. EME doesn't make any promises about cross-platform compatibility anyway, so better stick with the two devils we know than switch to a system comprised of several unknown demons.
JS DRM is not DRM, full stop. The entire point is the black box. Without that you are always one greasemonkey script away from having a full-stream ripper for the casual user.
Yes, there is always the analog loophole, so ultimately all DRM is a best effort, but any JS implementation is at best 1% of current DRM implementations, it is no better than clear key encryption regardless of what obfuscation you put around it.
I really don't understand the point of the hand-wringing over EME. Before EME the only option for DRM was full-blown plugins, EME is much better for the open web than the dictatorship of Flash or Silverlight. As far as I can tell, technical activists are hoping to somehow put pressure on big content by refusing EME, but having spent the last 8 years building a streaming company, I can tell the EFF and everyone else that their advocacy has exactly zero weight with any content rightsholders. Big content will never capitulate to the abstract desires of the free software crowd because they hold the nuts. You either play ball with their demands or you don't get the content. Yes piracy will never go away, but it's illegal, so they will just continue playing whackamole for anything that approaches a good UX and pushing their DRM agenda on the rest of the industry.
Opposing EME is just a pointless skirmish over an implementation detail which overall is a huge net win for open web standards. Being absolutist about it just means everyone is going to have some shitty plugin, and they will have some shitty plugin because people want the studio content.
And as stupid and pointless as DRM is in the grand scheme of things, there is no principle I can think of that forbid people from building it. The Right Thing™ is that studios should be free to build DRM, and people should be free to hack it, there shouldn't be legal protections on either side. But for the free software community to refuse to make any integration points with DRM is just cutting off ones nose to spite ones face.
Why doesn't Netflix/all film directors distribute slightly different versions of their movies to every single viewer? Half a second here, a whiter scene there, it takes only 32 boolean situations to uniquely identify 2bn views, and they culd chase the viewer in court. Or do they do that already?
That'd require a lot more extra processing power than you might think, as video encoding is very demanding processing-wise. Say you have a 1h30min long movie. Without anything like this, you only need to encode that 1h30min once[1], after which you can serve the same encode to all your customers, whether there's hundreds, thousands or millions of them. But if you encoded even just say, 5 seconds of unique footage per customer, it takes only about 1080 customers to double your video encoding time for just this title.
There are also other issues with this, like how resilient the scheme would be. If your watermarking relies on things that the user would hardly spot when watching, then it's very likely that re-encoding the video would simply get rid of the watermarks, since quality video compression is generally based on the idea of throwing away as much information that the user wouldn't notice while keeping as much important bits as you can. At the same time, if you make the watermarking easy enough to spot while looking carefully, then you could just have two people compare their watermarks and consciously mess them up.
That being said, various kinds of watermarking technologies do exist, but unless they're dynamically added to the content on playback they should all very much have the same kind of scaling issues as far as video encoding is concerned.
[1] Once in all the varying quality and compatibility levels you offer, anyway.
Well actually with modern segmented streaming (HLS or DASH), you only need 2 encodes to get 2^n (for video of n segments) unique streams. The trick is you generate the manifest per user, and they each get a unique permutation.
I actually spoke to a vendor in the last month that claims to have actually deployed this and actually prosecuted pirates. Obviously this is a sales engineer pitching a product, so take it with a grain of salt, but I have no reason to believe the technology is not reasonably robust and scalable.
So then we need captures from, say, 16 users and some software to scramble all of them together.
If implemented in the player, no re-encoding would be necessary. Naturally this wouldn't help if a pirate grabs the data before it reaches the player.
All they would need to do is diff it against someone else's copy, flip a couple "bits" and incriminate some random person.
Or randomly flips bits anywhere and call it corruption.
This is an extremely good solution IMO.
I'll admit that I know almost nothing about the ways DRM works, but my gut tells me that JS would be too slow to implement anything too robust. If DRM is anything like crypto, wouldn't it require something relatively CPU-heavy?
That said, I didn't know the cross-platform thing was optional, and I agree that when I buy something, it should be DRM free. If it has to phone-home, then I don't own it, and things like Darkspore prove it can be stolen from me be the company.
DRM isn't really comparable to traditional crypto in the sense that crypto is intended to protect your secrets from anyone who doesn't have the key, while DRM is about preventing someone with the key from copying the unprotected content (since the content needs to be decrypted for consumption). As such, CPU-heaviness should not exactly be a requirement, as the cryptographic strength of the protection itself isn't necessarily the most important thing.
You can hardly call anything beyond JavaScript "heavy DRM." Something written in pure JavaScript running along the rest of the page's scripts could hardly be called DRM at all. It would be completely trivial to break.
I'm actually OK with the current HTML5 DRM scheme. Sure some binary blob runs and you don't know what's going on inside, but Firefox runs it in a sandbox so it can't do anything bad. Seems fine to me.
If the decryption keys were exposed in JS you'd only be a few debugger operations away from defeating any DRM system.
I have a hard time getting too worked up over EME. Netflix's content providers want DRM (as probably does Netflix itself, for its self-productions), and the EME-based stuff seems to be a clear win vs. Flash or Silverlight. The alternatives are clinging longer to Flash and friends or pushing things yet further out into apps where services are free to have whatever DRM they want.
Sure, you could instead hope for a world where the the studios don't want or mandate DRM, but that's pretty pie-in-the-sky thinking, especially for a cheap subscription service like Netflix.
> Sure, you could instead hope for a world where the the studios don't want or mandate DRM, but that's pretty pie-in-the-sky thinking, especially for a cheap subscription service like Netflix.
Whether the studios want or even mandate DRM is irrelevant. DRM is fundamentally not securable (in the sense that it will always be breakable).
Bits are (nearly) free. When I buy digital goods, I'm not paying for the goods. I'm paying for the service and ultimately just voting with my money ("make more films and services like this, please", so to speak).
Illegal film services offer me superb service. I can download whole seasons of shows in whichever quality I want in the click of a button. I get archivability - I don't have to worry about the media ever becoming unavailable due to licensing, censorship, the publisher going out of business, etc. And I get desktop integration; I can hit the super key, type 'Sherlock' and hit enter, and an episode starts playing immediately. Netflix requires that I open a new browser (Google Chrome b/c Firefox on Linux doesn't work), type a URL, authenticate, and then proceed with the above steps, all on the assumption that they even have what I'm looking for (new shows don't get added very quickly) and that I have a solid internet connection. After that, the video has to buffer and I can't seek randomly.
If purchasing rights to this media involves supporting such an anti-user system, I simply won't purchase the media. It's a shame for the artists - I wish it were different - but in the meanwhile I will support the arts by dumping the money I would have spent on Netflix, Google Play, etc into more usable and pro-consumer/pro-artist systems like Bandcamp and Patreon.
Why do companies still want DRM. I can understand that they wanted it when it was new but DRM has been proven to be worthless in terms of adding copyright protection and be a pain in the ass for the end use (I can't watch Netflix on my PC because the VGA adapter does not supper DMR). It is only a matter of hours before a cracked movie lands on torrent sites. So what is the purpose of DRM?
It seems that the intent is just to raise enough of a barrier to prevent casual copying: so, make it so there's not some 1-click program you can install that can dump all of House of Cards to your desktop.
Of course, this doesn't do anything about torrenting which can accomplish just that. I don't know if they're attempting to target people who are scared or morally opposed to torrenting, but would copy off a subscription service?
DRM has nothing to do with preventing copying. I'm surprized some still assume that's the reason it's used.
What is it used for then?
Various crooked reasons. Some common ones include:
1. Covering incompetence. Poor sales of bad product are blamed on pirates, and those who were responsible can say "but we don't sit idle, we put another DRM in place".
2. Control over the market (standards poisoning, excluding competition, lock-in and etc.). That's what mobile carriers did to prevent people from switching to competitors.
3. Satisfying their hunger for power and ability to tell others what to do or not to do. DRM allows creating new "laws" without any democratic process. As soon as something has DRM attached to it, they can forbid what they don't like using DMCA-1201.
And so on and so forth. Those who use DRM know perfectly well that not only it can't reduce lost sales, it only increases them. So they use it for very different (and crooked) reasons, unless they are simply completely clueless.
While I think DRM is largely a load of BS, it has been implemented with some efficacy (see: Darkspore), which has still not been cracked.
So I do think the intention is to reduce piracy....Whether or not that's effective is a philosophical discussion.
> see: Darkspore
Wasn't its DRM broken? They always are. Some observe, that the mere presence of DRM is an incentive for some to break it, since they see it as a sport.
People used to say about PC games, but the Denuvo encryption is unbreakable right now. The hackers and the studios are not on equal footing anymore.
This will happen to web DRM as well.
EME is just Flash 2.0, only it's even worse, as it relies on architecture specific binary blobs being sent to your browser and running in the (privileged) context of your graphics card driver. At least in Flash, the Flash VM could theoretically have provided some degree of sandboxing.
I'd love to have something like Netflix but with every movie ever. I'd even be willing to pay a reasonable fee per movie to stream them. I have hope that companies with a business model like VidAngel could legally provide that.
VidAngel is a family-friendly video streaming company that filters movies as they stream. While filtering may not be something that you're interested in personally, what I'd like to draw your attention to is their business model. They sell the movie to the viewer for $20, and then the viewer has the option to sell it back for $19 (SD) or $18 (HD) within 24 hours.
I have no idea if this is legal or if they are just under the radar, but so far VidAngel has a wide selection of new releases with a price point that feels reasonable to me personally.
Currently, only torrents seem to offer this. On the technical side. I won't argue about the legal side, which might be different in different parts of the world.
If people weren't so moralizing, maybe the movie mafia would listen to the users a bit more.
The technical side of torrents is lacking in this case, as a lot of rare, old, or more unheard of movies have no seed at all.
This is the main problem that you'll get with torrent if your goal is to have access to "every movie ever".
karagarga is great in that regard. I have a netflix account and also hulu for a while, but torrents are truly the best of all.
In 2011 a company called Zediva tried something similar, though without the "sell back" or filtering bits. They were successfully sued into oblivion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc....
https://www.vidangel.com/legal/terms
> VidAngel provides a service that allows its Users to buy or sell physical media, such as DVD and Blu-ray discs. While a User owns any physical media purchased from VidAngel, VidAngel will provide streaming services to permit the User to stream the Video Content associated with that physical media as many times as desired. [...] Using the VidAngel Services, a User may purchase physical media from VidAngel, whom then stores the physical media in VidAngel’s physical media vault. [...] VidAngel also provides shipping and handling service that allows any User to direct VidAngel to ship, to an address identified by the User, any physical media the User owns which is stored in VidAngel’s physical media storage vault. A reasonable shipping and handling fee applies. The amount of the shipping and handling fee, which is generally dependent on shipping location, time, and other shipping and handling circumstances, is disclosed to a User when the User requests the shipping.
You are buying a physical copy which they keep, or so they say. It is almost certainly questionably legal, because the license you receive from the film distributor when you purchase a physical copy does not permit you to stream the work, nor does VidAngel's license permit digitizing the work and streaming it out to you simply because you "own" another copy.
There's no army of contractors running around inserting your disc in racks upon racks of Blu-Ray players. They digitized and are serving a film from some other copy. That requires special licensing which their pricing scheme does not circumvent, nor the "ownership" (which is flirting with fraud, by my read).
Modifying the content with filters, especially user-selected ones, is even worse. Just doing that for broadcast requires special care. I know because I used to edit films for OTA broadcast, and observed the legal side that went into crossing every T. It took months before I was even allowed to load up a film in an editor, because merely importing the content into Avid entails a licensed usage. Film copyright is serious.
I don't care how many lawyers vetted this, it will not stand up under scrutiny (and, importantly, I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree with that). What concerns me more about VidAngel, though, is their mixed messaging and shadiness. On their about page, they say:
> That’s why VidAngel does not claim to be a moral authority. We will never tell you what to watch or what filters to use. You have the choice to watch however the BLEEP you want.
Sounds great. But then, one reads this:
> As VidAngel has grown and reached a broader audience, a few new customers have begun asking if they can stream on VidAngel without filters. [...] The short answer is, unfortunately, NO.
> There are a lot of great streaming websites for unfiltered movies like Amazon, Google Play, and Vudu. Use those sites for watching movies as-is, and use VidAngel for any movies you choose to filter.
(Note that the second link asks "why are filters required?" and then does not answer the question.)
http://blog.vidangel.com/2016/01/07/vidangel-policy-can-i-wa...
https://vidangel.groovehq.com/knowledge_base/topics/why-are-...
So it sounds like the filtering is important in their interpretation of copyright law (I only say this due to "unfortunately") or they are a moral authority and don't want to admit it to you. Which smells either way. Avoid like the plague and throw a few bucks at someone who flies by day, has a registered DMCA agent, and doesn't employ WHOIS privacy on their domain. What are they hiding? Seriously, if you take money and employ WHOIS privacy, I get immediately suspicious.
They're based out of Provo and only reveal that on their Privacy page (legally-required, I'm sure). I can safely predict exactly what is going on based on their being based in Utah and that the owner went to BYU, which is why it's funny that they try so hard to convince you that they're not a moral authority but then don't let you watch uncut content at all, then tell you that you're getting a choice. Quite the spin.
I'm an employee at VidAngel so I may be able to provide some insight (although my opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer and should not be taken as such).
When VidAngel says that it does not claim to be a moral authority, it is separating itself from the competition (e.g. ClearPlay). It is not going to tell its customers that x is inappropriate or that it is appropriate to view y. All it is saying is that it is up to the customer to decide their moral standing and what they would and would not like to view. We simply tag the content, they decide what they would like to view in their home.
VidAngel is, at its core, a filtering company. So if you are not filtering, VidAngel give you alternatives such as Amazon and Google Play. That does not conflict with its refusal to be a moral authority. It offers the service to filter movies and TV shows in the privacy of your own home, but what you choose to filter is not up to VidAngel.
VidAngel is a filtering company and doesn't offer unfiltered movies--because that is not the market it is after. Within that filtering, VidAngel offers no opinion on which filter is 'morally correct' or not.
As far as 'shadiness' goes, VidAngel definitely doesn't try to hide what it is doing. You can contact VidAngel at support@vidangel.com if you have questions.
The legal terms state "A User owning physical media must use VidAngel’s filtering service to permit the streaming of Filtered Video Content to the User’s device."
Section 5.2 at https://www.vidangel.com/legal/terms
This sure makes it sound like filtering is believed to be required to make the movie legal to stream.
I really struggle to believe VidAngel would build a feature to turn away customers because it is not their market focus. It just doesn't make sense as an engineering investment decision - it is easier and more profitable to allow any number of filters (with 0 being a valid number).
Hey, thanks for showing up and answering some questions. Can you address my point about which copy VidAngel is streaming? If I purchase a film from VidAngel, are they digitizing 'my' copy and transmitting it to me or are they transmitting a master copy of some kind with my filtering directions?
We kinda left that one hanging and now I'm curious. And it's the crux.
My guess is there's some provision in the "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act" that they think makes this streaming legal. The text clearly makes the displaying an edited version legal and does talk about transmitted works. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/110.
The key point is in (11). the following are not infringements of copyright: "the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a member of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture, during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing, from an authorized copy of the motion picture"
The "authorized copy" being the important part, unless you're clicking "buy" and then getting an e-mail the next day when your copy of the film, as digitized at your direction, is ready to stream. Which would make it pointless, so I'm almost positive they don't do that, and even if they did there is no streaming license of any kind in the whole scenario, so...
Good position to be in for them, though, because any type of enforcement will (a) rally a large portion of the community that company represents and (b) start a copyright-vs-family or copyright-vs-church or government-vs-church war, which will be a fountain of bad PR for all involved. (Not that MPAA cares.)
You can select a filter like "ending credits". Then you can watch a filtered movie that is essentially unfiltered.
CLEANFLIX is a documentary (available on Netflix :) about CleanFlicks, a similar editing service (though they sold physical DVDs of the edited films) that was sued by Hollywood.
Guessing: Their justification is: You're not streaming 'Batman', you're streaming, 'JoeBob's Batman Personal Fair Use Derivative Version'.
Whether that would stand up in court, might depend on jurisdiction, judge, jury, etc.
>if you take money and employ WHOIS privacy
I have my contact details on the company domain. I'm considering enabling the WHOIS privacy simply to get rid of the endless succession of people trying to sell me domains that are one character off.
iTunes has almost every movie ever. It costs between $4 and $6 to rent. That's sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Nope, most are only avail to buy as I was reminded when looking for star wars with my daughter, no way I'm paying $20 to see a forty year old movie.
iTunes has most movies and most of those movies are available to rent. New releases usually start as purchase only and become available for rent after a month or two. Star Wars is a special case and is not representative of "most".
That was just my last try, I've found more than half the time I want to see something it is buy only or not there, quite disappointing.
Try VidAngel.com, $1 per movie after an initial $20 purchase
>I'm an employee at VidAngel
So only those who have money should be able to enjoy Indiana Jones?
Your worldview makes total sense...
Thankfully, nobody sane agrees with you. Even Apple doesn't agree with you - its success of the iPod and iPhone is predicated upon pirated music and free access to information (the internet)
I make per-movie purchases digitally through Amazon's streaming service. I have been happy with it. (This is in support of your comment, to say there are services close to what was requested. I'm not trying to say iTunes is bad; it just doesn't work for me, as my "media box" is a PS4 hooked up to my tv.)
I don't understand this argument. Netflix depends on DRM and always has.
Also, this pledge won't protect anyone. Because there's no guarantee that the people/companies suing the developer who breaks future DRM will have signed the pledge. The best protection a developer can have against the DMCA is to not live in the USA.
I generally support everything the EFF does, but I don't get this. If the W3C doesn't standardize DRM we'll still get DRM. It will just be more buggy and with more security holes. Just like MS Silverlight and Adobe Flash.
The idea that you can prevent something from being developed by not standardizing it is absurd.
> If the W3C doesn't standardize DRM we'll still get DRM. It will just be more buggy and with more security holes. Just like MS Silverlight and Adobe Flash.
Honestly, this is what I want. That way, people will roll their eyes at installing "yet another plug-in". It'll be hacky, and terrible, and people will want to get rid of it. Standardizing it is basically accepting it as inevitable, which I don't view to be true.
I'm not so sure - don't confuse the general consensus on HN with the wider public. Average Joe won't think twice about clicking "install" on that dialog that tells him to install Flash in order to watch the movie he's been looking forward to.
I have no stats on this, only anecdotes, but most people I know are annoyed at having to install flash, or java, or any other plugins. They usually will, but they are still annoyed. That's the first step, IMO
Of course they are, but in my opinion it's more of the "oh, there's another iOS update already?" - kind of annoying. It interrupts whatever they were intending to do, but I rarely see any real objection attached to it. Then again, it's all just anecdotes.
I can understand somebody completely disagreeing with this statement, but perhaps:
By not standardizing DRM, the shitty, near-unusable DRM environment will remain shitty and unusable. More users will be discontent with the system, and this gives more opportunities for companies that present a good (non-DRM) system to compete.
The argument is that Netflix grew on the first sale loophole, but today movies are not being released on physical media and for some bizarre reason the people are complacent in these companies effectively removing first sale doctrine if the information isn't on external media.
You could not start start Netflix's DVD business with steaming, and since DVDs are dead, streaming is all that is left, so you cannot found another Netflix - which means you cannot get to another independent content developer like Netflix has become that way.
> I don't understand this argument. Netflix depends on DRM and always has.
Nope, they never really have (though it may be changing now that they are producing their own content). The studios supplying them with content on the other hand has.
Do you think they would have gotten any contracts for content without DRM? I doubt it.
No DRM support from Netflix - no content on Netflix.
Film industry is one of the most corrupted and backwards thinking (MPAA is the prime example). So this can be rephrased as "Help fixing film industry which keeps pushing for retarded idea of DRM at every occasion!". And really it's not the whole film industry. Actual creators most often don't care about this garbage. It's publishers and lawyers who feel the need to satisfy their unquenchable urge for control. DRM and DMCA give them that. Ego feeding control feeling (which is really fake, since in essence they don't control it anyway). I'd call them control freaks.
And how can one exactly fix it? GOG attempted it a while back[1], trying to replicate their success with DRM-free gaming. But they failed.
[1]: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...
Minor correction:
> It's Netflix, from its founding in 1997, the company mailed DVDs around America and then the world, right up to 2007, when it switched to streaming.
Netflix's DVD service never went beyond the US, and still exists to this day.
I was bothered by that too. Up until three years ago, we had kept the DVD-by-mail subscription active for those movies we wanted to watch that weren't available on the streaming sub. After we got our first Roku, we dropped the DVD sub since pretty much anything we wanted to watch was offered on one Roku channel or another (not to mention Netflix's streaming offerings steadily improved over the years).
I believe that in a few years every content owner will have developed their own streaming platform. Or the opposite in Netflix's case. Customers will be forced to pay for N different providers to get access to all content.
What we need is legislation similar to radio broadcasting, which has fixed per-play rates, but for video.
Perhaps this is a business opportunity for white label streaming services (as hosted SaaS or on-premise deployment).
Plex could develop their product to fill this market imo
I'm surprised Netflix hasn't already done this TBH.
The information density of this article is very low.
> For the first time in its history, the W3C is adding encumbrances to the Web, rather than removing them.
How, specifically, so?
>How, specifically, so?
By pushing the EME standard. A Netflix employee is on the working group for it.
So this is about the DRM stuff in the new specs? Didn't Netflix use DRM since the outset?
I know there's some moral positioning about standardising DRM, but would it really affect the 'next Netflix'? Standardised DRM responds to business needs, and companies have already discovered that DRM-Free is a feature, so standardising DRM won't make DRM-free stuff disappear...
From the petition page:
>Imagine a new, disruptive company figured out a way to let hundreds of people watch a single purchased copy of a movie, even though the rightsholders who made that movie objected.
> Of course, it's also the business model of Netflix, circa 1997
This is only true in a pedantic sense. Netflix was shipping around physical copies. Sending digital copies goes by another name: broadcasting! The Supreme court already ruled on that one.
I can't see people being like "oh, yeah, people should be able to broadcast other people's content to hundreds of thousands without the content owner's positions" (Think: this is the main objection to Facebook's Video strategy)
I guess EFF has a position and this is them trying to defend it but their narrative is pretty unconvincing from where I stand.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how would EME have stopped Netflix? They always had proper licensing and DRM for their digital content.
I think the author's point is that the Netflix of today was only able to afford proper licensing and DRM for digital content because they made so much money mailing around discs, against strong objection from the content providers. And if someone wanted to bootstrap a new video distribution service today on a digital platform, EME would give the content providers the power to put an end to it.
I'm wondering the exact same thing.
TFA makes it sound like Netflix bootstrapped itself by buying DVDs from WalMart, which is false -- Rental DVDs, of course, are purchased from distributors and are substantially more expensive than consumer DVDs.
You state your answer with great confidence, but I think you are wrong. In the US (where Netflix is based), the "first sale doctrine" has been held to allow the rental of any legally purchased DVD (even those purchased at Walmart):
http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/09/18/understanding-why-netfli...Because of the first-sale doctrine, any DVD reseller, including Netflix, can basically buy a DVD at WalMart, and turn around and rent it to someone else the very same day. The content owners have absolutely no control over whether the copy can be resold or rented. Period. As such, Netflix has the ability to rent (via DVD) any movie which has ever been sold on DVD, and its costs are relatively fixed as a result of the retail price of the actual DVD.In your defense, it appears that many lawyers also do not understand this law. Here for example we see three saying that rental of consumer DVD's is clearly illegal, and two saying that it's just fine: http://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/is-it-legal-to-rent-out-dv...
This is probably because various studios have attempted to convince the public that rental of consumer DVD's is not allowed, even though falsely marking DVD's in this way is probably not legal: http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/05/first-sale-fandango...
But while I'm pretty certain you are wrong, and although I think I understand the law here, I am not a lawyer, much less a specialist in copyright law. If you can point to evidence that supports your contention, I'd be eager to see it.
Glad to see this. I've criticized EFF before. Not because I disagree with them but because they haven't done a good enough job clearly communicating why they're relevant.
This article shows that they're improving in that direction. Netflix is something that average people really get and the idea that future Netflixes could be stillborn is a good way to communicate the importance of these issues.
Good job, EFF.
5 years old but still very relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
Verizon is throttling YouTube for unlimited data-plan customers a lot, to where it's unusable... other sites work somewhat better.
I am confused. Save netflix from DRM? Despite Netflix's commitment to open source I can't stream movies because the DRM solution Netflix chose is not supported under linux.
Netflix works fine under Linux and has for over a year.
Wow! This is great news, I never thought there would be an open source Netflix solution. Can you give me some pointers for where to find more information? I did a quick search and did not find anything.
1) Open Google Chrome.
2) Go to netflix.com
3) Watch netflix.
Wow. the whole thread here one have a single top-level comment, with a completely wrong understanding of the issue. (and yes, the title of the linked article is awful)
Honestly I have no thoughts on this
Anyone else miss Blockbuster?
Blockbuster's DVD mailing service was way better than Netflix's. Ironically, while Blockbuster stores were (rightly) criticized for having a very small, limited selection, their selection of DVDs was incredibly complete-- far larger than Netflix's. Even their envelopes were better-designed.
So yeah I kind of miss it.
This article is very confusing. What exactly about DRM prevents Netflix?
I don't understand this post at all. And I'm smart.
Why is my phone going to CRASH
Remember when everyone agreed that there was no point to competing with AOL and CompuServe?
> making some of the most innovative programming on any of our screens
Evidently the author hasn't seen "the ranch"
My best guess is that Netflix makes its original/shared rights programming for specific segments of its user base.
Some shows of theirs have really resonated with me, and others I can't even begin to approach.
However, that's just specific shows... with regular television, I'd feel that way about specific channels because they're targeting an entire userbase that doesn't include my tastes.
Netflix seems to cater to everyone, being extremely eclectic with what it holds in its catalogue, but when it comes time to make a series---they don't do the typical thing of watering down a series to try for broad appeal but rather they go for just to a specific niche.
And that's a good thing - I'd rather skip half of the shows and truly enjoy the rest instead of having to endure an endless sea of mediocrity.
"The Ranch" is a preview of CBS comedies ten years hence, when the FCC gets over its aversion to the fuckword. Netflix is just trying to show us a peek of the broadcast future.
F is for Family is the last of their "original series" I tried.
Wow. What a hateful show. It's like they found the world's greatest misanthropist, gave them $10,000,000, and said, "here, make a show that's kind of like The Simpsons I guess."
I have to admit I watched all the episodes, kind of like how when you see a horrible train collision you stick around to see how many bodies will be strewn about when it's over.
Fancy seeing you here!
Anyway. "hateful"? The show strikes me as a sitcom set in the 1970's about a middle-aged slightly-worse-than-average dad with an average family who's pretty dissatisfied with his life and social status.
Because it's a sitcom, it makes everything more two-dimensional and extreme than you'd see in real life. Once you get past that, you see that
* The dad thinks of himself as THE family provider, but is willing to back down from that position when the wife tells him to fuck off
* Both parents hate the fact that they're burdened with kids, but they don't hate the kids and understand that they have to make things as good as they can for the kids
* The kids are just your typical free-range, somewhat-troublesome kids
* The dad doesn't get the free-spirit neighbor, but kinda respects him and envies his lifestyle
* The dad tries to do what's best for the people that depend on him, but he's not above launching a mean-spirited prank on someone who has deliberately fucked him over for doing the right thing
It was comedian Bill Burr's idea. He pitched it to Vince Vaughan's production company, who then went to Netflix.
And he was probably not paid $10,000,000. But he is damn hilarious in that show
You thought it was funny? I found every minute of it horrifying.
> Vince Vaughan[sic]
That explains a lot.
I don't think it's fair to call it "a show kind of like The Simpsons". The whole point is that it's taking place in 1970s and showing the life in that era. I found the show very interesting.
If crap like that allows things like Sense8, Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Orange Is The New Black to happen then that seems like a fair trade.
I took time this weekend to watch it and holy crap is it so bad. But I watched the whole season, and when I let go of any sense of good that could come out of it, I enjoyed it.