Hacker News Reader

You don't need an EME blackbox to protect privacy.

You simply need client-side decryption for that case, which can be done in a transparent sandbox with audited open source code.

View on HN

That's already part of the EME standard, implemented in the browser (so as open source as the browser is).

https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/#clear-key

But they're never going to agree to that, because then it would be trivial to dump the decrypted stream to a file. Right?

But it is trivial anyhow. DRM doesn't actually work, never has, never will; and attempting to criminalize it (such as mentioned elsewhere around here) will only serve to increase piracy, not decrease it.

Yes yes, I'm on your side here. The point is that if the decryption module were open-source, it would be trivial to do it, and there would be lots of implementations of it, while if it were a binary blob, it would significantly raise the bar. They know this, so they'll never agree to having it be open-source.

If we're talking about privacy (protecting the user from "the cloud") and not copy-protection (protecting our media overlords from the user) then I don't see the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com