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Comment by cleverjake | Hacker News Reader

>>Focusing on minor issue (native plugin) while ignoring the major one (DRM) sounds strange.

I don't think it is a minor issue at all. My biggest complaint with flash has been the security vulnerabilities, and I trust Google/Mozilla with web encryption WAY more than I do Adobe. Can you explain why you consider it to be such a minor issue?

>>And in reality this whole EME thing won't even remove native DRM code. It just will hook it into JavaScript.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'in reality'. Thats it's entire purpose.

>>The risk caused by DRM won't get any less than it is already. I know? Who is arguing the opposite?

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>I don't think it is a minor issue at all. My biggest complaint with flash has been the security vulnerabilities, and I trust Google/Mozilla with web encryption WAY more than I do Adobe.

Why do you think Google or Mozilla would be the ones to implement the black box in the DRM? Firefox is developed by a community. The process is public and anyone can identify or patch vulnerabilities -- that's why the security is good. You expect Mozilla to devise and implement some DRM scheme? The actual DRM would end up being created by someone like Adobe again and have all the same security vulnerabilities, because the wider developer community couldn't be allowed to be privy to how it does what it does or it wouldn't be DRM anymore.

One of the problems with DRM is that pretty much anyone who understands security will laugh at you for thinking you can implement effective DRM, so it ends up being built by snake oil salesmen who don't know what they're doing. I don't see how putting it into HTML would change any of that -- all it would do is pollute HTML and encourage the proliferation of more bad code.

It's a minor issue comparing to the issue of DRM. You say - let's worry about plugins, while users will agree to use DRM anyway. I say - if user agrees to use DRM, user can as well use native plugins - such user doesn't care about security or privacy already and there is no point to drag that issue into HTML at all.

I don't really understand why you at the same time ready to trust some balck box DRM code from Netflix or whoever. Which can do anything of this sort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Their code won't have all of the power of flash and silverlight (ie my full user account on the computer). The worst case scenario is their algo's suck and I can decrypt their videos easier.

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