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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

I find the funniest part of all of this DRM browser talk is that the people most in favor of this kind of standardized DRM are pirates. It's fairly easy to see why when you look at the obvious point that any DRM running client side can be cracked. By standardizing it into the browser, you only need to crack a single thing - the browser DRM module - and then you will have free and unrestricted access to all of the DRM content with no additional work.

It's the same way PS2 piracy was so rampant. You only needed to install a simple mod chip into your PS2, and since all of the DRM relied on that, you could now run every game with no additional work. It created something of a golden age for gaming piracy and the PS2 actually remains popular today in certain regions because of it.

So standardizing DRM into the browser is a huge boon for pirates, and a problem waiting to happen for everyone else. The stupidity is sometimes mind-blowing.

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The hardware and the OS will hold the DRM, as far as I understand. That means that if say pirates break the DRM on Windows, Microsoft can patch it by next Tuesday.

That being said DRM by default in browsers (through EME) is probably the end of the "open web" - or at the very least the end of a "clean open web", meaning that everything will need to be hacked and cracked to make it work. Want to copy text or an image from a website? You'll have to find the crack for that website. Not to mention that doing that will be soon declared illegal (if it's not already from the moment DRM is applied to something).

This. I don't get why so many comments gloss over the fact that this isn't just about Netflix types of content, but something as simple as "view source" becomes banned outright. Its a step above when sites restrict right clicks because damn that image/whatever is off the hizzy and needs "protection"

Minification and obfuscation have often been enough so far but the slope we're sliding down is pretty steep and if TBL wants us at the bottom a lot of people are just going to follow suit. As someone who's finally embracing that development is increasingly being pushed to the web over native devices, I'm likely to be looking for yet another career shift (first from IT to software dev) before its all said and done. I do not look forward to debugging DRM when I already loathe minified JavaScript. Tooling is already abysmally slow in spite of Chrome's excellent dev tools (unmatched by any other browser or plugin IMO).

While I do understand the concept of protecting IP, this measure is inherently flawed right out of the gate. I'd honestly rather keep archaic Flash and not-so-archaic Silverlight around because at least their tooling is decent. I can't wait another 10+ years for this to catch up because everyone is foolishly starting from 0, not building on their successes (however much or little you define).

Comments 'gloss over it' because that's not what this fight is about. EME does not allow disabling 'view source' (unless I've completely misunderstood it). It's a step down the DRM road, but assuming that taking one step that way means we'll inevitably go the rest of the way seems hyperbolic.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/lowering-your-standard... is where I got the 'view source' line. If its hyperbolic, the EFF does a very good job of pushing it.

I thought another article pointed blocking the command out in the spec but I could be totally wrong there. Even so, nothing is stopping anyone from building a dumb front end and placing the entirety of the logic in the DRM container. Netflix isn't an argument in countries where it doesn't apply, like much of the world. View source and the actual openness of the web would be that argument, however. If its a concoction made up by what the EFF believes this fight would go versus an actual result of the fight as it stands, then I sadly fell for it pretty hard. Its not a difficult leap to make but I'm definitely more interested in facts over opinion based on someone's failing attempt at predicting the future.

I think the EFF is engaging in some FUD themselves on this. There's some other project exploring ways to protect source code of web applications, and the EFF suggests that, now that the W3C has touched some form of DRM, that will be able to push a way for sites to disable 'view source'. I don't think that's realistic - minification and copyright work well enough to protect JS code already. I'm disappointed that the EFF is resorting to scare tactics like this rather than debating the actual issue at hand.

Not sure why you think this but the people most in favor of this kind of DRM are certainly not pirates. Also, I don't understand your PS2 comparison - how exactly did the DRM on PS2 enable piracy? It was a poor implementation of DRM that was bypassed. If they had no DRM it would have been even easier.

Otherwise most of game manufacturers would try to implement a different, custom solution (as for PC games) which would need to be cracked separately for each game, instead of a one-crack-fits-all permanent solution.

There is no standard W3C DRM. The W3C EME spec that uproar is about is only a plug-in interface for launching arbitrary binary vendor-specific blobs (just like the <object> element, except as a JS API on <video>).

A browser that is 100% compliant with all W3C specs (and nothing non-standard) will not be able to play a single Netflix video, because that requires (deliberately non-standardized) Netflix DRM Extension (CDM) to be licensed and baked into the browser.

The proposed standard is just an interface to be implemented by the browsers. The actual decryption happens in a non-standard, proprietary binary module.

Yes, and there will be multiple of those, not just 1. Right now, Google and Microsoft each have their own (Widevine and PlayReady, respectively).

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