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?
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?
But this isn't an absurd question at all: Fast food and packaged food have dramatically changed the way people eat, for the worse.
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.
> 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.
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.
They'd be burning up the telephone lines to Washington and hiring lobbyists by the trainload.
All of the above certainly made it less annoying than it is today. Noting that there is no "do not call" list for businesses.
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 ;)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
funny you mention that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422531
I can happily install whatever I like on my stock Android device.
..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.
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.
So true. You can sideload on Android though. So all is not lost.
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'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.
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!
Just pulled my old punch cards out of the attic and dusted them off, hoping I can use them again!
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If people weren't so moralizing, maybe the movie mafia would listen to the users a bit more.
This is the main problem that you'll get with torrent if your goal is to have access to "every movie ever".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc....
> 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.
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 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"
Whether that would stand up in court, might depend on jurisdiction, judge, jury, etc.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
What we need is legislation similar to radio broadcasting, which has fixed per-play rates, but for video.
> For the first time in its history, the W3C is adding encumbrances to the Web, rather than removing them.
How, specifically, so?
By pushing the EME standard. A Netflix employee is on the working group for it.
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.
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.
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.
So yeah I kind of miss it.
Evidently the author hasn't seen "the ranch"
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.
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.
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