Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake [LWN.net]

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 6, 2013 22:30 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
Parent article: Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Looks like RMS's disconnect with reality grows wider and wider. He still spots problems in the development of the world as well as before but he's less and less realistic about his ability to influence them.

Think GPLv3: it had a noble goal - to return control back to users. And I was even convinced that it was the right step couple of years back. But now I'm less and less sure.

GPLv2 program merely gives you a source code, but often you can not actually use this source code with the hardware you supposedly own. GPLv3 solves the problem and everyone is happy. Right? Wrong. Instead of embracing GPLv3 vendors allotted substantial funds to remove GPL from the equation altogether. For example libstdc++ is distributed under GPLv3 and should be replaceable on device. Can you do that with Android? Nope: it does not ship libstdc++ in the first place (it only ships bits and pieces linked with various program which does not trigger GPLv3 because of special exception) and there are large efforts to replace it with libc++ in the future. GNU userspace is mostly removed from the equation for the same reason.

Now, DRM. Consider this passage from the proposal: If the DRM is implemented in the operating system, this could result in distribution of works that can't be played at all on a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. It's written as if we are discussing something hypothetical which can be avoided and postponed. Well, newsflash: netflix is over decade old by now, it always used DRM and is now even Linux-compatible (I mean: two most popular distributions are supported - Android and ChromeOS). The question is not "will Hollyweb be ever materialized" (that ship sailed long, long ago), but "will it be ever accessible to people who don't want to give total control over their devices to someone else".

And if the answer is "no, we value our freedom more then our ability to watch new movies and sitcoms" then I'm pretty sure Hollywood will accept this answer and will happily continue to ignore "these crazy Linux people".

to post comments

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 6, 2013 22:44 UTC (Mon) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (5 responses)

I've recently realized that I'm not a "live free or die" person. I'm a "live free, or live less free for now" person.

If there's something available under less-than-perfectly-free licensing terms, whether video or wireless drivers, I'm much happier to use it for now and build evidence that there's a user community who wants it to be free, than to separate myself from that world.

It's worth noting that RMS doesn't use a web browser. He emails some bot he's set up somewhere, which gets back to him within a day with a text-only scrape of the page in question. That should give you an idea of how reality-based his web policy proposals are.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 7, 2013 12:59 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (1 responses)

Thats called an open source person, aka a pragmatist. It is this specific point that RMS and Linus seem to battle on. RMS is a purist and Linus is a pragmatist. Neither are wrong, merely different points of view.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 7, 2013 21:20 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

There's nothing pragmatic about saying "I'm not willing to sacrifice anything to protect this thing that I greatly enjoy". A lot of people with that sort of attitude call themselves open source people.

(RMS wrote a good piece about pragmatism)

Open source is a technological movement: This method produces better software. (Other comparable movements would be "MacOS is better than Windows", or "KDE is better than GNOME", or vice versa.) Free software is a social movement: computer users deserve to be able to help themselves and each other. Each movement has its purists and pragmatists (and some people are both or neither).

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 8, 2013 11:11 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (2 responses)

> It's worth noting that RMS doesn't use a web browser. He emails some bot he's set up somewhere, which gets back to him within a day with a text-only scrape of the page in question.

I don't think he actually does this any more, judging from the volume of the Political Notes section of his personal website, and the fact that the one email I know of in which he mentioned that was circa 10 years ago IIRC.

> That should give you an idea of how reality-based his web policy proposals are.

The freedom to be able to do crazy fun things like this is important, though. I have weird pandoc / latex / mupdf based feed reader I hacked together, which I love, and this kind of innovation that is threatened by DRM.

Catering to non tech savvy users is important, sure, but using "reality-based" implies that there is and should be one way to access internet services, and it isn't worth caring about alternatives.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 8, 2013 16:08 UTC (Wed) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (1 responses)

> The freedom to be able to do crazy fun things like this is important, though. I have weird pandoc / latex / mupdf based feed reader I hacked together, which I love, and this kind of innovation that is threatened by DRM.
>
> Catering to non tech savvy users is important, sure, but using "reality-based" implies that there is and should be one way to access internet services, and it isn't worth caring about alternatives.

If I'm reading the summary of the proposal right, the DRM stuff that the W3C is considering is just about specific types of media (video and audio, mostly), to replace things that would otherwise have been done with custom Flash, etc. applets. I don't see a proposal to enable DRM of actual text content.

For that, there already is only one way to access the media -- use a device that supports Flash, and run the Flash bytecode. You already can't scrape, syndicate, etc. this content (modulo DRM-breaking). Finding a spec to let this run within the context of HTML isn't a further restriction beyond what you can currently do. Absent the spec, if you're unwilling (or unable) to install Flash, there are currently _zero_ ways to access that service; it'd be nice for there to be one.

If the spec were about DRM of text content, I would be up in arms about it too.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 8, 2013 16:47 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link]

> I don't see a proposal to enable DRM of actual text content.

No, thankfully nobody is proposing that!

> You already can't scrape, syndicate, etc. this content (modulo DRM-breaking).

Yes, you're correct. But the point I was getting at is that it's good to have the HTML standard only codify things that give you this kind of technical freedom, and mark anything else as a crappy nonstandard abberation, rather than something that has essentially been given approval by the W3C. I think RMS is right here, they have serious clout and respect, this is an issue they should use that on.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 0:03 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (39 responses)

It seems you're hoping for a trivial solution to a massive problem, and then blaming RMS for the trivial solution not existing. (You're also misrepresenting his arguments.)

There are two categories of entities that publish stuff under DRM. Let's call them the nasty and the clueless.

Netflix would be in the nasty group. They're intentionally restricting people and they're jump through barbed wire to do so. Having DRM in or out of HTML has no effect on this group.

Then there's the clueless. The people who don't think about the fact that controlling their document/video means controlling other people's computers, and that this might not be a nice thing to do. Most of the clueless are too small-time to know how to implement DRM, and they don't really care, so they don't do it.

If DRM is added to the standard, it'll become a tickbox option and suddenly a whole load of websites run by the clueless will disappear behind DRM restrictions.

A second problem is that HTML is a recognised open standard. When DRM is outside the HTML standards, we can say to non-nasty website owners that we want them to use open standards. And when they do, everyone can enjoy what they publish.

If DRM is added to HTML, then even standards compliant websites will get locked down with DRM.

And think of what influence it will have on our lobbying for better laws. We're not going to be able to outlaw DRM tomorrow, but if something in that direction was possible, it would be pretty annoying to have the nasty group being able to reply "Oh yeh, but then HTML won't work".

You're right that RMS's proposal doesn't fix the problem of Netfix existing, but he didn't say it would. He's just trying to stop a major step backwards in one particular aspect of the DRM problem.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 2:03 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (13 responses)

+1 to all of this. See also the BBC arguing any CDM needs to have legal consequences for bypassing it, and to be able disable AirPlay. They then play the concern troll that

high-quality video content that the broadcast industry produces will be made available only to closed devices and application stores where such security can be implemented. In short, it will be lost to the World Wide Web entirely, and such systems have shown so far to be difficult to link to and reference for the rest of the web.. We do not believe this scenario would be positive the open web, or for anyone, either video producers or customers.

In other words, the BBC claims the open web needs the threat of jail for consumers who AirPlay to XBMC otherwise they'll take their content and lock it away.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 6:44 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (12 responses)

Wow. The BBC. Trying to monetize what the public already paid for. Aren't they ashamed?

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 6:49 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (10 responses)

Their monetization comes from non-UK customers, which is fair enough. I'm not sure if they think license-fee payers should have AirPlay disabled by law though (my guess would be they do).

Who has a right to free BBC?

Posted May 7, 2013 9:44 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (6 responses)

It's been a few years since I looked into this. Is the content intended to be free for everyone physically on UK territory or is it for all UK citizens (at home and abroad)?

If the BBC is required to give either category of people access, then I wonder if it can be argued that any DRM scheme will shut out some part of that population and therefore can't be used.

Who has a right to free BBC?

Posted May 7, 2013 11:10 UTC (Tue) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link] (5 responses)

It's intended to be free to anyone who pays a license fee, and the licence fee only applies to UK residents. Technologically, iplayer though its purely geographic. There's no mechanism to prove I'm a license-fee payer travelling abroad.

When I travel in contintental Europe, many of my BBC podcasts fail to download, and instead I get a recorded message telling me that its not available outside the UK (many do still work - particularly those that don't use content not owned by the BBC (i.e. not music programming) - and much pure-BBC output is provided free to the rest of the word).

Who has a right to free BBC?

Posted May 9, 2013 10:29 UTC (Thu) by madhatter (subscriber, #4665) [Link] (4 responses)

This is a common misunderstanding, but it's wholly wrong.

"The BBC exists to serve the public interest.

The BBC’s main object is the promotion of its Public Purposes.
[...]
The Public Purposes of the BBC are as follows—
(a) sustaining citizenship and civil society;
(b) promoting education and learning;
(c) stimulating creativity and cultural excellence;
(d) representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities;
(e) bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK;
(f) in promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television.
"

This is taken from the beginning of the BBC's Royal Charter, its constitutional basis document, which can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/governance/regulatory_framework/charter_agreement.html.

The licence fee, however, is to be paid by "Everyone in the UK who watches or records TV as it is broadcast ... This includes TV on computers, mobile phones, DVD/video recorders and other devices". This is taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/strategy/licence_fee/licence_fee.html.

It's a matter of practice that the BBC tends to ignore constituents who are not licence-fee payers. I've been grumbling at the BBC for years to give me a free-software-based way of accessing the content that my licence fee is paying for; but when no response was forthcoming, I gave up my television, stopped paying the licence fee, used only free software to download and view iplayer content, and am still acting lawfully and am still part of the BBC's constituency.

Who has a right to free BBC?

Posted May 9, 2013 14:14 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (3 responses)

> used only free software to download and view iplayer content

Care to elaborate which software, and how?

Who has a right to free BBC?

Posted May 10, 2013 15:44 UTC (Fri) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link] (2 responses)

XBMC's iPlayer addon loads BBC content fine. I'm reasonably sure (although not certain) that it's free software.

Gerv

Who has a right to free BBC?

Posted May 11, 2013 1:54 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

It's Free from the point of view of licensing, but it's based on librtmp and so the legality of distributing it in much of the world is unclear. Is Free software truly Free if distribution in much of the world is illegal?

Who has a right to free BBC?

Posted May 11, 2013 14:17 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Of course, since you can't access iplayer outside the UK anyway without jumping through proxy hoops, I'm not sure how important the use of DRM-cracking software to fail to access it is.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 13:21 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

The BBC are using public money to promote and invest in DRM, which is not in the public interest (IMO). Their justification for this is that it allows their *commercial* arm to make more money, and hence allows them to make more programmes for the public. However, their commercial arm contributes an order of magnitude less money to the BBC than the public does via the licence fee (about ~£130M versus ~£3.5B) - so that argument makes little sense of itself.

I suspect this is as much about BBC management positioning the BBC for a possible future without the licence fee. The BBC is locking up the market as much it can now - using the public's own money - in order to ensure the rosiest possible outlook should it have to be run on a commercial basis at some stage in the future.

If you're a geek (esp in the UK), if you dislike DRM, know that the BBC is not a friend.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 15:16 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

Indeed, the BBC's commercial ventures have distorted various markets for some time, as pointed out by other contributors to this discussion. Particularly the print media (while such things were still an obviously viable line of business) were affected by BBC franchise publications which were actively advertised on the supposedly non-commercial publicly-funded BBC channels.

With various production agreements and a degree of internal privatisation (common in the British public sector and amongst its imitators), one would be forgiven for having the feeling that such commercial activity is a form of looting done for the benefit of various well-connected individuals. Such beneficiaries of BBC commercialisation/privatisation want DRM to maximise their licensing opportunities.

Meanwhile, absurd region-limited content licensing agreements made by the BBC itself mean that, for example, the lazy option of picking music tracks from a catalogue, for whatever production it is that needs a soundtrack, brings with it the "need" to impose DRM in case someone watching a wildlife programme outside Britain gets to hear some music they shouldn't be "allowed" to hear.

Naturally, the BBC could fund genuinely (re)distributable content and spread the wealth around a bit, but then such an exercise wouldn't put money into the pockets of various established beneficiaries of the BBC's kindness (to put it diplomatically).

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 15:37 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I would agree with the more general assessment you seem to be making: The BBC is run in the interests of BBC management and their associates, not in the public interest necessarily. There is good, repeated reason to believe the two are not the same. E.g., for a non-DRM example, the BBC has massive commissioning power within the UK media industry. Not infrequently the companies they commission material from are part-owned and/or run by high-ranking employees, and/or their associates (e.g. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/no-bbc-probe-over-jay-hunt... for a glaring example).

Further, the BBC itself often has a financial stake in the companies it commissions from. I gather it is in fact standard BBC practice. This of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, perhaps. However the BBC does often uses the argument that its hands are tied on DRM because of 3rd party rights-holders, while conveniently failing to mention that:

a) The BBC has a significant financial stake in many of these 3rd parties (BBC Worldwide is wholly BBC owned!)

b) The BBC is the one commissioning these programmes, paying for them, and writing the contracts!

The BBC is not as cuddly as its public image suggests.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 10:11 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

The BBC has been monetizing things created with licence-payers' money for decades. The Radio Times listings magazine has had a non-zero cover price since its creation in the 1920s, monetization of BBC programmes by licensing to foreign broadcasters started in the 1950s, and direct monetization of BBC programmes by sale of packaged recordings to the general public started in the 1960s for radio and 1980 for television.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 7:36 UTC (Tue) by sylock (guest, #90792) [Link] (23 responses)

Today anyone who want to implement DRM things (with closed source) can already do it with the browsers plugins system. (or am I wrong?)

The current proposal is not a standard but an HTML API to which closed software (CDMs) could be linked to. So it will be the wild if that proposal passes: everyone could write any CDM (compatible with his website) and the code will or won't be multi-platform (according to coder choices and knowledge). So we could virtually need to download and install as much CDMs as there are websites that uses that system.

In regards with these information, and knowing that W3C is an organisation supposed to build and ship STANDARDS, they must refuse arguing that the proposal won't better anything and the same purpose can already be done with browser's plugins.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 9:52 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (20 responses)

I don't think it's that easy to implement DRM. I used to be a programmer and I've been maintaining websites for 15 years but I don't know how to implement DRM. I'm sure I could learn, but it's not something I've stumbled across during my web dev work. If it was in the standard, it would probably creep into the general HTML howto's that we all consult when debugging our syntax.

And us techs also have to keep in mind that a large portion of the population think that the way to get to facebook is by typing "facebook.com" into Google! What we find easy, others find baffling.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 10:25 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (19 responses)

> but I don't know how to implement DRM.

Neither does anyone else. And if you're a mathematician, then you can PROVE that nobody does know how to implement DRM.

(Well, you can get pretty intrusive, with hardware-control and such. But there is still one fact remaining: You always give away the cryptographic key. And since you do that, it's provably insecure).

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 1:21 UTC (Wed) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (18 responses)

> Neither does anyone else. And if you're a mathematician, then you can PROVE that nobody does know how to implement DRM.

That's not as interesting an argument as it sounds like. If you're a mathematician, then you can PROVE that nobody knows how to do static analysis (since it reduces to the halting problem), but people clearly do and it's clearly useful on real-world code. Nobody knows if SAT is in P, but we have SAT solvers that operate in bounded time on any real-world problem thrown at them, etc.

DRM is about making it harder to exfiltrate content than to acquire it through the intended means. It doesn't have to make it impossible to be successful. I pay for, e.g., Rdio, which uses DRM to prevent me from walking off with their entire catalog. I can do whatever I actually care to do within their restrictions, and continue paying, and clearly so do lots of others. So it's a pretty successful DRM scheme, even if it's theoretically unsound.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 15:13 UTC (Wed) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (17 responses)

> DRM is about making it harder to exfiltrate content than to acquire it through the intended means. It doesn't have to make it impossible to be successful. I pay for, e.g., Rdio, which uses DRM to prevent me from walking off with their entire catalog. I can do whatever I actually care to do within their restrictions, and continue paying, and clearly so do lots of others. So it's a pretty successful DRM scheme, even if it's theoretically unsound.

I don't think so.

DRM is about removing control. More specifically, it's about removing the consumer's control such that they can't do profit-reducing things like format or time shifting -- instead, they'll be forced to buy the content again and again.

In theory, the control removal prevents piracy (by making it harder to copy illicitly than just to buy the content in the first place), but in practice that's not true either, as the ease of electronic distribution means that the consumer doesn't have to be the one cracking the DRM. They just need to find a site or P2P program with the content and click "Download".

DRM is great in a world that's not connected, and where cracks, rips, and other pirated content is not trivially available.

Thankfully that's not the world in which we live.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 15:54 UTC (Wed) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (16 responses)

I don't see how that's at odds with what I said. Yes, I could go and spend effort finding pirated versions of all the music I want. Or I could pay Rdio a few dollars a month, and they'll find all the music I want for me, and let me play it on every device where I was going to play it anyway.

DRM is successful when it provides the consumer a better experience than piracy, which Rdio's is definitely doing. (As are other providers; I'm picking on Rdio because it's the one I've been most happy with recently.)

Even if piracy is nominally "free", there are a range of downsides, from inconsistent quality to having to go to effort to conceal your identity from law enforcement. So there are plenty of avenues that a DRM provider can compete, saying, yes DRM is a downside but it's less of a downside.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 18:42 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

> and they'll find all the music I want for me

No, they won't. They'll find all the music THEY want for you.
And that is the problem.

http://mashable.com/2013/04/30/netflix-streamageddon-2013/

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 19:42 UTC (Wed) by bjencks (subscriber, #80303) [Link] (14 responses)

It's not the DRM that's providing those benefits, it's the legal and convenient content provider.

Compare providing exactly the same service with and without DRM. At this point it's quite clear that the content will be available for piracy one way or another, so it's really not credible to claim that the DRM is preventing piracy. Therefore, the only reason they have to choose DRM is the loss of control ThinkRob was talking about.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 20:13 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Without some sort of DRM you can just grab songs you need and then let your subscription expire.

One solution to this is to make subscription mandatory. Another one is to use DRM to make copying music a hassle.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 20:59 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

> Without some sort of DRM you can just grab songs you need and then let your subscription expire.

But how many people actually do that? Most people wouldn't even bother, as long as they are given an easier way to access their content wherever they want to (that is, supporting multiple platforms and possibly offline access).

Besides, one of the important points of a subscription is that you also get new stuff automatically -- whethere it's new TV shows in a series or new releases by favorite artists. And you get access to content that you didn't anticipate in advance you would want to see/hear.

I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but it seems it would be rare enough not to be a significant hindrance to business. Most likely they would gain just as many new users who would otherwise be put off by the DRM.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 9, 2013 1:42 UTC (Thu) by bjencks (subscriber, #80303) [Link]

Sure, you can "just" grab the songs. You can also just pirate them in the first place. Either way, you're going out of your way to do something illegal, and I'm not convinced the difficulty is substantially different.

For example, Pandora seems to be doing just fine without DRM. Part of it is that you can't easily trawl through their catalogue, but it's also because downloading is inconvenient and using it legally is incredibly convenient, and they're providing a value-add service of automatic song selection.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 20:59 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (10 responses)

At this point it's quite clear that the content will be available for piracy one way or another, so it's really not credible to claim that the DRM is preventing piracy.

It's not clear at all. It took years to break PS3 encryption and even XBox360 was not all that convenient to use with pirated content either (quite different experience from previous generations where you only needed to install modchip once). We'll see what happens with XBoxNEXT and PS4.

The goal is not to make content completely unavailable for pirates. The goal it to make it unavailable for enough time to make the whole venture profitable.

Remember the basic thing about security (said by Abraham Lincoln two hundreds years ago): You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

DRM people shoot for the all of the people some of the time and do better and better job as time goes.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 21:47 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (3 responses)

> We'll see what happens with XBoxNEXT and PS4.

Your mistake is to think that the venture must be profitable. PS3's locking was broken here in Brasil soon after it was launched. Pirated games here are almost free, because people usually charge for the service of unlocking the console and do not charge for the games. That way, pirates take only marginal profit on pirate copies, if any.

> DRM people shoot for the all of the people some of the time and do better and better job as time goes.

This is a common misconception. It works just as badly as Macrovision worked. The point is that, today, you can combine DRM and some convenience incentives (Netflix: cheap, simple, fast, reasonable quality, had a nice albeit slightly outdated catalog) and disincentive DRM breaking..

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 8, 2013 22:13 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

>PS3's locking was broken here in Brasil soon after it was launched.
No it wasn't. BD-drive firmware was cracked. So the next iteration will simply move the driver firmware to the trusted code section.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 9, 2013 9:39 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I think you are confuse XBox360 crack and PS3 crack.

XBox360 was actually cracked quickly - both DVD drive and the body, but Microsoft quickly patched the vulnerabilities in Firmware which meant that you always needed about half-year-to-year old XBox360 to actually unlock it (to run Linux, for example) while DVD needed new firmware to play new games just as frequently.

PS3 was completely unbroken for almost four years and BD-drive was never actually broken: firmware was broken via overflow in USB driver (I strongly suspect some kind of leak was involved because it's hard to cook up such an exploit without looking on the decrypted firmware code and said decrypted firmware code become available only when aforementioned exploit become public).

Wii? Yes, Wii was broken again and again - but it also had no protected hardware components to support DRM, almost everything was done in the main CPU without any protection from the running program, no wonder such scheme was quite easily broken.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 9, 2013 9:31 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

PS3's locking was broken here in Brasil soon after it was launched.

Citation needed. All respectable sources say that PS3 was unbroken for almost four years (from release autumn 2006 to autumn 2010). For you four years may be "soon after" for SONY it was enough to make nice profits.

XBox360... yes, it was "broken" quickly after release. But not really. It's DVD-drive was broken and it was not all that useful for pirated content: ban waves (Google is your friend if you don't know what they are) exhausted lots of potential pirates enough to convince them to buy new console and keep it unbroken.

How pirates coped? Usually by offering previous generation of consoles (PS3 was released in 2006, but PS2 was discontinues only in 2012), some even offered clones of PS2 in a case similar to PS3 - but this does not mean DRM was cracked or somehow didn't work. It did. This is not a new trend, too: unofficial clones of NES were offered in PlayStation-style case shortly after introduction of original PlayStation - similarly to how today there are lots of fake iPhones which run Android but copy all attributes of the iPhone (they even have fake Lightning connector which duplicates the shape but is, of course, incompatible with the original).

World is much, much more complex then it looks on a first glance. If you've seen "unlocked PS3" banners "soon after it was launched" it does not mean people actually sold "unlocked PS3".

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 9, 2013 18:22 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link] (5 responses)

> > At this point it's quite clear that the content will be available for piracy one way or another, so it's really not credible to claim that the DRM is preventing piracy.
> It's not clear at all. It took years to break PS3 encryption and even XBox360 was not all that convenient to use with pirated content either (quite different experience from previous generations where you only needed to install modchip once).

Note that consoles are a bit different than media. Blocking piracy on a console does *not* require protecting the content -- it just requires controlling the platform enough that you can't easily turn around and play that content on another PS3. With music and movies, it only needs one point of attack to get the content before everyone can freely share and use it. With consoles, every single console needs to be attacked individually in order to play. People were dumping and sharing images of PS3 games for years before anybody could actually use them on another system.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 9, 2013 20:02 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

Note that consoles are a bit different than media.

What's the difference?

People were dumping and sharing images of PS3 games for years before anybody could actually use them on another system.

What they were "dumping and sharing" were opaque useless blobs of [partially] encrypted data. When PS3 was finally broken it was found that most dumps were only usable on the very system which was used to create these in first place.

With music and movies, it only needs one point of attack to get the content before everyone can freely share and use it.

You still need to decrypt it and somehow pull the unencrypted video from it. Well, unless you'll be happy with "screen copy" made by webcam from your monitor. That's why DRM makes so much sense for programs (where "screen copy" is basically useless), it's somewhat less useful for videos (where it's worse but many are happy to have even that) and is completely useless for music and literature (where "screen copy" satisfies most users).

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 9, 2013 21:13 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link] (3 responses)

Note that consoles are a bit different than media.
What's the difference?

The remaining text in my post explained what I meant. I'm not sure if your question is implying that it wasn't made clear, or if you are just reading and replying to one sentence at a time.

People were dumping and sharing images of PS3 games for years before anybody could actually use them on another system.
What they were "dumping and sharing" were opaque useless blobs of [partially] encrypted data. When PS3 was finally broken it was found that most dumps were only usable on the very system which was used to create these in first place.
With music and movies, it only needs one point of attack to get the content before everyone can freely share and use it.
You still need to decrypt it and somehow pull the unencrypted video from it. Well, unless you'll be happy with "screen copy" made by webcam from your monitor. That's why DRM makes so much sense for programs (where "screen copy" is basically useless), it's somewhat less useful for videos (where it's worse but many are happy to have even that) and is completely useless for music and literature (where "screen copy" satisfies most users).

It sounds like you're missing my point. There is a fundamental difference:

With a movie system like Netflix attempting DRM, one person can spend $50,000 on fancy equipment to scrape the digital data directly from their LCD monitor wiring. This person spends a month or two of effort, and gets a perfect digital copy of a movie. They distribute the movie as an MP4, and everybody in the world can view it. It is extremely difficult for DRM to prevent this type of piracy.
With a game system like the PS3, one person can spend any amount of money on fancy equipment to scrape the decrypted game directly from RAM, or to decap chips and get their encryption keys, or any other method to get a copy of the game. But now, they're stuck. They can distribute that game, but nobody can play it, because everybody else still has an unhacked PS3 that cannot play such games. There is no other hardware for which PS3 game data is useful.

If someone is discussing the feasibility of DRM in case #1, it's not a fair comparison to bring up case #2. To pirate movies, an attack needs to occur exactly once, and people can copy and watch with no effort. To pirate games, an attack needs to be repeated by everyone who wants to play. That's why PS3 and XBOX DRM has lasted for years.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 10, 2013 17:16 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

It sounds like you're missing my point.

No, it looks like you are missing my point.

There is a fundamental difference:

It's not as fundamental as you think.

With a movie system like Netflix attempting DRM, one person can spend $50,000 on fancy equipment to scrape the digital data directly from their LCD monitor wiring.

Yes, it's possible. Or rather: it's possible today, we don't know if it'll still be possible tomorrow. But of course can use good camcoder instead which will be good enough in the foreseeable future.

This person spends a month or two of effort, and gets a perfect digital copy of a movie.

It's not "perfect digital copy". This is copy which was uncompressed and probably has watermarks added (if DRM embeds them). But this minor issue. The major issue lies in the fact that need for the $50'000 of fancy equipment makes you trackable. It's not possible to send everyone who wants to watch "facy movie" to jail. It's perfectly possible to send a handful of persons who buy $50'000 of fancy equipment to jail.

They distribute the movie as an MP4, and everybody in the world can view it. It is extremely difficult for DRM to prevent this type of piracy.

Difficult, not impossible. You are right: there will be people who will do that for one reason or another - but the goal is not to stop piracy, the goal is to make sure movie is not widely available in the vital first few months when most of the profit it made.

To pirate movies, an attack needs to occur exactly once, and people can copy and watch with no effort.

To pirate movie. Singular. Yes, there are big difference when we are talking about the world with one single coveted movie and one single coveted PS3 game. But in real world with thousands of PS3 games and millions of movies (if you'll include serials in the list) difference is not as big as you want to portray. Difference in complexity of cracking a single movie is compensated to a large degree by the difference in scale.

World is not black and white, there are large number of shades. And movies are much closer to games rather then to sound recordings or books.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 10, 2013 18:09 UTC (Fri) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link]

> World is not black and white, there are large number of shades. And movies are much closer to games rather then to sound recordings or books.

So you admit that games are different from sound recordings. Good. geofft was talking about music, you brought up games as a counterargument. I am only trying to point out that there are differences, and that a direct comparison (that stressed the length of time that game DRM lasts) needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 10, 2013 19:13 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

>> With a movie system like Netflix attempting DRM, one person can spend $50,000 on fancy equipment to scrape the digital data directly from their LCD monitor wiring.

> Yes, it's possible. Or rather: it's possible today, we don't know if it'll still be possible tomorrow. But of course can use good camcoder instead which will be good enough in the foreseeable future.

This will always be possible.

At some point in the display of a movie, it needs to be decrypted so that the human brain can understand it (even if we had DRM chips installed into out heads, they need to output decrypted data to our brains)

If you capture the data at that point with high quality equipment, the results are going to be close enough to the original for anyone. It may not be "digitally perfect", but one decompression/compression cycle is not going to degrade the quality enough for people to care.

The equipment to capture data at high resolution at these speeds isn't cheap, but as the previous person is saying, only one person in the world needs to do this, and then the decrypted result is available to everyone.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 11:07 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (1 responses)

W3C has already acquiesced to developing this standard; don't forget they're a trade organisation with mostly business members. Netflix, Google etc. prefer HTML5 video with ESE/CDM over Flash or Silverlight, on the basis that the former fits much more natively with the rest of the web stack, and that with everything supporting HTML5 with ESE the number of platforms they have to support will go way down. There will only be a few practicable CDMs, viz ChromeBooks only having Google's WideVine, but ESE allows the implementation detail of the CDM to be abstracted away from the HTML UI. So it is better than Flash/Silverlight (both of which are dying), but still terrible for user freedom.

ESE will be developed either way, but I think it's important it doesn't get the W3C imprimatur, and shouldn't because while ESE can be usefully implemented by anyone, CDMs cannot.

Now, for some interesting news, check out ORBX.js, a HD video codec implemented in JavaScript and WebGL. It can also do watermarking of each frame, which could eliminate the need for DRM.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 17:17 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]

The need for DRM doesn't need to be eliminated - valid need for it simply doesn't exist to begin with, since it has nothing to do with copy protection. It's created for the purpose of insulting legitimate users and stagnating the technology.

RMS is right. Again.

Posted May 7, 2013 17:13 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]

Very good points, and RMS actually said just that:

> On a practical level, standardizing DRM would make it more convenient,
> in a very shallow sense. This could influence people who think only of
> short-term convenience to think of DRM as acceptable, which could in turn
> encourage more sites to use DRM.

Netflix is really playing evil here with pushing a dying unethical trend into HTML, in order to proliferate it and to make it stick around longer.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 7, 2013 7:09 UTC (Tue) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (4 responses)

If the DRM is implemented in the operating system, this could result in distribution of works that can't be played at all on a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. [...] Well, newsflash: netflix is over decade old by now, it always used DRM and is now even Linux-compatible

I think that RMS's point is that, when you install the proprietary Netflix player, your operating system is no longer free. So his point stands.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 7, 2013 14:35 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

Nope. His arguments are carefully constructed to misrepresent facts (while using only literal truth for that). This kind of falsehood has a name - it's called lying by omission. Basically he says "if you'll do X then really, really bad thing Y will happen" but forgets to say that "really, really bad thing Y" will happen anyway which makes further discussion kind of pointless because it'll be dominated by fantasies about world where "really, really bad thing Y" does not exist. In real world it exists already and will continue to exist no matter what the W3C decision will be thus other implications should be considered instead.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 7, 2013 15:08 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link]

If you're going to call the man a liar you could at least have the courage to speak concretely about what exactly you're accusing him of lying about.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 7, 2013 15:35 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Then I guess it was OK that Microsoft gamed the ISO standards process to get OOXML rubber-stamped because "Microsoft are sort of standard anyway" and we shouldn't expect any supposedly independent arbiter of standards to uphold any notion of independence, never mind the quality of those standards or whether they promote the organisation's own principles or serve the organisation's objectives.

After all, just calling something a standard saves everyone from all the hard work of defining a proper one, and everyone who just needed to tick that box marked "standard" can now do so. It's amazing how much business you can create for particular companies by just agreeing to do everything those companies ask. If only that was what genuine standards organisations were for.

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 8, 2013 12:23 UTC (Wed) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link]

Sorry, you've lost me.

Your GGP comment asserted that because Netflix is available on Linux, DRM-encumbered content can be played on Free operating systems, contrary to what RMS said.

In my GP comment, I contend that the Netflix client makes your operating system non-Free, meaning that despite the existence of Netflix, you still can't play encumbered content of Free OSs.

And in your parent comment, you're countering with... what? It's not that RMS is wrong, but he's lying by omission... somehow? I guess that "X" is "install the Netflix client", but I'm not sure about "Y". Is it "your OS will be non-Free"? I'm trying to substitute that into "your OS becoming non-Free will happen anyway" - but that doesn't make sense. How will it? Why? "In the real world [your OS being non-Free] exists already and will continue to exist..." WTF?

Could you elaborate a bit more, so I can get some kind of handle on what you're saying?

Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Posted May 7, 2013 7:55 UTC (Tue) by sylock (guest, #90792) [Link]

You are free to chain yourself if it makes you happier. But think of that:

Bread and Games became the solution in Rome between 200 BC and 300 AD when it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the people happy, happy meaning keeping them from starting the revolution against the system, against their repression and against their exploitation.

http://www.allardvanhoorn.com/pdf/bread_and_games.pdf

Today, things has changed a bit. They produces sitcoms (and I do likes some of them but it is a good thing to be aware of it). At Romans time, distractions and feed were a way to prevent a revolution. Today, you ask to be slaved and chained and pay to be able to be distracted. The current system is in fact more efficient that the Romans one.

Benjamin Franklin -- "Those people who would surrender some of their freedoms to obtain safety deserve neither freedom nor safety." 1776, Circa.

libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 7, 2013 16:37 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (7 responses)

libstdc++ is not under plain GPL. It has an exception which allows it to be linked, even statically, without causing the result to be GPL'd. See http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html and http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/faq.html#faq.lice...

Anyone avoiding libstdc++ for licensing reasons isn't paying attention. I personally know at least one Very Large Company with extensive legal expertise and a lot of experience with, and concern about, GPL software which is not worried about libstdc++.

libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 7, 2013 17:31 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

libstdc++ is not under plain GPL. It has an exception which allows it to be linked, even statically, without causing the result to be GPL'd. See http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html and http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/faq.html#faq.lice...

True. This exception means you can propagate (== distribute) program linked with libstc++ under license of your choice if GCC embeds bits and pieces of libstdc++ in your program. But if you propagate libstdc++.so itself then you are not propagating just such a bundle! You are propagating libstdc++.so as independent, isolated module, too and such propagation does not fall under the aforementioned exception (there are no "Independent Modules" in libstdc++.so).

This, paradoxically, means that it's safer to distribute libstdc++ linked statically rather then linked dynamically.

Anyone avoiding libstdc++ for licensing reasons isn't paying attention.

Well, may be.

I personally know at least one Very Large Company with extensive legal expertise and a lot of experience with, and concern about, GPL software which is not worried about libstdc++.

And everyone knows about another Very Large Company which does not distribute libstdc++.so on their devices to make sure they'll not be affected by GPLv3. They may be too paranoid, sure, but the fact that the exact same guys who advised against distribution of libstdc++.so actually helped to write the aforementioned exception itself gives them some credibility, you know.

libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 7, 2013 20:56 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

Actually, while I don't know too much about it, I think it always makes sense to distribute libstdc++ statically, if you're not distributing it as part of an OS.

How doees linux cope with the same library compiled with different versions of the compiler? I know we use .so numbering to avoid dll hell, but I believe C++ neatly gets round that by changing the ABI based on the compiler used ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 8, 2013 2:17 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

> How doees linux cope with the same library compiled with different versions of the compiler?

One thing I've encountered is that in Linux (and likely other ELF implementations, though I've not tested beyond Linux) is that the symbol table is global. Given the following setup:

> A -> C.1
> B -> C.2
> D -> C.1

Where A and B link to 2 different libraries C.1 and C.2 which share symbols (newer version of some dependency, unfortunate collisions, whatever).

If A is loaded first followed by B, what happens at runtime is:

> A -> C.1
> B -> C.1

for the symbols common between C.1 and C.2. What I wish that would happen is that the linker would see that A linked C.1 and therefore *only* look for symbols in C.1.

One example we keep hitting is that some external, third party program uses a dependency that we use (e.g., Matlab and Boost). Matlab uses some old version of Boost (1.3x) and our project requires 1.4x. Since we load the Matlab with dlopen, Matlab gets very unhappy calling the newer Boost symbols with the same name. What we have to do is "#define boost boost_custom_version" in boost/config/user.hpp so that the symbols don't collide for our project. The better solution (that would work today) would be if Matlab used "#define boost boost_matlab_VERSION" (since I doubt MathWorks is going to let anyone else compile Matlab anytime soon) instead of forcing everyone else to get out of its way.

The ideal solution (which I believe Windows uses, but I'm not 100% sure) is the "only look up in linked libraries". RTLD_LOCAL isn't a solution because then D fails to load because it can't find C.1 symbols because A loaded it transitively as RTLD_LAZY and locked all the other libraries from it.

I guess this could interfere with LD_PRELOAD from working as intended, but maybe it could be solved by injecting it into the "allowed libraries for symbol resolution table" for all libraries in the process.

> but I believe C++ neatly gets round that by changing the ABI based on the compiler used ... :-)

The inline namespace trick introduced in C++11 would help tremendously, but that's years down the line for common usage. If multiple symbol versioning could be done with C++ class methods without touching headers[1], it could be done today (maybe it is, but I've been unable to find docs).

[1]Users shouldn't care that there are 3 versions of foo::bar floating around; they should just get the latest version of the method, but the old versions should still be in the source file. Versioning the entire class results in quite a bit of code duplication.

libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 8, 2013 8:46 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

The ideal solution (which I believe Windows uses, but I'm not 100% sure) is the "only look up in linked libraries".

That's not an ideal solution: this means you can not have few different implementations of the same ABI (think gnutls vs openssl) and switch them at runtime. And Windows still uses only filename to resolve collisions thus problems are still possible.

What you want to do in Linux is to use different version strings for different versions of libraries (especially for the libraries like boost which are changing ABI often), but sadly only few standard libraries do that - everyone else pray to "our distribution makers will just rebuild the whole world to keep everything compatible". Kind of ironic to see that once upon time FSF promoted technologies which are good mostly for "nonfree" programs.

The inline namespace trick introduced in C++11 would help tremendously, but that's years down the line for common usage.

… if you forget the fact that inline namespaces are just a minor improvement over ages-old "using namespace nested;". Sure, "using namespace nested" is problematic if you want to do, e.g., partial specialization of templates but these cases are extremely rare: I've built Gentoo system with thousand of packages after building gcc with --enable-symvers=gnu-versioned-namespace and only had couple of problems in places where things were broken by design (where people forward-declared things in std:: namespace instead of including proper header).

IOW: there are more then enough ways to solve compatibility issues in Linux, but to actually do that you need to think ahead and this is extremely unfashionable nowadays. It's much easier to complain on forums about lack of a "silver bullet" (when new "silver bullet" arrives people quickly find out that it does not solve the problem of careless design too and continue complains with abandon).

libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 8, 2013 9:16 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Sure, "using namespace nested" is problematic if you want to do, e.g., partial specialization of templates but these cases are extremely rare: I've built Gentoo system with thousand of packages after building gcc with --enable-symvers=gnu-versioned-namespace and only had couple of problems in places where things were broken by design (where people forward-declared things in std:: namespace instead of including proper header).

Oh, sorry, I take my words back: in reality it all was based on "inline namespaces", of course - my memory is just fuzzy. As this proposal claims "inline namespaces" functionality was added (under the "using namespace nested __attribute__ ((strong))" guise) more then eight years ago and is now supported on all Linux distributions (including such slow-moving as Debian or RHEL). I've used them in my work about seven years ago. Plain "using namespace nested" approach is even older, of course, but it's less compatible.

libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 10, 2013 15:08 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Every library glibc loads can have a unique order in which it searches libraries for symbol (it calls these 'search scopes'). By default, for compatibility with projects that started out using .a libraries, all libraries use the same search scope, and symbols named in earlier-loaded libraries interpose the same symbols used later, even in calls within the library. But declaring symbols hidden avoids this for those symbols; linking with -Bsymbolic or -Bsymbolic-functions avoids it for all symbols in a given library for references within that library; using -Bgroup causes all lookups from within that library to be done only within that library and libraries within the group it is part of (defined via --start-group and --end-group); using dlmopen() causes the dlmopen()ed library to get an entire new namespace sharing no symbols with the old...

... there are lots of ways to get different namespaces. Some are poorly supported (e.g. dlmopen()/dlclose() pairs fail after 30-odd attempts on glibc as currently constituted, and there is a static limit of 16 namespaces at present), but the interfaces are there and it sort of works.

libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 8, 2013 8:19 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Actually, while I don't know too much about it, I think it always makes sense to distribute libstdc++ statically, if you're not distributing it as part of an OS.

Have you actually looked on the original comment? I'm explicitly talk about distribution of libstdc++ as part of an OS.

How doees linux cope with the same library compiled with different versions of the compiler? I know we use .so numbering to avoid dll hell, but I believe C++ neatly gets round that by changing the ABI based on the compiler used ... :-)

ABI is open on Linux (it's not like some other OSes) which means you can keep your compilers compatible. E.g. GCC has few versions of name mangling (to cover cases which are impossible to cover in older versions of it), but it explicitly only changes the default when major version of libstdc++ changes.