Re:I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me
by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @06:47PM
(#19559318)
> What is so adversarial about these corporations to the browser makers? What benefit, concretely, do Microsoft or Google or Apple get from being free of the shackles of Disney or CBS?
These companies make Xbox, Chromecast/Stadia, Apple TV, etc. Things that could plausibly be a media center, given some latitude and open standards. You could upload your movie collection onto it, give it your streaming account credentials and it gives you a single interface to all your media.
DRM kills that. You can't make an interface that allows the user to watch a Disney movie they've paid for and then have it show the YouTube commentary on it. You can't have something that recommends Orange Is The New Black after you watch The Wire because one is Netflix and the other is HBO.
Because DRM allows the studios to assert rights that copyright doesn't give them. That's all it does -- that's why they want it. It clearly doesn't prevent piracy.
> One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
The problem with this is that it can't simultaneously have such low privileges that it can't do anything harmful even if totally compromised by malicious actors, while also having such high privileges that it's immune to interference by even the owner of the system with physical access to it. They're diametrically opposed objectives. And the second one systematically fails regardless, but having to pretend that that isn't the case compromises the ability to do the first.
These companies make Xbox, Chromecast/Stadia, Apple TV, etc. Things that could plausibly be a media center, given some latitude and open standards. You could upload your movie collection onto it, give it your streaming account credentials and it gives you a single interface to all your media.
DRM kills that. You can't make an interface that allows the user to watch a Disney movie they've paid for and then have it show the YouTube commentary on it. You can't have something that recommends Orange Is The New Black after you watch The Wire because one is Netflix and the other is HBO.
Because DRM allows the studios to assert rights that copyright doesn't give them. That's all it does -- that's why they want it. It clearly doesn't prevent piracy.
> One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
The problem with this is that it can't simultaneously have such low privileges that it can't do anything harmful even if totally compromised by malicious actors, while also having such high privileges that it's immune to interference by even the owner of the system with physical access to it. They're diametrically opposed objectives. And the second one systematically fails regardless, but having to pretend that that isn't the case compromises the ability to do the first.