We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

...The technically-inclined will always find a way around stuff. The corporations just have to make their system easy enough, and hard enough to circumvent, for the average person not to bother.

...all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device)...

Yes, the techies will work around, but with the sharing of that information, being illegal, it won't be on nerd sites, it will have to be completely under the table. Other than getting the techies laid more, I see no good coming from it.

[Undertoad]

No, HM, it doesn't inevitably follow that the provision for DRM on streaming media will lead to DRM on all other media for HTML5 and/or all other protocols everywhere.

It's like this. Does anyone here have Flash installed? Anyone?

Then you may sit down and shut up. You've been running a DRM platform that you couldn't see the source code for, controlled by a single corporation (Adobe), working outside of web protocols. And it was, up until recently the by-far predominant method of display of most video on the web.

When Netflix came along, they didn't like how Flash was all like controlled and whatnot, and so they chose Silverlight. Another DRM platform that you couldn't see the source code for, controlled by a single corporation (Microsoft), working outside of web protocols. Do you watch Netflix on your PC or Mac? You have chosen to use a non-web protocol controlled by Microsoft.

It's shitty that these various corporate-controlled platforms sit like barnacles on the web. They are dragging the whole boat down. Why can't we figure out a way to have everything be HTML5?

Why does Doctorow think this is giving away the keys to some secret castle? End of everything? Did he not notice that all iPads, iPhones and iPods are a seriously closed platform that people choose of their own free will? Did he not notice how much of the web is happening outside of web protocols? Maybe he had a bad day. I know I've sat on conferences where I thought the result was going to be the end of the world. It never turned out to be true.

Part two, next message.

[Undertoad]

We've already discussed this you know. It was 2006, and the threat was

The Internet is over!

It was driven by a Nation article The End of the Internet?.

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

That's horrible! But when does their evil plan begin? Because while they can "craft" "strategies" all day long, here we are 8 years into the plan and -- hey, wait a minute... a fee for everything we do online... are they talking about Candy Crush?

~

My post in "The Internet is over!" is one I'm still proud of. Proud, you know, proud like hey I squeezed out a particularly nice turd today. But I would still call you over to admire my turd, which applies here in this thread as much as it did those many years ago. It said:

People, please. This is the Internet, and we are in charge here.

There is no advantage in being a big company on the Internet. Bigness doesn't really matter on the net. No single entity can hope to truly control any major part of the net; the net won't tolerate it.

This is the internet. Every product on the Internet is one click away from every other product. Companies that charge must actually add value. And as only a select few have learned, on the Internet, it is extremely difficult to gain power by exercising control. Google found that it gained power by giving power away. By doing so it has accumulated more net worth faster than any company in history.

This is the Internet. We are not "consumers", eating products and shitting money. We are all partners. No single company can control you - that is, unless you allow it.

This is the Internet, and we are in charge here. I promise you, that is true. The network is many protocols, and it will be many protocols. These protocols are here to serve us. When they don't, they will be discarded, overridden. Many have been discarded and overridden before. It's part of the whole point.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore

Still true today. It's because humans are part of the network. That's US. WE are in charge here.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I'm glad to hear that because I have great faith in your assessment. I'm only slightly more knowledgeable than the random man on the street when it comes to this shit.

I was worried because Doctorow seems to be up on this stuff and the movers/shakers behind it. When they start making laws against end-runs, and the NSA already knows who's running... can you say federal job security.