How Firefox Will Handle DRM In HTML 361
An anonymous reader writes "Last year the W3C approved the inclusion of DRM in future HTML revisions. It's called Encrypted Media Extensions, and it was not well received by the web community. Nevertheless, it had the support of several major browser makers, and now Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal has a post explaining how Firefox will be implementing EME. He says, 'This is a difficult and uncomfortable step for us given our vision of a completely open Web, but it also gives us the opportunity to actually shape the DRM space and be an advocate for our users and their rights in this debate. ... From the security perspective, for Mozilla it is essential that all code in the browser is open so that users and security researchers can see and audit the code. DRM systems explicitly rely on the source code not being available. In addition, DRM systems also often have unfavorable privacy properties. ... Firefox does not load this module directly. Instead, we wrap it into an open-source sandbox. In our implementation, the CDM will have no access to the user's hard drive or the network. Instead, the sandbox will provide the CDM only with communication mechanism with Firefox for receiving encrypted data and for displaying the results.'"
Re:Brilliant. Perfect way to kill market share! (Score:0, Informative)
Fuck your font.
Re:Where's the progressive outrage machine when we (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla did not "oust" him. He stepped down after the wider community spoke up. This is being forced by a bunch of DRM happy corps (MS, Apple, Google) and their media industry buddies (Netflix, MPAA, et. al.)
Re:Isn't hard drive access desirable? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Informative)
1) A third party is writing the plugin.
2) We did wait until it was inevitable. Every single other browser is already shipping it, Netflix is using it, and other sites are starting to use it. The only alternative to shipping this was to make sure Netflix and other video sites continued to work with Flash or Silverlight _and_ that Flash and Silverlight continue to work indefinitely.
Re:Pragmatic, makes sense. (Score:4, Informative)
We've tried sandboxing the plug-in process Flash runs in. It breaks all sorts of existing Flash-using stuff, unfortunately.
The benefit of having a sandbox from day 1 is that you don't have that problem.