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An anonymous coward writes:
"In March, 2013 Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, proposed adopting DRM into the HTML standard, under the name Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). Writing in October 2013, he said that "none of us as users like certain forms of content protection such as DRM at all," but cites the argument that "if content protection of some kind has to be used for videos, it is better for it to be discussed in the open at W3C" as a reason for considering the inclusion of DRM in HTML.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has objected, saying in May of last year that the plan 'defines a new "black box" for the entertainment industry, fenced off from control by the browser and end-user'. Later, they pointed out that if DRM is OK for video content, that same principle would open the door to font, web applications, and other data being locked away from users.
public-restrictedmedia, the mailing list where the issue is being debated, has seen discussion about forking HTML and establishing a new standard outside of the W3C."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TrumpetPower! on Monday February 17 2014, @10:47PM
I feel such a loss as so much of the Internet I grew up together with continues so rapidly to devolve into nothing more than another variation on TV -- a medium never well done.
I don't think there's any way out save to build yet another network either on the bones of or from the ashes of the Internet...but this would have to be one, from the start, where censorious restrictions are simply not possible to enforce. At the same time, it must have the same ubiquity as the Internet.
Is Tor or Freenet there yet? It's been a while since I've checked either out....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1) by clone141166 on Monday February 17 2014, @10:50PM
Hmm... maybe we can implement some form of rudimentary, worldwide sneakernet... "SoylentNet... is people!"
(Score: 1) by TrumpetPower! on Monday February 17 2014, @10:54PM
Sneakernet wouldn't work, but a store-forward-and-cache distributed wireless mesh network could maybe do the trick, especially if bridged over the existing IPv? infrastructure.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Daniel Dvorkin on Monday February 17 2014, @10:50PM
> Is Tor or Freenet there yet? It's been a while since I've checked either out
I was told recently that FidoNet still exists. I had no idea.
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [dev.soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 1) by TrumpetPower! on Monday February 17 2014, @10:56PM
As great as that sort of thing would be for nostalgia...there're reasons why it fell by the wayside. Plus, one needs certain numbers of participants for a network to be useful....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:33AM
Yeah, but they said Usenet had fallen by the wayside, but once the idiots who swarmed in swarmed back out again, it retains all the usefulness it had in the 80s. Which was plenty. Some people were even asking for a nntp feed for soylentnews, it's far from a dead distribution mechanism.
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:30AM
Fidonet definitely still has some alive and kicking echos, though as you might expect, most people are no longer dialing into BBS's to access it, but rather go through a telnet or ssh interface. Synchronet seems to be the most prevalent still-in-production BBS server package around, but some of the old ones are kept up by enthusiasts, including WWIV, Wildcat, Renegade, and some of the Amiga servers. Enthral was a relatively recently created BSD-oriented BBS package, though I'm not sure if it's still being worked on.
The biggest issues with BBS's these days is that since it's all TCP/IP, most of them don't end up having much more than the Sysop for a userbase, so the local message boards are usually unused. Some do get a bit of traffic for door games, especially with interBBS play. But when it comes to the message side of things, FIDOnet, DOVEnet, Scinet, Zeronet, etc are largely where the discussions happen, as it's one of the few ways to reach more than a handful of people on them.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Monday February 17 2014, @11:08PM
Building out another network won't do anything to change the problem of DRM.
Tor/Freenet/etc are transport level.
DRM is all application level. Netflix's DRM'd video doesn't prevent you from getting video from other sources bittorrent or some other questionably legal web site. And moving to Tor won't make Netflix's impact on the market for video any different.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday February 18 2014, @12:00AM
Yes and no.
A big part of the original glory of the Internet was that every node was both client and server; which was which depended only on what role the node was playing in the context of that particular communication.
That concept kinda sorta still exists, but only in the most diluted of forms. Realistically, if you want to publish content, you either have to "upgrade" to a "business-class" network account, or you have to pay somebody else (with money, eyeballs, privacy -- or, increasingly, all three) for the privilege of publishing your own content for you.
Done right, especially with a store / forward / cache topology, the distinction between consumer and producer should again go away. Once that happens, not only does a great deal of power flow back to the people, it levels the playing field in such a way that you really do have to compete on the quality of your offering and not simply rest on your monopolistic laurels.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:38AM
Yes and no.
The original glory of the internet was that the people who were running the clients also had interesting stuff to share, and so them being servers too made sense.
Nowadays, the vast majorty of the users of the internet have nothing worth keeping to share, they're mostly just consumers rather than creators. Ability to comment on something you've just consumed is not creative, it's paliative - to make you feel involved and keep you on the drip wanting to consume more.
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 1) by nukkel on Tuesday February 18 2014, @01:51PM
This.
The internet was supposed to be all about decentralization. Somewhere along the way, things didn't quite pan out that way.
(Score: 1) by jonh on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:02PM
The internet was supposed to be all about decentralization. Somewhere along the way, things didn't quite pan out that way.
There's a lot of vested interest in centralization. Practically all commercial broadcasting is more interested in selling/telling you stuff than listening to what you have to say. I'm actually hoping that this may start to change as the TV generations die off. Kids raised on (say) reddit and 4chan will probably resent being told to sit quietly and consume their culture.
(Score: 1) by Statecraftsman on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:37AM
Check out cjdns. Their concept is to develop router software that displaces the need for a central authority to hand out IP address space. All communications are encrypted from end to end. It's at http://cjdns.info/ [cjdns.info]
(Score: 1) by jonh on Tuesday February 18 2014, @01:03PM
I agree, and as much as I personally consider DRM to be a waste of CPU cycles, the devolval (sp?) of the internet into a "Cable TV 2.0" is unfortunate, but there are a number of factors driving it:
So everyone seems to agree that the internet is the future for entertainment, but DRM is attractive to those who are familiar with 1950's-1990's paradigms. Perhaps a few years from now, we might start to see technology and policy being driven by peoples who grew up with the internet, but for now, we're still living in the twilight of the TV generation it seems.
(Score: 1) by mcgrew on Tuesday February 18 2014, @02:52PM
Unfortunately, the general public don't seem to be particularly concerned about having access to free ('libre') technology, as the success of the iPhone demonstrates.
Well, first, Joe Sixpack has never heard of libre soft/hardware, secondly phones have always been locked down, and third, Android outsells iPhones two to one.
And they haven't got a clue about Net Neutrality because nobody breathes a word of it in mainstream news.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:26AM
Freenet is largely deprecated these days, though somewhat from its ashes, i2p has sprung up. Much better way of doing things than Freenet was (like, you won't unknowingly be hosting kiddie porn by using it), and because it doesn't concern itself with connecting out to the open Internet (like Tor does with exit nodes), in some ways, it appears to be more secure than Tor for doing certain types of things. There's even an altcoin (Anoncoin) specifically designed for use over i2p, as well as some torrent trackers (unlike Tor, i2p is quite happy to handle torrents, as it is largely built on DHT to begin with), some activity on iMule (a clone of aMule, an eMule client), and a decent number of eepsites (the i2p equivalent to onion sites, accessible via the .i2p tld). IRC is very polished on it, as it was one of the major drives to creating it in the first place, and naturally, mail services exist as well. One of the more interesting things I've seen done with it is detailed over at Irongeek.com, where he has a how-to on setting up a raspberry pi as a drop machine, used to infiltrate networks by physically connecting to them and then using a reverse-ssh connection over i2p, getting around the need for a hole being poked through the firewall.
Worth checking out at http://www.geti2p.net/ [geti2p.net].