That is a bit of a stretch. If the non-compliance is simply a case of not supporting the DRM part of the spec (or doing so incorrectly/not in full), that does not aid in circumvention as the DRM content simply will not play.

It IS a bit of a stretch. The trick would be to require digitally signed browsers and then shift the burden of demonstrating compliance onto the distributor. Then you could talk about non-compliant browsers as circumvention tools. But we're a good way away from that as yet.

On the other hand, I don't think there's any doubt that breaking the DRM is going to be illegal, and that's what bothers me about all these calls to support the proposal on the grounds that DRM is technically flawed. Because any eforcement is only going to use technical measures as a first line of defence. The second line will be lawyers and lawsuits.

My philosophy is this:

First, try to follow the law. Do not compromise principles, but try to follow the law. Second, if following the law means I must compromise my principles, break the law. Third, do not ever get caught, also help others to circumvent the law and not get caught.

The law can get fucked when it has become the tool of big business to wield against normal people.

Firstly, I can't help but admire your principles.

That said, it seems to me one thing to call for massed civil disobedience against an unjust application of an unjust law, but quite another to advocate illegal behaviour as a workaround for a standard that hasn't yet been passed.

The first case is, arguably, every person's civic duty in the face of oppression. The second is simple contempt for the law. I think that's a much harder proposition to justify, both philosophically, and in a court of law.

What you get it useless, easily bipassable security features

Which would be fine, except that bypassing those features is almost certainly going to be illegal under laws like the DMCA. We can expect to see people sued and non-complying browsers declared illegal as circumvention tools.

So are you really advocating breaking the law as a valid response to an onerous standard?

And if one day the content corporations launch a series of prohibitive lawsuits, will you condemn those corporation for their poor behavior? Or will you (as many others undoubtedly will) say "morality has nothing to do with it - it's the law".

And maybe "you should have complained when the standard was first proposed."

/me googles ...

Ha! I like it! :D

You still seem to be missing my point: standards don't force the big vendors to do anything at all ever. The big vendors do what they want to meet their business needs. You can either write a standard that describes that (e.g., SCSI) or write a standard that fails to describe that, and thus generally fails (like HTML in the IE6 years).

Well that's one way of looking at it. Or we could consider that conforming to existing standards helped establish Firefox and Opera and break IE's dominance of the market and the long stagnantion of th Microsoft Years.

So maybe "fail" isn't the best word for what happened :)

I've been a secretary of a standards body working group, if we're appealing to experts here, but I don't see how that's particularly relevant.

I'm delighted that you've been secretary of a standards working group, it doesn't seem to follow that you know more about the SQL standards process that Michael Gorman who was secretary of that particular group.

But the point is that giving the big vendors everything they want does not necessarily result in a useful standard. And to support the point, I thought I'd provide a link to a case where exactly that had happened. And where the secretary of the working group (who might ordinarily be expected to support the standard in question) was the one questioning the validity of the result.

Just to be clear about this: I'm not invoking Gorman's name as an authority on the purpose of standards. I'm citing him as an authority on the standard that he oversaw, and the usefulness of that standard after the approach you advocate. And while I don't want to belittle your experience as secretary of an unrelated and unnamed group, it's not at all clear how that gives your opinion equal weigh as regards SQL.

"Because the big boys want it" is the only relevant thing for a standard.

Citation needed :)

We could ask them to keep that shit out of the browser and build their own client.

Ask all you want, standards aren't laws.

Aardvarks aren't kumquats. So what?

Browsers will have to support whatever the big players do, standard or otherwise, and we'll end up with the IE6 problem all over again. No thanks.

The problem with IE6 wasn't so much that the standards were wrong. It was one of wilful non-compliance on MS' part. MS wanted to use their then dominant position to turn IE itself into the de facto standard. That way all their competitors would have been forced to play catch-up with MS. They gambled and lost.

Alternatively, look at the SQL Standards process. The standard committee is composed of representatives of all the major database players, and rather than get into a pissing match about who gets what in the next standard, they've basically adopted the approach you recommend. Whatever any of them is doing or wants to do next goes into the standard.

The result is a standard that's probably unimplementable in its entirety. In fact all the groups represented on the committee announced that they intended to implement "a subset, plus extensions" of the standard. Even the secretary of the standards committee questioned whether the standard was in fact worthy of the name "standard". But don't take my word for it.

I've explained elsewhere why I don't think that "because the big boys want it" is in itself sufficient reason to include something in a standard. I hope I've shown here that even if that happens, it won't necessarily bring about any benefits.

Really, it's just an all round bad idea.

I suppose if there were any similarities at all between DRM and physical violence, you'd have a point.

The similarities are between standards and laws. While they are not without differences, they have a fundamental similarity in that they outline a common set of behaviours to which it is intended that we adhere.

The question is whether we use them to try and make the world a better place for everyone or do we use them to sanction existing practices?

It works in Ankh-Morpork. And you wouldn't want to argue with Vetinari would you?

So all we need now is a ruthless despot willing to throw anyone caught abusing the standard into a scorpion pit, and all will be well? That could work.

Of course reaching agreement about who to trust in the role of "ruthless despot" might take some time :)

A technical standard is in no way, shape, or form a law. That's probably where your thinking went off.

A technical standard and a law are both ways of defining how we want some aspect of the world be work. That's probably where you've failed to keep up. (BTW, do we really need to do this all snide and sarcastic? I mean I'm up for it if you are, but it's not exactly conducive to a constructive discussion. Your call :))

Standards are useful precisely to the extent they describe what the big players actually do, so that you can code against the standard and be content

Standards are only useful if people follow them yes. But that doesn't mean that we should use them to rubberstamp every counter-productive, short-sighted or destructive practice currently being persued.

Standards are supposed to be about how to make something work well.

A standard that petulantly refuses to describe what the big players are doing anyway is worse than useless. The W3C finally learned this lesson, but apparently /. has a shorter memory.

So presumably we should legalise mugging because muggers are going to rob people with violence whatever we do, and if we're going to have destructive anti-social behavior, it's far better if it's enshrined in some sort of formal framework?

Hey, I know. Since our neighbouring country hasn't much hope of conquoring us, why not let them amass all their tanks on our borders?

I mean they'll never have the nerve to invade, and we can sneak over the border at night and syphon off all the petrol.

Doesn't seem like sound strategy to me

If it's so laughable, then isn't it better to just have it?

Well, the security aspects are laughable. The potential legal follow ons are not. For instance, the next logical step is to insist on digitally signed browsers and declare non-complying browsers illegal as "circumvention tools" under the DMCA or somesuch. You might not be able to detect hack browsers, but you could sure as hell sue anyone distributing binaries or patches. You might have a hard time claiming non-infringing uses as well.

That would pretty much make any new browser impossible to distribute, and potentially puts enough regulatory red-tape on people like mozilla that they'd have difficulty continuing in their current open source form.

Then there's the possibility to pressure ISPs to only allow encrypted content (call it an anti-terrorism measure - that works for most things) and eventually to start chaging for access on a per web-page basis for all content.

From the point of view of some media and content cartels, that's a very desirable outcome. The genie would be back in the bottle.

On the other hand, if we don't have EME then the problems don't arise, so on balance I'd say better not to have it.

So instead of a world where content owners won't publish jack on HTML5

I don't see why that's a problem. There are DRM formats that work with PDFs so it's not as if your content dudes can't publish under DRM. They just can't try and make it apply to the whole web. Nothing of value is being lost here.

you get a world where content owners would and you can somehow mine the keys

Mine the keys illegally I think you mean. Possibly with disproportionate penalties as used by the recording industry in their anti p2p lawsuits.

Let's just not go there. Less effort + less risk == Win

5% is not a minority share holder.

OK, you're right. 5% is not a minority sharholder. %5 is a percentage.

Someone who holds 5% of the stock in a company however IS a minority shareholder. That's going by any definition. I can find, anyway.

They're strategy is exactly the same as Apple (and now Microsoft).

Well, not exactly the same as Apple. To get an exact match Apple would have had to introduced iOS before the launch of the iPhone, adding a number of increasingly controversial and unpopular changes to their otherwise beloved OS X. They'd then rename the result "iOS" and launch a phone around it.

What Ubuntu is doing is closer to MS' strategy. Only without the u-turn to reinstate a conventional desktop and start menu and without Stephen Elop waiting in the wings to deliver them a mobile phone manufacturer at fire sale prices. And also without MS' ability to absorb the losses if they pour money down the drain developing something that nobody seems to want.

What was broke was an interface that a user could use on all these different devices and screen sizes and still maintain some continuity in it's use.

So "continuity over different devices" is more important than "works well on the device in question" then? I'm not sure I'd agree. Especially given that canonical don't seem to have an ecosystem of other devices to support.

Die-hard Linux geeks may be fleeing Ubuntu and Unity

Nah... the die-hards tend to run Debian or Slackware or Gentoo. Ubuntu has always been aimed at the non-techies or casual hobbists. I think I might have mentioned that earlier.

but I'm seeing a lot of non-techies picking it up and asking me about it.

Well, yeah. Non-techies are the core of Ubuntu's users. If the non technical set weren't still showing interest Ubuntu it would pretty much be the end. No one is denying that Ubuntu has a lot of momentum. The question is whether they're gaining or losing that momentum.

Ubuntu is growing in China and several other countries outside the U.S.

I'm sure it is. Linux is growing in those regions, and Ubuntu is one of the better known distros. But if Ubuntu's share of the market (for want of a better term) shrinks relative to the other distros, that growth may not count for much. Just saying.

In the past everyone touted "choice" and freedom of "choice".

Completely off topic, but I love the way you put scarequotes around "choice". It's like you're saying "I don't really believe in this concept, but I'm going to reluctantly use the word in order to further the discussion".

That aside...

Ubuntu is just another choice among not only Linux, but operating systems in general. If you can't stand Unity or something Ubuntu does, then by all means please find an operating system that suites you.

Done and done. I started with RedHat, moved to Gentoo and I've alternated between Debian and Gentoo ever since. I've never used Ubuntu, although I've installed it for a fair few friends and family. I think I might mentioned that in my earlier post as well.

That said, I like Ubuntu. I like the focus on humanity and usability that the project had when it was launched, and I think Shuttleworth can Canonical did a lot of good.

As such I'm concerned to see Ubuntu moving away from the principles that made it so great. They seem to be moving away from "Linux for Human Beings" and toward "Who cares about the users? They'll get what they're given and like it!" That may have worked for Microsoft when they were the only game in town, but as you point out, those days would seem to be ending.

At least with Ubuntu my grandma or distant cousin has a choice against Apple or Microsoft or even Android!

And you know what? That would still be true if Ubuntu had kept Gnome as their main desktop and developed Unity as front end for mobile devices. Their penetration of the device market wouldn't (and couldn't) suck any more than it does right now, but they'd still have a legion of loyal and happy users.

But hey, users! Who cares about them, right?

How is anyone forced to use Unity in Ubuntu? There's still Kubuntu, lubuntu etc. And even with straight Ubuntu, you can still install whatever desktop you want, and select it at login.

I guess that rather depends on the user. The people posting to Slashdot are savvy enough to vote with their feet, whether it's to another 'buntu, or another distro. But Slashdotters aren't your typical Ubuntu users.

Ubuntu built its rep in no small part as the Linux that you didn't need to know Linux to use. A lot of the Ubuntu userbase are people who don't know how to change desktop environment or window manager. They're people who don't want to know how to do those things. All they know is that they found a computer system that they liked, and each release seems to be taking them further away from that system.

I personally don't mind Unity, I can pretty much work with whatever desktop is installed by default, as I use the apps and not the shell. So long as I can switch easily between apps, who cares.

Well, not the people who work with your computers the way you do, clearly. But not everyone does. I mean I'm happy with an xterm, launching apps from the command line and alt-tabbing between them. It gives me everything you want in a desktop ... but I know from experience that most people hate working that way.

And I guess most none-technical people just don't care either way. If it works, it works.

If that was true, they'd ALL be happy with an xterm, alt-tab and a choice of wallpaper. And the year of Linux On The Desktop(TM) would have happened ten years ago.

Ubuntu worked well for a large set of non-techie users. It wasn't a million miles away from what most of them were used to in Windows, except that for various reasons, it suited them a bit better.

Canonical seem to have an urgent need to fix something that wasn't even remotely broken. And while it doesn't affect me personally I still can't see what they're doing as a viable long term strategy.