instead their job is to write down what the big vendors are already doing, so that everyone else can interoperate

We call people who work with the enemy collaborators, which is one of the faster ways to get your former allies to see you as a traitor.

There is a fight for freedom going on here, and many of you are talking about movies. Anybody that things this is hyperbole or "crazy" hasn't been paying attention.

(actually, given that the target audience of this post is nerds that like netflix, I suppose these links would be more appropriate)

The DRM isn't a closed source part of *firefox*.

That is a disingenuous game of semantics, and you know it. Firefox is enabling it, and any sane person see that firefox (the package they downloaded) is what is playing the DRMed video. The specific technical nature of sandboxed processes, plugins, and dynamically loadable object files are mere implementation details.

These implementation details can change in the future, too. Remember, anybody that uses this is literally asking for a non-free (as in freedom) internet, and is making any future fight against DRM significantly harder. Once this crap is established and you have to fight people that USE the DRM, you're going to have a lot harder time fighting updates. The fight is hard enough already; good luck when you have to also convince users that they should give up their netflix instead of installing some rookit-style update.

It can't...

You think it will stay that way? You've never heard of the foot-in-the-door technique? Once this is established, it will be a lot easier to force through "updates" that fix those trivialities. Those updates will be accepted because it will be a lot harder to get people to give up a service they are used to using (e.g. netflix using this DRM) and reject the update, compared to the fight right now where this DRM is still new and largely unused.

Because mozilla decided to promote DRM instead of a free web, we can look forwards to lots of sites (which used to work) displaying a nag screen with a link to download the "proper" version of firefox, specifically because the DRM version is a free download. They will assume everybody has support available, so there is no penalty to using this crap everywhere.

Or have you not been paying attention to how businesses work these days?

When the fight for freedom is hard, there are many potentially useful strategies. Giving up without a fight and simply handing victory to the enemy is not one of them.

the plug-in interface is standardized

Previously, there was some hesitation to use this crap thanks to this lack of standardization. Now, thanks to this idiotic move by Mozilla this type of DRM will be used, and if you think it only apply to Netflix - or only apply to video - you haven't been paying attention.

Now that it is possible to for businesses to claim that "almost all of our potential customers support DRM", it will be used in many places. Remember the pages that show an image of text instead of just putting the text in the page? Well, get ready for the video equivalent the first time someone gets paranoid because browsers have a save-as feature. Besides, once DRM for one type of content is in place, the other industries will cry "equal access".

All of you who are "ok" with this, or are thinking only of convenience - your selfish view of the world is a big part of why this is happening. You should be fighting this, if you give a damn about having an free an open internet in the future. Unfortunately, you're probably going to mod me down and go back to cheering about how you get to watch movies in your browser, and I hope you enjoy fighting the far more difficult battles in the future, because you didn't stop this crap when it was still small.

enhanced interrogations

Stop using the CIA's euphemisms - it's called torture.

close, but wrong city... at least according to St. Vincent:

They say, "I'm on your side
"When nobody is, 'cause nobody is
"Come sit right here and sleep
"While I slip poison in your ear"

We are waiting on a telegram
To give us news of the fall
I am sorry to report
Dear Paris is burning after all

We have taken to the streets
In open rejoice revolting
We are dancing a black waltz
Fair Paris is burning after all

Well said.

I find it unlikely that the NSA doesn't know how this will affect the US software/tech industry. Which means they are deliberatly trying to undermine an entire sector of the US economy. I call this treason. Many of these traitors took an oath to defend the constitution, yet they publicly announce how their desire to do the exact opposite.

I know some of you are thinking that this is a crazy idea, because the US definition of trason is a difficult standard to meet due to the requirement to show that the traitor is "making war" against the countyr. Well, what else do you call the deliberate undermining of the most profitalbe sector in our economy? Modern weapons of war include a wide variety of tools, not just rifles and tanks. More importantly, this is exactly the kind of type of methods the CIA has used to "destabalize" other countries.

"Beginning"?

The USA has been doing PSYOPS on it's own citizens a loooooong time. You just noticed this now?! I wonder how surprised you'll be when you finally notice COINTELPRO never really ended; the government has been up to a lot more than PSYOPS...

You might want to read this post from a few years ago when the GNOME and GTK 3.x were replacing thir 2.x branches. Of particular interest is the quotes of Allan Day (GNOME dev and RedHat employee):

Facilitating the unrestricted use of extensions and themes by end users seems contrary to the central tenets of the GNOME 3 design. We’ve fought long and hard to give GNOME 3 a consistent visual appearance, to make it synonymous with a single user experience and to ensure that that experience is of a consistently high quality. A general purpose extensions and themes distribution system seems to threaten much of that.

[...]

I’m particularly surprised by the inclusion of themes. It seems bizarre that we specifically designed the GNOME 3 control center not to include theme installation/selection and then to reintroduce that very same functionality via extensions.

[...]

One particular issue is the ability for users to modify the top bar via extensions. This part of the UI is vital for giving GNOME 3 a distinctive visual appearance. If we do have extensions, I would very much like to see the top bar made out of bounds for extension writers, therefore. We have to have at least *something* that remains consistent.

[...]

The point is that it decreases our brand presence. That particular user might understand what it is that they are running, but the person who sees them using their machine or even sees their screenshots on the web will not. The question we have to ask ourselves is: how do we make sure that people recognise a GNOME install when they see one?

So not only is this about enforcing a monoculture, the reason to enforce a monoculture is because the desktop isn't about getting work done. No, the desktop - according to GNOME - is for branding/advertizing.

*sigh*

While we're on the subject, I recommend everybody read this post by the same author. It's speculative, but it does explain a lot of what has been happening to linux over the last few years... and how it may fit into the large picture.

Download cap? It's a "smart tv", so I expect the upload for the microphone-related features to be a pain in bandwidth caps. Really, though, anybody who buys into these spy^H^H^H "smart" (networked) products has no right to complain about the 1984-style future. "voice activated"? Yes, only after uploading the room's audio to a remote server for processing. It turns out it only took rebranding surveillance devices as "smart", and consumers will pay money to have their house bugged.

I like the internet, and have spent a lot of my life working on parts of it, but.... it is a very bad idea to put everything on a network.

So why isn't a torrent of Citizenfour soumewhere on the net? There isn't even a terrible shakey-cam recording anywhere on the net. This is very unusual.

That would be why the 4th amendment got writtent in the first place - this kind of "writ of assistance" is an affront to the very ideas of "justice" and "rule of law".

As you examine larger and larger groups of people, no matter the type of group, their similarity to the the average population approaches 1.0. A small group is brought together for some specific reason that may differentiate the group. At the other end, a sufficiently large group of people would is the entire population.

National armies and other armed forces will usually be some of the larger groups. So they will have a lot of similarities with the average population... including most of the political argguments. If the army was given such exteme orders,, I suspect they would end up just as divided as the rest ofg the country.

"warrant"

I believe you mean "writ of assistance".