Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC's DRM Iplayer windows only

[Chris Croughton]

On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 06:54:21PM +0000, Philip Hands wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 02:25:09PM +0000, Chris Croughton wrote:
> ...
> > The point is that distributing executable-only is a pretty good way of
> > making it secure from most people.  If it wasn't, then there would be no
> > problem hacking it to run on free OSs...
> 
> Except that a lot of the people that would be most interested in getting a
> Free Software player would not contemplate that sort of hack, as it would
> almost certainly require some sort of copyright violation to achieve,
> and would probably contaminate them when it came to producing a clean
> implementation.

A lot, possibly (I don't have any figures on how many rabid fanatics
there are), but there are also a lot who don't care as long as their
machine does what they want.

> I'd say that both the "it's no more than a French translation" and the
> "compilation is almost encryption" positions are rather extreme, with
> the truth lying somewhere between them.

Yes, indeed, note that I said "a pretty good way ... most people".  It's
not strong encryption, but even ROT13 is good enough to stop most casual
users reading something and x86 machine code is over the head of 90% or
more even if you include virus writers.  I spent several years writing
x96 assembler, and I certainly wouldn't take on the task of decoding an
executable without a lot of pay and some expensive tools.

> > (No, I don't like DRM.  Music etc. which is distributed DRM locked I
> > simply don't use, the same for IE-only and Flash websites.  That's their
> > loss, they don't get my custom, I vote with my wallet.   I don't like
> > the BBC using my TV tax to develop a bad replay system, the same as I
> > don't like the government using my other taxes to run their wars and ID
> > databases.  But I also don't like fanaticism wherever it is, including
> > "free is perfect, everything else is evil" fanaticism.)
> 
> As an extra data-point here, a friend of mine phoned me out of the
> blue after seeing my photo in The Register when I was protesting
> outside the BBC.  It seems that until recently she used to work in the
> same office as the iPlayer developers.  She tells me that the bulk of
> (or perhaps all of) the developers use Firefox to develop their stuff
> (because it works better). only using IE for testing, and then just
> before release they intentionally cripple it to only work on IE.

If that's true, that's pretty damn nasty.  And an even worse use of my
tax money.

> That strikes me as pretty outrageous.
> 
> It does make me wonder if the BBC is being used by MS in order for
> them to get some leverage in the set-top box market (which is currently
> dominated by GNU/Linux AFAICT) by ensuring that the ability to grab BBC
> content via the Internet is something that's exclusive to set-top boxes
> with OSs licensed from MS.

If so, it's the same as they have the rest of the government(s) in their
pockets.  Tax calculation programs which only run on Windows (or Flash).
I can't say it would surprise me.

Chris C