We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell.
Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The WC3 push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them…
Thanks for the heads up but can’t we keep on building websites without the new DRM extensions and avoid/opt out services that use them? I might be missing the point.
No, it doesn’t matter if you don’t build on those extensions. What matters is that there will no longer be any place on the Web for browsers that don’t have opaque code that’s illegal to report vulnerabilities in.
Those browsers will need OSes that are designed to support the kind of control Netflix demands — they’ll need secure paths from the browser to the screen, as well as the ability to detect when the browser is running in a VM — which pretty much kills GNU/Linux in one stroke.