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0 pointsDalewyn1y ago0 comments

>"Doing the right thing" for the user's best interests is the job of the user agent. It's just that simple.

No, a user agent's sole job is to represent its user. It's right there on the tin: User Agent. Forcing no DRM is just as bad as forcing DRM, it's not the user agent's business to decide for the user. The fact that most user agents today are actually developer/publisher agents is part of the problems we are having.

>I am objecting to the inclusion of DRM technology in web standards, where this pitiful semantic debate about what a user agent is for doesn't even apply in the first place. What is fit for the open web platform and respective standards has nothing to do with decisions made by user agent developers.

Commercial interests are not going to fly the free-as-in-beer pirate flag no matter how loudly you bang that drum, and if the internet is open then those commercial interests also certainly have a right to be part of it.

It's ultimately not a problem if internet standards allow room for DRM schemes, because in a properly functioning system the users will decide through their user agent if they want to engage in DRM schemes or not.

So long as you are fueled by self-righteous dogma with a seething hatred towards people just minding their own business, you're not going anywhere and I would even argue you're actually contributing to the very problems you want to see resolved.

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squigz1y ago

That last paragraph is unnecessarily aggressive, and seems to me an uncharitable reading of their position and how they've presented it.

DalewynOP1y ago

The HN Guidelines state to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says", which is what I did. And yes, I was aggressive, but I don't think it was unwarranted given how strongly he feels about making people "do the right thing" as far as he is concerned.

It would be nice if we could go back(?) to a world where the user operates their computer, not the computer operating their user.

jchw1y ago

Yes, but as I stated no less than three times, I am talking about what goes into web standards and the web platform. That is before the term "user agent" comes into things, because web standards are about what the web is, not about the programs that serve and access it. It really side-steps the semantics debate quite elegantly, but it's inconvenient for your argument which is shallow and depends on a pretty lame interpretation of the words "user agent".

A user agent should chiefly do what the user tells it to do, but if you pay more attention, you'll see how bad web standards can actually still screw over the user. Because if you make particularly bad web standards, the user agent can still do what the user is telling it to do, but the website can then start behaving in a manner which goes against what the user is telling their computer to do.

If browsers had implemented WEI, a chief use case was to allow websites to control whether extensions and adblocking could be used while browsing their pages. And the clever part is, sure, your user agent could implement WEI "wrong" and let the user do whatever they want, but the attestation would allow the website to decide which user agents pass attestation, so you can't just make a user agent that does what the user wants.

DRM and WEI are pretty similar as they're both technologies that require computer programs to restrict what you can do on your own computer (and DRM does what WEI does with browser choice but in a litigation way instead of cryptographically-attested way), but I will repeat this again for hopefully the last time:

Not wanting DRM in web standards has nothing to do with the definition of a user agent.

One more time:

Not wanting DRM in web standards has nothing to do with the definition of a user agent.

Seriously, stop ignoring this. It's not like I didn't already aggressively state it previously.

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