Being a bit of a pessimist, I do believe that as time goes on computers will become ever less general purpose and user accessible, and "secure content delivery" is one of the motivating factors for that. Even if a user remains free, or finds a way, to install or develop applications, the task of writing a suitable program to display a video stream might become prohibitively difficult.

Theoretically, you can always factor a very large number, but practically you can't, and that's the kind of asymmetry - another being that you can always reverse engineer the function of a chip, in theory but not in practice - that mitigates against humans staying ahead in this particular arms race.

For a little while I worked for Nvidia, and as I understood it they were very careful to support "secure delivery" and leave as little by way of loopholes as they could. The nature of IP licensing mean the same forces apply to other manufacturers.

Of course there could in theory be other platforms which deliver unprotected video content - but if they deliver anything copyrighted by the major powers, they probably won't last very long, as legal and technical obstacles will be brought to bear.

Edit: for an optimistic take, we have the late Ursula K Le Guin: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I remember my shock/surprise, on firing up my first MS-DOS machine, that it didn't come with at least a text editor and an assembler... and that was forty-odd years ago. The CP/M machine I had used previously had assembler and compiler; the 6502 system I used prior to that had an assembler and compilers were available. My main praise for Linux is that writing your own code is simple (even if you don't understand the layers of abstractions that current languages use) and that, even if not included in the ISO, assemblers and compilers are easily obtained.

The claim is persistently made that we need encrypted and cryptographically signed software to protect us from those nasty black-hats who would riffle through our files, blackmail us, spam us, raid our bank accounts. And they have a point, but to me it is more an issue of poorly thought out protocols: for example, does anyone really need a Turing-complete programming language in a word processor? In a spreadsheet? Let's not mention third party cookies and tracking pixels - none of their [expletive deleted] business. And of course, the software suppliers would much prefer that you used only their software, and incidentally keep all your data on their clouds... oh no, you can't trust that nasty open-source stuff, it will eat your soul.

(It doesn't help that modern software is often released ridden with bugs, because the Agile model lets (relies on) the user be the tester, 'because we can always fix the faults in the next sprint'.) I preach the Unix/Linux approach: one program does one thing and does it well; don't try to bolt on the kitchen sink. (cough: systemd?)

Whisper it: could it be that Google doesn't know what colour its hat is?

Neil

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I agree - but the concept of small and simple is good, and worth remembering.

Poettering, the author of systemd, now works for Microsoft. Can't help feeling there's a connection. He's got other 'simplifications' in mind, I believe.

Neil

I'm curious on how it's working for you. One day it just stopped for me and every video I played on Firefox with uBlock Origin still showed the YT warning about ad blockers.

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Cat; the other white meat.

How about right now?

I just tried everything which triggered before and everything plays.

I use Opera as my primary browser for video viewing and it has an internal ad blocker.

One point: I understand that YT does not target every user of an adblocker; just a small selection. So it could well be that you're simply not getting the warning delivered, rather than the adblocker is removing it.

That said, I often get the warning, but I can still view without adverts (except for in-programme promotions).

On the other hand: if I choose not to accept cookies, it complains that it can't show me things based on previous views. Fair enough, but it doesn't show me anything at all unless I actively search for something. Which I think is rather against the Euro cookie rules, which afaik say the sight has to continue working without cookies...

Neil

My first "PC" was a genuine IBM. The first generation had a base memory of 16K expandable to 64K on the motherboard. Mine was the second generation with 256K on the motherboard; I bought an expansion board with it (AST Six Pack) taking it up to the max of 640K thinking that as as programmer, I will need to be able to test on a machine with the full amount of memory. For the longest time, my boot disk would create a ram disk formatted with DOS along with commonly needed software, then reboot from it. I then had two empty floppy drives to use.

The first version of DOS I used was PC-DOS 1.1 - I wish I had bought 1.0 when the store was clearing it out as it is quite rare today. DOS did not come with an assembler; I think the Macro Assembler cost something like $100 or $150. DOS came with a line-oriented editor called EDLIN which was much better than CP/M's ED. I already knew WordStar from CP/M, so I got that for the PC as soon as I could. I even wrote a gizmo which would load the overlay files into memory so that WordStar never needed to hit the disk again after the initial load.

I had several CP/M machines all which bundled additional software like WordStar and Microsoft BASIC. DOS machines were not initially sold that way.


Simple if you knew C and the standard library; not everybody did at first. My big complaint was that I hated the AT&T syntax in the assembler, so much so that I refused to write code with it.


The worst security mistake made was allowing rich text in e-mails. It made it easy to create convincing phishing messages. They had to make it even worse by allowing JavaScript to run in e-mail messages which made it impossible to see where a link ultimately went. Compound that with URL shortening services.

The second worst was Microsoft deciding that it was a good idea to hide those ugly file extensions. So malware came in the form of YouMustSeeThis.jpg.exe


I have worked on "shrink wrapped" software. Meaning that once it was shipped, fixing bugs meant sending some kind of disk to customers who demanded it. We went to pretty great lengths to reduce the number of bugs, though you cannot catch them all. This was before Al Gore invented the Internet so that users can download patches and the automatic updates of today.


Quite telling for a company whose motto used to be "Do no evil."

They are trying that. It is called ChromeOS. Luckily, we are not forced to use it.

iOS and Android are not much better as everything has to come from an app store. Microsoft is trying to move Windows that way. Fortunately, there was a recent legal settlement which hopefully opens up Android.

I stand firmly on the side of 'if you can't write your own programs, you don't own the computer'. And with that: if your software uses proprietary file formats, you don't own your data either.

Neil