skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I've seen this reaction in a few places, and I'm genuinely interested in what people think that it would achieve. You take the code of a browser that allows, but does not require, you to use a DRM system* and change it so that you are no longer able to install a DRM system. What's the value proposition of the new browser? You won't be tempted to install the DRM component when you find yourself wanting to view media that requires it? That seems pretty weak compared to the difficulty of maintaining a browser fork.

It seems to me that refusing to ship DRM makes sense if it gives leverage against the content companies, such that could be used to make them adopt DRM-free solutions. To get such leverage it would be necessary both that the reach of the unencumbered web was compelling and that requiring DRM would significantly limit that reach. Unfortunately plugins have historically provided a DRM-enabled way of distributing content via the web, so there was no compelling reason for content makers to forgo DRM in the past. This makes it significantly more difficult to change the industry today.

It is possible that there was a chance to win back some ground with the decline of plugins on mobile. However, it's also possible that the prevalence of native apps on those platforms made the web itself a less appealing medium for distributing content to mobile users. In any case, the eagerness of Microsoft and Google to deploy in-browser DRM means that we didn't get to run that experiment. Instead we are in a situation where some high percentage of web users can get DRM encumbered video content in their current browser. For those who can't the barrier to switching browsers is typically rather small. Not shipping the capability to view DRMed video in this situation is, tragically, trying to hold a non-equilibrium position; it might be principled but it is going to end in a significantly sub-optimal outcome.

I suppose the optimistic view is that video will follow the iTunes model and DRM will be a short term burden that we have to bear until technology and attitudes in the industry make it clear that there's a better way. I'm confident that Mozilla will continue to push to find that better way.

* Assuming one that exists that is compatible with your OS + hardware + etc.; all the usual problems of binary blobs in general and DRM in particular still apply, of course.
How exactly is Rice a war criminal?
I don't think the Scandinavian and US markets are comparable, but fair enough, I doubted even something like headweb could exist.
But he has a program he likes already.
> For most people, DRM is enough to stop them. It's only a select few people with a deep understanding of technology who can defeat even the most basic DRM.

I don't think you get the point. Most pirates never try to beat any DRM. They pirate what other capable few provide to them DRM free. Yes, some initially break that DRM. But it takes one knowledgeable pirate to do it in order for the rest to get it DRM free ever since. So, going back to the point above - DRM is not effective for anything except degrading the product for legitimate users.
Remember, the closed-source component is there because there has to be a place for the deliberately inserted NSA vulnerabilities (note the proposed use of Adobe). It's likely that this bizarre and unpopular decision is the result of some behind-the-scenes arm-twisting.
Why is Google Chrome's Math.random number generator not that random?
Yeah I made modifications to disable frame reordering and handle the extra SEI information properly, but I'll study your solution too because it seems really awesome. The lower the latency the better :)
Who would be pressuring Mozilla to remove the option?
> Perhaps the whole existence of Mozilla was leading up to this point where it could commit ritualistic suicide and take this DRM proposal with it.

Except, if Mozilla had committed "ritualistic suicide" over EME, it wouldn't have taken EME with it. Users would move to every other browser with HTML5 DRM implemented, Mozilla would die accomplishing nothing.

A world with entrenched HTML5 DRM & Mozilla strikes me as strictly preferable to a world without Mozilla in which HTML5 DRM is just as entrenched.
> This is a case where Mozilla thinks that by sticking around they can do more good than by killing this particular attack on the free web.

How can Mozilla kill it? It simply doesn't have the power, faced with Google, Microsoft and Apple implementing EME.

Yes, Mozilla could have taken a pure, principled stance and avoided EME. Perhaps some thoughtful people would use Firefox for that reason. But those same thoughtful people would have boycotted Chrome and Internet Explorer when they started to ship EME.

There has been no such boycott. If we - the people on the web - wanted to stop EME, that would have been the only way. Mozilla can't do it if the people don't want to.
Run DOS and the word processor in a VM, with Spotify running outside it, perhaps.

If that's doable, I bet DOS and WordStar (or WordPerfect, etc.) would be awfully quick in a VM.
TLDR: Market share > Principles

> We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.
I like the fact that NaN taints other numbers - early failure is better, than trying to hide it.

#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, const char* argv[] )
{
double nan = 0.0 / 0.0;
double x = 1.0;
double y = nan + x;
printf( "nan=%f\n", nan );
printf( " x=%f\n", x );
printf( " y=%f\n", y );
return 0;
}

/* Should print (gcc):
nan=nan
x=1.000000
y=nan
*/
> Would this mean that anyone can request anything to be removed from the internet if the company operates out of the EU?

If so, it's created a mechanism for litigiously DoSing opposing businesses.
The current state of SMTP STARTTLS deployment
hink the average customer watches Netflix et al through an app on their shitty Samsung smart TV, not through their Firefox browser. So I think this impression that users will suddenly all abandon Firefox is overblown and false.

As I noted above, this decision doesn't make or break DRM. I think we should just take note that Mozilla would betray their principles for some .5% of market share.
Saying that Apple "disabled the possibility to install a Flash plugin" implies that that possibility existed at some point. Support for installable browser plugins has never existed on iOS, so there was never anything for Apple to "disable".
> switch statements with more than 128 cases are not optimised in V8

I recently saw this in Petka Antonov's "Optimization Killers"[1], though I've definitely seen it somewhere else as well, because I recall hearing that variables mixed with literals in a switch could trip up the optimizer.

[1] https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Optimization-k...
Does this helps..
http://www.digitbrunch.com/internet/how-to-get-back-old-twit...
Actually, Massachusetts represents well the median diversity in the US. It is more diverse than about 30 - 35 other states. (Depending on how you count native americans). Less diverse than the immigrant rich states like Florida, California, Texas, New York, Georgia etc.

But actually ... fairly representative of most other states. If anything... Massachusetts should have MORE education problems than places like Nebraska, Washington and Missouri.
Matrix Spark
(For those that have no idea without reading the article, the AVICs are a series of car stereo made by Pioneer.)

Granted, most of this is probably driven by "can I do it?", but that's a lot of effort and expense to get rid of a nag screen. Though I find the nag screen annoying enough on my AVIC-6000 to have read to the end of the article...only to find out that he hasn't cracked that nut yet. :-(

But if you have one of the NEX series, you can watch DVDs as you drive down the road: http://avic411.com/index.php?/topic/38589-official-avic-nex-.... For diagnostic purposes only, of course. Or, if you're like me, you just wanted to get rid of the "OMG, the parking brake wire isn't hooked up correctly!" message because you just grounded that wire instead of actually connecting it to the parking brake switch. Now if I could just get it to stop whining about the speed sensor wire.
I wish they could expand. But alas, so far nothing like that is coming.
> It is the wrong choice.

WHat would the web gain if Mozilla lost most of its user base? Could we trust Apple, Microsoft and Google to have a moral backbone?
Capturing, decompiling the code will give you the routes / hardware key access points which you can then manipulate by pretending to be whatever they expect, et voila assuming you can decompile the transcoded information being passed along.
That depends on whether you parse 'anti-capitalist' as 'anti-people-who-are-capitalists' or 'anti-markets-which-are-capitalist'.

Completely unregulated markets aren't very friendly to capitalism (although some individual capitalists may end up on top of the heap) either as they don't stay capitalist, so most capitalists go along with trust busting and anti collusion regulations as they (correctly) assume that their individual odds of ending up as the apex predator in a dog-eat-dog world are not very good.
It would be nice to know what I'm signing up for.
Thanks for this, I'm just starting with graphic programming. I'm using the irrlicht engine, but this is better to get the theory down.
Can't addons be used to supplement the missing features?
What I learn is that don't force yourself to hire someone just because solo founder doesn't have a good reputation. As others have stated focus on your product and growth. Nothing matters as long as you have growth (PG's startup = growth).

At the same time don't hesitate to give a good chunk of equity if you find someone who you think will be essential to your company. Don't forget that you want to have a small chunk of big pie than having a big chunk of essentially nothing.
Yes, you'd have to implement tri-state logic, with all its unintuitive implications, in all languages that wanted to use IEEE 754. Clearly not very feasible. In SQL, one of the few languages with tri-state boolean as a first-class data type, null==null does return null.
> But there are a lot of people using Windows XP prior to Service Pack 3, and they will have problems.

I think a lot of times people on HN and related sites are a little callous to the needs of users stuck on old platforms. But in this case even I'm like "screw those people". Is there any common legitimate reason to be on XP but not be able to go to SP3?
DRM is a fantasy that uninformed media executives cling onto with a dream that it will put the genie back in the bottle. It's sad to see this stuff but totally understandable considering the divide between the technology people who understand the reality and the people in charge of dreaming of a fantasy that gets them back to the '80s..

Yes I know.. I was an executive as a major record label, trust me it's hard to be on both sides of this argument and it's not as simple as everyone makes it out to be...

I can't explain how many times I tried to help executives understand that the path between the media to the human eye or ear was vulnerable to so many attacks it clearly was a fruitless goal to protect media in that way. They hear some bright young person tell them they can protect their media like it was in the good 'ole days and they have the need to believe because without that belief they are out of a job..

And artists are on their own to figure out how to make money on their work...
One way to look at it: collision resistance prevents more attacks than mere 2nd preimage resistance, so that is a "higher" barrier. As you say, a certain type of attack would be to arbitrarily pick the first message and then try to find a collision, but that isn't the only conceivable attack. You might be able to run an attack that would generate message pairs that would have a higher likelihood of defeating a particular hash, if the hash had 2nd preimage but not collision resistance.

EDIT: I agree with sibling comments.
I'll give you some links:

http://swedishstartupspace.com/
http://www.meetup.com/STHLM-Tech-Meetup/
http://startuplocation.com/stockholms
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/11/european-sta...
http://www.thelocal.se/20140508/stockholms-like-a-party-with...

Working shouldn't be a problem, living is the tricky part.
This is only the case if you try to get the content legitimately (i.e. pay for it). Consumers without scruples have an easy ride.
PANDOO – The World's first Personal Computer, on the cloud goes Indiegogo
Pandoo TEK Inc, the company behind the revolutionary PANDOO will launch an Indiegogo campaign on May 20 to raise money for development of the world’s first way to turn any web browser into YOUR personal computer.

More details on the social media: https://www.facebook.com/PandooInc

Test an early DEMO of PANDOO at http://pandoo.cc
Had similar experience with a project that I was responsible to release a couple of months ago. We already had an app available on Mac App Store. We then spent about 2 months adding new features and fixing bugs. Turned out, because of stupid sandboxing, we could no longer add any new features. Only bug fixes were accepted. Release got stalled for about 2 weeks trying to find a workaround. It was really depressing 2 weeks. Eventually we decided to release on our own. We notified our existing customers and gave heavy discounts for those who wanted to get the new version. Received few angry emails from our existing customers but most of them understood our problems. Other than that, it's been going smooth. We are happy we did it. We don't have to pay 30% to Apple (there is a little cost associated with licensing but it is just like 3% of the total cost). We now can release bug fixes as soon as we want. In fact, the first bug fix we did was within an hour! I'd recommend everyone to skip MAS if possible.
I wonder how Mozilla would have handled this if they still were dependent on donations from users for funding instead of Google.
I think it's worse than that: DRM is serving a market of users ASKING to pay a lower price for renting movies instead of buying them. Many users are very happy to trade freedom of sharing with cost, and I personally don't think you can expect a business model based on an agreement of sharing restrictions to work without any layer of technical enforcement.

Even outside of movies, there are surprisingly few examples of successful artificial restriction policies without any kind of enforcement. Socially, people assume that they will be physically restricted from doing things that they are not supposed to be doing (from key locks to bank safes to packaging boxes with safety labels to bodyguards to keep out signs to whatever). I'm not sure it makes sense to go chicken/egg here: we can simply accept that people expect restriction policies to be enforced somehow, and they find totally reasonable that there is some kind of enforcement.

The whole business model of movies is based on restricted consumption; you pay more to get a better experience (e.g.: more quality) or less restrictions (e.g.: buy instead of rent). You can't expect this to continue to exist without a technical enforcement, and at the same time you can't expect Hollywood to come up with a radically different business model for a mature industry. You need disruption to arrive from somewhere else.

IMO, fighting against DRM for movies is ignoring the big picture. There are absolutely zero possibility that you will be able to experience Hollywood digital movies without DRM, because people accept and DEMAND to be restricted in order to access to discounts. The only alternative that makes sense is to boycott Hollywood and finance an innovator that can setup an alternative movie industry not based on restricted consumption (and good luck with coming up with a workable, scalable business model; that would easily make you billionaire and it's thus quite hard to achieve).
The comments on this point to another question of which this is an exact duplicate. Interested parties should definitely read the top answer there, as it was written by a member of the IEEE-754 committee.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/1573715/203705
Free market != anarchy. Copyright doesn't stand in the way of a free market any more than the property rights that keep me from hacking into Facebook and creating a competitor with its database.
Why Jill Abramson Was Fired
You can disable Flash from chrome://plugins
is this some sort of hosted service and if so where is the pricing ?
Where do those websites get the information from?
There are so many people here claiming this is the wrong choice, and yet I wonder what percentage of the commenters here are using chrome? By most sources I've seen, Chrome has 2x the marketshare, and actively pushed FOR EME. Perhaps if FF had Chrome's current marketshare, they would have been in a position to say no, but its the users who made that impossible. Mozilla should be commended for fighting as far as they did. And if you don't like this decision, make sure you switch off chrome before commenting.
> Firefox's lack of DRM means its users are being disadvantaged.

Firefox's lack of DRM would mean that users are being encouraged to used the services not encumbered with this nonsense, instead of all gravitating to whichever DRM service is most popular.

Mozilla supporting DRM is a failure because of Metcalfe's Law[1]. By giving access to the network of people using DRM to their n users, they support that network by O(n^2) and make it that much harder to dislodge in the future.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
> Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise).

That's not right either. It's the users that have the power. Users can pick which browsers they use and which sites they visit.

There was essentially no boycott of EME-shipping browsers (Chrome and Internet Explorer). That shows that we, the people on the internet, did not care enough to fight EME.

EME isn't fought by talking about it and hoping someone like Mozilla will kill it. We would have had to actually do something ourselves, and a successful boycott of Chrome and Internet Explorer would have killed EME very effectively.
All property rights are government created monopolies. Imagine applying compulsory licensing to other things. They government forces you to sell your widgets at a "reasonable fixed fee." Imagine the government forcing Google or Facebook to share their databases to potential competitors for a "reasonable fixed fee."

Compulsory licensing was a tactic used to shift profits from content creators to middlemen.
Collision resistance implies 2nd-preimage resistance, and is therefore the stronger notion.

Suppose your function is collision resistant, but not 2nd-preimage resistant. Then this means we cannot find an arbitrary pair (x, y) such that H(x) = H(y). But given a fixed x, H(x) we can find y such that H(y) = H(x). This is of course absurd, since we can easily turn the latter 2nd-preimage attack into a collision attack by fixing some arbitrary x ahead of time.

It is also the case in practice that collisions are easier to find. This is owed to the fact that a collision attack has much more degrees of freedom given to the attacker than a (second) preimage attack.
> And, it's probably closed. the web is open.

Do you understand that these new HTML DRM plugins will be closed as well?
Because otherwise it will defame people selectively.
There's the obvious warning that one shall not compare floating point numbers for equality...

But then, it's indeed quite surprizing. It get worse on pure tanguages where the expressions (0 / 0) and (0 / 0) are equal before evaluation, but different afterwards. Also, it trashes hash tables.

Yet, NANs being different is the sanest mathematical definition. Maybe people should have opted for the ugliest choice because of real world concerns (it wouldn't be the first time), but this time, they didn't.
Sadly, the text of the "right" allows suits against the search engines, and it's easier to find and sue major search engines than the owner of every site returned by results.

http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/righ...

Safe harbor is an endangered species.

Google and Yahoo should spend a day blurring out every name in search results to illustrate the danger of the ruling.
Collision resistance is harder to meet in the same way that "stronger" results are harder to prove. That is, I think you're correct and that my wording was just confusing, sorry!

Historically, many hash functions have been broken by collisions, but even very "weak" hash functions (i.e. MD5) still have full design strength for preimage and second-preimage resistance (as far as I know).
That won't work, you'll need to try harder.

I have some insider knowledge of how these chips work. First, you get the chips with crypto keys already installed, so having a copy of the firmware source code won't help. Second, the keys are unique to the device, so getting it won't give you much. Third, the firmware is authenticated so modifying the firmware won't help. Fourth, the chip is designed to be resistant to physical attack.
students do not have to study for 14 hours a day in their prime of their youth to acquire a stable career

Students don't have to do that anywhere. And they don't do that anywhere. I have lived in east Asia (and my three older children all have) and I challenge your assumption that pupils there study for fourteen hours a day (they most certainly do not) or that everything about schools there is a "pressure cooker environment." There are trade-offs involved in living anywhere, rather than living somewhere else, but you really owe it to yourself to find out more about how effective primary teaching is done before concluding that it shouldn't be tried in the United States. As they say in Chinese-speaking countries, "百聞不如一見" (hearing about something a hundred times isn't worth seeing it once). I offer for your reading pleasure a reading suggestion, full of food for thought, namely Liping Ma's book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States.[1] Reviews of this book appear below the book link.

Anyway, we can get other reality checks on this issue by seeing what people who have studied the United States school curriculum say about secondary schools here, for example "What’s Holding Back American Teenagers? Our high schools are a disaster."[2] The last federal sample survey on the issue resulted in news reports such as, "School is too easy, students report,"[3] suggesting that a lot of learners here don't appreciate dumbed-down school lessons that waste their time without providing a return in new knowledge and skills.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf

http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2695436?uid=2&uid=4&si...

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/02/high_sc...

[3] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-07-...
Huh? Since when have Hollywood movie studios been government created monopolies?
Exactly, Mozilla had power right up until the tech community sold out the future of the web in favor of sparkly things given to us by our benevolent corporate masters. Every time we installed Chrome for our parents because it was so minimal, every time we fired up safari because zomg the user interface was "lickable", we were working towards this point. We gave Google and Apple this power because we decided that smooth animations and per process tabs were a fair trade for the future of a global information network not controlled by corporate interests. Mozilla could have had real leverage if the tech community wasn't populated by a fashion driven divas with just enough foresight to see the tip of their own nose, but that isn't the world we live in.