[Novalug] EFF to Security Researchers: Tell the W3C To Protect Researchers Who Investigate Browsers

Roy Wilson roywilson1963@gmail.com
Thu Mar 31 12:09:28 EDT 2016


On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 10:35 AM, Bryan Smith via Novalug <
novalug@firemountain.net> wrote:

William Morse wrote:
> > Do you believe DRM in HTML5 is for their benefit?   I don't.
>
> You mean a small content owner having a standards-based facility in
> the open standard that allowed them to insert their own backend,
> keying and other features, that _all_ browsers support, _instead_ of
> having to go to a big, industry monster, who can push browsers to
> support their own, high-royalty, proprietary implementation because a
> standards-based one doesn't exist?
>

  I have to laugh at this entire conversation.  I remember pretty much the
same conversations over ARPA, FIDOnet, RIME, USENet, etc in the late
eighties right through the nineties.

  Everything was dialup, all 'net software had to be accessible to Least
Common Denominator systems, as there were BBS's running everything from
Bell Unix through CPM to that newfangled "DOS" stuff.

  And then....

  Some of the more expensive BBS software started using a front end instead
of the LCD of dialup N81 ASCII / ANSI.  You NEEDED to be running that
company's software on the accessing the machine if you wanted to talk to a
Host BBS that was using it.  At the time, those "big three" or so
proprietary systems were the only multi-line systems with any sort of
reliability, so a lot of people went to them;

  So we had the precursor to the web browser.

  And then....

  The corporate network systems started appearing - AOL, Fraudigy (er,
"Prodigy"), and such.  Within about six months they'd killed off most of
the timesharing companies, which many of the private nets used as gateways
to get internet / usenet / ARPA mail feeds.

  When the "browser precursor" systems first began being talked about, the
discussions mainly centered around *security*.  As in "what's this program
doing that I can't SEE?".

  Prodigy became popularly known as "Fraudigy" when it was discovered that
their proprietary software was keeping the bytestream open by grabbing
files (supposedly at random, but it always *seemed* to be Lotus 1-2-3
files, or any other spreadsheet columnar numerical data) and uploading them
to the Host (claimed to be to the bit bucket, but...).

  The current discussion here is like listening to a temporally displaced
echo to me. :)


  As to OPEN STANDARD...

  You all DO realize that if "everyone agreed" that The Open Standard for
file names shall be Eight-DOT-Three, inside of fifteen minutes some
brilliant idiot would find a way to use a NULL to make their own
proprietary software actually Eight-DOT-Four, right?



More information about the Novalug mailing list