Chromium not very free
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Hello folks,
I have a question regarding Chromium. As I develop a few websites and whatnot I have a range of browser on my system to test with. One of which is Chromium. As I'm using Debian, while they do a semi-decent job to keep non-free parts out of the OS, browsers, like Ice Weasel suggests flash player, and Chromium does too.
This can be ignored of course if your goal is freedom and you are aware of these issues, but I find the anti-free software people try to get you from all corners, hence the reason OSes like Trisquel were made. Thing is, my system does not work with Trisquel that's why I'm using Debian, not because I adore Debian but because it's all I can use. Already argued that one but anyway...
The point I'm trying to get to is the issue with EME. I have not been following the whole HTML5 thing however I remember a campaign by the FSF against the "Hollyweb". I expect this was against EME as, if I understand it correctly, EME runs software on your computer that is "secret" (for lack of a better term) and controls your PC. It's DRM 101. I don't know how effective this campaign has been, but regardless of the outcome of whether EME is to become norm or not in the HTML5 standard, people are still going to use EME on their sites and browser developers are going to implement it. Which I have discovered that Chromium does. I thought Chromium was Chrome without the non-free parts like the PDF reader and Flash player Chrome comes with, but it gets more complex than that.
Since I do not have flash player installed (other than Gnash, which doesn't seem to work atm), I went to youtube.com/html5 to try to get the html5 player. There, I saw at the bottom tests for EME and I noticed when I navigate Chromium to it, it had a green check mark!! Apparently Chromium has EME support built in, and unless you disable it, it will run on your PC. I just wanted to get that out here as I've seen some people talk about installing Chromium on Trisquel as Chromium is "free software" as some people called it, yet it does things like this without your knowledge and unless you disable it, you are at risk of running sites with EME.
Too bad there is no Chromium fork that doesn't have these features like Firefox has GNU Icecat? Anyway just thought it would be worth saying for anyone who tries to install Chromium on their computer, because unless I understand EME wrongly, Chromium contains DRM by default, so unless you directly turn it off it will be used, as such it probably should be avoided as much as possible.
IIRC, EME support is not necessarily non-free. Of course, the purpose of EME is to allow DRM integration, but this is not something technically defined by EME itself, i.e. it is /possible/ for free EME plugins.
A better way to solve this issue might be to stop Trisquel web browsers from running proprietary JavaScript. Or maintain the status quo of not bundling Chromium at all.
Thanks for that, as I have not followed EME as closely as I should. So I take it Chromium is not in Trisquel but some people is requesting it, I guess this is worth bringing up. :) I really do like Chromium from a functional standpoint, so to see it added later would be awesome, but it has it's issues so they need fixing first, not just with EME, but suggesting proprietary plugin too.
What advantage of EME would it be to have a free EME plugin though. I do not know much about EME, clearly.
> What advantage of EME would it be to have a free EME plugin though. I do not know much about EME, clearly.
Exactly, there would be no point. Encrypted media extensions are designed for websites like Netflix to prevent the user from directly accessing bits by hiding the decryption key in a proprietary plugin. Unless, of course, the decryption keys were leaked out on to the internet AACS-style and then a free program could do the same thing (although doing that might be illegal in some countries).
Andrew.
I suppose EME could be used by free software to circumvent EME, wouldn't make it much different than copyleft in that case haha.
Software I run on my machine is run if it meets the four freedoms naturally (source code available, GPL licensed). I do not care about DRM anti-circumvention laws or software patents as a user. That doesn't mean they're not important issues, what I'm saying is I'll use 09 F9 if I want to in spite of the law as long as it's with free software.
I don't think it would be very effective to leak out the keys though for something like netflix, as they'd probably have a scheme to change the keys like you see with BluRay discs. So it probably would be futile to leak and makes it useless from a freedom standpoint. That's all assuming that they'd even be leaked. I'd like to see it happen though for anyone who does use it ;)
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