- He genuinely might not know. I worked on a similar incident when our video encoder caused about 30% of a pretty mainstream mobile handset to hard lock when recieving a stream, requiring the battery to be removed to reboot the device.
Neither us nor the OEM ever figured out why. They suspected that it was a weird combination of different bin combinations from different parts, but ultimately we had to change the method of delivering video to stop it happening.
- Really great article.
I also think there's still an enormous ignorance from passkey devs that lots of people want to occasionally log into personal services from locked down corporate machines, and the flow to deal this is at best terrible but more often non-existent, and developers with typically enhanced privileges just aren't able to conceive how difficult this is.
- Which is why it won't happen, what would the revenue benefit of that be?
In the medium term you'll get a D+/Hulu-esque split with maybe a discounted bundle of Netflix and HBO Max together - the evidence is pretty strong that bundles reduce churn.
If they ever do go to one library, it'll be because Netflix feel they are able to push prices to the same level as both services combined.
- No, that was going to happen next year, but it never did and this deal has been agreed for the whole company.
WB pitched that to make it easier for them to be acquired by shunting all the debt to the channels entity - but it was unlikely the debt owners were ever going to go for that as presented, there would have been quite a significant chance of the channels group going under and them losing all the money.
But ultimately it turned out that enough entities were willing to bid now, before that split, that there was no point continuing to work out how to do it. Netflix will, presuming this deal completes, be the owner of CNN/TNT/Discovery at al.
Now, I am very sure they will look to sell several parts of those off - there is absolutely no way Netflix leadership wants to continue to own TNT - but that will have to come later.
- You know the UK and EU already operate such schemes for Orphan Works?
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-over...
All without registration...
- That wouldn't be sufficient. You'd need a hardware component to verify the OS signature of the specific distro with a trusted (by the game company) asymmetric key, and that enforced driver signing.
Those things are all possible, but really the only entity that has the power to realistically do them is the OEM - Valve could do it for SteamOS, but only on it's own hardware.
- Well, it's not intractable if it's pushed to the underlying hardware and signed drivers.
Valve could build something into their chipset and start signing the Steam Deck drivers, create secure boot etc and essentially create an Apple SIP equivalent. Wouldn't work for the rest of the Linux ecosystem or other devices, and people would absolutely howl about it, but they could do it.
- Also Microsoft closing the kernel to non-MS/non-driver Ring 0 software is inevitable after Crowdstrike, but they can't do that until they have a solution for how anti-cheat (and other system integrity checkers) is going to work. So something like this is inevitable, and I'm very sure there is a team at Microsoft working on it right now.
- This story seems overly kind. They aren't going to do anything to fix Windows burning platform, and just try and cram in more AI.
A PR statement that amounts to "we still love you" with no action whatsoever means nothing. We've had years of terrible management decisions about Windows 11 at this point. If they want any trust back statements aren't going to cut it, they would need to actually do things that they don't like and that users do.
- It's just an understandable reluctance to insert a bunch of additional dependencies in your playback stack unless you really, really have to.
People underestimate how much engineering Netflix have put in over the years to get it to work seamlessly and without much playback start latency, and replicating that over literally millions of existing videos is pretty non-trivial, as is re-transcoding.
It's not because of older devices - any TV that has got a YouTube app for a decade was required to support Widevine as part of the agreement to get the app, so the tail end of devices you'd cut off would be tiny, and even if they wanted to keep them in use you could probably use the client certificate to authenticate them and disallow general web access. It wouldn't be 100% fullproof but if any open source project used an extracted key you could revoke it quickly.
- A fairly poor piece.
It fundamentally doesn't understand tokenisation. It claims that you could have an age verification token that doesn't reveal to the government what you were trying to view, but how would that work? The site receiving the token still has to cryptographically validate it as being genuine, and having not being revoked, so it will still need to ask the government database (giving the government an instant kill switch against sexual minorities it decides it doesn't like into the bargain). There's no anonymisation here (and bluntly the government doesn't want that).
It's defence against a government using it for nefarious purposes is literally just the defeatist argument it decries as a fallacy in the paragraph before. Ultimately the best defence against such a government is that the harm it wants to cause can be made slow, expensive and inefficient, and that is a very good way to discourage governments from doing things en masse. But with a single identifier and digital ID it becomes far more efficient.
- It's incredibly fragile at the CDN level if deployed at scale for a start.
You'd see playback issues go up by 1000%.
In the nicest possible way, it is pretty clear that this article was written by somebody who has only ever looked at video distribution as a hobbyist and not deploying it at scale to paying customers who quite reasonably get very upset at things not working reliably.
- > Passkeys are great because they get sync'ed to all your devices, which makes it really easy to share access to those websites with other people ( who have access to devices on your account ). Like a spouse.
They certainly fucking don't.
I also have no interest in my credentials touching any cloud whatsoever.
- > If you have to buy a second device to use Netflix, so be it, but we need laws that guarantee people can make digital payments without Apple or Google's permission.
The reality is however that if you look at active current projects being able to use digital IDs to access fundamental freedoms like communication without child safety rails in Europe is going to require Apple or Google's permission because politicians like it that way.
You can think things should happen in a way all you like, but they are not going to, because governments have vested interests in the opposite direction.
This is an internet myth pushed by certain sci-fi writers doing incompetent research.
Disney were certainly in favour of the US's most recent copyright extension, but the main driver of it was the need for the US to move to a similar period to the EU for international treaty reasons.
The EU had moved to Life+70 years as a model because it unified to the longest period in the block when it unified the copyright period across the entire EU, under the logic that no copyright owner should have their term reduced as a result.
The longest period in Europe was Germany, and Germany's long copyright period was the result of lobbying from local German publishers, nothing to do with American companies.
It's really a bit of US exceptionalism to think Disney had much to do with it.