Comment by matheusmoreira
17 hours ago
It's got nothing to do with protecting users. It's got everything to do with protecting the corporation from the users. Especially the corporation's bottom line.
If you have a free computer, you can make it save a copy of the film the corporation is streaming to you. It's your computer, you are in control.
If you have a corporate owned computer, it will not let you do that. They own the computer, they are in control. If you manage to subvert their control, it will be detected and they will not stream the movie to you.
Substitute corporation with government, and streaming with cryptography. Now consider the fact Europe is trying hard to enact laws that force client-side scanning of our end-to-end encrypted messages.
That is the war we are fighting. The fact we are losing hurts me deeply. It is hard to put into words my disillusionment.
I did use "supposedly" in there. While media lobbies are strong, that's not how they are convincing governments to line up: it's about protecting the naive, non-techy user in this tech-heavy world.
To me, that's why we need to rise and say: I need no protection! Media companies can do what they please and still insist on "secure attestation" (like Netflix does with Chrome on Linux, still limiting to lower quality streams), without essential services like government services, banking services, communication services etc. being allowed to do the same if the user decides against that "protection".