myself and several others have both baulked and laughed at the assertion that: “Because web developers never hope their web apps are easily copied by others.”
many of us make stuff (web apps included) with that exact explicit hope. was it written intended as a joke? we’re not sure.
A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can’t “Save As…” an image; where the “allowed” uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively “View Source” on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It’s a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It’s a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn’t just look up the details of all the “Web” technologies. They’d have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable.
If you find a technical solution to this (even if flawed and incomplete), you will open the world up to further security vulnerabilities and covert surveillance capabilities to any of the sites included on any page.
Hollywood and the MPEGLA have already broken the web so deeply, that any freedom respecting system already has a limited experience of the web, content which legally cannot be viewed in a user freedom respecting way, even if that view has purchased or otherwise leagally obtained the licenses to view that content.
I do not want to view any content or have my system execute any application that does not allow me to inspect that it does what is supposed to do!
Really… the openness of the web is its fundamental boon! Freedom respecting browsers and other user agents may not implement such nefarious functionality!
I am _not_ going to execute foreign webclient code on my system that needs to hide itself from my eye.
js on the web needs the opposite: More openness. Signed release tarballs, declared dependencies (so I need to download only once), declarative scope (only some features used) etc.
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myself and several others have both baulked and laughed at the assertion that: “Because web developers never hope their web apps are easily copied by others.”
many of us make stuff (web apps included) with that exact explicit hope. was it written intended as a joke? we’re not sure.
is this a joke?
sounds like.
Any sort of obfuscation you can do necessarily needs to be undoable by the client so that the page can be rendered. This is an exercise in futility.
John couldn’t have summed it up better. What an elegantly simple yet profoundly accurate sentiment.
If you find a technical solution to this (even if flawed and incomplete), you will open the world up to further security vulnerabilities and covert surveillance capabilities to any of the sites included on any page.
Hollywood and the MPEGLA have already broken the web so deeply, that any freedom respecting system already has a limited experience of the web, content which legally cannot be viewed in a user freedom respecting way, even if that view has purchased or otherwise leagally obtained the licenses to view that content.
I do not want to view any content or have my system execute any application that does not allow me to inspect that it does what is supposed to do!
Really… the openness of the web is its fundamental boon! Freedom respecting browsers and other user agents may not implement such nefarious functionality!
“Because web developers never hope their web apps are easily copied by others.”
Seriously? Have you heard of open source software?
Here’s an idea: if you don’t want the source code of your app to be stolen, don’t build it with open-source, client-side technologies.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
I am _not_ going to execute foreign webclient code on my system that needs to hide itself from my eye.
js on the web needs the opposite: More openness. Signed release tarballs, declared dependencies (so I need to download only once), declarative scope (only some features used) etc.