In the bad ol' days Microsoft was known for being ruthless with potential competition, obsessed with keeping what was theirs, theirs, and generally putting consumers last. Cleaning up their act a bit after governments like the EU went after them, Microsoft would like you to believe that today they're a friendlier, more open company, with your interests at heart. Maybe not...
threatpost[.]com/digital-rights-advocates-call-for-investigation-around-w3cs-drm-extension/119294/
Microsoft’s Paul Cotton, the HTML Media Extensions Working Group chairman for the W3C [The World Wide Web Consortium - w3[.]org], is pushing for "standardizing DRM in Encrypted Media Extensions, a draft specification that would ultimately feed into HTML 5."
Advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and security researchers alike have gone on record decrying the move, stressing it could have implications for competition, or anyone who discloses browser vulnerabilities. “Browsers are among the most common technologies in the world, with literally billions of daily users. Any impediment to reporting vulnerabilities in these technologies has grave implications,” Cory Doctorow, an activist and special advisor with the EFF, wrote in a post to the group’s Deeplinks blog Wednesday.
DRM is subject to legal protection through laws already on the books worldwide like the United States’ DMCA, Canada’s Bill C-11, and additional EU laws. Those laws, the EFF believes, could allow a company to threaten researchers who identify vulnerabilities in browsers that have HTML5 implemented. A slew of security luminaries, including Bruce Schneier, Ron Rivest, J. Alex Halderman, Ron Deibert, to name a few, signed off on a proposal in March that insists the W3C ensures researchers are protected before the consortium moves forward with its DRM work. The “covenant,” as Doctorow refers to it, would require members to sign and agree not to use the DMCA or similar laws to attack security researchers.
“The black hats who are already doing this are not bound by fear of the DMCA, and they are delighted to have an attack surface that white hats are not allowed to investigate in detail,” he wrote.