Naughty Auntie

Okay, now for something completely different. I have not had a good moan or a long rant for at least 5 posts, so I better say something controversial before you all start agreeing with me and thus get bored and stop flaming me in the comments. Anyway, the latest way the BBC's management are getting on my tits is forcing me to pay for content that is specifically designed to be only accessible on Windows.

Disclaimer

I am not the biggest fan of the BBC's policies to start with. This is due to the fact that the BBC forces you to buy their services even if you just want to watch a competitor's offerings. For the many years that I could not afford a TV, I (or rather 'the present occupier') was harassed often by mind-numbing pro-forma letters telling me that I must be a criminal and would be fined X thousand pounds, no matter how many letters I wrote back, the cycle would soon start again. Fortunately my home was never invaded my ex-cons in the employ of the BBC's out-sourced thugs, (for the horror stories, visit this site). Needless to say I am suspicious of them until proved innocent, as that is how they treated me. They also have a corporate line that favours a certain set of political views, but they are probably close to many of my views, so I don't notice that so much.

Hello OSC

I wrote recently that I have no idea what half of these open source organisations actually do for us. Well one that has stepped out of the shadows is the Open Source Consortium. They have rightly complained to all the relevant regulators etc about the BBC's support for Microsoft's illegal operating system monopoly, the BBC are seeking to lock licence fee payers into Microsoft only technology with it's new 'iPlayer' service, why the BBC needs a player I have no idea, what is wrong with RealPlayer or any other of the cross platform players?

Let's not mince words, if BBC content is not available on Linux, it will hinder many UK consumers from using Linux. People will have to use a product from a foreign convicted monopolist rather than a British or EU company. Many (or most?) UK Linux users use Realplayer (mostly open source), Mplayer (open source can use closed codecs) or whatever else to access the existing streaming BBC content, getting set up for the BBC online content is always a frequently asked question in distributions' forums.

In the Register article, one of the weasel excuses used to justify the BBC's Windows only services was that:

> "we consider that access to iPlayer would be only one of many factors influencing the decision to purchase a new computer operating system".

That is a bit like the "I only drive the train" excuses that we looked at in the last post. The causes of lock-in are 'many factors' as the man said, but most of them are through the government's intervention in the market.

I buy a lot of stuff online, and I have never yet found myself in the situation that an online shop has refused to sell me something because I used Linux, they just happily take my money and send me whatever it is. I am sure there are some examples, but if I did ever find such a shop then I would go to one of their competitors who are just one click away. The problems of lock-in are usually the fault of the government, because you have nowhere else to go.

You can probably find other examples were the government or a publicly funded institution has forced you to use Windows. To take one example, my University spends some tiny part of my tuition fee on ebrary, which I can only sometimes use on Linux by means of weird hacks. They do not give me that money back. Ebrary is such a shame because otherwise the IT Services at my University are absolutely fantastic, I can use everything else on the operating system of my choice.

Naughty Words

As far as I know, the English language has no swear words being with 'L', until now that is.

The new profanity begins with 'L', ends with 'X', and has five letters in total.

The BBC itself reports on the Windows lock-in situation but specifically does not mention the 'L word', even though that is a major part of the OSC's complaint. I do not believe this is an accident, I have noticed that in documents before where they dare not speak it's name.

> "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi

While Microsoft is moving from the laugh to the fight stage, the BBC is still firmly in the ignore stage.

I have a theory on this. I predict the BBC will make a plugin to Quicktime or something, pull it out of the hat and say, "iPlayer is cross-platform, it works on both Microsoft and Apple". Acknowledging our existence as Linux users ruins that merrily little plot.

Their plan, of course, is not good enough. The BBC has a resposibility to provide a format that any company can support. Imagine if at the digital TV switchover only worked with Sky and one brand of digibox, there would be an outcry. Imagine if the government decided to only allow two foreign brands of car to use the roads. Only two supermarkets could sell food.

The BBC's content should work on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, even those OpenBSD nutcases should be able to use it. They should provide the content and allow the market to provide the player.

While Apple have had a bit of a resurgence as of late, however you cook the numbers, Linux is more or less head to head with Apple. The only thing standing in our way to greater usage is all of these niggley bits like Media Codecs, pre-installation and graphics drivers, and the latter two seem to be on the way to a solution.

DRM is bullshit

The other reason given for not giving me the programmes I have paid for is 'DRM'. The BBC's own article said:

> "Our ability to deliver this open approach will be influenced by the availability of alternative DRM systems on the market.

The problem with DRM on Windows is that you have to actually let the viewer watch it at some point, and that is an unavoidable point of failure. Current DRM systems also have to decrypt the video into RAM and send it through the video card too.

Current DRM systems on Windows are just pretending to work, but it is just smoke and mirrors. 'Insecurity though obscurity'. On Linux we could have a DRM solution that pretends to work too, no problem, it will just be even more obvious that it does not work.

It is possible to have a fully working DRM on either platform without starting the whole history of computing again. On the Mac maybe you could make a credible attempt to lock every single thing down (yet still fail because you let the consumer take it home), but the PC market just does not work like that. On both platforms the user can have any combination of devices and the operating system is under control of the end user. There are many other points of failure, for example, the USB HD-DVD drives that the Windows crackers use to break the protection, the USB connection being the weak link - USB was not created to handle two masters.

DRM is hypocrisy, as Jeremy Allison, co-creator of the Samba project and one of the leading technologists of our age has pointed out in his article "Why DRM won't ever work":

> Engineers know that DRM doesn't work, that it can't possibly work. Yet just like Scotty when Captain Kirk calls from the bridge asking for the impossible, they can't seem to help producing ever more complicated versions of the same broken system. Companies keep trying to create and sell DRM systems to the content industry. Having lots of money thrown at them to do this probably helps, just like Scotty liked to be thought of as a miracle worker.

Allison attributes the following insight to another leading thinker, Cory Doctorow, that:

> A request for a DRM system is a sign that the customer is in denial, and isn't dealing rationally with reality.

If the BBC won't support Linux until we have DRM (which remember is broken by definition), then I will make a binary only kernel extension which logs the word "ping" to /var/log/messages every time the graphics card is used. If anyone wants to be the marketing manager for this then let me know, we could be onto a fortune here!

Update: I noticed a guy called `Mike Arthur made a similar point`_ at the same time I was writing this. See that article for some interesting analysis. A point he implies that is worth mentioning is that DRM never stopped anyone that is determined to use unauthorised content (these people are on unauthorised copies of Windows anyway) but just get it the way of law-abiding people, the copies of content on filesharing networks have no DRM.