Hello folks,
I have a question regarding Chromium. As I develop a few websites and whatnot
I have a range of browser on my system to test with. One of which is
Chromium. As I'm using Debian, while they do a semi-decent job to keep
non-free parts out of the OS, browsers, like Ice Weasel suggests flash
player, and Chromium does too.
This can be ignored of course if your goal is freedom and you are aware of
these issues, but I find the anti-free software people try to get you from
all corners, hence the reason OSes like Trisquel were made. Thing is, my
system does not work with Trisquel that's why I'm using Debian, not because I
adore Debian but because it's all I can use. Already argued that one but
anyway...
The point I'm trying to get to is the issue with EME. I have not been
following the whole HTML5 thing however I remember a campaign by the FSF
against the "Hollyweb". I expect this was against EME as, if I understand it
correctly, EME runs software on your computer that is "secret" (for lack of a
better term) and controls your PC. It's DRM 101. I don't know how effective
this campaign has been, but regardless of the outcome of whether EME is to
become norm or not in the HTML5 standard, people are still going to use EME
on their sites and browser developers are going to implement it. Which I have
discovered that Chromium does. I thought Chromium was Chrome without the
non-free parts like the PDF reader and Flash player Chrome comes with, but it
gets more complex than that.
Since I do not have flash player installed (other than Gnash, which doesn't
seem to work atm), I went to youtube.com/html5 to try to get the html5
player. There, I saw at the bottom tests for EME and I noticed when I
navigate Chromium to it, it had a green check mark!! Apparently Chromium has
EME support built in, and unless you disable it, it will run on your PC. I
just wanted to get that out here as I've seen some people talk about
installing Chromium on Trisquel as Chromium is "free software" as some people
called it, yet it does things like this without your knowledge and unless you
disable it, you are at risk of running sites with EME.
Too bad there is no Chromium fork that doesn't have these features like
Firefox has GNU Icecat? Anyway just thought it would be worth saying for
anyone who tries to install Chromium on their computer, because unless I
understand EME wrongly, Chromium contains DRM by default, so unless you
directly turn it off it will be used, as such it probably should be avoided
as much as possible.
- [Trisquel-users] Chromium not very free jonah
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