*Boring, complex and important: a recipe for the web's dire future* /The Electronic Frontier Foundation has resigned from the W3C, the body responsible for governance of web standards. Cory Doctorow explains why/ By Cory Doctorow Thursday 21 September 2017 There is nothing more deadly than a fight that is boring, complicated and important. This toxic trio lies at the heart of disasters as wide-ranging as climate change, the 2008 financial crisis, and now, a sea-change in the very nature of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the most prominent force in the creation and maintenance of "open standards" for the web. Standards are boring, complicated and important. Reasonable people can debate at length the optimal gauge for a railroad track or voltage for a mains socket, but in the absence of an agreement at the end, your trains will go off the rails as your kettle will burst into flames. Every W3C standard until 2017 formalised some technological means of giving users control over their computers, from the power to display a certain kind of image format to the power to render complicated web-pages in browsers. This week, the W3C published a first-of-its-kind recommendation titled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) that does just the opposite. It enables media companies from Netflix to the BBC to remotely control your computer while you are enjoying copyrighted works, preventing you from (for example) saving a programme for later, without regard to whether you have the legal right to do so. […] Continua qui: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/w3c-eff-open-standards-web-cory-doctorow