Re: Privilege Levels Below User

Michael S  <already5chosen@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Sun, 16 Jun 2024 08:49:42 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

It has options to build against toolkits for every codec and file
format that is still worth using these days, and a few more besides.

>
All I know about it is that typical FF installation on x86-64 uses plug
in provided by Cisco. I have no idea if the reason for it is technical
or legal.

I believe the reason is patents... Which is another way of saying it
is/was for legal reasons.

h.264 is/was extremely heavily patented, the MPEGLA patent consortium
list for what patent they include in their license is 58 pages[1],
with three colums! A lot of that is due to national patent duplication
but still, Firefox just says "More than 1000 matches" when I search
for just US patents!

Now, a lot of the US patent expired during 2023 but did ALL? And what
about all the patents in other countries. And also remember that this
decision was made long ago when alll these patents were presumed to be
valid (including by courts) and there were real grumblings about
various people suing other people under these patents.

So when Cisco open-sourced their h.264 implementation under a BSD
2-clause license back in 2014? and let Firefox use it while being
covered by Cisco's MPEGLA agreement (unknown date)?!

Well, since no one else stepped up (and there was calls since, well,
Cisco) it was the *only* way Firefox could safely ship binaries that
could do h.264 out of the box. So lots of hand wringing and teeth
gnashing but... no choice really if they wanted to survive.

IIRC before (and after) that there was various workarounds with
external modules (say the user providing FFmpeg) or just "use the
system video player" (possibly playing in a different window!) but
none of them was good solutions.

1. https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf