| loadedstatement said: Hulu will quickly disable this as they did with Boxee and many other sites trying to embed Hulu. |
and how exactly can they disable it? The only info they (or any website for that matter) have about your computer other than your IP address is that provided in the user agent. The other info in the lower layers (such as the MAC address) is stopped at the local network gateway. If you spoof the user agent and use your PC as a proxy, they can't do anything about that because they have no way of knowing whether the info provided by the user agent string is accurate. The only way to stop people from doing that sort of thing is to block every OS and web browser and obviously they are not going to do that because it completly defeats the purpose of having a website.
Blocking embedding on the other hand is much simpler because all you have to do is efficiently mask the actual physical address (ie. make it so you can't find out http://hulu.com/blabitty_blah_blah/24_season1_episode4.mp1) of the content from the client computer and don't provide any methods to embed content like youtube/viddler/etc. do. If someone breaks your encryption, you just change the encoding method.
However, all this is done on the server side where they have complete control over what is done to the content. A user agent string on the other hand provides no way for the server to verify if it is accurate or not. I've seen people use user agents like "omg obama is teh sh*t!!!" and they were still able to access anything they wanted on the web. The user agent is meaningless except as a way for websites and companies to track what OSs and browsers are accessing their website. Their usefullness is dependent on the fact that most people either don't know how or don't care enough to change them, not because they are a secure and/or accurate way of tracking the usage of different computer technologies.
Not trying to be a fanboy. Of course, it's hard when you own the best console eve... dang it
