Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Rant (Page 6 of 10)

New Chromium now supports Netflix natively without Wine plugins

August 31, 2014 / / 46 Comments

chromium_icon

The latest update to my Chromium package is an interesting one. It took me many nights, all of last week, to find a solution for a crash that is mentioned in various bug reports and for which I could not find a working fix anywhere. In the end, I just removed the few lines of code which trigger the crash.

Dear Google: I think it is stupid to force a crash in my package just because my build is not an “official build”. If your developers want bug reports, fine, arrange something in your development or beta source code, but do not annoy users of your your stable releases by making your product unfit for Google searches.

Anyway, Chromium 37.0.2062.94 comes with a couple of critical bug fixes:

  • [$30000][386988] Critical CVE-2014-3176, CVE-2014-3177: A special reward to lokihardt@asrt for a combination of bugs in V8, IPC, sync, and extensions that can lead to remote code execution outside of the sandbox.
  • [$2000][369860] High CVE-2014-3168: Use-after-free in SVG. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$2000][387389] High CVE-2014-3169: Use-after-free in DOM. Credit to Andrzej Dyjak.
  • [$1000][390624] High CVE-2014-3170: Extension permission dialog spoofing. Credit to Rob Wu.
  • [$4000][390928] High CVE-2014-3171: Use-after-free in bindings. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$1500][367567] Medium CVE-2014-3172: Issue related to extension debugging. Credit to Eli Grey.
  • [$2000][376951] Medium CVE-2014-3173: Uninitialized memory read in WebGL. Credit to jmuizelaar.
  • [$500][389219] Medium CVE-2014-3174: Uninitialized memory read in Web Audio. Credit to Atte Kettunen from OUSPG.

New in Chromium 37:

Two nice things happened in Chromium 37 that I want to write about.

  • A separate PDF plugin is no longer needed. This release of Chromium finally has the PDF library included which in the past would only be released with the binary Chrome builds. PDF’s are now nicely rendered in the browser window without having to install the chromium-pdf-plugin package. In fact, I removed that plugin package from my repository. If anyone still wants or needs the SlackBuild for that, let me know and I will post it somewhere.
  • I have not tried it myself (no Netflix here) but reportedly Chrome 37.0.2062.94 can play Netflix natively in Linux, without the need for Wine plugins that add support for MS SilverLight. The new HTML5 player with DRM which Netflix optionally uses now, is supported thanks to co-operation between Chrome developers and Netflix. I assume that the Chromium package would provide the same support. In any case, newer (developer) versions of Chromium reportedly do support Netflix natively, just not sure of the exact version where this started working. Try it, and tell me what you found! I will release a “chromium-dev” package later this week to allow testing in Slackware of new functionality, that may help too.

How to make Netflix work with Chrome/Chromium?

These are instructions I took from a LinuxQuestions.org thread, again I am unable to verify their value.

  • Install Chromium (Chrome would work too of course)
  • Install a User Agent switcher (apparently Netflix keeps blocking Linux browsers even though they now support them…)
  • Add new User-Agent in User-Agent-plugin with following settings:
    • New User-Agent Name = Netflix
      New User-Agent String = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win 64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.24 Safari/537.36 (looks like 37.x.x.x version numberss do not work; use the latest Chrome (beta) version here).
      Group = Chrome
      Append = Replace
      Indicator Flag = NX (or whatever you want)
  • Add a new Permanent Spoof List
    • Domain = netflix.com
      User-Agent String = Netflix
  • Make sure your mozilla-nss package has at least version 3.16.4 (Pat Volkerding upgraded all mozilla-nss packages in recent Slackware releases for this reason)
  • In Netflix Playback-settings chose HTML5

Have fun! Eric

Note (added Fri Jan  9 12:12:23 UTC 2015):
Please also read my follow-up article because I have made the Widevnie plugin actually work with Chromium and watching Netflix is now possible in Chromium without any UserAgent spoofing.

On LKML: an open letter to the Linux World

August 14, 2014 / / 74 Comments

I wish I were better with words. There’s thoughts that strike a note in your heart and mind,  but I would not be able to express these thoughts on paper so that they deliver the needed punch. That was my first thought when I read this open letter on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/12/459 . The text is written by a longtime Debian user who feels deeply betrayed by its board of leadership. The emotions he penned down are exactly mine. Thank you, Christopher Barry. This was of course not the first eloquently written rant, but I hope it sparks a discussion in Kernel Land about what is happening in User Land, and whether they can afford to keep looking the other way (with the public exception of Linus and some others).

One word. One demon. systemd.

What relation does Christopher’s rant have to Slackware? After all, it’s Debian that got the flak, and in the comments section people indicate they intend to switch to Gentoo… forgetting that Slackware is a good systemd-free alternative (but hey! this automatic dependency resolution thingie that makes life so comfortable in Gentoo is not part of Slackware either).

Last week I asked the SDDM developers to reconsider their decision no longer to support ConsoleKit because Slackware does not have systemd or logind and thus we need to keep using ConsoleKit. The answer could be expected: “answer is no because ConsoleKit is deprecated and is not maintained anymore” and therefore I had to patch it in myself.

Of course, the ConsoleKit successor systemd-logind, written by the same team that gave us all the *Kit crap, depends on PAM which we also do not have in Slackware. One of the fellow core developers in Slackware, who is intimately familiar with the KDE developers community, has heard from multiple sources that KDE is moving towards a hard dependency on systemd (probably because they are going to need the functionality of systemd-logind). We all know what that means, folks! It will be the day that I must stop delivering you new KDE package releases for Slackware. That’ll be the day.

Eric

Skype drops support for ALSA

June 19, 2014 / / 45 Comments

In a Skype blog post yesterday, the announcement was made that the latest version of Skype has dropped support for the ALSA sound system and that Linux users are expected to use PulseAudio exclusively from now on.

Boo Hoo Microsoft, for killing this itsy bit of Linux compatibility in your closed-source product.

I guess for Slackware users it is game over for Skype calls. Time to find out if we can come up with a solution that bundles private libraries for PulseAudio so that we do not have to pollute the system directories with it.

Eric

Reset The Net – 05 june 2014

June 5, 2014 / / 5 Comments

ResetTheNet_05jun2014

Did I make you jump by showing the intrusive banner?

Today marks the start of a campaign, called Reset the Net, sponsored by digital rights groups and well-known Internet companies. It is meant to encourage both users of the Internet and companies with an active presence there, to take measures to prevent getting their data snooped by surveillance agencies. The campaign focuses on the promotion of privacy-enhancing tools.

Today’s launch of the campaign is not coïncidentally linked to the first anniversary of the publication of the leaked NSA documents through news articles online and on paper.

Last month saw the HeartBleed bug, today we are confronted with yet another bloody serious leak in OpenSSL., only a few days after the disclosiure of another serious leak in GnuTLS, the OpenSSL alternative. The Internet is never a safe place. Slackware is a fairly sane OS security-wise but the highest risk always comes from the user of that OS.

When you are on-line, act consciously, and think before you do. Guard your privacy and respect that of others. No, Edward Snowden is not a traitor. He sacrificed a lot in order to get the truth out there, and we should have respect for that, too.

Eric

How to make UPC Horizon TV work in Linux

April 17, 2014 / / 3 Comments

pipelight-logo
In an earlier article I have explained how you can use pipelight to run a Windows-based browser plugin seamlessly in your Linux browser. This solution makes use of a modified Wine under the hood. This way, you can for instance display web sites using Microsoft’s SilverLight technology (many dutch schools use a proprietary SilverLight based pupil management system), or use the Windows Flash Player which is much more up to date than Adobe’s plugin for Firefox.

The pipelight plugin loader also supports the Widevine content decryption module, which is used to decrypt a DRM-protected Flash video stream. Widevine is used by UPC‘s service to subscribers to watch television channels on your computer: Horizon TV. I pride myself to be the initiator for getting widevine support added to pipelight because I am a UPC subscriber, but when it actually got added, I found out that I could not make it work with Horizon TV. Bummer!

After a lot of frustration I accidentally stumbled across a thread on the UPC community forum, where cause of the issue was explained and the solution was provided.

The widevine plugin as installed by pipelight is actually too new! In order to make Horizon TV work in a Linux browser, you need an older version of the Widevine DLL. That older version is still available for download, but to be safe I made a copy.

These are the steps you need to perform to make it work: Download the Widevine plugin for Firefox (an XPI file); unzip it in order to extract the DLL file it contains; and then copy the DLL file into the wine-pipelight prefix where Widevine has been installed – this will overwrite the newer (but non-functional) version of the DLL with the older (but working) version.

$ wget https://dl.google.com/widevine/6.0.0.6678/WidevineMediaOptimizer_Win.xpi
$ unzip  WidevineMediaOptimizer_Win.xpi plugins/npwidevinemediaoptimizer.dll
$ cp -p plugins/npwidevinemediaoptimizer.dll \
    ~/.wine-pipelight/drive_c/windows/system32/

Thanks to Theo Band for the instructions! With these three commands, I was able to watch television in my Slackware Firefox browser.

upc_horizon_tv

Hope this helps some of you. Eric

 

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