GNU IceCat for Ubuntu?

[Feathers McGraw]

After reading Cory Doctorow's article on Mozilla's recent decision to include proprietary DRM code from Adobe in Firefox (technically, to include free code that installs the proprietary DRM code), I decided to try GNU Icecat.

...but the ppa hasn't been updated for 75 weeks (!) and adding the repo gives this error:

W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnuzilla-team/ppa/ubuntu/dists/trusty/main/binary-amd64/Packages  404  Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnuzilla-team/ppa/ubuntu/dists/trusty/main/binary-i386/Packages  404  Not Found

Anyone know how where to get IceCat for Trusty?

[claydoh]

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/24/

Note the date of October 2013, that's the latest version afais

Sent from my Droid DNA using Tapatalk, like that really matters

[SteveRiley]

Feathers, will you then uninstall Chrome (which includes Flash) or the Pepper plugin for Chromium, if either is on your machine now? They both implement a form of DRM, too.

[Feathers McGraw]

I haven't used chrome for a while (months and months) and actually don't use flash. Most things work just fine with html5, and if they don't I tend to just go somewhere else.

Mainly though, I'm curious to see what will break without the proprietary bits in FF. It's quite a good way to gain an appreciation for how crucial certain things are/ how much they're being used, even if you then add the proprietary bits back in once you know the difference.

This DRM sandbox seems better than flash but still not ideal. I hope the BBC don't use it for iPlayer, currently their stuff is DRM free, but apparently they're one of the organisations calling for this!

[SteveRiley]

the BBC...they're one of the organisations calling for this!

Why don't you ring them up and tell them where to shove their "proprietary bits" then

[Feathers McGraw]

I doubt they would even know what I was talking about.

Hopefully they just want to implement it for content that isn't ours (films and stuff they've paid other people for). It's very frustrating to pay for a TV licence and then be told that you can't have the content you paid for!

It would be a shame if they added DRM to everything and get_iplayer stopped working as a result.

[SteveRiley]

It's very frustrating to pay for a TV licence and then be told that you can't have the content you paid for!

Once upon a time, there was only TV. Your nation's TV tax I mean license generated revenue for your nation's production mafia I mean studios to create content. This content was available only via TV. QED.

Now there exist many not-TV ways to consume content, nearly all of which are not taxed I mean not licensed. Thus, your argument in reverse: "It's very frustrating to lose revenue because fewer people pay for the taxable consumption device and then be told that you have to make your content available for the not-taxable devices too."

It's all about perspectives. Over here, rather than taxing TVs, we stupidify viewers with ads. That model moved easily to the Internet, because so many people are already trained to be stupid. But DRM still sucks, and not in the way I like -- no matter how one justifies it.

[Feathers McGraw]

Don't get me wrong, I actually like the BBC, think they do some good stuff and are a nice counterbalance to Murdoch's far reaching propaganda machine.

You actually still need a TV license if you watch stuff live on any device, or record it as it is being shown live. By this logic, you don't need a TV licence if you only use iPlayer on a computer to watch things that have already been shown. However, in practice they even try to make you pay if you have a device that is capable of doing it even if you don't actually use it for that. So, anyone with a computer or smartphone has to pay

Given that everyone here is paying for the shows to be produced, they are OUR shows and we should have unrestricted access to them, whatever happens to the content they send abroad.


Can I ask how much of a PITA DRM is for security people? The laws that make it illegal to discuss vulnerabilities in DRM seem outrageously backwards, but in practice how much of a barrier is it to security research?

[SteveRiley]

Given that everyone here is paying for the shows to be produced, they are OUR shows and we should have unrestricted access to them

Go ahead and live in your little bubble, lol. We have our own bubble over here, too. We're all supposed to believe that the airwaves belong to the public, according to most interpretations of the Communications Act of 1934. But in reality, this notion is utter bullshopt, as the broadcast lobbies themselves repeatedly remind us with their mountaintop missives.

Can I ask how much of a PITA DRM is for security people? The laws that make it illegal to discuss vulnerabilities in DRM seem outrageously backwards, but in practice how much of a barrier is it to security research?

I'm not allowed to discuss that.

[Snowhog]

I'm not allowed to discuss that.

(FCC drmsnoopbot) "Your discussion on not being able to discuss what is undiscussable violates your non-discussion clause. Your violation has been noted and will be disucssed."

[SteveRiley]

Uh, can we talk about this first? hehehe