Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

blog.samuelmaddock.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 194 posts

Re: I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

#131

Post by danogentili »

sneak wrote: post #18
tracedddd wrote: post #13

I’m not claiming the situation is just or should be ignored, but the option the author seems to be ignoring is to launch without Widevine. Sure, a lot won’t work, but a lot will. Having a vocal community can add a lot of pressure.

They could also reverse engineer the Widevine module binary and reimplement it in their own project. You don't really need Google for this.

Or literally use the header files for the widevine blobs freely available in the chromium sources to directly use the API exported by the .so...

... and then get sued for illegally calling a few exported methods on a shared library you freely downloaded from the internet (but without first obtaining a license from Google!).

And by the way, I wasn't kidding about the freely downloadable from the internet part, when you open Netflix in Firefox, the browser downloads and loads a shared library from a Google domain: https://dl.google.com/widevine-cdm/${WIDEVINE_VERSION}-linux...

As per https://gist.github.com/ruario/3c873d43eb20553d5014bd4d29fe3..., which is still used by certain browsers and unofficial clients like the inputstream kodi extension to play netflix videos. If you're on arm, an entire chrome OS image is downloaded instead, extracting the compiled widevine shared library.

Re: I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

#133

Post by smaddock »

DelightOne wrote: post #127
smaddock wrote: post #39

Blog post author here. Since this post, there's now an option available for DRM-enabled Electron. However, it's only available through a single vendor, castLabs [0]. This is a closed source, downstream effort which means no modifications can be made to Electron itself. All changes must make it upstream to show up in this fork. When asked whether they would eventually merge it upstream, they didn't provide a clear ans…

> This is a closed source, downstream effort which means no modifications can be made to Electron itself. It has the MIT license since 2 months ago. Did the closed-source part change or is that only about the non-npm code?

The code included in the GitHub repository downloads the closed source Electron binaries. Just for comparison, the full source would look something more like what's accessible here: https://github.com/electron/electron

Re: I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

#134

Post by annoyingnoob »

fctorial wrote: post #124
annoyingnoob wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

I think the OP wanted to say that there are large, complex, high quality community driven software projects.

My take-away from the post here is that to build a good browser you'll need to include some licensed bits. You might have a hard time incorporating those licensed bits into an open source project. Which sort of brings things back around to a business problem.

Re: I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

#135

Post by zucker42 »

supermatt wrote: post #42

I had the same problem. After a couple of emails, I got completely ghosted. They simply do not respond. Seems that google pushed hard for EME, under the guise of giving widevine to anyone who wanted it. Of course, as is evident from OPs situation - this isn't the case. There is an ongoing EC investigation.

What is EC?

Re: I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

#136

Post by smaddock »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #114
hirundo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of his browser is to be able to playback Netflix, Hulu, etc. between browsers in sync. That can't be done without DRM, and Widevine is "the only available DRM for a Chromium-based browser, especially so for Electron."

I believe that's mistaken. From the article: > As far as I’m aware, Widevine is the only available DRM for a Chromium-based browser, especially so for Electron. But according to this [0] the Chromium-based Edge browser supports both Google's WideVine CDM and Microsoft's PlayReady CDM. Not sure if it's really any help, but that's a different question. [0] https://github.com/google/shaka-player/issues/2492#issuecomm...

At the time of the article, Chromium Edge hadn't been released yet with PlayReady CDM integrated. The followup article I wrote elaborates on these options further.

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-br...

Re: I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

#137

Post by ocdtrekkie »

judge2020 wrote: post #102
thethimble wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another security consideration here: whether you trust the webview not to peek at your https content. With a known browser, you get reasonable guarantees that TLS is being handled properly. With an unknown browser, these guarantees are gone. Considering the average person has no idea what https/TLS is, banning all unknown browsers as a defense against phishing seems completely reasonable.

HTTPS isn't even the largest concern - it's the browser being some malicious app asking to 'sign in to Google to load your profile' and stealing either the password or auth token.

What's frustrating (and clearly anti-competitive) is that Google thinks this is a problem enough to justify this, but refuses to ban browser extensions that utilize permissions broad enough to allow them to do this in Chrome directly. Browser extensions can generally collect everything on web sites and that you enter into websites, and has access after all TLS decryption has occurred.

For the most part, if a browser's extension store isn't in order, everything else they claim to do to secure web traffic is kinda a joke.

Re: I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

#138

Post by eecks »

Thaxll wrote: post #108

"I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me" Title is very missleading, your web browser works and google does not block you, it's all about DRM. "For the last 2 years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source project." This is crap, you should probably have known that before starting the…

> As a dev it should be some common sense that you can't just playback 4k video from Netflix with a built-in Browser.

why not?

Re: I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)

#139

Post by ddalex »

kmeisthax wrote: post #87
tyingq wrote: post #73

I'm curious what the gatekeeping around letting you use Widevine or similar does. As an "approved" entity are you then technically capable of copying DRMed content? Trying to understand if that's why it's so closely guarded.

Under DMCA 1201 technical protection measures automatically get legal protection against this sort of thing. There's actually two layers of protection: 1. You can't deprotect the content for a purpose that would violate copyright law (this is the "DMCA exception" process you hear about every 3 years) 2. You can't provide tools that deprotect the content for any purpose Both provisions give DRM the force of law, thoug…

> the only legal way to actually play Widevine-protected content is to license Widevine

or re-implement a Widevine-compatible plugin outside the US where DMCA doesn't apply

of course, say goodbye to ever setting foot on US soil again

Post reply on HN