Firefox 38 Arrives With DRM Required To Watch Netflix

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from VentureBeat: Mozilla today launched Firefox 38 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include Digital Rights Management (DRM) tech for playing protected content in the HTML5 video tag on Windows, Ruby annotation support, and improved user interfaces on Android. Firefox 38 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Note that there is a separate download for Firefox 38 without the DRM support. Our anonymous reader adds links to the release notes for desktop and Android.

Comments

How does it work ?

[itzly]

Is there an explanation of how this works ? At the end of the rendering pipeline shouldn't there be an unencrypted frame for display, and couldn't somebody it just grab it from there ?

it's stupid DRM, not real encryption

[DrYak]

according to all what I've read:
Yup, they have indeed implemented it this way (DRM is mainly a small external plugins. Firefox feeds encrypted stream into it, and get decrypted stream out. Plugin runs in a sand box and isn't allowed to do anything else)

But if you read the original EME specification, there's another possible implementation:
- it's also possible to write an EME plugin that is entirely in charge of presenting the decrpyted video on screen. Firefox feeds encrypted data into 3rd party plugin, plugin it self access screen and displays video on it.
That would be a clear violation of the sandbox that 3rd party EME plugins are currently run in, but in theory the specifications offer such alternative.
Still, even such an approach is open to screen-grabbing so it's just as useless as the current implementation and only opens security risks (as the 3rd party EME plugin won't be inside a sandbox restricting to only stream IO and decryption).

Re:Typo: Digital Rights Management

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Because everyone who uses it is legitimizing it and sending the message that it's acceptable and the way forward.

For a rental service like Netflix it is perfectly fine. Aim your guns at Steam, they're the ones that charge you full purchase price for software that will fail when they go out of business. You lot got all upset at DRM back when it was used exclusively for 'permanent' purchases, you forgot to re-evaluate that for rentals.
 

Where was the choice?

[MrL0G1C]

So, my Firefox did the whole pop-up thing with a message saying that it was urgent that I upgraded my browser for security reasons.

Did they offer me the DRM free version? NO.

Did they tell me that this next version would be infested with DRM? NO.

If the update was so urgent, why is the DRM free version dated 8th of may and it is now 13th May, it can't have been very urgent can it.

And why is it that when I went to about Firefox on the help menu it checked again for an update and said that none was available when Firefox had already told me that an update was available? FFS.