Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/17/your-phone-isnt-yours.html
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For now Netflix will run, you just won’t be able to find it in the Play Store.
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People have been doing “authorized unlocks” of their bootloader, where they ask for permission to unlock the bootloader and in exchange their device is marked as such by Google. Until now, being marked as unlocked didn’t have much consequence, so power users were content to take this route. I predict this will change.
Used to be we would rewrite our bootloaders with hacks and exploits, authorization be damned. If I hack my bootloader without permission and then tell the device to imitate a good citizen, how could they tell the difference?
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Well thank goodness they’re protecting us all from improper computering.
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Thank you Netflix for giving me another reason to pirate your shows!
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“It’s not remarkable that Netflix wants to do this, but it is remarkable that they can”
They’re not. They’re paying Google to do it for them. And Google has access to your entire phone, if you have their services installed (which are actually not required for an Android device at all). Ever check those permissions…? There’s nothing at all “remarkable” about this.
This is one argument Cyanogen was entirely correct about. Their ROMs (and many other AOSP ROMs) run just fine without ever touching Google at all.
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Weird… my torrented shows don’t require me to run an adversary-controlled computing device for all of my private information and data. Thank you Netflix for reinforcing the correct choices about media viewing: pirate every day.
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who is using android to pirate from netflix? maybe there is some great technical advantage in how the app streams videos…
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I do love that the response to stuff like this always ‘guess this validates my rampant piracy’ and not ‘guess I’ll go buy from DRM-free places or support independent films’.
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Rights are too important to be left unmanaged, no?
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Netflix allows you to download some shows/movies on mobile devices for offline viewing. On a rooted Android device I assume it would be possible to copy these off to an SD card or network - and then obviously torrent them…cause EVIL.
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This is some stupid, closing the barn-door shit.
Very few netflix piratings are bitstream copies.
99.9% are made by guys with hdmi boxes that strip off the copy-prevention, they capture it one frame at a time and re-encode. The quality is spectacular, for all intents and purposes it is indistinguishable from the original with file sizes that are roughly equivalent to the original too. Also these “webrips” are rampant.
It is true that over the last couple of weeks there seem to have been a couple of bitstream copies made, maybe by exploiting the “download for offline viewing” option on the android netflix app. But nobody other than anal retentive perfectionists cared all that much. It was more an oddity than some piracy holy-grail.
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I love when people start a sentence with “I love” but really mean “I hate.”
It’s not confusing at first, nor is it annoying after I figure it out.
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I mean, you figured it out, right? Like sure it’s sarcastic but it’s at least pretty obviously sarcastic.
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It seems like a construction that’s mostly used by trolls, so when it’s used as regular sarcasm it’s extra confusing.
Don’t mind me, I’m just venting.
Except quite a few responses here are nothing of the sort, including mine. “Always,” my left buttock.
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Unless you are very thorough a process like web browser fingerprinting will probably give the game away. If not that then they can try to do something that should fail on an unrooted device that succeeds on a rooted device.
So I agree with you in theory but in will probably be difficult to put into practice.
I’ve gotta say, Netflix is quickly becoming a humongous collection of crap; a bunch of home-grown nonsense that I don’t need to waste my time searching thru. I’ts pretty much getting close to ‘bye-bye-Netflix’ time. One more reason to ‘cut-another-cord’.
Notice that my commend was ‘X instead of Y’ not ‘X to the exclusion of all other topics’.
I just tested neflix out on my rooted phone and it works. It’s possible with Magisik and a Franco kernel to pass the android safety net system.
I went though that trouble to get Pokemon Go to work on my rooted phone. So this is the usual speed bump.
If I were to pirate from Netflix I would just plug a roku box into a nice Chinese HDMI repeater that conveniently strips out HDCP and call it a day. Not that I own anything like that.
