By @edent · drm ebook libraries · 9 comments · 500 words · read ~153 times.
It's a Friday night in the late 1990s and my teenaged friend group are bored. We're not cool enough to hang about in the park drinking cider. And we're not nerdy enough to play D&D. We don't have enough money to go to the cinema. What we do have is a Blockbuster card and, between […]
Continue reading →By @edent · code drm images · 14 comments · 550 words · read ~1,751 times.
People contact me with all sorts of weird opportunities. Some are fun. Some are not. I've lost count of the number of NFT grifters who've asked me to "revolutionise" the art space. I'm generally not a fan. But I had one chat with someone who wanted to do something intriguing. They were worried about people […]
Continue reading →By @edent · copyright drm · 33 comments · 750 words · read ~4,825 times.
During the middle of the 20th Century, the UK's Royal Air Force took thousands of photographs of the country from above. Think of it like a primitive Google Earth. Those photographs are "Crown Copyright". For photographs created before 1st June 1957, the copyright expires after 50 years. Recently, the organisation "Historic England" started sharing high-resolution […]
Continue reading →By @edent · drm ebook MSc · 3 comments · 450 words · read ~7,008 times.
I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art of screenscraping. This is a quick-and-dirty way to grab images of the pages and convert them […]
Continue reading →By @edent · BBC drm iplayer iplayer-dl media NaBloPoMo python · 13 comments · 500 words · read ~3,611 times.
Way back in 2010, Paul Battley was blogging about device discrimination on the Internet. The new iPlayer service was using TLS certificates to ensure that only specific devices were able to stream media from the BBC's servers. That's a situation which continues over a decade later. If you watch iPlayer on your laptop, you're stuck […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Adobe drm ebook linux ubuntu · 10 comments · 250 words · read ~4,259 times.
After my rant the other day about Adobe Digital Editions, I discovered libgourou by Grégory Soutadé libgourou is a free implementation of Adobe's ADEPT protocol used to add DRM on ePub files. It overcome the lacks of Adobe support for Linux platforms. There are a few limitations, but nothing too serious: Only ePub is supported. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Adobe drm ebook · 900 words · read ~587 times.
Adobe's accursed eBook DRM is just the worst. Not only does it lock up books that you have purchased - but it's impossible to use sensibly on Linux. Sure, you can futz around with Docker, WINE, and old versions of Python - and if you're lucky, you might get a book out of it. I […]
Continue reading →By @edent · css drm HTML · 41 comments · 300 words · read ~1,165 times.
Update! It's fair to say no one liked this idea - so I've reverted it. Thanks for all the feedback 🙂 Do you ever see those daft email footers which say "Please consider the environment before printing this email." Like, who the fuck is still printing out their emails? Anyway, a few years ago I […]
Continue reading →By @edent · audio av drm hdmi media tv · 3 comments · 750 words · read ~2,989 times.
I decided to treat myself to an upgraded home cinema experience. But mandatory copy-protection has meant I've spend the weekend trying and failing to get things working, rather than watching glorious 4K HDR 10 bit movies. Here's the problem: Why am I getting the error "This content can not be displayed because your TV does […]
Continue reading →By @edent · design drm falsehoods google usability · 10 comments · 550 words · read ~8,180 times.
I've written before about Solipsist design - those services which have been designed to work only for a very specific type of family. I was taking a look at Google's "Family" proposition - which allows users to share their purchases with other family members. What I found didn't impress me. File under "Falsehoods Programmers Believe […]
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