A few issues on https://github.com/seanpm2001/Degoogle-your-life/wiki/WideVine

[gamer191]

Hi,
I just wanted to point out the following corrections to https://github.com/seanpm2001/Degoogle-your-life/wiki/WideVine. Obviously mistakes always happen, so I'm not criticising the article, just pointing out potential corrections.

Firstly, the "Violation of web standards" section refers to the EFF as a "founding member". Yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions (paragraph 3) states that the EFF "joined in 2014 to participate in...decision making".

Secondly, the "what you can do to help" section is incorrect as a firefox user (on any OS) can uninstall Widevine by going to about:preferences, typing "drm" into the search box and turning "play drm controlled content" off (Widevine is the only DRM currently supported by Firefox). That will even notify users if a webpage (eg: Netflix) requires reinstalling widevine (note that disabling widevine in about:addons will not uninstall it). Also, Widevine is not installed by default in Brave Browser (on Windows, I'm not sure about other OSes).

A second mistake exists in "what you can do to help", since I'm not sure about paid YouTube movies, but free content on YouTube (which usually contains ads) does not use WideVine. (perhaps "free with ads" means something different, but the article does not make this clear enough to the reader)

Kind regards,
Gamer191

[seanpm2001]

Sorry for the late response, I didn't see it until recently. Thank you for your input, it helps. I hope to improve the article at some point.

On your first claim, I can't find anything on that article regarding the EFF joining in 2014, can you please provide a source? I only know that they left in 2014, I never heard anything about them re-joining.

Second, I never said that WideVine can't be uninstalled. I noted that it would likely phone home if pre-installed, which is a privacy risk. Turning DRM off and disabling it doesn't prevent it from working. I have tested this on Linux/Ubuntu but not on Windows. I am a bit confused on this.

I don't use Brave browser, but I have heard sources say something regarding DRM, I will fix this.

For the YouTube portion, I need to clarify the types of DRM. Thank you for pointing this out.

Thank you for pointing out these errors. I will try to fix it by the end of the week, if else, I will get to it. You will be credited for helping out.

[gamer191]

Thanks for the response.

I can't find anything on that article regarding the EFF joining in 2014

CTRL-F "On the same day, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who joined in 2014 to participate in the decision making"

I noted that it would likely phone home if pre-installed, which is a privacy risk

True, but I'd imagine that if you turned off the internet while you installed Firefox, uninstalled Widevine and then re-enabled internet access it would most likely not phone home. I don't have the skills to test this though. I will, however, test whether Firefox can be installed with internet access disabled, when I get a chance (but that might be a while, since it would require me to first backup all my data and uninstall Firefox).

I'd have to test this also, but Waterfox used to not pre-install Widevine. I'm not sure whether that's still a thing in Waterfox G4 though. Also, they claim to support NPAPI (currently their NPAPI support is broken though), so that's a potential security risk (especially because people might have outdated NPAPI plugins left behind on their machine from back when everyone used NPAPI). On the other hand, both Flash and Silverlight support DRM, so NPAPI support is potentially a good thing if you're trying to avoid Widevine.

I don't use Brave browser, but I have heard sources say something regarding DRM, I will fix this.

I used Brave Browser once, and it definitely doesn't (or at least didn't at the time) come with Widevine pre-installed. It should be noted though that Brave Browser is Chromium-based.

Turning DRM off and disabling it doesn't prevent it from working

That confuses me. Do you mean that it doesn't prevent it phoning home or it doesn't prevent you watching DRM protected shows? If you mean the latter, which website did you test it on?

Kind regards,
Gamer191

[seanpm2001]

I think I corrected the errors in V14. I won't apply it to the main article until I make sure it is right. Can you check: https://github.com/seanpm2001/Its-time-to-cut-WideVine-DRM#readme