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Google blocks movie service on rooted Android devices
- njs12345 15y agoYou'd expect better from Google really, even if they are at the behest of the film companies here..
- jfr 15y agoFor the users, it is either this or no movie player for them. No movie player means a big product disadvantage compared to competitors, which is very bad for Google as a company. The problem is not Google, it is DRM and DMCA.
- aphexairlines 15y agoI'd rather have no movies and no music than to have our technology become increasingly hobbled by the entertainment industry.
- elithrar 15y ago> I'd rather have no movies and no music than to have our technology become increasingly hobbled by the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, whilst you're not alone in your sentiment, the majority of users to whom Android devices are sold don't care either way, and those are the same users that make Google the most money.
- aphexairlines 15y agoNot sure if that's the case. The company makes the most money from online ads, so is it better to foster long-term technology growth or to convince more people to use Android?
- elithrar 15y ago> Not sure if that's the case. The company makes the most money from online ads, so is it better to foster long-term technology growth or to convince more people to use Android? Getting more Android devices into the hands of users now is important to Google: it increases developer appeal (growing the platform), which draws even more users (increasing advertising revenue). Having competitive, consumer-orientated features like this—that stack up against Apple (and Amazon)—are far more important to these goals than things like whether a device is rootable, themeable and/or side-loadable.
- chopsueyar 15y agoConsumers will become very discouraged quickly when they try to add a skin, or theme, or any customization, and all of a sudden certain applications will no longer work. I feel this is akin to having a Windows PC that would disable Netflix streaming if you wanted to dual-boot your PC. Android devices are the current generation of the previous Windows-era ecosystem. A bunch of clone hardware running slightly tweaked OEM versions of an OS. The biggest difference, which consumers will really start to have issues with, is tying a software OS update to a hardware revision (If Dell prevented you from upgrading a Windows 98 machine to a Windows 2000 machine, not because of hardware limitations, but simply to generate more device sales).
- daeken 15y ago> I feel this is akin to having a Windows PC that would disable Netflix streaming if you wanted to dual-boot your PC. It's more akin to having a Windows PC that would disable Windows Media DRM files if you had unsigned drivers loaded into the kernel. Which it does. This isn't without precedent, by any means.
- yuhong 15y agoNote that you are always free to avoid this feature.
- jonknee 15y agoHow is that progress? There are plenty of apps to play movies without DRM.
- cookiecaper 15y agoI don't see "our technology" becoming "increasingly hobbled" just because there's one Android app out there that doesn't want to cooperate with a rooted phone. If anything this is positive since it probably acknowledges that anyone with a rooted phone is going to be able to capture the contents of the movie in an unencrypted format.
- kelnos 15y agoYou can have that. Root your device, and then you have no movies, and a non-hobbled device.
- bigmac 15y agoThis is completely unsurprising. The licensing agreements with the studios mandate these kinds of measures. If Google didn't do it, they wouldn't be able to play the game.
- stcredzero 15y agoI wonder if they can keep this up? If they can successfully keep those devices blocked, there are other services that could be built on top of such technology, even if it's just Google throwing manpower and dollars at the problem to keep those cracking the system busy.
- antihero 15y agoAh, piracy, the sweet smell of not being judged by anyone other that those who are cunts anyway.
- dsl 15y agoAndroid is open, so we can just go in and remove that check... oh right.
- kkowalczyk 15y agoThe openness of Android, the OS, has nothing to do with it. Google Movies service is just another application running on Android. If you had "Dsl Movies" application for Android (or iOS or Windows) you would have a right to protect your service from people trying to watch the movies for free or extract them from your service and post them on the internet. Why do you think that Google has no such right to protect their movie service? As to general snarkiness about openness of Android: please come back when you can download source code to iOS or WP7 or BlackBerry, compile it and then install on your device.
- AllenKids 15y agoStill waiting on Honeycomb. And point to me barebone OSS android without Google's proprietary magic dust's market share.
- technomancy 15y ago> Still waiting on Honeycomb. How is that remotely related to the article?
- AllenKids 15y agoIt's very relevant to the comment I was replying to.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoUm, go build AOSP? Build CM? Build Sapphire? There are several ways to build vanilla Android just fine. The only Google App on my phone is Market. How are people so incredibly uninformed about Android still?
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- Xuzz 15y agoThe most interesting thing here, to me, is not that this happened — with the MPAA as it is — but this is the first time we've really seen something like this. For example, the MPAA does not require Apple to block movie purchases or playback on jailbroken iPhones or Apple TVs. Maybe that something overlooked in the Apple contacts that they've gotten a chance to correct in their deals with Google?
- Entlin 15y agoThe difference is of course: with Apple, rooting a device is not an officially sanctioned thing to do. With Google, it is.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoThere is probably a huge amount of truth to this. Apple puts enough effort into stopping jail breaking that they can easily claim their movie blocking is done through those efforts.
- jessedhillon 15y agoI would suggest that the lack of a Netflix app on WebOS would corroborate this. You only have to enter a short key combination to unlock the phone (put it into dev mode).
- kkowalczyk 15y agoMPAA is not the entity that either distributes or licenses the movies for distribution, so they have nothing to do with it. The players that make those kinds of decisions are: a) distributors/sellers like Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu b) owners of the content that license this content to distributors (i.e. movie studios, tv networks etc.) A decision like that might have been made by a distributor, out of their own volition, or forced on the distributor by a content owner via contract.
- zinkem 15y ago>MPAA is not the entity that either distributes or licenses the movies for distribution, so they have nothing to do with it. Who do you think "b" is? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_America http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_A...
- j2d2j2d2 15y agoThis affects rooted devices only. Perhaps a little less than 1% of users will even notice.
- TryThinking 15y agoI'm curious how they're detecting that the OS is rooted. I suppose there would be a number of ways, but certainly they're not just requesting superuser -- that would be silly and fully apparent to the user. Ideas?
- jbert 15y agoHow are they performing the check? Surely it's subvertable. If you have root - you can provide any information you like to the movie playing application? Or is there a crypto chain of trust in android devices, analagous to the "trusted computing" on the PC platform?
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- SwellJoe 15y agoOr is there a crypto chain of trust in android devices, analagous to the "trusted computing" on the PC platform? There is. Everything on an Android device, including stuff in the OS image, is signed. I would assume that the movie player would converse with the movie service and it would easily be determined that the player is not running on a system image provided by a trusted signer. Subverting it would, I assume, require cracking the signing algorithm.
- rdl 15y agoThere are probably much easier ways; extracting keys from a local device (but this may only be a break of a single device, not a class break of all devices, hopefully), or exploiting bugs in any of the trusted binaries to load other code. The trusted/measured boot process on PCs (which is not actually used by anything widely deployed, as of 2011) is similar, but I think the Android device will have an easier time.
- evangineer 15y agoThe likes of HTC and Motorola are already shipping Android devices with signed bootloaders. It is increasingly likely that with tablet content deals for movies and tv shows in the works that there will be more use of signed bootloaders in combination with Android 3.1+ DRM frameworks.
- gcb 15y agoSo what movies are we talking about? titles says "Movie service" which one? netflix? some gMovie i've never heard about? youtube?!?! The linked page also does not help.
- gcb 15y agook, navigating a little on the linked page it seems it's option "some gMovie i've never heard about" Quote some 2 clicks away from the linked "article": Q: Where is my Videos app? A: At this time, the Videos application is only available to Verizon Motorola Xoom users.[...]
- _frog 15y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but won't this hurt Google's business rather than protect it? With no legitimate means of buying/renting movies on their Android devices people will likely resort to piracy.
- yanw 15y agoThese are the wishes of the studios, Google can do little about it.
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- daimyoyo 15y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but if you have root access to your phone, can't you work around this block?
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- Relwal 15y agoHere's what I believe is going on: Honeycomb adds a framework to support DRM plugins. Android 3.1 adds an actual implementation of a DRM plugin called Widevine (acquired by Google in Dec. 2010). Android 3.1 also supports HDCP. The DRM plugin is technically not built into Android; it's a modular add-on. The interface to the DRM plugins is part of Android. In order for DRM and HDCP to actually work the DRM system has to validate that the system can be trusted. (That's all that DRM does.) If the system is rooted, apparently the DRM system can not validly claim that the system can be trusted. Google's YouTube Movie Rental service that's part of the Android Market on Android 3.1 apparently relies on the DRM system to validate that the system can be trusted. (This condition may have been part of the deal to get the movie studios to allow their content to be distributed and rented through the Android Market.) If the DRM framework reports that the system can not be trusted because the system has been rooted then the jig's up -- no movies. Bottom line: you can't have a movie rental service that requires that the system be trustworthy and a possibly untrustworthy system that would result from the system being rooted. You can have one or the other -- not both.
- darklajid 15y agoWhat I'd like to understand is how pluggable these DRM plugins are. For most things on Android you can just replace the default thingy with your own (dialer, home screen are prominent examples). How long until someone comes up with a custom DRM plugin that returns true for all validation requests?
- tomjen3 15y agoHa that is really going to help reduce piracy. Sorry you can't see our movies (even if you are willing to pay for them) because you might share them with your friends. On the other hand, if you get them for free of some torrent or from rapidshare (and finding the links are much, much easier than rooting your phone) there are no such restrictions and the studio doesn't make a dime. When did these people stop thinking?
- dexen 15y agoA case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance perhaps, guessing some expernal entity demanded such steps from Google?
- tomjen3 15y agoNah to make it malicious, they would have redirected to a search on google for the movie in question with "avi download" appended. That would have been malicious.
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- yanw 15y agoIt is obviously due to demands from the studios, and I suspect it has something to do with DRM.