Month: January 2020

Enlarge / No CBS All Access on Linux makes elderly Picard cry. (credit: Aurich Lawson / CBS / Getty)

Update, January 31: After this story went live earlier in the week, an Ars reader reached out to speculate that the problem was most likely due to enabling VMP (Verified Media Path) on CBSi's Widevine server. Verified Media Path, similarly to UEFI Secure Boot, makes certain that content will only be delivered to browsers with sanctioned, verifiable "authentic" framework; this is a configurable behavior, and by default, unverified platforms are allowed to receive licenses.

This morning we asked CBSi executives to check with their engineers and see if this was the problem. While we never received a response, two hours later, CBS All Access was playing successfully on Google Chrome on multiple Linux distributions. (Firefox still crashes.) For now, we have verified that the fix—which, again, may or may not actually have involved VMP—covers all of CBS' content and not merely the first episode of Picard, which CBS released yesterday on YouTube for a limited time. If we hear official word from CBS regarding what happened behind the scenes, we'll update this post accordingly. The original story appears unchanged below.

As of this month, the CBS All Access streaming-video platform—home of popular shows including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and now Star Trek: Picard—stopped working on Linux PCs, regardless of the choice of browser. Ten years ago, this would have been just another day in the life of a Linux user, but it's a little surprising in 2020. We were originally tipped off to the issue by a few irate readers but quickly found it echoed in multiple threads on Reddit, Stack Exchange, and anywhere else you'd expect to find Linux users congregating.

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  Trailers and ads all work fine on CBS All Access, in any browser. The problem isn't the streaming—it's apparently something to do with the DRM itself. [credit: Jim Salter ]

I'm both a Linux user and a CBS All Access subscriber myself, but I had been unaware of the problem since I do all my own watching on a Roku. Technically, the Roku is a Linux PC in its own right—but CBS has its own app in the Roku store, which works perfectly.

Enlarge (credit: Mayumi Arimitsu, USGS)

Wildlife management has been revolutionized by the ability to track species in their natural habitats—to figure out what areas they actually occupy, where they feed, and so on. For years, that ability was limited to large mammals, which could easily handle the bulky batteries and electronics required to frequently broadcast location information. The miniaturization of electronics, however, has opened up the list of species we can track, adding birds and fish to it, and revealing the huge ranges covered by some species.

But now, some researchers have decided to turn the tables by placing hardware on birds to keep track of us. More specifically, our fishing fleets, which often operate in remote areas that are difficult to track. The work showed that albatross species could easily carry miniature detectors that would pick up radar and identification signals from any fishing boats they get within range of. This strategy is made even more effective by the fact that albatrosses are drawn to fishing boats.

Snooping on fishing boats

The Pacific is immense, but it's dotted with islands. Some of these create exclusive economic zones where one country has access to the fish stocks; there are also some large oceanic preserves. Outside these areas, any nation is able to fish, although some at-risk species may be covered by international treaties.