VideoLAN @videolan App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
I wish I was lost in dessert, but it’s better for my wasteline that I’m not.
And good on VLC for standing up against this. This type of thing should absolutely be opt-in by the developer.
i love how google is not even trying to hide the fact that they are engaging in obvious extortion
“give us the keys to all your secrets so that we can secretly inject NSA malware, or be setenced to obscurity”
anyway this is what we get when we trust gargantuan multi billion corpos not to royally fuck us over
With Play App Signing, Google manages and protects your app’s signing key for you and uses it to sign optimized, distribution APKs that are generated from your app bundles
You can use google’s play app signing. It’s not mandatory.
That is not better, it still means that the app is signed with a non private key, which goes against the very concept of the private/public key concept
Thats what they complain about. They can use it. They dont have to. Yes its bad but they mix up a lot in one post.
Why do Google need the private key? I can only see it being used to modify apps without notice.
Iirc, they build the app and publish it for you. “For convenience and security”
Wow, that is terrible.
Yes, but only because it’s Google. Fdroid do exactly the same thing in their repo.
The idea behind it is sound, because otherwise you’re putting all your trust in the app developer. By having the store do some basic checks and compile the app the idea is they can guarantee no third party/bad actor has inserted malicious code.
However, this being Google, they are the bad actor.
No, that is wrong, the app developer signs the app with their private key, sends it to Google, google scans ans verifies the app, and add their signature with their own private key.
The app can thus be verified to have been built by a specific developer and verified by Google before publishing, without breaking trust
An unacceptable option is not an option. This is like saying somebody has access to multiple Internet providers when one ISP is so slow as to be nearly unusable, but it technically exists and you can technically pay for it. That’s not really what we mean by “choice.”
Your response is so typical and frustrating to be honest. It’s flippant nonsense where you know what we are talking about but you don’t want to agree so you hide behind lazy responses like the one you wrote.
Okay, but are they still releasing updates via other channels? The newest version on their website is 3.5.4, the same that I got through the play store.
So install and updated it without going through the store apps … you can download all the installers directly from their website. Absolute non-issue.
Feel for these guys.
Also MPC has been better for ages.
MPC is decidedly not better than VLC.
Windows only. Useless
Don’t care, vlc is the best .
Dear VLC, in your download section there is the F-Droid app store option which I consider a good thing. p.s. Why are you still posting on Twitter ??? On your website I see two buttons Facebook and Twitter. Time for a change ?
By the way, archive.is and archive.ph are Tor unfriendly. Another link : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39798565
The guy upset about his 14 year old iPad not still receiving support is hilarious!
Its hilarious that apple is creating a bunch of ewaste for no good reaaon?
My mom’s macbook is 14 years old and perfectly functional. So why doesnt it work (well) anymore?
Apple doesnt provide updated root certificates anymore, so all https sitesare borked.
Name a company that gives security updates to 15 year old tablets.
I wish they did, but this is hardly just an Apple problem. The only reason I bring this up is because people very quickly dunk on Apple without thinking about the fact that we need more access to all of our hardware in order to increase the longevity for those who want to.
Frankly I find iPads work longer on average than most other tablets. Purely anecdotal though.
The other elephant in the room is that most people don’t want to use 15 yr old tablets. I know I don’t want to edit video on 15 yr old desktops, even though they were perfectly capable of editing 15 years ago. But not current videos. Just like 15 year old tablets will not be able to readily stream or display a lot of modern content correctly.
My iPad2 can’t do internet anymore, or for instance used as a panel for home assistant webpage or client, but it’s perfectly fine as a homestudio controller and music / midi generator and that is what I still use it for. Battery is still great too. I got it about 13 years ago and I will be using it until it stops working. Looks as good as new too.
I do have a recent iPad too, it’s for all the stuff I cannot do on the old one.
Almost any iPad works great as a second monitor as well, with minimal setup. I wish they could be easilly made to work like a Bamboo tablet for drawing purposes though.
So the ending to the story which i didnt feel like typing out earlier was that i loaded debian on to the macbook and it runs 2x faster now with regular security updates…
The vast majority of people will never edit a video. The vast majority would be perfectly happy doing 90% of their work in a browser on older hardware instead of chucking it in the bin
i do edit photos and video on a 15 year old desktop. yea, it’s not as fast. it even still only has mechanical hdd. it works. i really don’t give a shit how long it takes to encode. it can sw encode hd h264 in ‘real time’ (sw giving better quality output and at a smaller file size than the faster gpu encoding), that’s good enough for me. it does everything the much newer system i’ve been able to use recently at the office can do–it’s just slower at some things.
You edit video on a PC from 2009? This must be very light weight work. What exactly are you working with here? And what NLE?
My 2007-era desktop was perfectly capable as an HD video editor and streaming server. Anything worth a shit in the Desktop space since round-about 2010 has been decent at on-the-fly transcoding as well.
Your incredulity is astounding to me. The Xbox 360 and PS3 were both perfectly capable as streaming players, way back in 2006. The PC’s of that era were more powerful, not less, and avoiding emulation or discrete gpus are some of the main reasons those consoles used PowerPC. They wanted a more compact solution
Yes. In their day, they could play/render the media of their day. Though I promise you if I handed your computer a beefy HD codec it would struggle. “HD” doesn’t tell us the whole story. Obviously you use(d) very small proxy files or highly compressed ones, and you may be even referring to 720p. Consumer computers were not doing any sort of real HD editing in 2007 in any appreciable number unless you heavily invested in the machine.
What are you editing on/what NLE/what kind of footage? Though you said “was” which means it isn’t currently in use, so I’m guessing any answer now would be speculative as to its capabilities in 2024.
Edit: kept having new thoughts so added and redid the comment.
Why does it have to be a company?
Tons of old hardware continues to be useful turrets owners just by virtue of being on open and maintainable platforms.
But Apple continues to push harder and harder for planned obsolescence while claiming they support their devices better than the competition.
Apple earns unique hate in this category because of how strenuously they fight against things like right to repair. Failing to support old products isn’t the end of the world but intentionally making it so that old products aren’t supportable is very bad and the Apple App Store is a major instrument for making sure old Apple devices stop being useful.
why does to be a company?
Because the person brought up a company and its policies so we are discussing blame among companies.
If you’d like to broaden the scope of the conversation by all means but don’t imply I’m leaving stuff out here when I’m just responding to what was stated.
apple does ‘support’ their hw better, it’s just that it’s a pretty low bar to start with these days. they and their competitors could do better–much better, but zomg! someone has to think of the shareholders. they’re far more important than users or the planet.
They only support their hw better on phones and tablets. On a computer you’ll longer support from Windows or Linux LTS distros. I have a 13 year old laptop still running the latest version of Ubuntu
Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.
They don’t get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren’t doing it. But control matters more to them than support.
I really don’t think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.
Ok yeah it’s kind of funny but if you think about it for a second that ipad is perfectly functional. If apple doesn’t want to support it because it doesn’t make them money, then why can’t the community? Why does apple get to decide what is e-trash and what isn’t?
The laptop I bought second hand in 2014 is still very much functionnal, and in fact it still runs. I’ll concede that it doesn’t run well, as it was already unpowered back then, but it runs some flavors of Linux oriented towards low-power devices, because people made them to do specifically this. If I had bought a second had ipad instead, it would be in a landfill by now. It didn’t even take any special actions on toshiba’s part to make it behave like this, they just made a laptop that was up to the standards of every other laptop at the time. What I’m getting at is that this isn’t a new idea, we know how to take care of our devices for longer already, were it not for the apples and googles telling us what we can’t and can do on the device we own.
I thought MissTake’s response was really good and covers pretty much everything
“Thanks to Apple”?
The original iPad was a 32 bit A8 single core CPU that topped out as 1Ghz and with 256MB Ram and used the ARMv7 instruction set.
How do you expect a modern day OS with requirements to deal with real world sensors, and user requirements that didn’t exist back then, to run against that?
The latest iPads have 2GB Ram, are 64 bit, run multiple cores and have embedded motion coprocessors and neural capabilities running a much later instruction set.
Let’s be reasonable here - that device is now about to be 14 years old.
And, if “the hardware works beautifully” how is it “pretty much a brick”?
iPads are not the same as laptops or desktops. Sure, you can still run some Linux distros on older 32 bit hardware, but everyone who does knows of the limitations of doing so and realize that they lack the horsepower of modern day computers and use them accordingly.
Disagree. They should be forced to open it up for the community to maintain it when they end support.
My thoughts exactly. It would be unreasonable to expect full support 14 years after it came out, and it would be unreasonable to expect modern apps to work flawlessly. But it’s not unreasonable to say that all the specs mentionned by the commenter can just be considered to all be 0 if the device cant run anything - not because it is physically incapable of it, but because we can’t even try.
By the way, archive.is and archive.ph are Tor unfriendly.
Not just Tor, they poison DNS queries from Cloudfare and Quad9, basically any DNS that doesn’t give them sufficient location information about the end user.
That’s probably why it wasn’t working
I’ve scrolled through the F-Droid repositories in Droidify app and see that VLC does not have their own F-Droid repository ? They could create one, and set up mirrors for it, think of a way to cover the hosting costs, why not ? Making yourself depend on Apple and Google and saying that app stores were a mistake feels wrong.
Better to use the official fdroid repo
Generally with small time apps, sure, but VLC are trustworthy enough to get it straight from the source. However, it’s not like VLC is an app that you need to keep up to date as soon as possible.
It doesn’t because you should get the app from F-droid main.
Unlike certain services, the main fdroid repo is pretty reliable
Fdroid is the obvious answer me thinks. Anyway love you guys/gals at videolan still haven’t come across a software that destroys every other in its field in every aspect.
I dont think that works for windows?
How about winget or the other commandline package managers? winget does have VLC according to winget-pkgs. This is the kind of “stores” we need, ones that emulate Linux repositories instead of locked down smartphone garbage.
Is singer secure tho? Iirc chocolaty isnt
Asking if something is secure on an insecure OS. Seriously, both the program and the repositories are on github:
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs
So you be the judge.
Unfortunately even FlatPak is insecure, so OS doesn’t really matter
Maybe don’t check all the permission boxes in flatseal and you might find it’s more secure than you think.
It’s all about default permissions
On Windows you should be downloading from the website.
Or use scoop or something similar. Or better yet don’t use Windows
Or winget if they provide it.
Thats not secure. Isn’t the pount of the Windows Store that packages are signed by developers and verified when downloaded?
No, the point of the windows store is that Microsoft gets more control over your machine.
Code downloaded from websites can still be (and is) signed; when it’s not you get that box where you have to click “Run Anyway”
I think the point of the Windows store is to coerce developers into either using the Visual Studio environment and beta testing new package formats, or paying MS a fee to get a signed certificate.
You can pay a one time fee if $25 to get Microsoft to sign your app on the Microsoft store, or you can pay $400+ per year to buy your own certificate. So Microsoft Store is sadly the cheap way to release apps on Windows. (Without users getting scary warnings from Windows and AV about installing unsigned aoftware)
Right. My memory is a bit hazy (I don’t use the store). What I was trying to address was the revenue funnel they built around the environment. MS still gets a cut of the $400 certs, right?
The UX of the scary warning is to make the user feel safe installing signed software in comparison, but there is no guarantee that a signed app does not contain an exploit. It’s an abuse of people’s misunderstandings of security, for profit and user share.
Maybe I should have worked through my thoughts a little more before posting, but hopefully this clarifies my sentiment. And like I said, I don’t use the store at all, so if I still have some inaccuracies then I welcome corrections.
The certs are sold by certificate authority companies, and Microsoft doesn’t get a share of that, though I’m not sure.
Yeah, software being signed says nothing about it not being malicious or insecure, but it does prove the author is what it says, and if it is malicious then the responsible party is clearly visible.
For non-commercial hobby/open-source software the certificate price is prohibitive, so the only 2 options are Microsoft Store or accepting that users will see the scary warnings, and of course complain to the developer about it.
Come on man, every single software developer in existence uses package managers. It should not be complicated to understand the point of the store.
You don’t have to use the visual studio to package in MSIX
You can try chocolatey store then. Community maintained.
Pretty sure they’re signed by Microsoft instead? At least that’s what other app stores do.
It’s all a game of shifting the point of trust around. Personally, I’d trust most small time developers more than the likes of Microsoft and Google, however I’d trust Fdroid more than unknown developers (but still go direct to the developers I do trust).
The good ones are signed by the devs, otherwise there’s a risk of malicious modifications at upload or on the publishing infrastructure. This is how Maven works. All packages MUST be signed with PGP by the devs.
Apt isn’t signed by the devs but its signed by the package maintainers, whose job it is to verify the packages that they prepare (devs can’t upload software in Debian)
Winrar?
7zip.
What does 7zip do better?
Not show annoying popups about licenses?
7z is better than rar and its algorithm is fully open source
Removed by mod
Encryption?
I tried it and went back so winrar.
PeaZip is something you should check out too
Have people actually checked the versions there before making the suggestion?
F-Droid: Version 3.5.4 (13050408) suggested Added on Feb 23, 2023
Google Play: Updated on Aug 27, 2023https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.videolan.vlc/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlcThe problem seems to be squarely with VLC themselves.
Can someone break down the thinking behind this?
It’s explained here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@Aissen/112139649840297169
“Ios still allows us to deliver to ios 9”
It’s a poorly written post. On whatever site this is. Looks like crap.
So, uh, why not? The link doesn’t answer that.
It’s a frustrated tweet not a hard hitting piece of journalism. Why is everyone here scrutinizing this so much? Do people hate VLC now or something?
Huh?
We’re just curious behind the causation for the tweet. Why won’t Apple and Microsoft allow them to update? Is it DRM? Security? Fear?
Huh?
Have any of yall tried asking?
Google is forcing apps to have Google services handle private keys. VLC doesn’t think that’s a good policy for security (it’s not), so they’re refusing to adopt it. Whenever you sign in on an app with your fingerprint, the encryption/authentication is being handled by a different program and stored alongside all your other keys. This creates a single point of failure for all sing-ons on your phone.
Thanks! 🙏
This creates a single backdoor for all sign-ons on your phone.
My guess is that their update won’t be approved unless they drop support for old OS versions
Which is a problem given it’s a media player, and AndroidTVs still on Android 11 or earlier would be denied updates.
Some still sold and serviced are Android 8 i think?
Is it a problem though? Old versions of VLC still work fine; I have it on my iPad 2 but haven’t updated it in over 5 years.
Old hardware doesn’t have to worry about security updates because it’s already insecure. So unless VLC stops working, I don’t need updates. And it’s not like my iPad is capable of playing HEVC 4k HDR video anyway, so new codec support isn’t a problem.
One of the quickest ways to pivot into a corporate intranet is via an old insecure networked printer that Shannon from HR brought in.
Sure, maybe you don’t have anything worth stealing or leaking, but I bet getting hit with ransomware that encrypts every drive on the network and charges you $2,000 per drive to decrypt will put a damper on your day, month, or year.
Hope you’re one of the 0.1% of people that actually keep regular backups.
My point though is that if you’re running the old device without appropriate lockdowns, it’s already leaking like a sieve. It’s been at least five years since the corporate perimeter has been considered more than a minor line of defense, specifically because there are so many pieces of equipment long out of security patch support (if they ever had it) that can’t be trusted.
And ransomware actors don’t bother with the printer; they get in via phishing emails and misconfigured routers and remote access tools — because it’s too much work to target the printer when there are juicier targets.
Although there’s been a recent push towards credential management compromise, and if you’ve got an iPad 2 connected to an Apple ID that also happens to include an iCloud keychain with your Exchange server credentials on it….
My thinking was more along the lines of old vulnerabilities in VLC (specifically codecs/implementation) exploiting a set of the most commonly sold TVs, and spreading via torrents. If your malware group can target 6 models of the best selling 5 year old TVs and spread via torrents and then infecting video files, which spread over Windows networks and keep infecting video files, it could be a good few million device strong botnet.
Seems more like something an APT actor would focus on because the effort:reward ratio isn’t there for most groups, and it would take a lot more effort than the MicroTik botnet or other compromised router nets.
I’m hesitant to run any outdated network-connected devices on my (read: the one my personal devices use) network. The only older model device we have running is a brother printer but it still receives firmware updates, and it’s segmented so printing is never done directly from anyone’s device, it’s hooked up to an old laptop running a simple custom web server that accepts files and puts them in the printer queue, and tunneling and DNS are configured on the router, if someone needs to print, they go to [thenameoftheprinter].com in their browser and upload the file(s) and it prints. Devices without access to the guest network can print with Bluetooth, it just requires opening the laptop and pairing and manually printing.
But that was born out of issues of compatibility with the printer running on the guest/kids network, and not wanting to plug it directly into the router or use the Brother apps more than “This printer is older, must not have direct network access.”
But why is fdroid so behind?
I don’t think app stores are the problem. I think big company app stores are the problem, such as the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. I think something like F-Droid where you can add your own app sources or Droid-ify that has a ton of sources by default you just need to enable is the way to go.
The issue there is similar though - who controls Fdroid? They have the final say. Besides, 99% of users stick with the defaults.
Its open source.
I like the defaults personally.
Do you also like being tracked and having your private data sold without your knowledge?
I’m sorry what? F-droid takes security, privacy and freedom very seriously. You can read more about it here:
https://f-droid.org/en/2024/03/08/privacy-design-of-fdroid.org-webservers.html
You said you like the defaults… Fdroid is not the default.
Oh I misunderstood, I though you were about to argue that the play store us more secure or something
Fdroid has no say in what repos are added by the users.
Theoretically yes, but in practice for the vast majority of users it makes no difference. Very few people are going to go through the trouble of vetting another source, adding it, etc. That’s what the tyranny of the default is all about.
That’s right. Fdroid the app is just a program that accesses repositories. It’s not even the only one, Aurora has a similar version of their own called Aurora Droid.
Fdroid the repo is a repository of FOSS apps maintained by the Fdroid team with apps they’ve reviewed and compiled themselves, to provide an element of trust that you might not get from every random developer.
There’s no fool proof way of handling app trust other than developing your own understanding of the code. Otherwise you have to trust someone. Fdroid seem pretty trustworthy, more than the big corporations, and more than many unknown small time developers - however you can get app updates quicker direct from the developer, through the Fdroid app, if you’re willing to trust them.
Probably beating a dead horse, so… sorry, but look into the Gab fiasco or FreeTusky.
F-Droid does ‘censor’ or moderate their app repository. However, they do not control which sources or repos you may install from.
If there’s an app you want that f-droid doesn’t stock, see if the app has a private repo, like Bitwarden, or is in another repo, like IzzyOnDroid.
same thing for linux. their repo’s latest version is 1.16 while their github version is 2.4.
I’m not too sure about the numbers but probably that.Reading this I remembered that stupid apple is now forced to let us sideload on iphones. I just kicked off the ios update to enable it.
