Bug 18584

Summary:	AT&T Uverse Live on Mageia does not work
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	William Kenney <wilcal.int>
Component:	RPM Packages	Assignee:	Mageia Bug Squad <bugsquad>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal	CC:	cae
Version:	5
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:	icedtea-web-1.6.2-1.mga5.x86_64.rpm	CVE:
Status comment:

Description William Kenney 2016-05-30 02:33:35 CEST

Description of problem:

This bug is for information only at this point.
Any thoughts and/or tips are warmly welcome.

AT&T

http://uverse.com/live

is the new On Line presentation of some ( about 200 ) of their "cable" TV
channels that are offered to their customer base. I being one of those.
This is their on-line solution and there are similar offerings from other
Cable TV services here in the States. After some tinkering with it I think
that they are using, at a minimum, Browser Java technology to make this
happen. So that brings into play:

icedtea-web-1.6.2-1.mga5.x86_64.rpm

at a minimum. Installing icedtea I get correct responses from:

https://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp
http://javatester.org/version.html
http://www.test-java.com/
https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~matuszek/General/JavaVersionTests/JavaTests.html
http://jgames.com/

So you would assume that installing icedtea would do the trick. Nope.
Now the site is asking for Microsoft Silverlight, a dead technology.
So either Silverlight is embedded in their system, or it's a fallback,
or maybe icedtea is not a 100% solution all the time.

This wouldn't be such a big deal but all the cable TV services over here
as switching to this kind of a delivery system so it may become problematic
for everyone, including us, in the future.

Comment 1 Charles Edwards 2016-05-30 03:08:50 CEST

I no longer use ATT and could not even try to access any of their locked content
but I Was able to access and view their free content.

It uses Flash so I would think that the locked content does the same.

I viewed it using Google chrome Version 52.0.2743.10 dev (64-bit) using pepperflash
which supports the latest flash version.

You can also install the freshplayerplugin which allows firefox to pepperflash if chrome is installed.

Out side of that you may need to start bugging ATT to switch to HTML5

CC: (none) => cae

Comment 2 William Kenney 2016-05-30 03:24:48 CEST

(In reply to Charles Edwards from comment #1)

> Out side of that you may need to start bugging ATT to switch to HTML5

That's kinda like trying to turn the Titanic when the iceberg was spotted.

Comment 3 William Kenney 2016-05-30 17:47:14 CEST

A deeper dive into this today. Understand the platforms under test here are two.
A Mageia Linux 5 x86-64 KDE and a 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. Both as a
VirtualBox Client. Firefox 46.0.1 Browser. Initially neither have any plugins
installed in Firefox. Website under test is:

http://www.uverse.com/live

So using the site it will ask for various plugins to be install to make it
operational. First requested plug-in is Flash. Do remember that Flash anything
these days is the devil. Last update a few weeks ago fixed over 80
vulnerabilities. Even Adobe is getting away from Flash because of all of this.
Second plug-in requested is Microsoft Silverlight. A now dead technology.
So for me in order to view something on the above website requires the
installation of a horribly vulnerable plugin and top that off with a dead
proprietary technology. I'm sure things are different on an Android and iPhone
but for me using Uverse Live is unattainable because of the risks and the dead
proprietary technology. If someone can show a better light on this I'm more
then open to listen.

Comment 4 William Kenney 2016-06-02 00:49:56 CEST

(In reply to Charles Edwards from comment #1)

> I no longer use ATT and could not even try to access any of their locked
> content
> but I Was able to access and view their free content.

Many thanks for the comment. I'm gonna put this one down for now
as it's really not our problem. As it turns out this is an old
legacy setup that AT&T is using. Wow, a Flash + Silverlight + Java mashup.
I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => FIXED