tweet clients, drm

last update: 20200309

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Gee, why wouldn't the Chinese want to adopt our unintrusive, unlitigious DRM/IP restrictions? Injecting an army of IP attorneys into their economy shouldn't cost much or swamp their legal system (cough).

Adobe used to purchase content creation companies (eg. Macromedia), then sell content creation software, meanwhile adding layers of DRM. This means whatever "free" player is released slows to check DRM and/or nags users for updates. Good for revenue, but a percentage of creativity is lost, at least for all of those who can't buy the Adobe software.

Unsurprisingly, TweetDeck software requires customers to sign a EULA and to install Adobe's proprietary run-time platform Adobe AIR. Adobe AIR appears to have Adobe's customary DRM layers and potential phone-homes (updates, statistics) drawbacks. To me, TweetDeck means "Twitter, now with statistical data-mining, nagware, and under-the-hood file manipulation". Extrapolating a bit, watch for Adobe to someday "partner" with Twitter or otherwise make "reliability" data-sharing agreements with Twitter. One of the simplest explanations for why DRM seems to make financial sense to companies is this article which notes how creation software helps lock non-purchasers out of the creative process. The article is from Techdirt. I emphasize "seems", because they could likely make more money if they GNU licensed, but offered paid support subscriptions.

tag hasher options
TweetDeck :: Linux version available but, as noted, requires the installation of Adobe Air runtime.

TweetGrid :: Linux compatible. Nothing to download. It appears to require that one's referrer header is set to "2" in "about:config". The developer told me this is to prevent hotlinking. I left my referrer header at "0" and installed the RefControl add-on to firefox to manage the header. This helps on other sites which require headers as well (eg. Adobe!). Appears TweetGrid searches both a tweet's text and its title.

Twitter Search :: This is a sort of rudimentary way to go about it, which is why Adobe and TweetGrid can step in, but it can find whatever I want. Apparently limits its search to tags.

video streams

As of 2020, we sometimes can use Widevine to access some DRM accounts, such as Netflix. It's a browser plugin for chromium... $ yay chromium-widevine, then activate it. The streamer can then gather as much personal and impersonal data as possible from the content viewer. The other major Silverlight clone, Pipelight, appears to operate similarly.

wine - details

Wine installs no problem with netpkg in Zenwalk, but the latest version has a tweak or two with opening a browser from whatever application is running in Wine.

The first step, found here suggested adding this entry to ~/.wine/user.reg:

[Software\\Wine\\WineBrowser] 1178036531
"Browsers"="firefox,konqueror,mozilla,netscape,galeon,opera,dillo"

The number "1178036531" will not be the same for each installation. The first seven digits are uniform throughout a wine installation, and I duplicated the three trailing numbers of the entry from [Software\\Wine\\MSHTML].

The second step, discovered here, notes that a symbol must be added to each line with winebrowser.exe in ~/.wine/system.reg:

@="C:\\windows\\system32\\winebrowser.exe -nohome"

would be changed to

@="C:\\windows\\system32\\winebrowser.exe -nohome %1"

Following these two tweaks, Firefox opened without error when called from Wine applications.