Amazon Prime Video Now Usable On Linux, Too!

DRM protected content is a hotly debated topic and not without side effects but I have to admit I was somewhat glad when Netflix added support for Chrome and HTML5 playback on Linux back in 2014. At the time I also experimented with Amazon Prime video which was using Flash. Unfortunately this solution was quite unstable and thus unusable. Recently I noticed, however, that Amazon now also supports Chrome and HTML5 video playback on Linux. Over the past weeks I’ve watched a few full length movies and playback is now flawless. Well done, Amazon, thanks! … Just remove that DRM now please…

How To Get an IPv6 Prefix From The LTE Network

Back in 2009 (!) I described the theory behind how a mobile network assigns an IPv6 Prefix to a mobile device. 3GPP TS 23.221 and TS 23.060 are a good starting point. 6 years later things have moved from theory to practice so I decided to write another blog entry on the topic, this time with some more details out of traces made in a live network.

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First Wifi Access Point With PMF Frames Sighted

In the past few years a number of hotel chains have experimented with Wifi De-associaten attacks to force venue guests off their own Wifi access points. Fortunately the FCC has responded quite sharply and so I haven’t seen further reports about such behavior in the wild. FCC rulings are good, countermeasures are even better. So far I haven’t seen them “in the wild” which was a bit disappointing. Up until now.

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VoLTE – Some Thoughts On Bandwidth Negotiation

In the previous blog post on VoLTE I discussed how speech codecs are negotiated during connection establishment. VoLTE uses the AMR and WB-AMR codecs that are adaptive and can encode the voice stream in several data rates and qualities. In the case of WB-AMR, voice streams can be sent with data rates between 6.6 and 23.65 kbit/s. In practice, many networks limit the codec rate to 12.65 kbit/s in the case of WB-AMR and to 12.2 kbit/s for the narrowband AMR codec. Let’s have a closer look how that is done in practice.

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LTE and Quadcopters

Quite high on my list of things to do and get into when I have a bit of time are quadcopters. Well, actually that topic is on my list for years now but there’s always something else to do. Anyway today I came across a Quadcopter project with LTE connectivity for control. Cool idea, have a look here.

Speaking of quadcopters, another project that is on that wishlist of mine is the Crazyflie. Everything is open in this project, so it has a special appeal to me. That quadcopter might be a bit too small for LTE connectivity, however.