Plex will be blocking access from at least one VPS provider

Briongloid@aussie.zone to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 283 points –
imgur.com

Appears to be Hetzner for now, wouldn't be surprised if all VPS get affected eventually.

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I never understood this, it's your selfhosted server but you kind of don't own it and depend on them, so you just have an application which depends on a their service which means plex isn't 100% selfhostable, correct?

Plex has been hostile towards self-hosting since the very beginning. They have been asked to add local authentication for more than 10 years.

Yup, as soon as they started the mandatory login bullshit, I bounced. Companies keep adding this "feature" as a way to control your stuff: Doom on Switch, Halo Master Chief edition, nvidia, my fucking mouse(!?); all need a login for no other reason than to add a point of failure/killswitch.

Same here. When my Internet is out, my household needs to still be able to watch shows from my NAS locally without having to jump through hoops. Plex wouldn't let me just do that anymore.

Moving to Emby has had its own small issues, but with the internet out the family can still just load the TV app and watch a show like normal. They don't need to know how to do any troubleshooting, alternate login options, etc.

The problem is that they want to route control through their own servers for making sure you can't use some of the extra features without paying.

A few years back they dropped some clients (including the one for my old TV) because they were dropping support for legacy SSL ciphers on their servers - and those devices didn't have support for the new ciphers. This is a pretty stupid dependency due to the way they want to do things - so I moved to jellyfin back then, and have been encouraging people to drop plex ever since.

To be fair, old ssl isn’t really ssl at all & considered to be a vulnerability by a lot of libraries.

Without them forcing you to go through their server for user authentication it'd be a thing local to your network - where it wouldn't really matter. Without that stupid requirement you also could just keep unsupported clients running by yourself.

But can't you already. Just allow unencrypted clients?

But also on the other side, we're talking about just media consumption, not banking or other sensitive data

Yeah, I agree, and ultimately shame on the tv manufacturer. However many software just won’t connect so it’s not really a plex issue. If they use a library that won’t support it…

A few years back they dropped some clients (including the one for my old TV) because they were dropping support for legacy SSL ciphers on their servers

TLS 1.0/1.1? Those were deprecated and dropped by the IETF with RFC 8996. You can't even get a certificate using 1.0/1.1 anymore unless you are self-signing.

You can also allow unauthenticated users on certain networks, usually limited to your local nets. But I do agree that doesn't solve the problem. I'd love to allow users to optionally use local authentication with, eg, Authelia, something built in, or an LDAP backend.