[plug] AUSkey on Linux - WARNING v52 Firefox will cease working

Onno Benschop onno at itmaze.com.au
Sat Mar 4 09:21:27 AWST 2017


https://groups.google.com/forum/?anchor=!forum/auskey#!forum/auskey

At this time I can advise you that Linux will continue to be a supported
platform for the ATO. This is great news!

As you may know, currently the AUSkey infrastructure relies on Java to
authenticate. As of Firefox version 52 [1][2], legacy plugins using NPAPI
technology will stop working. If you've been playing for a while you'll
recall that this is also true for Chrome which discontinued support for
NPAPI a year and a half ago [4].

This is essentially why the ATO software stopped working under Chrome on
Linux and will stop with version 52 of Firefox.

This same change has happened under Windows and OS X. Fortunately, the
solution that exists for Windows (and OS X) will also apply to Linux. This
has as a side-benefit that both Firefox and Chrome will be supported under
Linux. In addition, Chrome compatible browsers such as Vivaldi and Opera
are also expected to be supported.

Until this is released we have several options:

   - While AUSkey is still working on your machine, you can link MyGov to
   the ATO and bypass the AUSkey authentication process. If AUSkey no longer
   works on your machine, you can as a once-off, use a Windows machine to do
   the linking. (Well spotted Rob!)
   - If you don't upgrade Firefox to version 52, AUSkey will continue to
   work.
   - If you move to Firefox ESR [3] (Extended Support Release), you can
   continue to use NPAPI plug-ins until early 2018.


I have also been advised that the libabrakmbe.so shared object file that
Michael and Jayen discovered is code that does the authentication to
AUSkey. In the past, this was achieved by a plug-in written by Oracle,
which if you recall required installation prior to use - and instructions
to achieve this formed the origins for this mailing list and the FAQ.

At this time I'm not able to tell you when this will roll-out, just that it
exists today and that it's coming.


Sources:
[1]
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/
[2]
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-adobe-flash-usage-in-firefox/
[3] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
[4] http://www.chromium.org/developers/npapi-deprecation

-- 
Onno Benschop

()/)/)()        ..ASCII for Onno..
|>>?            ..EBCDIC for Onno..
--- -. -. ---   ..Morse for Onno..

If you need to know: "What computer should I buy?" http://goo.gl/spsb66

ITmaze   -   ABN: 56 178 057 063   -  ph: 04 1219 8888   -
onno at itmaze.com.au
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plug.org.au/pipermail/plug/attachments/20170304/ba6ff805/attachment.html>


More information about the plug mailing list