[HN Gopher] Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and strip...
___________________________________________________________________
Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from
Profobuf (2022)
Author : udev4096
Score : 622 points
Date : 2025-03-18 07:59 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ericdraken.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ericdraken.com)
| perching_aix wrote:
| > I discovered that putting a man-in-the-middle proxy between my
| Apple TV and the world lets me decrypt HTTPS traffic
|
| This surprised me quite a bit because normally that shouldn't
| work, but then that surprise was exchanged for a different one,
| when I learned later down that you can add CAs to the certificate
| store of an Apple TV.
|
| Nice and thorough writeup, thanks for sharing. A good carousel
| through the entire stack involved.
| windhaven wrote:
| If I had to guess why Apple supports adding certificates, it's
| probably to allow Apple TVs to work as AirPlay boxes in
| corporate/educational environments while playing nice with the
| IT/device management stuff that entails. For instance, when I
| was in college, getting something on the college WiFi either
| required allow-listing it's MAC address or installing a
| certificate.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| This, and the fact that a fair bit of this would 'come for
| free' due to tvOS being based on iOS which has supported
| custom CAs for ages.
| codemusings wrote:
| > [...] when I learned later down that you can add CAs to the
| certificate store of an Apple TV.
|
| Same. I would not have guessed that that's possible but I guess
| I never tried to access a resource without a valid certificate
| chain on Apple TV.
| jisnsm wrote:
| Most devices allow you to add CAs, but almost all apps nowadays
| use certificate pinning which means the system certificate
| store is ignored. I find it extremely surprising that YouTube
| doesn't do that.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I find it extremely surprising that YouTube doesn't do
| that.
|
| Not surprising for me - it used to be only banks where it was
| required (sometimes by law) that any and all communication be
| intercepted and logged, but this crap (that by definition
| breaks certificate pinning) is now getting rolled out to even
| small businesses as part of some cyber-insurance-mandated
| endpoint/whatever security solution.
|
| And Youtube is obviously of the opinion that while bankers
| aren't enough of a target market to annoy with certificate
| pinning breaking their background music, ordinary F500
| employees _are_ a significant enough target market.
| AnonHP wrote:
| > but almost all apps nowadays use certificate pinning which
| means the system certificate store is ignored
|
| Certificate pinning (or rather, public key pinning) is
| technically obsolete and browsers themselves removed support
| for it in 2018. [1] Are there many apps still really using
| this?
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning
| klausa wrote:
| Mobile apps still frequently do, yes.
|
| It's gotten less popular over the years as people keep
| asking "wait, what are we doing this for again?"; but it's
| still very popular in certain kinds of apps (anything
| banking related will almost certainly have it, along with
| easily broken and bypassed jailbreak detections, etc).
| solarexplorer wrote:
| I don't have any numbers, but I think this is still pretty
| common. On iOS for example Alamofire which is a popular
| network stack, still offers this as a feature. I think the
| use case is a bit different for apps and web sites,
| especially for closed ecosystems like Apple's where reverse
| engineering is not as easy/straightforward.
|
| https://github.com/Alamofire/Alamofire
| oarsinsync wrote:
| Most personal banking apps I've used still do this. The
| bank is liable for your lost funds if your corporate IT
| department doesn't secure the MITM solution properly
| otherwise.
|
| (The end customer isn't liable for the bank's inability to
| properly secure their app from MITM attacks...)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| HPKP, yes. Certificate pinning in apps is the norm.
|
| The difference between HPKP and certificate pinning is that
| HPKP can pin certificates on the fly, whereas certificate
| pinning in apps is done by configuring the HTTPS client in
| the native application.
|
| Apps like Facebook won't work on TLS MitM setups without
| using tools like Frida to kill he validation logic.
| boscillator wrote:
| That sounds like you've just made it so your app doesn't work
| behind a corporate SSL proxy. I really need people to stop
| rolling there own SSL stores (looking at you python, java and
| nodejs). I spend way to much of my time getting things
| running on my work laptop that should just use the CA store
| IT pre-installed.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Is that a problem? What segment of Google's Apple TV
| revenue comes from people behind shitty middleboxes?
|
| YouTube won't work on Chromecast if you're trying to MitM
| it, so clearly Google doesn't think this situation is worth
| making an exception for in their logic.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I can't help but wonder if any apps have tried doing TLS-
| in-TLS, with the _outer_ TLS not caring about MITM, and the
| _inner_ TLS doing certificate pinning?
| myko wrote:
| Certificate pinning seems like extreme overkill for nearly
| all applications. Are most folks really doing this?
| netsharc wrote:
| A regime can now force you to install their "root
| certificate" (and forcing organizations under their rule,
| e.g. national banks) to use a certificate issued by them,
| and these certificates would also be able to MITM your
| connection to e.g. Google. (1)
|
| Looking forward to Americans being forced to install the
| DOGE-CA, X-CA or Truth-CA or whatever...
|
| 1)
| https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2020/12/18/kazakhstan-
| roo...
| josephg wrote:
| Unfortunately Google can trivially block this by checking which
| CA signed their SSL certificate in the YouTube app. I don't
| know if they will - doing so might break YouTube within a lot
| of corporate environments. But it would be unfortunately easy.
| pbasista wrote:
| Of course Google can do this. And more. They could, if they
| wanted, to embed ads into the video stream itself with no way
| to distinguish them from the actual video content.
|
| But they do not do it. They had so much time and
| opportunities to do that over the years. And yet, they did
| not do it.
|
| I am not going to speculate why. But I suppose it is safe to
| assume that it is their _intention_ to not do it.
| ryao wrote:
| Does anyone do that? The average developer likely would not
| think to do this because it is too computationally
| intensive to splice things into A/V streams on the fly.
|
| A more clever developer could splice the ad into the video
| at an I frame, but then the ad needs to be a multiple of
| the number of frames that are both the I frame and follow
| the I frame. This also would mess with metadata on the
| length of the video that would need to be adjusted in
| advance. It is doable, but you give up flexibility and your
| HTTP sessions cease to be stateless. Then there is the need
| to handle splicing into audio and I do not know offhand if
| there is a cheap way of doing that at the server like you
| can do with video through I frame splicing.
|
| It seems to me that they have lower server costs by doing
| things the current way.
| DrFalkyn wrote:
| YouTube Videos are a stream, not a file you download. I'm
| not sure what the major technical nurdle is injecting ads
| directly into the stream. Also H.264 has key frames
| typically a few sounds apart anyway
| wingworks wrote:
| I think twitch embeds their ads. To block there ads you
| now need to pretend to be in one of the ad-free
| countries.
| season2episode3 wrote:
| What are the ad free countries?
| wingworks wrote:
| Russia
| pbasista wrote:
| I think that it should be sufficient to create content
| identifiers of all unitary parts of the video, e.g. parts
| between keyframes, and skip over the ones which are not
| supposed to be there.
|
| These identifiers could be collected automatically by
| plugins like SponsorBlock in a community effort and then
| combined together to identify parts which are common for
| every viewer, i.e. the ones representing the original
| video content.
|
| In other words, it seems to me that even putting ads
| directly into a video stream would not prevent people
| from being able to block these ads.
| kenhwang wrote:
| SSAI (server side ad insertion) is not uncommon for
| premium streaming video; Twitch and Hulu have had the
| technology in use for years. It's also practically just a
| checkbox option to enable the feature for all major ad
| serving tech platforms, including Google's DoubleClick.
|
| They're not using it simply because it increases server
| and bandwidth costs. YouTube is still positioned as part
| of Google's "moat" by driving down video ad price so no
| one else can build an ad empire off video instead of
| being a profit generating division on its own.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Youtube do their own re-encoding on upload to different
| quality levels, so they could theoretically hook that and
| make sure to provide suitable splice points and record
| them in the metadata.
|
| > your HTTP sessions cease to be stateless
|
| There's already pretty heavy magic around preventing
| people from simply grabbing all the HLS blocks, I think?
| All the work that yt-dlp does.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Doing that across billions of streams a day will cost big
| computer costs to encode it as they are dynamic ads
| rasz wrote:
| >But they do not do it.
|
| yet. They are moving forward with measures. YT webpage
| player.js no longer fetches individual video/audio stream
| URLs. It fetches single bundle pre-packaged on the server.
| Its a POST request now with only one URL parameter changing
| &rn=x, where x increments with every request, and ~2000
| byte binary encoded body.
|
| It requests pre sliced segments in form of
| "itag_251_type_3_src_reslicemakeSliceInfosMediaBytes_segsrc
| _reslicemakeSliceInfosMediaBytes_seg_492_range_77715493-777
| 57871_time_4920.0-4922.6_off_0_len_42379" "itag_251
| _type_3_src_reslicemakeSliceInfosMediaBytes_segsrc_reslicem
| akeSliceInfosMediaBytes_seg_492_range_77757872-77879973_tim
| e_4922.6-4930.0_off_42379_len_122102_end_1" "itag_2
| 51_type_3_src_reslicemakeSliceInfosMediaBytes_segsrc_reslic
| emakeSliceInfosMediaBytes_seg_493_range_77879974-77987247_t
| ime_4930.0-4936.5_off_0_len_107274" "itag_251_type_
| 3_src_reslicemakeSliceInfosMediaBytes_segsrc_reslicemakeSli
| ceInfosMediaBytes_seg_493_range_77987248-78044561_time_4936
| .5-4940.0_off_107274_len_57314_end_1"
|
| and pushes those directly into MediaSource sourceBuffers
| mzajc wrote:
| Ironically enough Android TV (at least version 7.X) does not
| let you do that, which I found out the hard way when trying to
| work around untrusted Let's Encrypt certificates.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Starting with Android 7, apps have to opt into user-installed
| certificates. Browsers often do (Firefox is an annoying
| exception, you need to turn it on in the dev settings and it
| doesn't work in the official release version of the browser),
| but apps usually don't even know that the setting exists.
|
| Aside from that, Android has a very easy certificate pinning
| API where you can just assign a fingerprint to a domain name
| in the XML config files and it'll pin a certificate to that
| domain. Easy to bypass if you modify the APK file, but then
| you miss out on updates and other mechanisms could check if
| the signature has been tampered with.
|
| With root access (shouldn't be too hard to gain on an Android
| device still running 7) you can add your certificate to the
| root certificate folder on the system partition. This will
| make Let's Encrypt work on all apps. It doesn't bypass
| certificate pinning, of course, but you don't need there for
| Let's Encrypt.
| ryao wrote:
| I remember people promising a rogue CA would not work anymore
| due to certificate transparency requiring certificates to be
| published in order to be valid, but it is quite obvious here
| that certificate transparency was not even needed. A private CA
| is different from a rogue CA, but if the private CA was not
| forced to do certificate transparency, I wonder what is
| supposedly forcing the public CAs to do it for their
| certificates to be "valid".
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > I wonder what is supposedly forcing the public CAs to do it
| for their certificates to be "valid".
|
| The power of browsers and operating systems including the
| cert in the default store distributed to everyone.
| Participating in cert transparency is a requirement.
| ryao wrote:
| How is that enforced as it was billed as certificates are
| not valid unless published, yet it is obvious certificates
| for a private CA are not being published and are treated as
| valid?
| mubou wrote:
| > I want to support content creators, so to be fair, after a few
| months of blocking YouTube ads, I am now paying for YouTube
| Premium; Just because I can break something, doesn't mean I need
| to.
|
| Does paying for YouTube Premium support creators? (If so, how
| much, compared to say Patreon?)
| ozzyphantom wrote:
| Not much compared to Patreon but if you watch more than a
| couple YouTubers can you reasonably be expected to subscribe to
| every YouTuber's Patreon?
|
| I don't doubt any given YouTube premium subscription provides a
| negligible amount of income to a creator but watching their
| videos ad-blocked provides nothing.
|
| (I use ublock on Zen and do not make enough money to be a
| Patron of anyone unfortunately)
| chii wrote:
| > watching their videos ad-blocked provides nothing.
|
| it provides the view count, for which the creator reaps
| rewards from as part of the boost in the algorithm from
| youtube.
|
| Not to mention that a lot of creators on youtube also do
| sponsored segments.
| debian3 wrote:
| And that's why there is SponsorBlock
| hhh wrote:
| which has horrible issues with moderation and zealots
| over-blocking random things in videos
| netsharc wrote:
| I've seen a Linus Tech Tips video where the seekbar was
| very colorful due to SponsorBlock, someone added all the
| sponsors, product placement and tangents into it.
|
| I admit I've marked segments on videos, e.g. skipping
| cringy jokes when I find the presenter annoying.
| pbasista wrote:
| To clarify, are you saying that these segments were
| marked incorrectly?
|
| If so, then it is a plain case of internet vandalism. I
| would just ignore such segments.
|
| But if the segments were marked correctly and there were
| too many of them in the video, that is the problem caused
| by the video creator, not by the community which
| publishes the segments.
| netsharc wrote:
| They were marked correctly, but I had a feeling someone
| was sufficiently annoyed with all the fluff in the video,
| that they went to the trouble. I think it was the only
| time I saw an LTT video with that many SB segments.
| imchillyb wrote:
| Sponsor block may have issues for content creators, but
| as a viewer I don't care; at all.
| hhh wrote:
| I mean issues in that they over-mark things that are
| unrelated, instead of just skipping sponsor-related
| segments.
| skyyler wrote:
| "horrible" is kind of overstated, I feel.
|
| I use SponsorBlock and haven't had any issues. I enjoyed
| when it skipped 99% of an MKBHD video, it was kind of
| funny.
| rubslopes wrote:
| You can adjust the settings to block only actual ads
| nfriedly wrote:
| Really? I've been using sponsorblock for years and I
| don't feel like I've ever seen any of that. It's pretty
| rare for me to go back and watch something that was
| skipped, and when I do, I generally feel that skipping it
| was the right call.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Youtube has recently added a premium feature where if you
| skip ahead 5s, it will prompt you to skip an entire
| "commonly skipped" section. It seems like they've picked up
| on sponsorblock and are making it a feature for Premium
| users.
| jnsie wrote:
| Is this the new artists-doing-free-work-for-exposure?
| chgs wrote:
| They get far more from a premium viewer than an ad viewer.
| kebman wrote:
| Could you please substantiate that claim?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7060016?hl=en
|
| > If you're a YouTube Premium member, you won't see ads,
| so we share your monthly membership fee with creators.
| Best of all, the more videos you watch from your favorite
| creators, the more money they make.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/177353i/you_sho
| uld...
| chgs wrote:
| Looking at my YouTube watch video, and that creates get
| about 45%, it tends to be about 50p an hour (I watch
| about 12 hours a month and pay about PS12) so say 10
| cents per 10 minute video.
|
| From what I see ad views tend to net about $1-5 per
| thousand views, or well under 1 cent per video.
|
| Ie a creator makes 20-100 times as much per view from me
| rather than a typical viewer.
|
| Im not sure how it works if you end up watching music on
| repeat for 200 hours a month and 10 hours of new content.
| Probably fairer than the way Spotify distributes my
| subscription fee.
| alwyn wrote:
| Supposedly creators get a bigger share from YT Premium users'
| compared to regular, ad-watching views, simply because skipped
| ads mean no revenue. It's still marginal because most people
| don't have Premium though.
| diggan wrote:
| > Supposedly creators get a bigger share from YT Premium
| users'
|
| I've heard this multiple times before, but every time I go
| hunting for a source from Google/YouTube, I cannot find any
| official statements or confirmed information about this,
| seems this is mostly based on 3rd party analysis afaik.
| parasti wrote:
| I've released an album via Distrokid which distributes the
| release to YouTube as well. You can look at detailed
| reports there. Youtube revenue is split into Ads, ContentID
| and Red (which I believe is the old name for Youtube
| Premium). I just checked and I am currently getting a
| bigger share from Ads than from Red, per play.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| Is "per play" the correct metric to use? What I'd like to
| compare are the hypotheticals "everyone is on Premium"
| and "everyone runs all the ads", but I'm not sure how to
| extrapolate this from some random split (I assume you
| don't see the ratio of your viewers) of Premium-to-ad..
| kalleboo wrote:
| I found this screenshot of the partner program contract
| that says it's a 55% split for either
| https://imgur.com/YjOHAAr
|
| But for Premium the amount is distributed by watch time,
| whereas for ad-supported users it's by number of ad views.
| This means that for short videos where the value of the ad
| is higher then the value of the watch time, a "free" user
| wins, but for longer form videos where the watch time is
| longer, the Premium user wins.
|
| LinusTechTips once showed the YouTube income breakdowns for
| some of their videos that showed this - for their hour+
| long PC build streams, Premium income was higher and for
| shorter videos, Ads income was higher.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Linus tech tips had a break down of their income. One thing
| Linus highlighted was that YouTube Premium revenue was much
| larger than most would expect. See
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4&t=400s (it's a
| little under 20% of their total revenue from YouTube).
| natebc wrote:
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7060016?hl=en
| dtech wrote:
| > Does paying for YouTube Premium support creators? (If so, how
| much, compared to say Patreon?)
|
| Yes. Recent info is sparse, but when they initially released it
| as Youtube Red it was generally much more than they got from
| ads per view.
| chippiewill wrote:
| Yes,.more than ads, less than patreon.
|
| It's based off of watch time rather than ad impressions so
| creators with long form content do a lot better from it.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Well it would be less than patreon, youtube the platform
| obviously costs more to run than patreon the platform
| abricq wrote:
| I really like everything related to network-wide blocking of
| shitty online services that are enforced on us !
|
| On top of blocking adds (which is great), I wish there were more
| / easier ways to do network-wide blocking of all sorts of
| aggressive infinite scrolling (in my case : youtube shorts and
| instagram reels).
|
| I often like to go on instagram to see posts / stories from the
| people I follow and I don't want to be suggested stupid videos
| that are especially designed to catch my attention. I know it's
| probably revealing a lack of strength on my side, but yeah, I
| often fall for watching a few of them and loosing 15 minutes of
| my life.
| arnvidr wrote:
| Hit that "For you" at the top and select the "Following" feed.
| Only the posts from the people you follow, no suggested posts,
| no ads.
| rwmj wrote:
| Until the company decides to unilaterally reenable that
| setting to "help you get more from their service".
| david_arcos wrote:
| That's not persistent :(
| soraminazuki wrote:
| YouTube still provides RSS feeds for individual channels.
| Combine that with mpv's yt-dlp integration and you can avoid
| the official web frontend altogether.
|
| I don't know how long it's going to last though, with the
| current trend of rug pulls and enshittification.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Pretty sure it's only gonna get deleted if either a) enough
| people use it so that a MBAs notice or b) the way it's
| accessing the data blocks a feature that an MBA wants
| desdenova wrote:
| Or just use a localhost invidious instance.
| rwmj wrote:
| Youtube have been gradually cracking down on yt-dlp by
| blocking IPs that download (presumably without watching the
| adverts, or some other method to fingerprint it). Currently
| it's mostly annoying as I have to rotate through IPs every
| few days. But I imagine it'll get worse and worse until I
| stop watching youtube.
| account42 wrote:
| I've been using the same IP for ages and never had problems
| with yt-dlp as a whole - it's always just some specific
| videos where it won't work.
| rfgil wrote:
| This has worked great for me to prevent the infinite scrolling
| on instagram: https://www.distractionfreeapps.com/index.html
| aembleton wrote:
| I'm not going to trust that until its on F-Droid.
| mtsr wrote:
| I feel this, particularly as a parent. It's difficulty watching
| your kids get lost in the algorithm. We regularly discuss this
| with them and they agree with our perceived harm, but it's just
| too difficult to resist. Heck, even I get lured into
| (doom)scrolling every now and then.
|
| I've setup ad-filtering using pihole, where possible, but I'd
| prefer not to block youtube as a whole. But I'm definitely
| considering that in the future, to protect my family.
| freehorse wrote:
| Imo the best thing that can work is introducing delays to the
| loading of videos, increasing as time goes by. Youtube
| introduced sth like this to me, when they were presumable
| trying "punishing" users with adblockers, and it worked as a
| charm to get me disengage from the youtube rabithole. A lot
| of such addiction dynamics work based on how fast getting the
| reward is, and these interuptions disturb this.
| wffurr wrote:
| Delete the app, use the webpage, and use a browser that allows
| user scripts. I found a good one that turns an Instagram page
| into just an image tag so you can just see the picture:
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5014-un-instagram
| andrepd wrote:
| It's 11 years old, I'm impressed that it even works.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Wouldn't risk trying to extract from IG too much, I used to
| yt-dlp from it a lot and use scripts to extract the images
| because I like to archive references, nothing on a massive
| scale we're talking <20 times a month and I got a warning
| that I could lose my username if I "use automated scraping
| tools".
| tecleandor wrote:
| Oh! Were you using your user cookie? I use yt-dlp a couple
| times a month, but I think I'm always unauthenticated
| (although I guess they could match my IP address in their
| logs)
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I think the urls might be specific to your session in
| some cases. I've noticed some old IG posts I've put in
| bookmarking services say they're expired.
|
| So passing to yt-dlp would be traceable back to me in
| that case.
|
| Definitely wasn't cookies that's what surprised me.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Why would you use an account to do that?
| heap_perms wrote:
| AFAIK you need a username to be able to extract anything
| from instagram at all.
| Marsymars wrote:
| You don't, I don't have an IG account but my wife
| occasionally sends me links to reels that I use yt-dlp to
| download.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I didn't that's what surprised me. I think some urls are
| unique to your session.
|
| Not that it should matter I don't think I'm the one at
| fault here.
| tecleandor wrote:
| For web access, in Firefox I've been using the "SocialFocus"
| add-on, that allows you to remove certain blocks in "social"
| websites (for example, blocking Shorts or comments in YT),
| put a color filter to make it "black and white", or even
| blocking the whole site. I had to access Facebook a couple
| times some months ago, and the quantity of trash you can
| filter with this add-on is astounding. This developer has
| also a YouTube specific add-on I haven't tested yet, named
| "UnTrap for YouTube" that has almost 200 different options
| for blocking very specific stuff there. Their add-ons in [0]
|
| For Android there's an App called Revanced that let's you
| apply patches on certain commercial apps like YouTube or
| Twitter modifying their behavior, and for example block
| shorts. See the patches available for YouTube in [1]. I'm
| still pending to test it, but if you do, go to their official
| site [2], or even better, to their GitHub releases [3] as it
| seems like there are a good bunch of scammy sites using their
| name.
|
| -- 0:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/user/17777732/ 1:
| https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.google.android.youtube
| 2: https://revanced.app/ 3:
| https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager/releases
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I often fall for watching a few of them and loosing 15
| minutes of my life.
|
| If you're on iOS, set a time limit (Settings - Screen Time -
| App Limits - Instagram). Doesn't stop the initial scrolling but
| the "you've run out of time" pop-up is a good breakpoint. You
| can bypass it and give yourself another 15 minutes but making
| that choice is also a good breakpoint / reinforcement.
| duxup wrote:
| > that are enforced on us !
|
| You don't have to use them and you could pay for them.
|
| The users of the internet have made their call and they often
| don't want to pay, so someone does.
|
| As a whole the users of the internet are not rewarding anyone
| for NOT showing ads. We want our content and we want if for
| free generally.
| Jgrubb wrote:
| Every one of the streaming services that I paid extra to go
| ad free decided to push ads anyway.
| duxup wrote:
| And they got their subscriber still I guess....
|
| As users of these services as a whole we reward this kinda
| thing and then are upset when it happens again.
|
| I don't like any of this situation but I also think the
| user's choices incentivize it.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Which choice could they have made differently here? They
| took the "pay for it" option that you suggested and then
| you still blamed them for giving the company negative
| incentives.
| rchaud wrote:
| They didn't though. Every single streaming service bar
| Netflix loses money. On top of that, they've all poisoned
| the well by creating as many subscription tiers as Dell
| has laptop SKUs and raising the price every 9 months so
| nobody knows what the service should cost.
|
| This ensures that people start and stop subscriptions
| just to watch a single series, instead of sticking with a
| single service all year.
| friendzis wrote:
| So it appears paying entrenched IP-hoarding organizations
| majority of your income further incentivizing their
| entrenchment is not the best business practice for a
| middlemen
| rchaud wrote:
| The hoarding began once they decided to abandon the DVD
| market, paranoid about file ripping and sharing. Now TV
| shows are like videogames now, can't watch without an
| internet connection phoning home.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| The problem is that advertisement business infects
| everything.
|
| For instance, I could pay for Youtube Premium to ostensibly
| not be shown ads, but it doesn't change the fact that all the
| content[^1] in the ecosystem is still produced for maximizing
| watch time and/or being advertisement friendly.
|
| I could pay for news, but that doesn't change the fact that
| the news is written to receive clicks from the non-paying
| users.
|
| Paying for things does not help escaping the second order
| effects of advertisement.
|
| [^1]: To a close approximation.
| jnsie wrote:
| Recently I've been annoyed with Youtube Premium. I pay for
| an ad-free experience and do not see ads in the traditional
| (wait 5 seconds to skip) way, yet more and more content has
| inline product promotion where time is spent thanking a
| sponsor and pitching their product. So I'm paying not to
| avoid ads, but I'm still seeing paid promotion...
| fn-mote wrote:
| > I'm paying not to avoid ads, but I'm still seeing paid
| promotion...
|
| It seems like you have shifted from having a problem with
| the platform to having a problem with the content
| producers. Can't win?
| jnsie wrote:
| People all the way down...
| duxup wrote:
| > where time is spent thanking a sponsor and pitching
| their product
|
| I've been unsubscribing from folks who do that a lot.
| Instant unsubscribe if the product is questionable.
|
| I'm not going to judge their business decision, but it
| tea sets an odd tone when I'm watching something
| informative and they bust out into a "someone paid me to
| say this".
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| google for "sponsorblock" extension for your browser,
| crowdsourced data makes it skip all the promotions,
| intros, "like and subscribe" and all other unneeded
| parts.
|
| And when you're at it, ublock origin also skips the
| youtube ads.
|
| There's also: https://freetubeapp.io/ , but it's a
| constant cat and mouse game with youtube, where you now
| have to refresh a video a few times before it starts
| playing (then it works fine), until they upgrade the
| software and then it works, until youtube changes
| something again.
| chgs wrote:
| YouTube has a "jump ahead" built in - at least on the
| phone - which skips sponsored bits
| skyyler wrote:
| SponsorBlock works great.
|
| https://sponsor.ajay.app/
| chuckadams wrote:
| It's an old-fashioned plug, and you can hit the skip
| button. Usually there's a banner of some sort that makes
| it even easier to know when the plug is done. If that's
| too much, then find a way to live without the show.
| javcasas wrote:
| You know who is the best target demographic for selling
| stuff? People with money.
|
| So that's who you want to show ads to.
|
| And do you know a proxy for "have money"? Paying for
| premium, when there is free.
|
| Therefore, every time you pay for premium, all the
| advertisers look and say "I'd pay a lot to show ads to that
| guy". At some point, the premium service includes ads,
| because of so much potential extra revenue!
|
| And that's why I don't pay for premium.
| davidcbc wrote:
| I'll never understand why people are reluctant to pay for
| a monthly service because of something they _might_ do in
| the future to make the service worse.
|
| If they do that thing then just cancel! It's incredibly
| easy to do!
| acdha wrote:
| It's especially weird because the one thing guaranteed to
| result in more ads is not paying. People spend a lot of
| money making content for YouTube and something has to pay
| for it.
| javcasas wrote:
| We already have more ads. The "promise" is that, by
| paying, we will get no more ads. For now.
|
| I didn't ask for that content. I don't understand why I
| have to pay it.
| acdha wrote:
| So do what I do and don't watch it. Just don't deprive
| the creators of revenue and then be indignant when
| everything is loaded up with ads and sponsored content
| because people need to pay rent.
| choo-t wrote:
| Because if the service you pay for start to do what you
| expressively pay them not to do, your whole subscription
| since the beginning will feel like a waste.
|
| Worst, your money was partially used against your
| interest, by financing people unilaterally altering a
| contract they made with you.
| davidcbc wrote:
| > your whole subscription since the beginning will feel
| like a waste.
|
| This is such a bizarre way of looking at something. I've
| canceled many subscriptions because of changes made by
| the company and I never felt like the time I already paid
| for was a waste. I got the thing I was paying for, then
| it changed in a way I felt like it was no longer worth
| paying for so I stopped. It doesn't change the time I was
| using it at all.
|
| If a company taking your money and using it to make the
| service works is your line in the sand I've got bad news
| for you about how almost every single companies uses the
| money you pay them.
| ghaff wrote:
| And there have been a ton of things I just lost interest
| in over time and wasn't getting value from any longer, so
| I (usually, eventually) canceled. Doesn't typically mean
| my earlier subscription was a waste. When I got rid of my
| cable TV, doesn't mean I wished I never had it.
| acdha wrote:
| If your favorite restaurant changes their menu, does that
| make your past meals feel like a waste? It seems like a
| textbook economic transaction to buy when the deal is
| good and stop when it isn't.
| choo-t wrote:
| Restaurant aren't subscription based, you pay for a one-
| time meal.
|
| The whole point of a subscription is to support an
| ongoing service _to you_, if your money is used to
| enshitify the service and make it work _against you_,
| there no point of paying it altogether, you will be
| better serve by piracy (as you don't provide them with
| money to enshitify it, nor to lobby against your
| interests).
| acdha wrote:
| "Your" money isn't being used to work against you, you
| are voluntarily paying for what is currently on offer.
| They've announced major changes in advance so you have
| plenty of time to decide to cancel after the current
| month if the future service is not to your liking.
|
| It's rather entitled to think that your monthly payment
| gives you some kind of veto authority over their product
| plan. If you don't like how they run their business, that
| doesn't magically create the right to use their work on
| your terms.
| javcasas wrote:
| "Might" is misleading. "Will" is more realistic.
| chippiewill wrote:
| You don't pay for premium because one day maybe it'll
| have ads?
|
| The mental gymnastics people employ to not pay for
| content with either money or ad impressions is just
| silly.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I don't understand this complaint in the context of
| YouTube. It's the only major streaming service with
| plentiful new content that _isn't_ clickbait, focus-
| grouped, lowest-common-denominator, metrics-chasing trash.
| I can hop on and watch hours of jets flying through the
| Mach loop, people playing chess, and people machining
| metal. If those aren't your thing, I bet there's plenty of
| stuff that is.
|
| Sure, there's a lot of crap. But you don't have to watch
| that.
| choo-t wrote:
| > Sure, there's a lot of crap. But you don't have to
| watch that.
|
| But even non-crappy content will be steered toward some
| direction by the advertisement, most videos are made just
| long enough to fit whatever is the new optimum time for
| revenue per view. And some subject will be censored to
| not displease advertisers.
|
| Some people are not doing that, but it's simply because
| they don't rely on YouTube revenues.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The people who aren't doing that still produce way more
| than 24 hours of quality content per day. And for those
| who do, I'll judge them based on what they make, not how
| I imagine they decide what to make.
| choo-t wrote:
| So your whole argument is just cherry picking? Sure if
| you ignore everything wrong, you can say the system is
| alright.
| wat10000 wrote:
| My gob is properly smacked by this reply.
|
| I mean, yeah! Cherry-picking is the entire point of an
| on-demand video service. Are you just watching whatever
| it gives you in order? I seriously cannot comprehend what
| would possess someone to write this.
| haswell wrote:
| By way of analogy, large portions of Reddit have turned
| into every other social media hellscape.
|
| Reddit is still awesome if you curate your subscriptions
| and avoid the big subs.
|
| Is it cherry picking to say Reddit is awesome because
| I've carefully made it that way?
|
| > Sure if you ignore everything wrong, you can say the
| system is alright.
|
| This framing doesn't make sense. It's an ecosystem, and
| it's not so much about "ignoring" things as much as it is
| about making active choices. If you go to a shopping
| district, there is nothing forcing you to shop at every
| store. If the district still has the stores you care
| about, shop at them.
| choo-t wrote:
| > This framing doesn't make sense. It's an ecosystem, and
| it's not so much about "ignoring" things as much as it is
| about making active choices. If you go to a shopping
| district, there is nothing forcing you to shop at every
| store. If the district still has the stores you care
| about, shop at them.
|
| There ton of people that won't go to some shopping
| districts because the rest of the area is an intolerable
| mess.
|
| In the same spirit, look a Twitter/X, sure, there still
| plenty of people making good content there, but you can't
| deny that the website policies are steering it in a
| peculiar direction, and lot of users choose to leave
| Twitter entirely to not be complicit.
| haswell wrote:
| > _There ton of people that won 't go to some shopping
| districts because the rest of the area is an intolerable
| mess._
|
| But there is still a major difference between "this
| shopping area is mostly stores I don't care about but has
| a few that I care about significantly" and "this shopping
| center is a complete nightmare and not worth wading
| through the nightmare for the the few stores I care
| about."
|
| I can easily think of a few real places in my city that
| fit into each category.
|
| YouTube is still arguably in the first category.
| wat10000 wrote:
| A better analogy would be the internet. This place has
| enormous mountains of crap. And yet there's more than
| enough good stuff for it to be worth it to me to pay a
| decent amount of money for access.
|
| I'm not paying for YouTube, really. I'm paying for access
| to the output of various creators. The service also
| includes access to a bunch of other creators I'm not
| interested in. And that's fine, I don't access them, just
| like I pay Verizon and T-Mobile but don't use their
| service to access instagram.com.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Do you not choose what to buy when you go to the
| supermarket?
| dmonitor wrote:
| You get to pick the cherries that you eat.
| nindalf wrote:
| > Sure, there's a lot of crap. But you don't have to
| watch that.
|
| The way people complain, I genuinely think they don't
| know about this option.
|
| For example, Mr. Beast content isn't for me. But I was
| also living blissfully under a rock for years without
| knowing who the heck he was. Now that I know about him I
| simply don't click on his content and therefore never see
| it in my feed.
|
| "But what if I click by accident?" - glad you asked.
| Simply delete it from your watch history and see your
| recommendations improve.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Either that, or "that stuff is bad" is meant to be
| understood as "nobody should watch it."
| nindalf wrote:
| Which is even dumber. How immature do you have to be to
| think you can dictate the tastes of others.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > it doesn't change the fact that all the content[^1] in
| the ecosystem is still produced for maximizing watch time
| and/or being advertisement friendly.
|
| That's just not true. There is an enormous amount of
| content on YouTube right now, which is made chiefly with
| quality in mind, by some of the most professional people in
| the industry. There's more than you could watch even if you
| watched for a thousand years.
|
| You just have to use the like/dislike and subscribe
| functions, so the algorithm knows what you want.
| abricq wrote:
| I know that I, as a user, ultimately have 2 choices: to pay
| for a subscription, or the choice to not use these services.
|
| Option (1) does not block infinite scrolling content, it only
| removes adds. So this is missing the point. All i want is to
| not see these dumb shorts videos that I genuinely give no
| fuck about, but that manages to catch my attention
| regardless.
|
| Then sure, I can always delete my social accounts, and
| ultimately i might end up doing it. But let me try to explain
| why I think this is difficult, and also unfair.
|
| I give 2 purposes to these social networks: First, they play
| a role in personal-life balance as a way to be more
| integrated in my group of friends / local communities.
| Second, they play a role as citizen of my region (in my case,
| France and switzerland) by being a (sorta reliable) source of
| information through following accounts and newspapper on
| them.
|
| Initially, none of these social-networks came with this
| super-fast / addictive content. They only started to
| integrate it, in my experience, since 5 years. So it seems to
| me that these companies have broke the initial contract that
| they "sold" to us: to connect with our friends & communities
| and to allow us to follow a specific set of public
| influencers.
|
| I guess that I am mad that we, as a society, have allowed
| these companies to gain such an important role in our daily
| lifes (social life and public life) that they can now say :
| we will allow you to interact with some of our friends, but
| you will also have to watch our stupid videos... And
| unfortunaltey, it's not easy at all to spin up a concurrent
| social networks that would be full-filling this initial
| contract. Probably lots of people actually like to scroll on
| insta Reels and youtube Shorts.
| ed312 wrote:
| This is why you fundamentally cannot rely on private
| companies to build the "town square". This will _always_
| happen because every company has a profit motive (even if
| its a loooong tail via SV-style funding). The problem
| behind the problem is people want great communities and
| tools, but don't way to provide any effort to build them.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > All i want is to not see these dumb shorts videos that I
| genuinely give no fuck about, but that manages to catch my
| attention regardless.
|
| My recommendations never shows any low quality content. All
| you have to do is like good stuff, dislike bad stuff, and
| subscribe to good channels. The algorithm works
| surprisingly well.
|
| > we, as a society
|
| There is no we and there has never been. You have to start
| taking responsibility for your own actions.
| choo-t wrote:
| Paying make it worse, paying doesn't prevent ads to be forced
| later (e.g: Netflix, Prime, Disney+) and split people fight
| against ad, as the ones with enough money to avoid them will
| berate the other for not paying, will still providing
| benefits to an ad-driven company.
|
| Never pays to avoid ad, block them or get the content by
| other means. It's akin to "never negotiate with terrorists"
| or "never pay ransom", you have to remove the incentive.
| windexh8er wrote:
| You _could_ pay for them or Google _could_ choose to take a
| different approach that is less intrusive. The assertion here
| seems to put the onus on the viewer. Considering YouTube pays
| little to nothing comparative to its profits based on content
| it does not make, I think a realignment of how Google
| operates YouTube could be an improvement for users of the
| service.
|
| > The users of the internet have made their call and they
| often don't want to pay, so someone does.
|
| Just because YouTube users put up with a broken system
| doesn't mean it's the correct, fair, or ethical approach.
| Beyond that many of the views are curated via algorithms that
| intentionally work against the user with an end goal to hold
| them in a viewing state regardless of the users original
| intent. With that in mind users _should_ use tools against
| those malpractices and not feel bad about not paying for
| them. If someone is intentionally trying to manipulate you,
| what 's stopping you from doing the same?
|
| If Google were a fair and ethical company I think treating
| them the same would be more in line with your response.
| However, they are not.
| friendzis wrote:
| I'm not that old and yet old enough to remember internets
| before ad-supported free content, which was just infinitely
| better.
| davidcbc wrote:
| I've been on the internet since the mid 90s and that entire
| time it has relied on ad supported free content.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Yeah, my first ad blocker was "AdSubtract" in ~2000:
| https://paulenglish.com/intermute.html
| windward wrote:
| Paying users are too valuable not to serve ads to. Their
| clicks are worth more: ad-free tiers are always temporary.
|
| Not that it matters: I pay for the bandwidth and hardware
| too. So I decide what it serves and runs.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| People have voted with their wallets on YouTube that they
| don't want to pay for premium, and prefer to watch ads or
| block them.
|
| Ads aren't "forced" upon YouTube users, people have the
| option to pay but they just don't want to pay.
| belorn wrote:
| YouTube can always choose to package the content in a
| financial transaction. They have chosen not to do so, and
| instead they are supplying advertisement alongside the
| content for which the viewer may or may not watch.
|
| They can always change it, but then there are legal
| consequences of making it a financial transaction.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| > I know it's probably revealing a lack of strength on my
| side...
|
| I think these tactics exploit our natural sense of curiosity
| and the aesthetics that surround it. So I don't think it's so
| much a lack of strength, but more of a jadedness we have build
| up and I think that's pretty bad. I respect the effort and
| creativity it takes to fight back and make the platform work
| for us instead of vice versa.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I wish they simply had a way to disable shorts. People have
| been clamoring for that option but yt ignores them because they
| know how addictive they are. I can't think of a more
| illustrative example of a conflict of interest and the contrast
| between the early days of computing that were driven by user
| demand.
| Zephyrix wrote:
| I've tried implementing this a few times on my Apple TV to no
| avail. I think YouTube has implemented cert pinning on their app
| now or something. Has anyone else been able to get this working
| recently?
| Jiahang wrote:
| what about in openwrt?
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| So I have to ask, I am legitimately curious, how is AppleTV
| better than hooking up a laptop with an air mouse on your TV?
| angulardragon03 wrote:
| Lower power consumption, actual 10-foot interface rather than
| squinting at the TV, lower maintenance, and (depending on your
| OS of choice) less intrusive OS-level advertising.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| Mostly because there is no laptop hooked up to your TV. I
| wouldn't want to have a laptop standing around, which is mostly
| an aesthetic choice.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, basically the size of a hockey puck. And priced a lot
| lower than a laptop of course.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| In addition to the sibling comment, it also:
|
| - Comes with a simple remote control which in addition to
| controlling the AppleTV also allows muting and changing the
| volume of your TV. As someone who uses my TV exclusively with
| the AppleTV this means my TV's remote simply sits in a
| cupboard.
|
| - If you have an iPhone you can use it as a remote over WiFi, I
| do this all the time to turn off the TV from a room over when
| the kids need to stop watching. The iPhone can also act as a
| remote keyboard which can be very convenient for text input.
|
| - The voice search feature works very well in my experience.
| The remote has a mic in it and you simply hold one button and
| dictate what you're searching for and 99% of the time for me it
| works perfectly.
|
| - It's very fast and responsive, allows quick and easy
| switching between apps.
|
| - It's popular such that any streaming provider probably has an
| app for it.
| skydhash wrote:
| Also, Infuse, which is a nice app for playing video files
| over the network and support Jellyfin, Plex, and others. It
| also have Dolby and DTS decoders, which works great as the
| box only have PCM output.
| int_19h wrote:
| I should note that, when it comes to remote, one downside of
| Apple TV is that you can have at most one official remote
| paired to it at the same time. If you want two remotes for
| convenience, there are some third-party remotes that
| effectively present themselves as Bluetooth keyboards, but
| you lose some of the features with them, and they are usually
| flimsy plastic.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > laptop with an air mouse on your TV?
|
| Having done the Windows Media Center version of that: it sucks
| a lot. Remote-control friendly interfaces are actually hard.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Typing a youtube/netflix search box with a remote seems
| harder to me than doing it comfortably on a decent keyboard.
| asadalt wrote:
| we use voice or input from phone (we get a prompt on phone
| when we highlight a textbox on apple tv)
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I do it with an air mouse keyboard combo[1]. See below,
| it's in between, it's small like a remote and sucks to type
| on, but better than selecting letters onscreen.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-
| Keyboard-W1-Multifunctional-...
| Marsymars wrote:
| You can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to an Apple TV.
| rs186 wrote:
| Convenience.
|
| When watching TV, people enjoy using a remote to navigate the
| interface, instead of with keyboard/mouse/trackpad, potentially
| having to get up and go to the laptop to do that.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I am an Apple critic that has long bemoaned their practice of
| trying to lock people into their walled garden.
|
| In the past, I used gaming consoles to stream, which I thought
| worked well.
|
| I finally, angrily caved and bought an Apple TV because I had
| an app (LFC TV) that would only stream via AirPlay. After using
| it for a bit, I have to say I love the thing.
|
| I liked it so much that I bought a second for my other TV.
|
| Reasons:
|
| - Build quality. The remote is machined aluminum and feels like
| a weapon.
|
| - HDMI CEC implementation. I used HCMI CEC on the consoles I
| owned, but there was always something that didn't work quite
| right. The Apple TV seems to nail it on both setups I have
| YMMV.
|
| - AirPlay. This one makes me a little angry, but if you find a
| need to stream from an iPhone, the Apple TV is pretty much the
| only game in town.
| cloin wrote:
| AirPlay is a killer feature for me and I love the AppleTVs I
| have. However, for kids TVs or the TVs that I don't use
| often, I just get an AirPlay capable 4k Roku stick. They're
| small, simple and work great as AirPlay receivers.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Nice! I didn't realize Apple licensed that tech to others.
| Definitely good to know.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Asides from what the other replies mentioned, various streaming
| providers have PC streaming platforms that aren't as good as
| their streaming apps.
|
| I'm currently watching Canadian and world championship curling,
| and the rights-holder in Canada (TSN) has a website that logs
| me out between _every single game_.
|
| Otherwise I watch mostly Plex, and while there is a 10-foot
| interface (Plex HTPC), for whatever reason it stops my PC from
| sleeping when content is paused, so I'm forced to use the non-
| HTPC interface.
| 05 wrote:
| YT Premium is $140/year (unless you know someone with an Indian
| credit card :), it's cheaper to buy a $100/yr Apple Developer
| sub, patch the app and sign with your cert.
| dtech wrote:
| It's $0 to go to Bittorrent and download movies, it's $0 to use
| adblocker and not have Youtube premium. There will almost
| always be piracy or piracy-adjacent cheaper options.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Shows how this is the typical HN article of nonsense that is
| not applicable to real life.
|
| Why hack your Apple TV like this, so you can afford an Apple
| TV but not YT premium? Or just use adblocker.
|
| For movies yea Bittorrent is alive and well not that I would
| know :)
| skyyler wrote:
| >so you can afford an Apple TV but not YT premium?
|
| How many months of YT Premium does it take to exceed the
| cost of the Apple TV? They're like $150...
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Yes sure, but if you want to hack things, just get
| something Android based that lets you side load or instal
| whatever you want.
| skyyler wrote:
| But I like hacking Apple things :3
| rs186 wrote:
| Arguably you want to spend a bit more than $0, e.g. a good
| VPN or a good seedbox. And VPNs can be as expensive as
| YouTube premium. (That said, VPNs have other uses, but "most
| people" probably don't really use VPNs much anyway)
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Usenet costs around $3/m if you find one on promo. You
| don't need a VPN for that as it's all encrypted. YouTube
| Premium family plan costs $22.99+tax per month in the US.
| While it's not free, it's very close.
| llui85 wrote:
| (2022)
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37279109
| vitus wrote:
| > instead, I found a flaw in the Protobuf format which allows me
| to reliably change one byte to obliterate ads.
|
| Let me guess, the author changed the field number to a large
| unused number.
|
| > Now, all we have to do is scan the Protobuf bytes for classic
| ad URL signatures like /pagead/ to bound our field search, then
| move backward from there until we find the target(s) field tags
| and thus field keys we would like to denature (e.g. 49399797 ->
| 49399796).
|
| Yeah. This isn't a flaw, this is intended behavior.
|
| If you're willing to go through the effort to find the tag, it's
| really not that much additional effort to then read the (varint)
| length right next to the tag and... just skip those bytes.
|
| Yes, you'd need to copy your buffer to do this, or at least slide
| your bytes around. But the proof-of-concept script already has to
| perform a copy because the bytes object returned by mitmproxy's
| API (`body: bytearray =
| bytearray(flow.response.get_content(strict=False) or b"")`) is
| immutable, and even a memoryview isn't going to bypass this
| limitation.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| On the protocol level everything is working as expected, but I
| think the flaw is that Google's way of dealing with these
| unknown fields in the ad data structure isn't to throw an
| error, but to pretend there are no ads to play. After all,
| Google will definitely release a new version of their app
| before they modify the protocol to make all the old versions
| not play ads anymore.
|
| Google could shut down this method of ad blocking instantly by
| either doing basic certificate pinning or by altering their
| decoding logic to be less graceful of failures when it comes to
| extracting ad information. If I were on the YouTube team, I'd
| consider these flaws.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Smoothly handling missing or unexpected fields is half the
| value proposition of protobuf. May as well switch a a much
| simpler versioned binary protocol instead of all this schema
| and field tagging complexity if you want to reject every
| message that doesn't match the client's schema.
|
| But rejecting unknown messages would likely degrade the user
| experience. Just because Google releases a new version
| doesn't mean everyone instantly has that new version
| installed everywhere.
|
| Certificate pinning would be a solution, but the world seems
| to have decided that that's very difficult to get right.
| Probably easier to get right in an app than in a website, but
| I understand not using it.
|
| They could manually sign the protobuf messages to ensure
| integrity. Duplicating some of the work TLS would already do,
| but doing it decoupled from TLS infrastructure may be easier.
|
| But unless something like OP's hack becomes mainstream,
| Google's current approach could be the right one. Sure, it
| leaves them open to message manipulation, but the potential
| lost ad revenue from even a tiny failure rate around update
| time from the other approaches could easily outweigh what
| they lose from a handful of people running middleware boxes
| to block ads.
| immibis wrote:
| AFAIK ignoring unknown fields is a MUST in the protobuf
| spec. It's safe to assume all of their tooling is built
| around this. It wouldn't make a difference anyway. As vitus
| pointed out, deleting the field isn't much harder than
| changing it to an unknown field.
|
| You can do cert pinning. And the user can modify the app to
| pin their own cert. And you can lock down the device so the
| user can't modify the app. And the user can get a different
| device where they can modifiable apps. And you can add
| device attestation. And it's not yet feasible to extract an
| attestation key from a device, but it probably will be in
| the future. And then you will switch it to a physically
| uncloneable function. And then someone will figure out how
| to physically clone it anyway. And so on.
|
| The war on ad-blocking is fundamentally the war on general-
| purpose computing. By the time you achieve unskippable ad
| blocking,
|
| You know, you could also just refuse to send any video
| segments until the time when the ad is supposed to be over.
| Then the user may try to download their videos in advance,
| but most of the time they don't know what they're going to
| watch that far in advance, so they'll sit through the ad to
| avoid sitting through a black screen. That seems like a
| more sane thing to try. And you don't have to destroy the
| fabric of society to do it.
| wruza wrote:
| _they 'll sit through the ad to avoid sitting through a
| black screen_
|
| Bold claim.
| max-privatevoid wrote:
| AFAIK Twitch already sends a simple "there's supposed to
| be an ad here" video stream during ad breaks when viewing
| through a non-web player. I'd take 30 seconds of silence
| over 30 seconds of advertisements any day of the week.
| alwa wrote:
| I'd be thrilled to have a black screen instead of ads. I
| suspect you assume that my motivation is to escape the
| interruption. To me, let me tell you--the interruption is
| a mild annoyance, while the ads themselves are an active
| assault.
|
| Especially now that they're individually and
| programmatically targeted to showcase and inflame the
| neuroses, health concerns, and predilections of each of
| the specific people in the room around the television.
|
| Amazing how the HIV commercials only appear when
| individuals in risk groups are around. Those outed a
| friend once--luckily in a supportive environment.
|
| And the random miscellaneous cancer drug ads come on when
| the friend who's an older cancer survivor comes to visit.
| And the sports betting ads when friends facing gambling
| addiction are around. And if I hear one more ad hawking
| supplies for squealing tiny humans when new parents are
| around, so help me...
| wruza wrote:
| Instead of a black screen, I'd like to watch calm cat/dog
| sleeping videos when they try to serve ads. Maybe one day
| uBO will add this opt-in feature, like mute the lie and
| overlay it with a 5-minute preloaded neutral cute
| content, for desperate services that force users into it.
|
| PS. spent 5 minutes on "a dog sleeping" without stupid
| music and couldn't find one. Search these days, man...
| natebc wrote:
| i'll give you one better for free. Behold the Sea Otters
| of the Monterey Bay Aquarium:
| https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-
| cams/sea-ot...
| dcow wrote:
| The point is that when ignoring unknown fields leads to
| users defeating your business model, even though the
| protocol requires it, the business logic of your software
| almost certainly should not. Protobuf working as intended,
| youtube client not so much. Agree that cert pinning is not
| the solution.
| echelon wrote:
| Protobuf and the app are behaving the right way. 99.999%
| of users aren't going to MitM your protocol.
|
| How exactly should you deploy client code to the edge,
| which may not be updated, to handle "unknown" tag number
| fields? You don't, because that's crazy. Nobody should
| write software like that because it creates a maintenance
| hell where you can't upgrade or downgrade because "smart"
| applications are doing stupid, undeterministic things
| with the protocol.
|
| It's impossible to reason and engineer backward / forward
| compatibility when you don't treat the wire format and
| API with respect.
|
| Most of the major migration headaches I've had in my
| career have been the result of engineers trying to be
| clever in the time and place they wrote the code.
| lokar wrote:
| The next best option is to version the api and support
| all old versions going back 10+ years
|
| I agree, what they are doing with proto is much better
| wat10000 wrote:
| If you want to prevent MitM modification attacks, the way to
| do it is to sign the data. Trying to do it by making the
| serialization format less forgiving isn't the right approach
| at all. It still has to be pretty flexible. It's going to be
| pretty hard to come up with a format that cannot possibly be
| altered to make the client show no ads. Something like
| certificate pinning is way easier.
| fastball wrote:
| I'm very surprised Google isn't already certificate pinning.
| kbolino wrote:
| The current YouTube certificate has a lifetime of 84 days.
| The next one will live that long or even shorter.
| Certificates are rotated too quickly nowadays for pinning
| to be viable. They'd be better off pinning their CA than
| their certificate, but that might cause issues for users in
| certain scenarios.
| dcow wrote:
| Cert pinning is not a solution and defeats legitimate
| traffic inspection cases. It also just moves the goalposts
| as the author discusses it can be defeated by a modified
| app binary. The industry has moved on. Sign your data if
| modification in-flight is a threat. I'm surprised google
| isn't doing _that_.
| dambi0 wrote:
| Alternatively perhaps the cost of implementing /
| performing the overhead of signing and verification isn't
| worth the cost given the relatively few people who are
| likely to do this
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Sign your data if modification in-flight is a threat.
|
| Which effectively pins a _different_ key in the binary.
| Might as well use certificate pinning, which provides
| both signing and encryption without a second layer of
| crypto.
| gowld wrote:
| A legitimiate traffic inspection case, from the content
| publisher's perspective, would have an alternate
| certificate backed by a trusted authority who agreed to
| protect the ads.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Google still supports the YouTube app on the PlayStation 3.
| They are not going to rotate hashes/certs on that app
| because it's very likely there are between zero and two
| people who know how in the whole org. There are countless
| other supported devices like this that are either EOL or
| not receiving updates, and part of YouTube's value
| proposition is that they are available everywhere.
| gkbrk wrote:
| I'd consider cert pinning malware behaviour if it rejects
| the certificates explicitly trusted/installed by the user.
| gowld wrote:
| Funny you mention that, because unnecessary "security"
| controls on streaming data is how Google broke Chromecasts
| lacked week, and still hasn't figured out how to fix.
| smadge wrote:
| Thoughts my own, smooth, uninterrupted video playback is much
| higher priority than recovering a small amount of ad revenue.
| sgarland wrote:
| > the bytes object returned by mitmproxy's API (`body:
| bytearray = bytearray(flow.response.get_content(strict=False)
| or b"")`) is immutable
|
| Byte objects are immutable, but bytearray objects are not.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| The typical HN article of nonsense that is not applicable to real
| life.
|
| Why hack your Apple TV like this, so you can afford an Apple TV
| but not YT Premium? Or just use adblocker ublcok origin with a PC
| then instead.
|
| For movies yea Bittorrent is alive and well not that I would know
| :)
| kortex wrote:
| > The typical [HACKERnews] article [about hacking] that is
| applicable to [computer enthusiasts].
|
| Fixed that for you.
| vachina wrote:
| My gf's YouTube account for some reason does not show ads on any
| device it is logged in, including the Apple TV. It is not
| premium, nor ever was premium.
|
| Wonder what flag is set internally that disabled ads.
| a12k wrote:
| Interesting. If you can DM me the username and email associated
| with the account, I can look into this and get it fixed for
| her.
| pawelduda wrote:
| "We're sorry for any inconvenience this error may have
| caused"
| chuckadams wrote:
| More like Mitch Hedberg would have said: "Sorry for the
| convenience."
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Why would anyone want this fixed?
| saaspirant wrote:
| It's a joke
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Woooosh
| madmulita wrote:
| How would you know what to buy without ads?!
| transcriptase wrote:
| Perhaps set the account to only show ads until she's caught
| up!
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| And by fixed you mean.. show more ads??
| duxup wrote:
| Long ago a Google music subscription would disable ads on
| YouTube. When they discontinued it / I cancelled, it took a
| good 6+ months before YouTube ads started up for me.
|
| But of a "oh I see what people are complaining about" moment
| for me ;)
| pfooti wrote:
| I am still paying for mine. My Google music all access I'm
| feeling lucky subscription turned into a YouTube music one,
| which includes YouTube premium, and I'm still only paying 8
| bucks a month, which seems like a pretty good deal even if I
| also pay for Spotify.
| manwe150 wrote:
| How did you manage to avoid the last price increase? I
| thought they'd ended that sweet deal for everyone (myself
| included)
| pfooti wrote:
| I have no idea. I signed up for the music service under
| the $8/mo plan basically the day they announced it, and
| i've never canceled or missed a payment, but they've
| never increased my price. I just hope I haven't jinxed
| myself here.
| TN1ck wrote:
| Maybe she is in a holdback experiment. To understand how a
| feature affects the metrics (such as running ads), they often
| have some people in a holdback. I worked there and we did have
| such experiments for our features.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Isn't that pretty unethical without an IRB and informed
| consent?
| MBCook wrote:
| I mean, it's Google.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The is the advertising industry, unethical is their middle
| name
| recursive wrote:
| How does ethics even come into this? They didn't require
| consent to show ads in the first place. Why require consent
| to _not_ show ads?
| immibis wrote:
| That's academic ethics. Academia holds itself to a high
| standard - voluntarily. Used car salesmen do not.
| choo-t wrote:
| Afaik Youtube cannot legally display ads to some countries'
| residents, it could explain this behavior.
| fastball wrote:
| Presumably he lives in the same place as his girlfriend.
| choo-t wrote:
| She may have created the account abroad.
| zeroadsever wrote:
| Which begs the question: if you used a proxy server/VPN
| and created an account "overseas", would you get ads?
| zeroadsever wrote:
| The above is true. Some countries don't get ads. Lucky them.
| Albania, Cambodia, Ivory Coast, Laos, Myanmar, Macau,
| Madagascar, Maldives, and Russia.
|
| Use a proxy server/VPN and go ad free.
| timmg wrote:
| Your GF is _essentially_ in the "control group" for ads. Her
| behavior can be compared to the behavior of people who see ads
| to better understand how ads affect those other users.
| xnorswap wrote:
| I don't like to advertise this just in case it gets fixed, but
| I have that same experience for Twitch.
|
| I don't run an adblocker and yet as long as I'm logged in, I
| get no ads. Not in the website nor in the mobile app. I don't
| have "turbo" and I don't even have amazon prime any more (which
| itself only very briefly suppressed adverts across twitch
| globally before they replaced it with a "Free sub" perk ). I
| don't have any of the other Turbo benefits, so it's not like
| I've been fully flagged as Turbo either.
|
| I don't know if I accidentally bugged my account profile
| messing around back when they ran a bug bounty, but I'd happily
| provide more details in return for keeping this perk.
|
| What's weird is that I vaguely remember once having a near-
| meltdown over the level of adverts on twitch when all I wanted
| to do was watch TV while I was heavily medicated and in pain in
| the hospital. Then some time a year or two later I was
| reflecting then suddenly realised I hadn't seen an advert for
| years.
|
| I guess most likely there's some long forgotten ad-free A/B
| test that it's not worth cleaning up.
|
| I've definitely benefitted over the years, I easily watch more
| twitch than any other platform. At PS12/mo (roughly $15.50),
| twitch turbo is among the more expensive in the world. In the
| US and Europe it's $12 or EUR12, so we're getting straight
| ripped off in comparison.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > some long forgotten ad-free A/B test that it's not worth
| cleaning up.
|
| That sounds about right. Different context but I once got on
| the good boy list at work by accident and it wasn't fixed for
| about 6 month. On the first of every month I got a little
| corporate swag box in the mail thanking me for going "above
| and beyond". Lots of cookies, blankets, coffee mugs and other
| trinkets.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Love the engineering, but it's kind of sad the hoops we have to
| jump through to get some semblence of owning our hardware or
| software.
| duxup wrote:
| Well you own the device in this case. I don't think there's a
| justification to arguing you own YouTube or the content.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > I don't think there's a justification to arguing you own
| YouTube or the content.
|
| This actually gets to the core of my sentiment. I am
| influenced by these systems, but I can't directly influence
| them back. I don't know if this is somehow wrong in
| principle, but I definitely want more.
| duxup wrote:
| As an individual viewer of course the creator of the
| content is the one with influence.
|
| There's potentially millions of viewers, there's no magic
| influence that you'd ever notice.
| dmos62 wrote:
| By "system", I was referring to the middleman
| infrastructure (Youtube, in this case).
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > but I can't directly influence them back.
|
| Opting out of viewing is directly influencing.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| What is "content"? I recently tried to use AppleTV Android
| app to play something and then use screen recorder app to
| record the phone screen. The recorder app was able to see the
| menus and even subtitles, but not the movie itself (black
| screen). Is the screen of my phone "mine"? Or does the
| manufacturer decide how can I use it?
| duxup wrote:
| I'm thinking of the Youtube videos as content.
| kriops wrote:
| Creative work, i.e. intellectual property. Much can be said
| about the state of copyright law in 2025, but the basic
| idea that you own what you create is the fundamental reason
| we (able to) prosper.
| knowitnone wrote:
| The screen is yours, the content displayed is not. Same
| reason you can "buy" a movie, game, audio, ebook and have
| it disappear overnight. Same reason your security camera,
| car, oven may suddenly cease to work if the company shuts
| down their servers. Do we support it? You do because you
| paid for it.
| recursive wrote:
| When I try to play something on youtube that has the DRM
| bit turned on (or anything on netflix), my whole entire
| screen turns off. Not only can I not see the content, I
| also can't use half of my screen for other purposes while
| I play the content on the other half.
|
| FWIW, I am no longer paying for netflix.
| stzsch wrote:
| > The screen is yours, the content displayed is not.
|
| Sure but traditionally this was a purely legal mechanism.
| There was no technological measure preventing you from
| copying a book, only a legal threat looming over _what_
| you do with the copy.
|
| Nowadays we have this very corporate-positive situation
| where copyright holders have their cake by embedding DRM
| and eat it too by leveraging the DMCA to prevent DRM
| circumventions. So you can be screwed even if you only
| want to take private screenshots, make backups, or
| exercise fair use.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Note that a significant amount of videos on youtube, and in
| particular many of the highest quality ones (e.g. educational
| material from schools like MIT or individuals like
| 3blue1brown) are Creative Commons licensed, so in terms of
| copyright, you are free to download and share them. Many
| including MIT's lectures are also NC and SA, so having the
| ability to save them and strip any ads is obviously in
| accordance with the wishes of the creators.
|
| As far as youtube's wishes go, I don't think people should
| have much concern for a company that's engaged in predatory
| pricing for years to develop a monopoly through network
| effects.
| rchaud wrote:
| Any $30 Android shitbox with a nieuwpipe apk has been able to
| do this for ~ 10 years.
| gytisgreitai wrote:
| I need this for openwrt:)
| baggachipz wrote:
| I need this for my pihole!
| timcobb wrote:
| If we're getting to the point where we need to decrypt things and
| reverse engineer protocols, maybe we should... not use these
| devices? Maybe we should opt out of this economy? Maybe we should
| do other things to entertain ourselves?
| lordleft wrote:
| I've started reading a great deal more. I'm tired of wrangling
| with my entertainment.
| selykg wrote:
| I started reading a great deal more at the start of the
| pandemic. I've kept it going since and it has been a real
| boon. I also switched back to physical books because I
| actually own them..
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| The problem is, that there is no alternative yet for that.
|
| Movies are not an issue, there's piracy, music is not an issue,
| there's piracy, books are not an issue, there are libraries...
| and piracy, but youtube is still limited, and the only way to
| avoid the ads is to buy another device (computer), thus turning
| pretty much any smarttv (with features you paid for) into a
| dumb display (that you mostly cannot even buy anymore).
| alistairSH wrote:
| Piracy isn't an alternative - it's illegal/immoral.
|
| But, the good news is there are two alternatives for all of
| the above... pay for the content. Or, don't consume the
| content.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Piracy offers the best service there is. You used to be
| able to buy DVDs, vhs tapes, etc., and you'd get the media,
| and even then you had to sometimes fast forward through
| ads.
|
| Now, it's impossible to buy media in many cases, even if
| you click "buy", it might be gone after a month, because
| some contract somewhere expires, there are ads even in paid
| plans, there are limits, to what I can do with that media,
| and more and more services require you to continue paying
| for content you already "bought".
|
| When they fix the "buy" button to actually mean "buy", and
| when they remove ads from "no ads" plans, i might
| reconsider. Until then, they're not getting any of my money
| anyway, piracy or not.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| > When they fix the "buy" button to actually mean "buy",
| and when they remove ads from "no ads" plans, i might
| reconsider. Until then, they're not getting any of my
| money anyway, piracy or not.
|
| This pretty much sums it up for me. I lost so much money
| over the years for so much content I technically should
| still "own access to".
|
| And not just media, games and books, too. It's so
| ridiculous how important things like anna's archive have
| become because otherwise science would be so crippled
| that it wouldn't even function anymore.
| timcobb wrote:
| "Piracy" of digital goods is an oxymoron... I don't think
| it's immoral. If you pay publishers, the creators don't get
| paid. And about the legality, well, just ask Meta what they
| think about torrenting.
|
| EDITED for tone.
| timcobb wrote:
| I should have included:
|
| ---
|
| Meta, however, is hoping to convince the court that
| torrenting is not in and of itself illegal, but is,
| rather, a "widely-used protocol to download large files."
| According to Meta, the decision to download the pirated
| books dataset from pirate libraries like LibGen and
| Z-Library was simply a move to access "data from a 'well-
| known online repository' that was publicly available via
| torrents."
|
| To defend its torrenting, Meta has basically scrubbed the
| word "pirate" from the characterization of its activity.
| The company alleges that authors can't claim that Meta
| gained unauthorized access to their data under CDAFA.
| Instead, all they can claim is that "Meta allegedly
| accessed and downloaded datasets that Plaintiffs did not
| create, containing the text of published books that
| anyone can read in a public library, from public websites
| Plaintiffs do not operate or own." While Meta may claim
| there's no evidence of seeding, there is some testimony
| that might be compelling to the court. Previously, a Meta
| executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark,
| had testified that Meta allegedly modified torrenting
| settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible
| could occur," which seems to support authors' claims that
| some seeding occurred. And an internal message from Meta
| researcher Frank Zhang appeared to show that Meta
| allegedly tried to conceal the seeding by not using
| Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid"
| the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader"
| from Facebook servers. Once this information came to
| light, authors asked the court for a chance to depose
| Meta executives again, alleging that new facts
| "contradict prior deposition testimony."
| alistairSH wrote:
| _If you pay publishers, the creators don 't get paid._
|
| Sure they do. The amount they get paid might not be
| enough. But by pirating, your guarantee the creator gets
| nothing at all. So... I stand by my statement. But, I
| will definitely agree that the whole "digital media"
| economy is fundamentally broken and hostile to both
| creators and consumers.
| timcobb wrote:
| Sure, technically some creators get paid something. Some
| creators don't get paid anything. If those creators don't
| have the means to sue, that's their problem.
|
| > the whole "digital media" economy is fundamentally
| broken and hostile to both creators and consumers.
|
| This is why I think it's actually our moral imperative to
| _not_ pay into this system wherever possible. (But
| personally, I choose to not consume rather than pirate. I
| 'll pirate something to check it out. If it's nice, I'll
| buy it.)
| timcobb wrote:
| Alternatives:
|
| - Not consuming exploitative entertainment
|
| - "Piracy"
| davidcbc wrote:
| > but youtube is still limited, and the only way to avoid the
| ads is to buy another device (computer)
|
| YouTube premium is cheaper than another computer and works on
| all devices.
| x187463 wrote:
| It's crazy how that option completely evades many people's
| reasoning on the subject.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But you still get in-video ads ("this video is sponsored by
| shadow raid vpn"), that (on a computer) you can skip with
| sponsorblock.
| acdha wrote:
| The alternative is paying for things you like so the people
| who make them can continue doing so. If you don't think
| YouTube is worth paying for, it might be a good idea to
| reconsider the amount of time you spend on it or whether you
| want to help promote it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I like the download-YT-content-locally then play. A project
| hit the front page recently that used yt-dlp to more or less
| do this.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I realize it's anathema to a lot of people, but you could
| just... pay for stuff. YouTube has an ad-free premium option.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I think most people don't have a problem paying for something
| that gives proper added value.
|
| But what's happening is that companies are degrading the
| basic experience and expecting people to either be OK with it
| (like Roku's increasingly intrusive ad experience) or to pay
| up to avoid it (like with YouTube).
| x187463 wrote:
| Perhaps on review of _specific_ ad presentation practices,
| you could argue for a degradation of experience, but
| showing adds more or less within YouTube to free users
| seems like an acceptable method of generating revenue.
|
| As an aside, the fact that people pay for cable and still
| have 4-7 minute ad-breaks every 15 minutes make anything
| YouTube does pale in comparison.
| godshatter wrote:
| Except for the tracking that ads use and the possibility
| of getting malware because they aren't curated as well as
| they should be.
|
| I also don't like companies aggressively trying to get me
| to buy stuff I don't want. Show a static image on the
| right somewhere with a link. Hell, show a dozen of them.
| Still less intrusive than an ad that shows up while
| you're in the middle of a video.
|
| But the poor ad companies are apparently on the brink of
| bankruptcy based on how hard they are pushing things.
| Just a little bit of composure or any respect for the
| people that they are pushing these on and I'd have a
| different viewpoint. But they are always all-in on this.
| dsco wrote:
| I wish I could do this for Spotify. Paid plans still include
| ads.
|
| They cram ads into podcast episodes which themselves also
| have ads, so you'll get the read ads + Spotify's local ads +
| Spotify laughs all the way to the bank.
|
| I believe over time not having ads will be a thing of the
| past, and you'll instead pay for fewer ads. Like where else
| are people going to go for exclusive content?
| timcobb wrote:
| > Spotify laughs all the way to the bank
|
| FWIW, I don't think Spotify makes much, if any, money lol
| nicholassmith wrote:
| Net profit was EUR1.14bn for 2024, which feels like a
| reasonable amount of money.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Sadly I think we're in need of the AriZona Iced Tea of
| streaming. A company that sells a streaming service, at a
| fixed price, makes a small profit and is happy with that
| profit.
|
| The issue is that the current streaming services have
| cost billions to develop and companies and investors want
| that money back, times a 100. The money hasn't gone into
| a long term product that people will be happy with for
| decades, it has gone into a product that needs to return
| large chunk of money in a short time frame (and cover up
| other failed ventures).
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| The issue is that such a company either needs to make
| their own first-party content, or pay licensing fees for
| third-party content, and the companies those license fees
| are paid to are always looking to either cut out the
| middle service in favor of their own or increase what
| they're charging.
| maweki wrote:
| > I don't think Spotify makes much, if any, money
|
| per their financial statements, about 150Mio in operating
| profits per quarter. Gross profit of 1.000Mio per
| quarter.
|
| I'd like to have that kind of "not much money"
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I've never heard an ad on Spotify, so this is true only for
| podcasts then, correct? In that case I can at least be
| thankful that Spotify is the worst option for listening to
| podcasts.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I canceled my Spotify premium subscription because they
| showed sponsored content in the app. Not as egregious as
| jamming ads in between songs, but I still don't want to
| have to scroll past a "sponsored" UI element to get to
| what I'm actually interested in.
|
| Moved to Apple Music and so far so good.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I highly recommend Radiooooo. They're DJ curated and very
| good. Dirt cheap for what you get.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Just buy the content and play it from your local devices. I
| use streaming simply for "auditioning" new music (and there
| are podcasts, YouTube channels that do that without a
| subscription, FWIW). I prefer then to buy the tracks from
| Bandcamp. Hopefully the artists get a bigger slice of the
| revenue that way.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I don't really listen to much Spotify but I feel like just
| the free plan in Firefox with uBlock Origin gave me an ad-
| free experience the last time I used it.
| jvolkman wrote:
| YouTube premium also includes ad-free YouTube Music. Yes
| there are still sponsorships in podcasts as usual, but no
| injected ads.
| ZaoLahma wrote:
| While I do agree with you, I am a bit concerned about the
| recent developments with "paid, but still has ads"
| subscriptions and how Youtube might slip towards such
| practices as well as soon as they have a large enough number
| of paying customers. Their premium might suddenly not be
| so... premium.
| chgs wrote:
| And then you cancel. I did that with Amazon, will do it
| with others when I start seeing ads.
| kittoes wrote:
| I totally get it. That said, YouTube premium is worth every
| single penny and has only gained features over time; no
| other subscription I have comes close in terms of value.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| With respect to that, YouTube premium has been around for
| over ten years, the majority of which I've been a
| subscriber because adblocking on Apple TV (my primary
| YouTube experience) is far too much of a fuckabout for me
| to willingly engage in it, and they haven't yet done it. I
| think Google is well aware of the fact that Premium with
| ads is an utter non-starter as a product. What would you
| even be paying for then? This isn't like TV+ or Prime where
| you have exclusives, almost everyone who posts to YouTube
| would happily jump that ship given enough reason to.
|
| And while there are still ads (sponsored segments) I
| personally have less problem with those since those are
| substantial money for the creators I enjoy, and a lot of
| the ones I watch actually manage to make them pretty funny.
| And hell, a couple I've even used their codes for shit over
| the years for. Like, an ad is an ad and some people hate
| all of them, but I can personally say I've engaged with ads
| from creators I like at an exceptional rate compared to...
| virtually every other type of advertising I've ever
| encountered.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Sponsored segments are also trivially skippable.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Yep. Most folks I follow will record ads at a different
| time from the rest of the video too, wearing different
| clothes and in different lighting. Sometimes I can be
| bothered to grab the remote, sometimes not, lol.
| siffin wrote:
| There is for certain a wide gap between a sponsored
| segment from the same voice and some random ad coming in
| and blaring over the top. For me, I can handle the
| narrator delivering an ad, it's the intrusive slot
| machine aspect of generic ads that irk me. Happy youtube
| subscriber here, use the music too, great deal.
|
| Youtube is one of the platforms where I find real value,
| usually in making/maintaining/repairing things, being
| able to skip through videos to find answers without
| worrying about ads definitely saves me significant time
| and therefore money.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Yeah I balked for a long time at paying for YouTube, but
| in the end, I consume magnitudes more YouTube than any
| other streaming platform. It's my most expensive video
| subscription but like... I can't say I don't use it.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's the only one I pay for. I have Netflix included in
| my cell plan. Every so often I fire it up to see what
| they have, find nothing, and go back to the good stuff.
| bcye wrote:
| Have they not already with Premium Lite or whatever it is
| called?
| wat10000 wrote:
| I don't see anything like that on
| https://youtube.com/premium
| bcye wrote:
| Seems to still being trialed in only a few regions. It's
| No ads during videos (still display ads during search,
| etc.), except for shorts and music videos for 6EUR/m.
| Without all the other premium features
| dmonitor wrote:
| I would guess that music producers are demanding
| unreasonable amounts of money per view, so carving them
| out of the equation is a fine trade IMO
| noja wrote:
| It's not that simple. It's common enough now to classify some
| ads as.... not adverts. So even if you pay for no ads, you
| get ads.
| kittoes wrote:
| Completely untrue in the case of YouTube Premium. I
| literally haven't seen an ad for over a decade now.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Netflix shows ads to paying customers. We've seen the same
| playbook across a wide variety of products and services, it's
| only a matter of time until paying users get milked too.
| wat10000 wrote:
| When that happens, I'll stop saying "just pay for it." But
| until it does, I'll continue paying for YouTube and being
| befuddled by people who get upset at their ads.
| saintfire wrote:
| Increasingly the "basic" paid plan has ads and you now have
| to pay even more to not have ads. Doesn't seem like playing
| the game is doing anyone any favours.
|
| Having the ability to tell a company enough is a enough
| serves as a ceiling for bullshit.
| kittoes wrote:
| Where are you finding this "basic" plan? YouTube Premium
| has only a single tier that is completely ad-free. I hate
| Google as much as anyone, but shouldn't truth matter?
| onion2k wrote:
| Or you can opt out. Both options are equally valid.
|
| I won't pay for YouTube because the consistency of YouTube is
| _massively_ variable. Sometimes channels I watch skip 6
| months between videos. When I do watch stuff its usually in
| the background or when I just have a few minutes spare.
| Spending money to fill that time is unjustifiable unless it
| 's a _really_ low amount, and YouTube Premium isn 't low
| enough yet.
|
| Oddly though, if I could buy 100 'skip this ad' tokens for
| $10 that I could use when I'm pushed for time, but just
| suffer the ads when I'm not, I'd seriously consider it.
| wat10000 wrote:
| You can, but the complaint rings hollow when we're talking
| about a service with enormous amounts of actual good
| content, and a straightforward non-abusive paid plan. If
| you don't think it's worth it, that makes complete sense.
| If somebody decides there isn't anything worth paying or
| watching ads and just bails out, totally sensible. But this
| "ads are so terrible we should just abandon the service"
| thing is weird here. YouTube is an example of doing it
| right. They use ads to support a free tier, and have a paid
| plan that removes them. They don't do nonsense where they
| take your money and still show you ads. They don't serve
| unvetted ads that infect your computer with malware or mine
| cryptocurrency. If people won't even consider paying for
| this (not merely deciding it's not worth it, but refusing
| to even consider it as a possibility) then I have to
| conclude that they just think they're entitled to get stuff
| for free.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > but you could just... pay for stuff.
|
| Careful... In the Kingdom of the Netherlands your comment
| will be considered by a court of law as aggravated assault.
| 42lux wrote:
| Choice is a luxury for most.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I can recommend "minitube" [1]. It's super minimalistic, and
| requires you to actively search for things to find them. No
| ads, no feeds, no short videos, nothing - just playlists for
| search terms. Uses yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, so it's
| using less than 5% CPU on my small Intel NUC machine, too.
|
| I can't stress enough how it is soooo much better in terms of
| what type of content I consume now. Mr-Beast-cutting-style dumb
| videos ain't stand a chance to get my attention now.
|
| Ironically, the author built it to be a children-safe
| environment to consume YouTube.
|
| [1] https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I've gone back to pirating everything. I can afford to pay for
| all the services, it's just the service and content quality has
| gotten so bad that it's just not worth it. I DO pay for content
| from other markets (French, Israeli, and Japanese), just not
| mine.
|
| It's just like vehicles. There isn't a single vehicle sold in
| my market that I would pay anything for (ok, maybe the Ford
| Maverick). There's a bunch in other markets (Europe, South
| America, Asia), just not mine.
| timmg wrote:
| > I've gone back to pirating everything. I can afford to pay
| for all the services, it's just the service and content
| quality has gotten so bad that it's just not worth it.
|
| If the content is so bad, then why the need to pirate it?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| OP said content _quality_ so I 'm assuming the streaming is
| shittier quality than, for example, BluRay quality you
| might get from torrenting.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I stick to old stuf from the 1930s to 1990s
|
| I will say the Criterion Channel is excellent and I do
| subscribe to them.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Have fun!
| lima wrote:
| A small C++/Go/... proxy can do the same thing with much, _much_
| less overhead. Been there, done that - for something well-defined
| like this, it is more stable and less work than fighting
| mitmproxy.
|
| Routing everything through the proxy will degrade performance
| even with SNI interception.
|
| Same with pfSense - a plain Linux server and a simple iptables
| rules set would do the job without having to fight against all
| the pfSense abstraction layers.
|
| Write a .proto file with just enough of the reverse-engineered
| proto fields to auto-generate code and flip the flag. Cheaper
| than the Python implementation and easier to update when the
| proto changes.
|
| Ignoring unknown field tags is an important Protobuf feature - it
| allows for compatible schema changes without breaking existing
| deployments.
| pcardoso wrote:
| I would love to degrade my YouTube experience and make it
| slower when switching videos, would make it a lot less
| addictive specially with shorts.
| brainzap wrote:
| I am experimenting a bit and definitly, a little bit loading
| delay helps to break the loop and ,,wake up"
| ushiroda80 wrote:
| 21th century will be remembered as the great digital drug
| crisis.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Or the Start of the Digital Drug Era.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe wait until the brain implants.
| j45 wrote:
| Slowing down certain domains bandwidth can help too.
| pcardoso wrote:
| It would, but it would also decrease the video quality.
| I'm not opposed to letting my kids watch YouTube, there
| is a lot of good quality content there, but having some
| agency in what they pick would be a lot better than the
| current behavior of short after short after short. Just
| like snacking on fast food.
| Always42 wrote:
| Thought this was sarcasm till the end. Good idea
| create-username wrote:
| Isn't Google degrading your user experience well enough?
| j45 wrote:
| This comment made me wonder if some folks have been compelled
| to find a way to block shorts.
|
| My use of YouTube predates shorts, and I haven't been a huge
| shorts consumer on social platforms, and I seem kind of
| indifferent to them. Anyone else?
|
| Maybe there is something we can figure out and share with our
| friends who want to manage their shorts use.
|
| Also, apps like opal can be really helpful.
|
| https://www.opal.so/
| pcardoso wrote:
| I never got used to shorts/reels/etc, but it is troubling
| to see kids addicted to them. I have been thinking that by
| forcing some pause between videos it would remove some of
| their addictiveness.
| immibis wrote:
| It does. Sometimes I click on an interesting short and
| then keep swiping to see if anything else is interesting.
| When the app takes ten seconds to load, I go do something
| else because there's no real value in the shorts.
| Narishma wrote:
| Google has been doing that for you since they bought Youtube.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I gotta say, I don't get that perspective. The content is
| one thing, but YouTube is super reliable for me, streaming
| or watching. I can easily stream in 4k 60FPS from OBS and
| YouTube has never had issues ingesting it, though I
| generally do 1440p because my computer is slow. When
| watching, I have never had an interruption on my wired
| Apple TV even for 4k/60FPS.
|
| I do hate the pushing of shorts and the algorithm that
| seems to have a 3 video memory, but aside from that I'm
| pretty happy, I don't get the weird right wing stuff or
| creepy videos pushed at me or my kids.
| Narishma wrote:
| For me the content is not the main problem, rather the
| consistent bloating and enshitification of the player and
| interface over the years. Nowadays I don't bother anymore
| and just use mpv and ytdlp to play the few videos I'm
| interested in.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _A small C++ /Go/... proxy_
|
| Got any recommendations for lightweight proxies that can run on
| macOS and serve other devices in the home?
| oefrha wrote:
| https://github.com/elazarl/goproxy is pretty nice Go library
| for writing proxies, I used it once. Supports both HTTPS
| passthrough and MITM. Here's a trivial example MITMing
| connections to www.google.com and rejecting requests to
| https://www.google.com/maps while allowing everything else
| through: package main import (
| "log" "net/http" "strings"
| "github.com/elazarl/goproxy" ) func main()
| { proxy := goproxy.NewProxyHttpServer()
| proxy.Verbose = true proxy.OnRequest(goproxy.DstHos
| tIs("www.google.com")).HandleConnect(goproxy.AlwaysMitm)
| proxy.OnRequest(goproxy.DstHostIs("www.google.com")).DoFunc(f
| unc(r *http.Request, ctx *goproxy.ProxyCtx) (*http.Request,
| *http.Response) { if
| strings.HasPrefix(r.URL.Path, "/maps") {
| return r, goproxy.NewResponse(r, "text/plain", 403,
| "Forbidden") } return r, nil
| }) log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", proxy))
| }
|
| Try: curl -k -x localhost:8080
| https://www.google.com/ curl -k -x localhost:8080
| https://www.google.com/maps curl -x localhost:8080
| https://www.apple.com/
|
| -k is to ignore cert error; note how we don't need it for
| apple.com due to passthrough.
|
| Remember to use your own cert rather than the hardcoded one
| in "production" (a trusted network like your home of course,
| probably a bad idea to expose it on the open Internet).
| dcow wrote:
| Can you put together a guide in response showing where the
| inefficiencies are and how to mitigate them with more simple
| software?
|
| It sounds like the author was aware of at least parts of your
| comment. The post is very thorough. They benchmarked using
| python and c++ and the final impl doesn't even decode protobuf.
| They used various mitm solutions. They are using pfsense for
| more than just "it's muh security router"--they are vlanning
| and vpning the traffic so they can target inly the appletv on
| their network.
|
| Your comment is cheap and dismissive. The author's post is not.
| You owe it to the community to put your money where your mouth
| is.
| Starmina wrote:
| Exactly my thoughts.
| lima wrote:
| Not sure what kind of answer you are looking for? I did not
| criticize the author's post. It was an enjoyable read, and I
| personally would have given up a long time before going to
| such impressive lenghts. The fact that the app isn't using
| certificate pinning is really interesting and the sheer
| amount of hacker spirit and determination is extremely
| wholesome.
|
| I am, however, very familiar with this particular engineering
| challenge (specifically, attempting to build on pfSense and
| using mitmproxy scripts in production), so I wanted to share
| my personal experiences to hopefully save someone else some
| time and frustration while attempting the same thing.
|
| Should I not have commented at all?
| WD-42 wrote:
| Sounds great, looking forward to the detailed blog post where
| you share how to do it!
| haagendos wrote:
| You want someone to show you how to write a C++/Go program to
| forward traffic? There are a lot of tutorials online that can
| already demonstrate this for you. :)
| s3p wrote:
| You don't sound like you are actually looking forward to
| this.
| scottydelta wrote:
| Just the other day I was discussing similar approach to remove
| political content from Reddit app.
|
| On Reddit, all the subreddits are constantly bombarded with
| Trump/Elon/Political content and there is currently no way to
| mute that content on mobile.
|
| It would be cool if someone can come up with a raspberry pi based
| system to do this for reddit.
| uptown wrote:
| I don't use it all that much, but the one feature I wish I had
| was the ability to scrub forward or backwards at will on an
| Instagram video.
| freeAgent wrote:
| I block YouTube ads on all my devices by paying for YouTube
| Premium. It feels refreshing to be able to pay for a service I
| enjoy and therefore not be served ads which I don't enjoy. It
| seems like a win-win to me. Doing something like this, while
| technically interestingly, seems like far more trouble than it's
| worth for 99.99% of people, especially when there's a reasonably
| priced way to block ads that also supports the service.
| a12k wrote:
| I paid for YouTube Premium and still got ads, though fewer. So
| I cancelled. Are they now offering YT Premium ad free?
| neilo40 wrote:
| I haven't seen a single ad in over a year. You still get paid
| sponsorships depending on the channel though
| millerm wrote:
| I've been paying for premium, basically because they've been
| sort of forcing to people with the ridiculous number of ads.
| I get zero ads injected. You'll still get sponsorships that
| are part of the video done by the creator, which is now
| become a little bit more annoying. But at least it's
| something that the content creator completely approves of and
| endorses. I can skip that part anyway.
|
| I'll probably cancel it soon, only because I need to stop
| watching so much of this stuff, and I need to get rid of
| things in life that I shouldn't be paying for. Once I do
| that, I'll never be able to watch YouTube again, because it
| was unbearable with the number of ads injected. I hate being
| reminded over and over that I am nothing but a consumer that
| they try to influence with ads over, amd over, and over, and
| over.
|
| Off-topic, I recently got another free month of Amazon prime.
| I was watching some shows on there, and the ads are f'n
| annoying there too. I can't believe they make people pay more
| now to remove the ads. I'll never pay for Prime in any
| fashion.
| voxic11 wrote:
| I have paid for YouTube Premium for years and watch YouTube
| nearly every day and I have never seen an ad from YouTube
| (you still may see baked-in ads from the video creator but
| those can be automatically skipped with the SponsorBlock
| extension).
| Gareth321 wrote:
| The ads which the "ad free" Premium service permits:
|
| 1. Sponsored in-video ads.
|
| 2. Ad overlays on videos (at the discretion of content
| creators).
|
| 3. Merchandise store ads below videos (also at the
| discretion of content creators).
|
| 4. YouTube and Google ads for various products and services
| in the video feed.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Ah I also use uBlock Origin so I guess that is why I
| haven't seen #4.
| kittoes wrote:
| My personal experience for the entire time the service has
| been available: if I get a single ad, then I'm not signed in
| to the right account.
| c0wb0yc0d3r wrote:
| I do it this way, pay for premium and still use an ad
| blocker. I do it this way because there is no question
| whether or not I see ads. My conscience is clear because
| YouTube claims creators get a kickback when premium users
| watch their content.
|
| For me it's the best middle ground. I pay one bill, everyone
| gets paid.
| neilo40 wrote:
| I paid for a family subscription a couple of years ago. It is
| very reasonably priced. Probably one of the least regretted
| subscriptions I have given the amount of use I get out of it
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I had been paying for the service for years. They recently
| increased the price 40% overnight. I cancelled.
| Marsymars wrote:
| It's great value if you use YouTube a lot, but terrible value
| if you use YouTube every three months to look up a car or
| washing machine repair video.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yeah, I use YouTube more than any other streaming service, and
| I happily pay for it.
|
| The ability to download videos is super duper useful, and the
| higher streaming quality is a nice extra.
|
| But most of all, no ads while still rewarding the creators I
| watch is great.
| bluescrn wrote:
| YouTube Premium doesn't get rid of ads though, as many of the
| videos themselves are still full of ads/sponsors.
| freeAgent wrote:
| This blocking method also wouldn't touch those. I'm comparing
| apples to apples. If you want to block ads inserted directly
| by video creators, you need something like SponsorBlock and
| to either DIY or rely on someone else to have done it before
| you.
| rglullis wrote:
| That would be all nice and dandy, except that by doing that you
| validate all the things that Google did before to kill off any
| competition in the video hosting space.
|
| There were plenty of platforms out there that could not rely on
| Google's bottomless coffers to sustain their operation. Were
| you paying for those as well?
| freeAgent wrote:
| I get that, but in that case it also makes sense to avoid
| YouTube altogether since you simply being there continues to
| deprive other services of the opportunity to compete. These
| days I think YouTube's biggest competition is stuff like
| TikTok, which I find odious.
| skyyler wrote:
| >since you simply being there continues to deprive other
| services of the opportunity to compete
|
| If DancingBacons posted other places, I'd go other places.
|
| Saying something like this completely ignores the realities
| of network effect.
| freeAgent wrote:
| I totally get that the network effect makes it difficult
| to leave abusive platforms, but if one cares enough, it
| is possible to make that sacrifice. I deleted my Facebook
| account, for example, and now I can't keep up with
| numerous people and groups that use Facebook. It was
| worth the sacrifice for me.
| skyyler wrote:
| "If you don't like it, you can simply stop participating
| in society" is not really a good argument to me, but I'm
| glad it works for you.
| rglullis wrote:
| I put all the ad blockers on YouTube and I pay Nebula not
| because I particularly enjoy it (it's nice, but not the
| first thing I think about when I want to watching some
| videos) but because I want to signal content creators "hey,
| if you want to be supported by your audience but worry that
| YouTube is the only place where you can make a living out
| of it, _there_ is an alternative. "
| nikeee wrote:
| One day my YT Premium subscription stopped playback when I was
| watching something while cooking and at the same time, some
| music video was playing on a different device. It said
| something like "you cannot use your premium account in multiple
| places".
|
| I went back to my PC and immediately cancelled my subscription.
| That is a restriction that I don't have when I am not paying
| anything at all.
| metabrew wrote:
| I would love to pay for youtube premium, but i have a google
| workspace/apps/own-domain/whatever the hell they call it now
| account, and loads of stuff (like youtube premium) isn't
| supported.
| neilo40 wrote:
| I had that issue. I just created a new account solely for
| YouTube
| Havoc wrote:
| Same. It's wild that Google can't sort that out
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Make another account.
| shidoshi wrote:
| Lots of social commentary here, but I'd just note you're one mad
| lad. This is a great writeup and a nifty bit of sleuthing. I
| found it enjoyable to read.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| There are ads on YouTube? I guess my browser blocks them so well
| that I didn't know.
|
| The real problem here is that the AppleTV experience is so much
| worse than an ordinary web browser experience. Apple locked the
| hardware down to the point that it benefits YouTube's ad profits
| more than it benefits the end consumer who pays for it.
| focusedone wrote:
| I never see ads on Linux, Windows or Android. Occasionally I
| try to watch YouTube on an iPad and am shocked at how frequent
| and irritating the ads are.
|
| Same with browsing the web on an iPad outside of the home pi-
| hole'd network. Howwww do people deal with this every day?
|
| The iPad is a work-issued device so I don't often use it for
| personal things. Every time I do it's a reminder of how
| irritating it is to do so.
|
| It's kindof odd; before being issued an iPad I thought they
| were only useful as content consumption devices. Turns out it's
| super handy for quick remote access to work resources but
| locked to an ad-infested wasteland for general web browsing and
| streaming media. Who knew?
| Terretta wrote:
| This is a novella that just keeps getting twistier, going deeper,
| and turning out more rewarding.
|
| And clearly all these "reasoning" LLMs trained heavily on Eric
| Draken's refreshingly introspective monologue full of
| interjections and discoveries.
| not_your_mentat wrote:
| Does this work for Amazon Prime as well? I installed AdGuard Home
| last night and these two have been the only outliers so far.
| Havoc wrote:
| Nice to see a writeup that includes the failures too
| vincnetas wrote:
| note that GDPR consent section on the site is invalid, it does
| not have "decline" button. so might as well just get rid of it.
| thomasfl wrote:
| For ad free Youtube, go to https://yewtu.be or any other
| Invidious instances https://docs.invidious.io/instances/
|
| There is an arms race between YouTube and Invidious. From time to
| time Invidious is not working, but the team has always found new
| ways to circumvent YouTube and deliver the videos without ads.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| This wouldn't work on Roku TVs etc since there's no "browser"
| :(
| xela79 wrote:
| there's a reason the author included "on AppleTV" in the title.
| Alternative clients/frontends etc simply don't work
| skyyler wrote:
| Well, other than this one:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629
| https://github.com/yattee/yattee
|
| The UX is not great, though.
| greenpizza13 wrote:
| Or simply pay for YouTube. They provide a service, it's not our
| job as technologists to enable stealing it.
| arnath wrote:
| I mean, they provide the service by stealing data from their
| users. I would argue that this is just as ethically fine as
| Youtube's entire business model.
| DavideNL wrote:
| ... if there'd be a healthy amount of alternatives/competitors
| to chose from, that would probably be true.
|
| However, as we all know, it's basically a monopoly.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Absolutely! When you discount for cable tv, satellite tv,
| airborne tv, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Disney and others.
|
| Because we are hackers and everything we don't like (or don't
| want to pay for) is automatically a "monopoly".
| b8 wrote:
| Now for someone to figure out blocking FireTV OS
| j45 wrote:
| YouTube is hard to watch with ads once you've watched it without
| ads for a long time.
|
| Neat post to learn about the current way the video stream works.
|
| Has anyone else found enough utility in paying for a YouTube
| premium acct maybe for their entire household vs other streaming
| services?
| Fokamul wrote:
| I've opted to installing opensource youtube app with Adblock and
| sponsor block. LGTV Webos is so great, there is easy way to
| become "developer" and it will open official way to install
| homebrew apps on your own TV. Yeah, since you own it, it can be
| possible to do what you want with it.
|
| Fu** you to all Golden-cage devices like Apple, Samsung, etc.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I prefer not to use the OS on my TVs and opt for never letting
| them online, I just hook up my Apple TV to it, this gives me
| complete control over my TV as things should be.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| This article is crazy engineering work
| RKFADU_UOFCCLEL wrote:
| Why would this be possible without pwning a CA? If so they can
| just patch it the day after they discover this article. There's
| no reason to do this anyway when you can just plug a video out
| from a PC to the TV.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| A PC isn't an Apple TV
| cryptonector wrote:
| YouTube will detect when you don't stream their ads and will ask
| you to disable your ad blocker and comment as to what's up.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| ...or get an Android TV box and run Tubular ;)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-18 23:01 UTC)