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Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

ericdraken.com

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Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#141

Post by newaccount74 »

fsckboy wrote: post #43
kccqzy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's not exactly computationally expensive if you can do it at 2GB/s! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931581

it's computationally expensive if it's more computation than all the other things you'd like your hardware to do, i think is a better definition.

No, that's not the issue.

The author seemed to have parsed the protobuf data by converting it all to a huge hierarchy of thousands (millions?) of Python objects. Of course that is slow and takes a few seconds. That's so many allocations!

But if you are just looking for a specific tag, there's no need for that, I'm pretty sure you can parse protobuf in place without allocations, which would be a million times faster. You could maybe even do it in Python with reasonable speed.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#142

Post by [deleted] »

userbinator wrote: post #12

I've been MITM'ing my traffic to, among other things, strip ads and rewrite pages with things like custom CSS, ever since I discovered The Proxomitron over 2 decades ago. It does tend to get me profiled as a "bot" by CloudFlare and such, but there are not-so-trivial ways around that too. It also shows why things like remote attestation are hazardous for user freedom.

[deleted]

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#143

Post by izacus »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #114
izacus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they didn't remove it did they? You just refuse to pay for that service and spread bs to make you feel better?

They removed it from in front of the paywall to behind the paywall. The non-paid version used to do it. It was a memorably jarring experience working out WTF happened when background-play was rugged.

I don't remember it ever playing in the background without a sub, when was that?

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#144

Post by cinntaile »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #135
jjallen wrote: post #122

I just subscribe to YouTube premium to support my favorite application out there. I learn so much from the people who spend hours and hours making videos every month that I am more than happy to pay a measly $13 or whatever it is every month to YouTube.

Nebula sounds like a better fit.

Youtube has the content the GP wants, why switch to a platform with different content?

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#145

Post by jampekka »

speedgoose wrote: post #24

On a side note, I noticed a rare tracking consent banner. You may want to update it to track users and respect GDPR correctly. It should be possible to refuse as easily as accepting to be tracked, with the same button size and colour, for example. The tracking should start after consent is given. Also, GDPR isn’t so much about accepting cookies but giving consent to be tracked. So many websites get it wrong, and the…

I interpret this as an opt-in as you can just scroll past the banner and not be tracked. If the site starts tracking without clicking the consent the banner is useless, or maybe even worse than useless, from the legal point of view.

It's maddening how people just refuse to understand the GDPR. This is likely partly due to intentional misinformation campaigns from the spyware (i.e. advertisement) industry. And then the cargo cult takes care of the rest.

The general gist of GDPR is that if you're not doing some shady shit that your visitors wouldn't want you to do, you don't need a consent. As you said, it has nothing to do with cookies.

And yes, Google Analytics etc are shady shit that your visitors wouldn't want you to do.

Also most of the nags you see all the time are illegal for any sane intepretation of the law. But the regulators just don't care to enforce the law at all. So if you want to do shady shit, just do it without adding to the insult with having to bother with your illegal nag.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#146

Post by ffhhttt »

jjallen wrote: post #122

I just subscribe to YouTube premium to support my favorite application out there. I learn so much from the people who spend hours and hours making videos every month that I am more than happy to pay a measly $13 or whatever it is every month to YouTube.

You could probably support them more directly over Patreon/etc. so they’d get to keep a much bigger proportion of what you pay

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#147

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1B05H1N wrote: post #26
userbinator wrote: post #12

I've been MITM'ing my traffic to, among other things, strip ads and rewrite pages with things like custom CSS, ever since I discovered The Proxomitron over 2 decades ago. It does tend to get me profiled as a "bot" by CloudFlare and such, but there are not-so-trivial ways around that too. It also shows why things like remote attestation are hazardous for user freedom.

You should be okay as long as you solve the challenge(s).

I also run a forward proxy and found adding a user-agent header was all that was necessary.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#148

Post by pmontra »

chii wrote: post #51
userbinator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike the attitude of those who reject ads but also refuse to pay. How is this any different from changing the channel, leaving the room, or just hitting the mute button and closing your eyes in the scenario of "regular" TV when adverts or any other content you don't want to see appears? Compelled consumption should be illegal.

The assumption is that not many people would leave the room, close their eyes or mute the ads. If you created a painless, super easy way to remove all ads, i'm sure that TV channels will also find it hard to sell to advertisers, and thus, their revenue would decrease.

My last CRT TV had a picture in picture mode. When ads started I pressed the PiP button on the remote, placed the channel I was looking at in the PiP window and started watching something else. When the ads were over I came back to that channel or stayed on the other one if I found something more interesting.

I watch TV on my tablet now, streamed from a Raspberry PI with a TV Hat. Again, I activate the popup player, start browsing, maybe checking HN or whatever. I put the volume off. Maybe I start doing something else. The advantage of a tablet is that I can bring it with me wherever I go in my house. The TV, not so much. I rarely switched on my TV in the past two years.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#149

Post by sneak »

jjallen wrote: post #122

I just subscribe to YouTube premium to support my favorite application out there. I learn so much from the people who spend hours and hours making videos every month that I am more than happy to pay a measly $13 or whatever it is every month to YouTube.

If you continue to give Google money you'll continue to get things like AMP, Manifest V3, Web "Integrity", and whatever else they think up to track you across the web.

They're an ad company. They pay the creators per impression even if you block the ads. Blocking ads harms Google, not the content producers.

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