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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

#181

Post by pixelesque »

sspiff wrote: post #61
FireInsight wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Youtube through Piped ( https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped ) to preserve privacy, block ads, and prevent getting sucked in by the algorithm. The only part of Youtube that I find valuable is the content. Not the UI, not the comments, algorithm. Free content hosting is nice, but it's not the only platform hosting videos for free. If I wanted to pay for a streaming service, it'd be Nebula ( https://nebula.tv/ ), b…

While Nebula has some creators om it that I follow, no platform comes close to having the broad collection of channels YouYube does. I follow a wide variety of channels, but there are maybe a dozen to 20 that I would consider essential. Maybe 3-4 are on Nebula. I think for a lot of viewers and creators, YouTube is simply inevitable at this point.

On top of that, in my experience both CuriousityStream and Nebula's search functionality is pretty bad: I got fed up of the number of times I searched for something mentioned in a spoken "advertisment" by users like Mustard on youtube who said they have extra content on those services and then I can't find it or find out how to list all videos by those users, I stopped my subscription to them...

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

#182

Post by chronogram »

tinus_hn wrote: post #179
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.

A problem with paying is that you have to be logged on so you can’t avoid being tracked and having every video you ever watch linked to you for all eternity.

You have privacy controls in your Google account. I have web & app activity off, location history off, YouTube search off and YouTube watch history auto deleting after a few months. https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy

If you're talking about them building a secret extra profile about you with those things turned off, then they wouldn't need you to login for that.

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

#183

Post by rightbyte »

fulafel wrote: post #86
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a CF employee but I am pretty sure it's working as intended as they built and use this: https://github.com/cloudflare/mitmengine

Here's hoping that, if they do it, they'll start blocking corporate TLS mitm regimes too.

Ever since Google started pushing HTTPS I understood that non-encryption would be a future privacy problem.

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

#184

Post by Jowsey »

dewey wrote: post #131

Easier solution: You can get YouTube Premium for $2 a month if you just happen to be in Argentinia while you sign up, even if you are using a US credit card to pay.

Does anyone know if this changes how much your view is worth to creators?

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

#185

Post by tinus_hn »

chronogram wrote: post #182
tinus_hn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A problem with paying is that you have to be logged on so you can’t avoid being tracked and having every video you ever watch linked to you for all eternity.

You have privacy controls in your Google account. I have web & app activity off, location history off, YouTube search off and YouTube watch history auto deleting after a few months. https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy If you're talking about them building a secret extra profile about you with those things turned off, then they wouldn't need you to login for that.

And if you believe Google is not storing that information anyway I’ve got a beautiful bridge for sale.

If you don’t use an account you can create a fresh container every once in a while and start the game anew and you can choose to not associate it all with your identity.

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

#186

Post by soraminazuki »

sneak wrote: post #149
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.

I just have no sympathy for the ad industry. I wouldn't have gotten into ad blocking if ads were non-intrusive, non-deceptive, and purely contextual. I used to even click on them more than a decade ago. But no, the ad industry wasn't satisfied with the money they were already making. They wanted to stalk you across the web and shove endless amounts of junk ads to uninterested people.

The ad industry brought the current situation on to themselves.

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

#187

Post by layer8 »

sgammon wrote: post #174
layer8 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how mandatory fields work in Protobuf, but to mitigate the attack, Google’s YouTube client could treat the field as mandatory and refuse service when it finds the field to be missing or having a default value.

Protocol buffers don't always support "default" values, because certain types will include a protocol-default value. For example, a `bool` which is not present will return `false` instead of say, a nil type. Required fields were a feature of Proto2. In proto3 syntax (latest), the required field concept was dropped because it caused issues with protocol evolution and was easy to misuse. In essence, because of the back…

Well, for the field in question, I imagine that it should be easy to distinguish meaningful content from whatever it defaults to when the field is missing.

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

#188

Post by FireInsight »

izacus wrote: post #75
FireInsight wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Youtube through Piped ( https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped ) to preserve privacy, block ads, and prevent getting sucked in by the algorithm. The only part of Youtube that I find valuable is the content. Not the UI, not the comments, algorithm. Free content hosting is nice, but it's not the only platform hosting videos for free. If I wanted to pay for a streaming service, it'd be Nebula ( https://nebula.tv/ ), b…

> If I wanted to pay for a streaming service, it'd be Nebula ( https://nebula.tv/ ), because I know it benefits creators Huh? Ad revenue and Premium subscription also ends up as direct payouts for YouTube creators, what are you talking about? Why the need for this BS?

Maybe it's just my bubble, but it is often I hear that "Our Nebula subscribers fund this show, we couldn't do this with youtube revenue alone" or "Signing up to Nebula with my link gives me a steady source of income that youtube just cannot provide".

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

#189

Post by sgammon »

layer8 wrote: post #187
sgammon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protocol buffers don't always support "default" values, because certain types will include a protocol-default value. For example, a `bool` which is not present will return `false` instead of say, a nil type. Required fields were a feature of Proto2. In proto3 syntax (latest), the required field concept was dropped because it caused issues with protocol evolution and was easy to misuse. In essence, because of the back…

Well, for the field in question, I imagine that it should be easy to distinguish meaningful content from whatever it defaults to when the field is missing.

In this case since he mentions it's a "tree" of data (he means a "message"), it would be a sub-object that would become an initialized default. So there would be an "object" there, but it would have no "ads" array in it, or what not.

Protobuf does this so you can do `deep.dotted.paths` and you won't get null exceptions (probably a side effect of starting partly in Java). The leaf fields end up as empty strings, `0`, `false`, or an empty array for repeated fields.

It's a neat trick to get it to ignore a field, just not a "flaw." It's actually a compatibility feature in disguise.

(So it might be pretty hard to detect, versus the potentially-legitimate case of just not having any ads to show.)

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

#190

Post by sgammon »

layer8 wrote: post #187
sgammon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protocol buffers don't always support "default" values, because certain types will include a protocol-default value. For example, a `bool` which is not present will return `false` instead of say, a nil type. Required fields were a feature of Proto2. In proto3 syntax (latest), the required field concept was dropped because it caused issues with protocol evolution and was easy to misuse. In essence, because of the back…

Well, for the field in question, I imagine that it should be easy to distinguish meaningful content from whatever it defaults to when the field is missing.

Anyway, none of this would be a problem if the TLS tunnel broke because the cert failed to validate against an issuer pin shipped with the app.
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