Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ericdraken.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 659 posts

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

#191

Post by jjallen »

kaliqt wrote: post #166
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.

This reads like an ad. I wouldn't support them that way. They shaft creators in every way possible. You should be subscribing to Patreons and their video subscriptions. YouTube Premium is NOT the way.

> YouTube Premium is NOT the way.

So have 100 different Patreon subscriptions each month? The minimum pledge is $1. What if I watch 200 different YT creators? What about the short videos? Should I create a new Patreon subscription for each individual creator I watch? What if my interests frequently change (they do). Should I spend hours per month managing individual Patreon subscriptions?

The original post is about blocking ads. Blocking ads reduces the amount of money going to creators. Now you are saying that paying actual real money to not see ads is also not the way.

> They shaft creators in every way possible.

I guess this could be true that YT "shaft[s] creators in every way possible". If this were true, I'm somehow guessing that not basically everyone would show their videos there, don't you think?

There's a balance here; being universally against ads (which quite a few people here are) while also refusing to pay anything for content is not a congruent view.

At a very minimum there is considerable costs associated with delivering the video content, as most of us know.

And for the record, I do patronize the creators whom I watch lots of consistently.

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

#192

Post by neurostimulant »

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.

I understand the sentiment, but the creators actually only got peanuts (most don't even see any money) out of your $13 while the rest go to Google. You are paying Google for youtube, and Google pay (some) content creators with a tiny fraction of your subscription money.

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

#193

Post by userbinator »

sneak wrote: post #152
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.

Presumably this involves installing new CA certs on your devices, no?

Yes, and this also answers the other comment about what else I MITM for: blocking devices that I can't inspect the traffic of is another reason, since the proxy is the only way out of the network.

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

#194

Post by ddalex »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #159
moonchrome wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that's what you get when you're the product by being a free user. Paid service relationship works just fine for me - Google isn't ideal but YouTube is one of my main content sources + YouTube music for my family for slightly more than the price of Spotify family subscription - yeah it's an easy choice. Spotify suggestions and playlists weren't a seller feature for me for years. Maybe I'm missing out on a few podca…

No, Google will keep fucking you over and destroying the Internet, whether you pay or not. Not to mention the fact that what they pay out to creators is absolutely pathetic. Go find their Patreon, their Ko-fi, hell their paypal, anything but giving Google 13 bucks. Adblocking Google is morally right.

Wouldn't be not using Google at all the morally right choice ?

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

#195

Post by tcfhgj »

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.

I recommend donating money yourself (E.G. Patreon).

It's not only more effective, but also doesn't support Google (main player in the ad industry)

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

#196

Post by ddalex »

Shekelphile wrote: post #180
ohgodplsno wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Google will keep fucking you over and destroying the Internet, whether you pay or not. Not to mention the fact that what they pay out to creators is absolutely pathetic. Go find their Patreon, their Ko-fi, hell their paypal, anything but giving Google 13 bucks. Adblocking Google is morally right.

> Adblocking Google is morally right. All ads should be blocked. I do not consume ads, and am not interested in paying a ransom to hide them.

If you don't consume ads, please do not use any ad-supported service, that's the easiest thing to do.

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

#197

Post by sgammon »

playingalong wrote: post #16
sgammon wrote: post #6

that's not really a "flaw" in protobuf; the protobuf is Working As Intended by decoding the field in a different place when you modify it. i am not sure how one could possibly characterize that as a "flaw," since protobuf is a field-numeric length-prefixed protocol in the first place. it makes a (reasonable) assumption that bytes won't be messed with over the wire, leaving integrity to the reader, so even if this _wa…

It says January 2022. So likely if they wanted to harden the protocol after the blog post, they would already have.

Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't noticed that.

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

#198

Post by jjallen »

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'm giving them money to view fewer ads. Isn't this an inherently "anti-ad" consumer standpoint? I am telling YT/Google that I as a consumer am willing to pay money to not see ads.

Am I not telling them with my wallet to develop other ad-free solutions that I will pay them and the content creators money for?

> They pay the creators per impression even if you block the ads. Blocking ads harms Google, not the content producers.

Blocking ads and refusing to pay any money into the YT ecosystem decreases the revenue per viewer which will eventually reduce the amount of money YT pays to creators and/or increase the price they charge to YT premium subscribers.

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

#199

Post by Shekelphile »

ddalex wrote: post #196
Shekelphile wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adblocking Google is morally right. All ads should be blocked. I do not consume ads, and am not interested in paying a ransom to hide them.

If you don't consume ads, please do not use any ad-supported service, that's the easiest thing to do.

No.

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

#200

Post by layer8 »

sgammon wrote: post #189
layer8 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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`,…

The article actually shows a screenshot of the structure they are cutting off.

I would think that a dummy object would be trivial to detect.

Post reply on HN