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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

#391

Post by imglorp »

Lio wrote: post #369
imglorp wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to address the concept of "ads are creepy" which you will hear often. It's a false equivalence. Most prominently you'll see the flag under "privacy settings" something like "don't show me relevant ads"; this is obviously a manipulative placebo. Ads are not the problem. That creepy feeling is the awareness that "they know everything about you", or literally how your vivisected intellect is presented in a mark…

That’s a very interesting point. It does seem weird though that the surveillance firms would go to the lengths of using dark patterns and persistent nagging to get users to allow targeted ads if it didn’t matter to them.

I haven't seen a lot of nagging, usually it's a checkbox in an options page. Where are you seeing them?

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

#392

Post by voytec »

greyface- wrote: post #17
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.

> It does tend to get me profiled as a "bot" by CloudFlare Since Cloudflare employees are known to lurk here, I'd like to know: is this considered a false positive, or working as intended?

I have no releation to CF but from my perspective, if a human is marked as a bot - that's a false positive.

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

#393

Post by hedora »

From the table of contents:

> New Goal: Let’s trick YouTube into believing I am a 70-year-old male living in Italy.

Once I somehow convinced ad targeting I was in the market for $500 machine washable silk pajamas for my mistress.

Best ads ever, though I wonder what they were paying per impression.

After switching to Apple TV, we mostly get incorrectly geo-targeted local ads. It’s better on average, I guess.

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

#394

Post by smoldesu »

slikrick wrote: post #382
BoppreH wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good question, and I think we haven't explored alternative solutions enough. As for me, I'm happy to pay for Netflix, Nebula, my VPN, and other services. I still pay, but I'm disappointed in Spotify, who is pushing more and more soft ads even on supposed ad-free plans. But a YouTube Premium subscription would be financing this ad machine and the decisions that come with it. Have you watched Shorts? No thanks…

if nobody pays for YouTube then YouTube will go away.

I'm prepared. I own a 10tb hard drive that is half-filled with YouTube videos I've backed up. That's 13,000-odd videos in 360p, all raring to go once YouTube bites the dust.

Defending YouTube because we're afraid it will "go away" is the same Stockholm Syndrome that paralyzed people on Twitter for so long. I welcome a change that forces people onto more P2P-oriented services, the status-quo is obnoxious and unsustainable.

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

#395

Post by lnauta »

Excellent write up! I learned a lot and there's still much I did not fully understand.

In my spare time I got to the point in the article of trying to figure out which URLs are ads and blocking those with a pihole in section 4.11 and failing miserably. Cool to see some techniques I would never consider, and they work!

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

#397

Post by dxxvi »

bavell wrote: post #356
elif wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using premium for almost a decade now, since before it was rebranded from YouTube red. I'll let you know when it's safe to remove your tinfoil hat. Oh and I'll be downloading my videos for offline viewing and listening to ad free unrestricted music as well.

Enjoy the tiny hole in your wallet? Weird flex. I enjoy the same benefits using uBlock origin and yt-dl. And it didn't take any tinfoil :)

Thank you for reminding me that yt-dlp also works with youtube music (didn't think of that). I just tried to list all the available formats of a song there:

    ID  EXT   RESOLUTION FPS CH │   FILESIZE  TBR PROTO │ VCODEC         VBR ACODEC      ABR ASR MORE INFO
    ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    233 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
    234 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
    599 m4a   audio only      2 │    1.05MiB  31k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.5   31k 22k ultralow, m4a_dash
    600 webm  audio only      2 │    1.27MiB  37k https │ audio only         opus        37k 48k ultralow, webm_dash
    139 m4a   audio only      2 │    1.67MiB  49k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.5   49k 22k low, m4a_dash
    249 webm  audio only      2 │    1.86MiB  55k https │ audio only         opus        55k 48k low, webm_dash
    250 webm  audio only      2 │    2.44MiB  71k https │ audio only         opus        71k 48k low, webm_dash
    140 m4a   audio only      2 │    4.42MiB 130k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.2  130k 44k medium, m4a_dash
    251 webm  audio only      2 │    4.71MiB 138k https │ audio only         opus       138k 48k medium, webm_dash
Hm ... no mp3 (my car accepts mp3 only) and the bit rate is not very high. Is youtube music that bad?

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

#398

Post by lxgr »

elif wrote: post #265

[flagged]

> I bet some of y'all blocking YT ads are paying for Spotify. That's just bad planning even if not immoral/illegal.

That argument works the other way around too: I'd pay for Youtube Premium if it didn't force me to also pay for Youtube Music in the process.

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

#400

Post by musictubes »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #351
quickthrower2 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust (with regards to privacy, censorship and bias) governments even less than Google to be honest.

Any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

That is insane. No corporation has the ability to incarcerate you or kill you. No corporation can round up your family.

What, precisely, is the “threat” that Google presents that does not rely on a government to be the muscle. Are they going to cancel your Gmail account? Cut you off from YouTube?

Surely if they actually are as powerful and dangerous as you think they are you wouldn’t use their stuff at all. But then I guess they wouldn’t be all that powerful if you could just stop using them…

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