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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

#521

Post by cbsmith »

notjoemama wrote: post #488
kentonv wrote: post #480

Cool hack overall, but some of the statements about protobuf strike me as odd. > Exploit a Protobuf Flaw to Easily Remove All Ads by Changing One Byte He's intentionally corrupting the tag on one field of the protobuf. The "flaw" is apparently that Protobuf ignores tag numbers it doesn't recognize. But that's not a flaw, it's a core design feature of Protobuf, designed to allow extensibility. > Notice how the Protobu…

Brilliant response and observations. I’m not sure I’d agree with this one tiny assertion though: “1.87MB is not that big“ I have lived in rural communities most of my life and unless I’m on my own Wi-Fi, this actually is a big file to download. Maybe they have a workaround for mobile? Mostly I just want to add that rural Wi-Fi still struggles with Web 2.0 architecture. More often we’re operating on 2-4G speeds. Altho…

It may be a big download depending on your bandwidth (which you're already doing if you are streaming the video), but it's not big in terms of a CPU trying to parse a protobuf. If you are decoding streaming video from YouTube, the extra CPU power needed to decode a protobuf of that size is barely going to qualify as a rounding error.

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

#522

Post by elif »

rvnx wrote: post #306
Lio wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the objection to ads is the tracking. If you subscribe to YouTube premium you’re making yourself even more identifiable. You end up seeing more creepy ads elsewhere on the web using your viewing history to target you. Versus an adblocker which will help hide you from Google everywhere.

What I find very unfair, is that I am paying for YouTube Premium, whose promise is "No ads", but the "poor content creators" are injecting ads that are directly embedded inside the stream. Like "Linus Tech Tips". I think YouTube should force streamers to tag the timecode of their in-stream ads, and auto-skip them for Premium users. It's like if you play a game and you purchase the In-App upgrade to remove the ads, an…

Yea baked in ads are actually against YouTube TOS but I've tried to report one of the most obnoxious bad actors (they run 90 second TV-style ad breaks made up of 4-5 premade ads with nothing to do with the presenter)

YouTube legal basically told me to kick rocks.

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

#523

Post by jefftk »

dragonwriter wrote: post #515
jefftk wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you taking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate , which was fixed in 2017?

The last sentence in the Wikipedia article you link provides reason to believe that the extensive and largely unfocussed show of action Google made in 2017 did not, in fact, solve the problem.

Are you sure these videos and their targeting are still a thing? Your comment is the first I've heard about it in years, and looking now everything I'm finding is years old.

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

#524

Post by elif »

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 :)

Tell me, do you casually click 15-20 videos on your phone while You're taxing before takeoff to be entertained for the whole flight? Do you use a media player that lets you turn off the screen but continue to listen to your just released yt podcast while you work out? Do you watch live feeds on your phone without ads? Or do you run a yt-dl scripts from the CL 3-4 times per year to farm w comments?

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

#525

Post by cbsmith »

slacka wrote: post #431
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.

Network level ad-blocking like Privoxy and pi-hole have so many downsides like they can't handle inline adverts. My pi4 pi-hole is unplugged right now because it just didn't work well. After hours wasted trying to make it work with all the services, I've thrown in the towel. The time involved is just not worth it for a home network. What works are browser based ad-blockers and app patchers like ReVanced. As my saving…

Inline adverts can be blocked, as long as you're decoding layer-7 (which is effectively what this ad is doing).

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

#526

Post by dieortin »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #512
notjoemama wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant response and observations. I’m not sure I’d agree with this one tiny assertion though: “1.87MB is not that big“ I have lived in rural communities most of my life and unless I’m on my own Wi-Fi, this actually is a big file to download. Maybe they have a workaround for mobile? Mostly I just want to add that rural Wi-Fi still struggles with Web 2.0 architecture. More often we’re operating on 2-4G speeds. Altho…

It's a little weird on HN to see someone refer to "rural wifi". Unless you're talking about a relatively rare form of mesh networking, there's not really any such thing as rural wifi, at least not in the sense that its different from any other kind of wifi - a very local RF network designed to share an access point. I assume you're using wifi as a stand-in for "internet" or "broadband". 4G speeds are completely fine…

I would guess he’s referring to a shared wifi network that connects to the internet through a low bandwidth link. That’s pretty common in small villages where I live.

1.87MB is definitely not small over a bad 2G link that you’re sharing with other people.

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

#527

Post by CamperBob2 »

dahfizz wrote: post #484
CamperBob2 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shrug) Insane, whatever. All I know is, when I call the IRS, I can get a human on the phone who actively wants to help. Try that with Google, PayPal, Amazon, Apple, or any number of other companies when an error they've made but refuse to even explain, much less fix, threatens to wreck your livelihood. To redress grievances with my government, I don't need to make the front page of HN or go viral on Twitter. We don'…

"megacorps have bad customer support" is a wildly different assertion than "megacorps are indistinguishable from government"

Ask the next person who comes on here begging for someone to unlock their account or restore their data so that they can make payroll.

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

#528

Post by cute_boi »

yukIttEft wrote: post #347
userbinator wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

layperson here: won't, say a banking app complain about the now new cert it deals with instead of the bank-cert?

most banks already do certificate pinning, even tho it is not necessary.

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

#529

Post by lxgr »

coder543 wrote: post #462
lxgr wrote: post #350

> We’re going to use WireGuard – we have the Intel AES-NI crypto instruction set WireGuard doesn’t actually use AES, as far as I know. In general, it seems like the author somewhat overestimates the CPU requirements for TLS encryption (or equivalently underestimates modern single-board computers): > The CPU requirements to decrypt and re-encrypt HTTPS traffic greatly exceed those available to Raspberry Pis. I'd be re…

I think you're underestimating the CPU requirements. If a weak Android phone is only able to decode 50Mb/s of TLS traffic, that's not a big problem in practice. It's a slow phone, usually connected to slow networks. On the other hand, if you have a gigabit internet connection at home and it is being bottlenecked to 50Mb/s by that weak device sitting between all of your computers and the internet, then that is a big p…

> If a weak Android phone is only able to decode 50Mb/s of TLS traffic

That's a lower, not an upper bound.

An RPi 4 can encrypt/decrypt AES-256-GCM at more than 300 Mbit/s, according to my rough measurements. That's per core, of which it has four.

RSA can be much more expensive, but that's besides the point – the author was claiming that AES-NI makes a meaningful difference here, which I'd really doubt even in the case of TLS. (As mentioned above, it can't help at all for Wireguard.)

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

#530

Post by kentonv »

notjoemama wrote: post #488
kentonv wrote: post #480

Cool hack overall, but some of the statements about protobuf strike me as odd. > Exploit a Protobuf Flaw to Easily Remove All Ads by Changing One Byte He's intentionally corrupting the tag on one field of the protobuf. The "flaw" is apparently that Protobuf ignores tag numbers it doesn't recognize. But that's not a flaw, it's a core design feature of Protobuf, designed to allow extensibility. > Notice how the Protobu…

Brilliant response and observations. I’m not sure I’d agree with this one tiny assertion though: “1.87MB is not that big“ I have lived in rural communities most of my life and unless I’m on my own Wi-Fi, this actually is a big file to download. Maybe they have a workaround for mobile? Mostly I just want to add that rural Wi-Fi still struggles with Web 2.0 architecture. More often we’re operating on 2-4G speeds. Altho…

As others pointed out, the article was talking about it as a CPU processing constraint, not a bandwidth constraint. In that context, it's not much. I do agree that it seems like an excessively large amount of metadata to be downloading just to play one video.
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