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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

#621

Post by brewdad »

dieortin wrote: post #526
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can’t imagine a scenario where someone with that setup would be streaming YouTube often enough to spend the effort to block the ads. Seeing one ad a month isn’t worth the effort to manage YouTube ad whack-a-mole.

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

#622

Post by tcfhgj »

izacus wrote: post #238
tcfhgj wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's the same Google which is providing the whole transcoding, delivery and bandwidth infrastructure to deliver you those videos? Something that costs rather steep amount of money?

I pay more than enough indirectly to Google (via buying products from companies that buy Google ads)

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

#623

Post by [deleted] »

mhils wrote: post #612
yumraj wrote: post #587

Qs: to those who are running a MITM proxy Is there no risk running an MITM proxy, even if self hosted, that can see all your financial and other important private communication? I know a couple mentioned here are open source, but are they guaranteed to be safe? How do I know which one (s) are good to use and can be trusted. I want to rub it based on this thread, but have the above concern.

I can answer this as one of the mitmproxy devs: We're doing this for 10+ years as FOSS, we're a relatively well-known project (so lots of eyes hopefully), our software has absolutely zero telemetry / phone home functionality, and we're developing under our real names. We also have relevant backgrounds in either the security industry and academia, and absolutely no plans to monetize mitmproxy. Does that make it guaran…

[deleted]

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

#624

Post by xethos »

ukuina wrote: post #599
eertami wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used a PiHole for a while but after a corrupted SD card I said screw it and started using NextDNS. I have very few subscriptions, in fact nothing else except Spotify, but this one was worth the time saved and hasn't required any maintenance on my end.

Why not AdGuard DNS? It's free.

How heartwarming that they run such a wonderful service purely out of the goodness of their hearts, with no income from it, and no expectation of financial compensation.

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

#625

Post by sizzle »

Salgat wrote: post #486
skinner927 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an unfair critique of the PiHole and I believe you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. The PiHole blocks DNS and that’s all it’s designed to do, and it does it well. There’s a grandiose amount of telemetry, marketing, and general unsavory traffic flying through your network that didn’t originate from a browser. The PiHole is not exactly a turnkey solution and does take some adjusting to your…

The problem is that unless you're willing to do surgery on a regular basis as you come across blocked sites, PiHole is going to cause more problems than it solves when you have your entire family using it. Even google stops working correctly because results for products on the front page start leading to blocked links. I like PiHole, but I had to stop using it because it was so aggravating for my wife.

This is not my experience. Pihole works flawlessly for me and it’s sitting in my closet connected to my cable modem. Haven’t touched it in a year. No broken mainstream sites and I’m blocking telemetry and other crap from apple, Amazon, google, Netflix, Hulu, Wyze, etc. related to advertising and device analytics trying to profile my usage. Pi-hole has been a blessing in the war on privacy and targeted advertising.

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

#626

Post by sizzle »

ryaneager wrote: post #474
KerrAvon wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What services are you having trouble with? My RPi PiHole has been working great for whole-house blocking for a half-decade now.

Likewise. My biggest tip is set your secondary DNS to something outside your networks so if your pi-hole goes down your entire network doesn’t go down you just get ads.

Is it okay to use cloudflare dns?

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

#627

Post by omneity »

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…

As the old saying goes, the best way to get help on the internet is to post a wrong answer.

In this case, getting a reply straight off the source.

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

#628

Post by brokenmachine »

michaelmrose wrote: post #584
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having worked for an internet service provider its common for people to literally refer to their internet connection as their "wifi" and fail to differentiate between their network and their upstream connection or even fail to differentiate between more obvious categories of things like their computer being able to turn on and "the internet". Their mental model isn't a graph its an amorphous blob. It's humorous if yo…

It blows my mind that people can be that disinterested in how the things they use actually work.

I would never want to be that dependent on first-level helpdesk to solve my problems for me.

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

#629

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #540
docmars wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any gamers out there, Reshade's installer is another example where TLS istn't implemented properly. It fails to download effect/shader packages for basic setup on up-to-date Windows machines because it requires that you disable TLS 1.3 globally on Windows so it can use 1.1 or 1.2. [1] https://reshade.me/forum/troubleshooting/8746-reshade-v-5-8-...

I never heard of reshade before but that is quite crazy. The only explanation I can think of is that the backend they connect to implements TLS 1.3 but in a broken way (because the client crypto lib would otherwise fall back to TLS 1.2 on its own) which really makes you wonder just how broken the crypto impl on their servers is and how many vulnerabilities they’re wide open to.

Here are a few sites one (IMHO) would expect to support TLS1.3 but do not

   www.digitalocean.com
   arstechnica.com (Amazon)
   git.kernel.org
   cdn.netbsd.org (Fastly)

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

#630

Post by sgammon »

userbinator wrote: post #607
sgammon wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Corporate MITM" is built into the very idea of PKI. Running your own custom PKI is a completely valid way to operate a network. This is a feature because it allows anyone to establish their own trust tree, completely outside of the public certificate trust network. "Regimes" sounds pejorative but in truth, companies have a duty and in many cases a legal obligation to protect their networks. Prima facie, I don't see…

And as a personal user, I also should have the right to intercept the traffic on my network.

That's what I'm standing up for in this comment, but you've characterized it as opposition. I don't understand, perhaps you'd like to clarify.
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