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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

#641

Post by CamperBob2 »

dahfizz wrote: post #638
CamperBob2 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a really simple flow chart to figure this out: "Does entity X have a monopoly on violence?" If yes, they are a government. If no, they are not. Whether X is nice or mean, important or unimportant, is irrelevant.

That's simple in countries without a Second Amendment, or that don't recognize self-defense as a fundamental human right, but it's not simple in this one.

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

#642

Post by chpatrick »

fsckboy wrote: post #541
chpatrick wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could choose to not use YouTube out of principle. Besides these days it's barely a monopoly with TikTok.

"you can believe in the benefits of law and order, and just walk away any time you encounter a thief who doesn't". Yes, or I can steal my stuff back which gives me pleasure. "anyway, you can switch from the high end monopolist to the low brow monopolist so I don't see what you're complaining about" Yes, you don't. the right to wear hair-shirts is not the only principle that counts.

Do you shoplift as well to stick it to Walmart?

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

#643

Post by spaceisballer »

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.

I’m a novice, and figured it out and have zero maintenance. Unless you count occasionally updating pihole every now and then. I have a word file with all my exceptions (mostly white lists for Microsoft gaming stuff my kids want) in the event I ever need to reload (ever since I switched to a better SD never have had corruption issues). I understand the spouse issue, mine loves clicking ads on her phone. Easiest workaround is to pop off WiFi click link then go back to WiFi.

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

#644

Post by spaceisballer »

Friedduck wrote: post #639
slacka wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is what I fail to understand. It’s a cool hack but ad-free YouTube is a few dollars a month. Spend that creative time elsewhere!

It’s $18.99 a month for an individual, I agree with your sentiment but really don’t feel like it’s that inexpensive. Then again I don’t consume large amounts of YouTube as most people seem to do.

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

#645

Post by JohnFen »

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…

> its common for people to literally refer to their internet connection as their "wifi"

This. It's the same sort of error as when people refer to the web as "the internet" -- which common even on HN.

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

#646

Post by userbinator »

sgammon wrote: post #630
userbinator wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not opposing, just adding more context.

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

#647

Post by userbinator »

josephcsible wrote: post #610
userbinator wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have a minor quibble with "my network". You should have the right to intercept the traffic originating or terminating at your devices, but not to intercept any traffic going between other people's devices just because it's on your network.

Then it wouldn't be my network anymore.

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

#648

Post by krackers »

Scaevolus wrote: post #519
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…

The trickiest part of decoding protobufs blind is how embedded messages and strings have the same tag type, but that's pretty easy to handle. You can write a simple protobuf decoder in a couple hundred lines of code if you don't want to pull in the full protoc dependency: https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/blob/master/guberna... https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/blob/master/guberna...

>but that's pretty easy to handle.

How do you solve it? Is it just heuristically checking where if the varlength byte sequence itself contains tags, it's likely to be a message?

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

#649

Post by josephcsible »

userbinator wrote: post #647
josephcsible wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a minor quibble with "my network". You should have the right to intercept the traffic originating or terminating at your devices, but not to intercept any traffic going between other people's devices just because it's on your network.

Then it wouldn't be my network anymore.

Should your ISP be able to MITM all of your traffic just because it's going over their network? If not, then what's the difference?

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

#650

Post by Moldoteck »

elif wrote: post #265

[flagged]

I pay for premium, but when I'm visiting my parents in another country, some premium features are deactivated, no more yt in background, sometimes even ads. Also sponsored blocks in yt videos. Like really, at this point on desktop &mobile i get a better experience by using ublock+sponsorblock compared to yt premium... The only problem is tv- I can't use ublock there and using some box for yt is not that nice: no remote support, sometimes worse chromecast support. An revanced app for tv would be a godsent
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