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

Post by userbinator » Sun, Aug 27, 2023, 7:22 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #51

userbinator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike the attitude of those who reject ads but also refuse to pay. How is this any different from changing the channel, leaving the room, or just hitting the mute button and closing your eyes in the scenario of "regular" TV when adverts or any other content you don't want to see appears? Compelled consumption should be illegal.

The assumption is that not many people would leave the room, close their eyes or mute the ads. If you created a painless, super easy way to remove all ads, i'm sure that TV channels will also find it hard to sell to advertisers, and thus, their revenue would decrease.

Post by SkiFire13 » Sun, Aug 27, 2023, 7:24 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #39

omnicognate wrote: post #29

The only alternatives to a service like youtube showing people ads are for its users to pay for it, for it to be funded through donations, for it to be run by the government and paid for through taxation or for it not to exist. I prefer the first or second approaches and Youtube is unusual among social media sites in actually giving me the first option. So I happily pay for premium and while I'd rather that were the…

I dislike the attitude of those who reject ads but also refuse to pay. How is this any different from changing the channel, leaving the room, or just hitting the mute button and closing your eyes in the scenario of "regular" TV when adverts or any other content you don't want to see appears? Compelled consumption should be illegal.

Post by izacus » Sun, Aug 27, 2023, 7:26 AM UTC

FireInsight wrote: post #38

omnicognate wrote: post #29

The only alternatives to a service like youtube showing people ads are for its users to pay for it, for it to be funded through donations, for it to be run by the government and paid for through taxation or for it not to exist. I prefer the first or second approaches and Youtube is unusual among social media sites in actually giving me the first option. So I happily pay for premium and while I'd rather that were the…

I use Youtube through Piped ( https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped ) to preserve privacy, block ads, and prevent getting sucked in by the algorithm. The only part of Youtube that I find valuable is the content. Not the UI, not the comments, algorithm. Free content hosting is nice, but it's not the only platform hosting videos for free. If I wanted to pay for a streaming service, it'd be Nebula ( https://nebula.tv/ ), b…

Post by nevi-me » Sun, Aug 27, 2023, 7:27 AM UTC

cannedbeets wrote: post #40

omnicognate wrote: post #29

The only alternatives to a service like youtube showing people ads are for its users to pay for it, for it to be funded through donations, for it to be run by the government and paid for through taxation or for it not to exist. I prefer the first or second approaches and Youtube is unusual among social media sites in actually giving me the first option. So I happily pay for premium and while I'd rather that were the…

There are so many reasons to block ads. Aesthetics alone. Protecting your valuable time. Consenting to watching an ad is not the same as consenting to your entire life being tracked and monitored. But the most important issue is that as long as malware can spread through ads ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising ), everyone should be blocking all ads.

Post by can16358p » Sun, Aug 27, 2023, 7:28 AM UTC

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.