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Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Sponsor block demonstrates one approach to this. If everybody has the ad at the same time stamps, sponsor block would just work out of the box.
If they got creative and introduced different time stamps for the advertisements for different people, then we could do something like MD5 hash of different video payloads, and look for the MD5 hash that isn't distributed to everybody, mark that as an advertisement
Theoretically they could deny serving byte ranges before the end-of-ad mark until those bytes have been served and a plausible time (the duration of the ad) has passed. Practically this is likely more expensive than what the ad revenue would yield.
Sure, but then you just need a youtube front running cache that preloads videos, or load multiple videos at the same time... i know i'm not the only person who watches youtube at 3x speed, so you could speed up past the ad, etc.
They could use stream encryption (DRM) to ensure you're viewing the ads as expected and make it hard to capture and playback.
Its a arms race, you could always just record the screen with a camera and edit it out as the ultimate.
you could spin up a vm, and capture the video output
you could use a graphics driver that lets you inspect the frame buffer, etc
you could use the side channel attacks to get the decrypted video frames, heartbleed etc, etc etc
Do these actually work against HDCP? (Outside using a camera, obviously). I know it used to work decently well against most "ordinary" attacks like VMs and capture cards.
I believe HDCP keys have already been leaked, I can find a couple different references to them on GitHub even.
This would probably be unviable, since from a UX standpoint you want the first segments of the non-ad content to be preloaded when the ad ends.
That will be irrelevant when the control freaks take over. Case in point: anti piracy ads in the good old DVD/BluRay days. Unskippable shit that ironically only punishes people who bought legitimate media.
I honestly think that the people at Google are a bit smarter than that, but we'll see whether that holds or not.