“This will allow Youtube to locate the best content” 🤡
It’s so insulting they add flavour text like this as if to call you a fucking moron to your face
“We know what’s best for you”
I mean… detecting (some) VPNs is as trivial as
fetch('https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/raw/refs/heads/main/output/vpn-ipv4.txt').then( res => res.text() ).then( res => console.log( res.includes( "1.2.3.4" ) ) )thanks to https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/
FWIW though I did try, connected via a random VPN from ProtonVPN from Argentina… and it wasn’t in that list. So it’s not perfect. Also ProtonVPN has apparently today 13K servers according to https://protonvpn.com/vpn-servers
That being said I can imagine that Google, which is literally built on crawling the Web, has all the infrastructure and expertise needed to have such lists and up to date ones.
I’m not justifying blocking VPN here, only trying to clarify that unless you self-host in a rather specific setup (i.e. not relying a popular cloud provider but truly self hosting) it’s technically not hard to block VPNs.
Tip: Peertube Companion is a good extension for directing you to duplicates of the video you’re trying to watch if it can be found elsewhere.
Everything detects VPNs. Reddit has an error screen I’ve never seen before about network activity when I use a VPN and I’m not logged in. YouTube refuses to let me watch embedded videos when I’m on my VPN. Many pages simply refuse to load.
I watched youtube religously 10-15 years ago. Now when I try to enjoy some content, I struggle to find anything of quality that’s in my feed. Sometimes I’m scrolling for 10 minutes and give up. Their algorithm for what might interest me was so much better back then.
I love that this complaint is posted to Lemmy: a platform that forces me to pause my VPN to make a comment.
Using Tor right now, no idea what you are talking about… oh right you use that instance.
.world =/= “Lemmy” 😉
Yeah, world is kinda shitty for that
I have a Tridactyl rule to rewrite YouTube URL to
youtube-local(repository https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local/ ) e.g. https://www.youtube.com/ becomes http://localhost:9999/https://www.youtube.com but as others have suggested, I do my bet to avoid YouTube entirely, because Google is bad, Big Tech is bad.Oh, so what they’re really saying is that a platform owned by GOOGLE has trouble FINDING the best content?
Everyone knows.
If you find what you’re looking for the first time, they can’t serve you as many ads.
Can’t argue with that, there goes my oneliner 🤣
It’s time to switch to Newpipe or Invidious, YouTube clients focused on privacy, without adverts and without Google’s clutches.
Been trying out Invidious lately. Nice stuff if it is not down for a reason or two.
Oh! Speaking of a devil. It is down right now!
Yeah, i even made a script just to log into its container (proxmox lxc) and pull the latest image when i see video stop loading.
It’s almost always google actively changing things, sometimes directly targeting invidious.
What did also helped was give its container 2 cpu cores rather than just 1. The internally errors and timeouts causes by google changes cause a big strain on it so it often crashed in combination with needing an update (leaving me unable to backup my up to date subscription list)
I haven’t used Invidious, but I’ve never had.an issue with PipePipe being down.
youtube sucks ever since googol bought it. I cannot believe people still use it.
Google bought YouTube in like 2006. I liked it before they bought it, sure, but I would be hard pressed to say it’s been all downhill after the first year.
They always could. What appears to be happening is that channels now have the option to turn on “a switch” so that content wont play if a VPN is detected. Most VPN ip addresses are well known, because they arent a secret. Everyone who uses the VPN goes through it.
If you come across the above message, its because the content creator turned it on. I had it come up with “stick to football”. Its the only thing that it comes up with. I just unsubbed and wont watch anymore. Im not turning off my VPN for anyone or anything. Id rather just go with out. I encourage all of you to do the same.
You could probably just record the users ID and it’s IP address. IP addresses that see a lot of different user IDs are either VPNs, companies or universities.
Or they are just home users behind a CGNAT, which more and more ISPs use.
And even if they aren’t, home users usually have dynamic IPs, meaning it can change.
Another thing that only very large companies can do is see the response time and compare packet size from different servers to narrow down your location, effectively defeating the VPN in a lot of cases.
Hypothetically, a specific amount of bytes gets sent to server B, response time indicates it was received 300 miles away which matches the response time of going from Server B to Server A where the user lives.
Of course it’s still important to use a VPN, if only because those big companies don’t want us to.
The latency to your VPN server is a constant added to the latency between your VPN server and whatever servers you are connected to. As long as the user’s VPN service doesn’t use different VPN servers for different destinations, it is impossible to determine the location of the user behind the VPN based on latency, and in general it is impossible to determine how far a user is from their VPN server because of varying latency introduced by the user’s own network or by bad infrastructure at the local ISP level. You can only know how far they aren’t based on the speed of light across the surface of the earth.
But, without a VPN, this is a real attack that was proven by a high school student using some quirks of Discord CDNs. Even without using Discord’s CDNs, if somebody wanted to locate web visitors using this technique, they could just rent CDN resources like nearly every big company is doing. Of course, if you have the opportunity to pull this off, you normally have the user’s IP address and don’t care about inferring the location by latency. The reason why it was notable with Discord was because the attacker was not able to obtain the victim’s IP address.
You say what I described is impossible but it’s been demonstrated by researchers such as “CPV: Delay-Based Location Verification for the Internet” by AbdelRahman Abdou with the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University Ontario.
Furthermore, on top of that method, if a company has access to data from servers in multiple places along the chain between endpoints, then they can see that a series of packets of specific size are traveling in a specific direction, narrowing down the location of the other endpoint. A company like Amazon, whose AWS servers make up almost 30% of the internet.
One of the more convoluted methods to defeat this approach was to simply add more stops along the chain, fragment the encrypted data into multiple parts, and pass it along random paths to the endpoint. I believe, but I could be wrong, that Tor utilizes this method. The problem with that is: it’s slower.
This…sounds a bit like bs. Can you share a more detailed writeup? At best you could get a radius, but that wouldn’t really be helpful
Yeah there was a cool paper on Delay Response method by AbdelRahman Abdou with Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University called “CPV: Delay-Based Location Verification for the Internet”.
The other method I mentioned, checking packet size and general direction, would require accessing data along multiple stops before reaching the other endpoint with which to compare the sizes of encrypted data packets and use that to identify what is traveling where, which either has not been demonstrated or the companies utilizing it haven’t admitted to it, yet. It’s not a stretch to think it’s happening, though, with massive companies like AWS and CloudFlare or telecom giants like AT&T.
I imagine they could compile large datasets of ping times and server locations and do some extrapolation. I don’t think it ever goes past a best guess but they’d have an idea (if what this person said actually happens).
Companies dont really need to know where you are. They just need to know where you aren’t. If you are not within a certain threshold of response time to certain cdn servers, then its reasonable to assume that you are outside their contractually obligated broadcast region.
The “best content” being ip-located ads, probably.
probablyTIL ads are content!
My ISP has started throttling YouTube to ~2mbps when viewed from desktop. Using a VPN gets around this and lets me watch in HD. Luckily I’ve not encountered this error yet, but if I do I guess it’s no more YouTube for me, 480p is just way too blurry to put up with.
Why would your ISP do that?
to save bandwidth
They’re 5g based, so I suspect it’s within the terms of service somewhere that they can limit the streaming quality? Historically I’d only ever noticed deprioritization, never a hard bandwidth limit.
Rip net neutrality
I wonder if there’s any workaround besides VPNs like changing DNS or something?
Phone->revanced
Smart tv->smart tube next
I don’t ever watch YouTube on my laptop but I’m sure there are utilities available.
I prefer NewPipe to Revanced.
Revanced is only in android right?
I think so. Only apple product I ever had was an iPod, so I’m extremely unfamiliar with their ecosystem.
When I see content blocks like that anymore, I just leave the content behind and go elsewhere. Malicious companies will not get my clicks. They can fuck right off.
Good sign though, means they are getting desperate. It is our duty to starve them of traffic.
Sure, but there are also lots of other ways around it. Non-chrome browsers (or Chromium-based browsers) still allow for good extensions that can block YouTube ads.
Firefox + uBlock Origin still works great, even when all the front-ends are broken.
Dude, I seem to find more sites that break when using my VPN than those that allow it. The bastards are winning
I’ll change servers a couple times, and if it still doesn’t work, I’ll just move on
At this point no corpo site is worth the hassle.
