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Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Their endgame is hooking directly into the TPM chip on your phone/computer to ensure you can't bypass ads, just like netflix, hulu, etc have done. Then the only recourse will be ripping all their videos to another hosting platform which they will then try to argue is a form of piracy.
This TPM bypassing will eventually be done by essentially pointing a camera at a screen (modern TVs have encryption baked in so even the video in transit is DRM protected), at which point the video hosting companies will bake in small differences/invisible watermarks that uniquely identify which user's account (which is linked to a real person who can suffer legal consequences) the video came from. Then we will have multiple cameras pointing at like 100 screens with an AI mixing them together to try to remove the differences/watermarks, at which point the hosting companies will create their own AI to counter and mislead the "piracy" AI
This is also why ISPs took away your ability to run a personal server on your home computer using NATs, firewalls, and dynamic IPs instead of just transitioning to IPv6.
Also websites are going to start blocking firefox citing low user counts but you know what the real reason is
I 100% believe this will happen because making commodities do as many
as possible between any given creator and end-user just so they can provide more "Services" no one asked for and thus extract more value for not actually doing anything is like the only trick capitalism has left.
http://cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-youtube-down-on-non-chrome-browsers/
This has never worked so far lol. Their "invisible watermark" always ruins the media even beyond treathog consumption levels.
Otherwise is there anything the individual user should be doing, short of not buying smart TVs (me) and not buying TPM chipped computers?
I guess put money you would have spent on streaming sites on hard drives and data horde before they stop you.
Support libre software and projects like Firefox and invidious
IPFS is an internet protocol that lets you the user help host things that you consume in a communal way, using some hard drive space you don't need right now, but I wouldn't recommend it yet because It has glaring problems. It's a better future vision for the internet but there are a lot of crypto bros involved trying to inject capitalism where IMO it isn't necessary.
You can't really get away from TPM computers for long I don't think.
In short; I don't even know
I data horde, and I don't pay for even one stream
I should donate to foss projects more but I am broke, alas.
IPFS sounds theoretically cool... As for TPM the newest PC in my house is a Zen Plus B450 machine that doesn't even meet the Windows 11 TPM requirments, and the last W11 install in my house is about to get swapped for a W10 LTCS install, for g*ming. When that dies I will just run Linux/W7 honestly.
You're interpreting the term watermark too literally
It will be a small unique arrangement of just a few pixels to identify the user
It can even be distributed across the screen pixel by pixel to make it less noticeable
All they'd have to do is make each pixel 1 hex code lighter or darker or something
Assuming each pixel can have no change, 1 step lighter, or 1 step darker, it'd only take 22 pixels to cover 31B accounts = 3^22
I believe there's 25B Google accounts in total out there atm
In every frame, easily identifiable by a shitty pinhole camera though?
I updated my comment with more details
It's plausible but unlikely I think, putting a lot of faith into shitty pinhole cameras to be able to see twenty two 4K pixels one hex value lighter or darker, when most cameras have atrocious definition/sharpness and get blown out by light, blinded by darkness. I dunno, this reminds me of the screaming around Microsoft Kinect in 2013. They had bad and shitty plans for Kinect but, cheap hardware everyone hated Idk.
I feel like if you just slightly turn up the compression ratio then all that nuance is lost making the watermark nonexistent or unusable
Yes especially since Netflix in particular has atrocious compression.
There exists a technology that takes elements in a picture, like a bird in the background, a character, a glass of water, etc and moves them just a few pixels. You can encode a lot of data like that and it's undetectable given just one example. They can encode your unique user identifier 1000 times in even a short video. A camera is bound to pick up at least part of it each time.
Quotin'
I guess if the TV itself was doing the DRM recognition? Idk though, I've seen alarmist posting like this before... seems to me evil tech shit usually gets done in more mundane ways?
Its definitely possible and even trivial to do there are a thousand ways to encode just a few bytes of data undetectably in a video and nothing but motivation stopping them from using every one every where. I think it's plenty mundane and even trivial for what they get.
@hello_hello@hexbear.net please rate my unhinged rant
I rate it a
out of 
needs more 
On the flip side China is eventually going to transition all their computers to GNU/Linux once this happens.
Too bad the great internet borderwall of America will prevent from accessing Chinese memes soon.
How do you have these emojis?
Hexbear has accumulated a vast amount of emojis over time.
We love our emoji! On hexbear I type : followed by the keyword of the emoji I'm looking for. I don't know how it works on other instances.
I still think this is a quite an unrealistically pessimistic outlook, so long as there are a decent handful of privacy-interested technerds, it'll be effectively impossible. The DVD encryption code was initially hailed as the end of piracy, but it was broken about 7 days into being released.
The adage remains true, to keep a thing secret and secure, you have to be perfect at security 100% of the time. To hack a thing, copy it a million times, and make it effectively public, it takes one lucky break. Perfect security is logically impossible, people will find a way.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: