this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
661 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

59589 readers
2962 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 34 points 7 months ago (2 children)
[–] metaStatic@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago (3 children)

exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it's worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 28 points 7 months ago

Technically NewPipe simply parses the website and is seen as a web browser from YouTube's point of view.

That how they bypass the API's TOS, they don't use it.

[–] Feyd@programming.dev 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Trivial? What information does this whitelist hold that can't be spoofed? It's not like apps have to tell the truth about what they are.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago

People do that? Just have their code go on the internet and tell lies?! This is a Christian internet!

(yes it's /s)

[–] passepartout@feddit.de 3 points 7 months ago

This is what current implementations like Revanced do. The endgame will be fullblown DRM. Until then, it will be a cat and mouse game.

[–] eluvinar@szmer.info 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it’s worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.

It's not trivial to make sure over the network on a device you don't control that you're talking with an app you think you are talking with. Just look how multiplayer games fail to combat cheaters and resort to kernel anticheats, and then still fail to assure the players are actually using the legit application. It's actually pretty much impossible in any open ecosystem, maybe possible on something like chromecast where you get to control almost anything (as long as someone doesn't hack it to run custom firmware, like they do with every console ever).

Not only is this impossible, it always makes the experience for your legit users worse (but hey, if they are fine with the level of ads on yt today they probably don't care if google were to mine bitcoins on their phones).