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.

@jet@hackertalks.com
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31Y

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.

Amju Wolf
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11Y

They could use stream encryption (DRM) to ensure you’re viewing the ads as expected and make it hard to capture and playback.

@jet@hackertalks.com
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5
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1Y

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

Amju Wolf
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11Y

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.

@jet@hackertalks.com
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1Y

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.

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