Are they breaking Widevine? Are they circumventing it? If the end result is an analog audio signal and (a ton of) RBG on/off signals - why can’t I as a normal consumer capture it using some store bought gyzmo?
Are they breaking Widevine? Are they circumventing it? If the end result is an analog audio signal and (a ton of) RBG on/off signals - why can’t I as a normal consumer capture it using some store bought gyzmo?
To put it another way:
Therefore, any media that is viewed on your computer is clear, on your computer, in a realm that you control.
This is also why ad blockers work. You can send me ads, or requests to fetch ads and my computer just ignores them.
Companies will never be able to stop this, cause at some point you can always just intercept the data feed at a hardware level and reconstruct the stream.
I might be asking a dumb question, but why can’t the companies host their ads on the server-side? Do the ads have to be on my computer for me to see them? What does being on my computer even mean in this context?
Sorry if this is a stupid question
Some do. YouTube switched their ad service so the main video and ads come from the same server. To get around this uBlock now blocks the script on the browser side that shows the ad, then returns a signal that the timer is up.
It’s a constant game of cat and mouse to get around ad blockers then block that new method.
I don’t think the new strategy of injecting ads directly into the video stream can be defeated in realtime though. It’s like how you cannot defeat tv ads…you can blank the screen, or record and restitch without the ads, but the content itself has the ad. YouTube is a bit different where you can theoretically skip ahead, but your device has to tell Youtube that it wants to skip ahead in order to actually even get the video content, and youtube can look at request timestamps to know you didn’t see the whole injected ad and just re-inject it in the video stream.
What I mean by “on your computer” is not that it originates on your computer, but that some form of it exists there–namely this is going to be images, text, links, etc that the ad company hosts and a website will normally download temporarily along with the rest of the site’s content. Once your computer has that site’s information you can do anything you want with it. Importantly what exists on your computer is a local copy of what the ad servers host. If you decide to color ads blue on your computer that only affects your copy. The original ad, and everyone else’s copies remain intact.
They do host them on their servers, sort of (if you’re asking how ad brokers work that’s a bit of a different scope).
Does poo have to be on your desk to smell it?
The post office (website) is telling you (your computer) to go over and pick up a parcel of poo (an ad) that’s there for you.
You say no, I don’t think I will (adblock/poo block)
If they have their way they will. All the tech bros are pushing for trusted computing platforms.
Imagine a world where most/all computers are as locked down as an iPad. That’s what they seem to want.
At some point the electrical signal has to be clear at a hardware level. Companies can make it harder, but if they’re streaming any info to a device in your possession someone will be able to extract that clean electrical signal and reproduce an acceptable feed.
TPM isn’t inherently bad, it’s just a way to cryptographically store keys. TPM overall is great as it gives you a very secure way to store things like encryption keys.
You also don’t need TPM to lock down a system. Locked bootloaders have existed for decades and platforms have historically rolled their own encryption modules as they wanted, like your ipad example, or any video game console in the last 20 years, or most mobile phones, etc.
The ‘knows enough to be dangerous’ crowd has been fearmongering about tpm since it’s been introduced, it isn’t some magic bullet for vendor locking, since vendor locking is already achieved.