As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it’s really too expensive.

Yes for example if you return always the same segment when skipping.

Out of order requesting of segments could be detected as well as faster requests. This would at least lead to a waiting time for the length of the ad.

Ah ok I didn’t know the EU thing. For the algorithm it’s a cat and mouse game. You could try to detect it by hash signatures of the segments or some kind of image detection but they could in turn add bytes to change the signature or other attributes. Could require a lot of effort on the blocking site to have the indicators up to date.

Exactly

Ah yes that makes a lot of sense. Googles war on adblockers seems really expensive but we don’t know the numbers maybe it’s still cheaper.

I’ve read in that thread that there are already ad blockers for twitch too but I haven’t looked up how they work or how twitch inserts the ads.

Sponsorblock works with static timestamps provided by users. This would not work if the ads are inserted at randomized times.

That wouldn’t make sense in the case of hls since the stream consists of multiple fragments of a video and you would just insert the ad fragments. This would only require changing the index file which could be done again and again with no effort and needs no reencoding of the video file.

I am not for ads but what is so difficult about adding them to the video stream. This should make adblockers useless since they can’t differentiate between the video and the ad. I could just imagine it would be difficult to track the view time of the user and this could make the view useless since they can’t prove it to the ad customer. I have no in depth knowledge about hls but as I know it’s an index file with urls to small fragments of the streamed file. The index file could be regenerated with inserted ad parts and randomized times to make blocking specific video segments useless.

Yes exactly and some providers also accept crypto.

As I read, they used timing analysis which should be preventable by using an anonymous VPN to connect to tor and streaming something over the VPN connection at the same time. Some of them support multi-hop, like mullvad, which will further complicate the timing analysis because of the aggregated traffic.

At least you’re consistent with your opinions.

So if putin wins ukraine belongs to him ?

Tbh, I’ve never worked in such an environment. I know somebody who told me similar things and I would love to hear more about this to form my own opinion on this. But it’s just not that deep. When I say corporate, I mean it’s full of GUIDs and only machine-readable names, commands and configs. It’s also most of the time not designed with the flexibility in mind and covers only the most commonly (used by the company supporting it) use cases. It just doesn’t have the free spirit which most of the open source tools, which are designed with humans in mind, have. If you need to supply a parameter to get output from a command that is often run manually while you could also have one to deactivate output for script usage. This seems like the wrong way to go.

But this is some Docker shit. For myself Docker always feels a little corporate. It’s just not very conventional with these multiline commands just to run a command inside a container. Especially the obligatory “-it” to fucking see anything. It’s not really straight forward. But if you get used to it and you can make a lot of aliases to use it more easily.

That’s true, but it’s not just one minister’s opinion. It’s the Federal Minister of the Interior who is directly responsible for public security, under which the data retention debate falls. And regarding the chatcontrol debate, it’s precisely this minister who represents Germany in the Council of the European Union, which is trying to find a common position on chatcontrol.

Even if I deeply like the Idea, something like this could backfire if it’s done constantly and not just once. But I would like to see a law that makes the usage of government communications mandatory for all government-related communication while storing everything revision-proof on their servers with different access rights. And a second law that makes it possible to access it by requiring petitions to be singled by a low number of people. Less extreme but still makes it harder to be corrupt.

Meanwhile, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) is fighting for the storage of IP addresses and port numbers without cause

That’s so fucking true. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Interior-ministers-want-data-retention-and-tougher-action-against-cyberbullying-9774193.html