You can bypass YouTube ads by adding a dot after the domain

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/gzr3cq/fyi_you_can_bypass_youtube_ads_by_adding_a_dot/

by ashitlerferad • 6 years ago

821 363 6 years ago

smaili• 6 years ago

For those wondering why:

It's a commonly forgotten edge case, websites forget to normalize the hostname, the content is still served, but there's no hostname match on the browser so no cookies and broken CORS - and lots of bigger sites use a different domain to serve ads/media with a whitelist that doesn't contain the extra dot

gorkish• 6 years ago

I would disagree that this is an "edge case;" it's a rather fundamental feature of DNS that is relied on every time a record from one domain references a record in another domain. The dot at the end fully qualifies the name and makes it unambiguous. Without the dot, unqulified DNS names are treated as members of their parent SOA. This is why when creating CNAME or NS or MX records that reference a foreign domain, you have to specify a dot at the end, and when you don't they dont resolve as expected.

So a machine with a search domain of 'foo.com' looking up 'www.google.com' should ideally seek the record for 'www.google.com.foo.com' first. Conversely, looking up 'www.google.com.' is more specific and returns google's ip even if 'www.google.com.foo.com' were to exist.

The reason it's not common is because all DNS client behaviors have been modified for convenience to avoid this; in basically every resolver any query containing at least one dot is automatically treated as if it were a fully qualified name. So behind the scenes, the DNS resolver is caring very much about the trailing dot and adding it to nearly every query; it's just typically hidden from users.

robbrown451• 6 years ago

It's an edge case from the point of view of the people who develop the ad serving software. If 99.9 percent of urls don't have that dot at the end, then it's an edge case.

inetknght4• 6 years ago

It's not only a commonly forgotten case (I disagree about it being an edge case), but the Anaconda installer used by Fedora removed the ability to enter a FQDN for the hostname during system setup.

[0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1648107

tyrust• 6 years ago

Or they could read the OP from which you copied.

MintelIE2• 6 years ago

This is great, everybody hates Youtube's ads. They are incredibly loud and annoying.

ianlevesque• 6 years ago

They are. But they offer an alternative https://www.youtube.com/premium - what more do you want?

imglorp• 6 years ago

uBlock origin takes care of ads. Oh and avoid Chrome.

emsy• 6 years ago

This, but without being tracked.

juanuys• 6 years ago

I have premium, but some content creators still do some product placements for sponsors.

MintelIE2• 6 years ago

I don't watch ads and I don't pay for Internet video. I get what I want.

Enginerrrd2• 6 years ago

It's too much for the value for me. $12/mo. The problem is everyone on the web is like this. I'd be paying $300+/month if I subscribed to every service like that when I want to occasionally watch a video, or read 1-2 articles a month from a bunch of different sources. It doesn't work, I'm getting ripped off compared to the amount advertisers are spending to show me ads. Why do I have to be the one who gets screwed?

I'd MUCH rather just have a system where I can just choose to either get ads, or to debit the amount the advertisers spent to show me an add to get an ad-free experience on a per-article or per-video basis where the provider (or host) isn't trying to bend me over compared to the deal they offer advertisers.

The problem is that would "disincentivize engagement" and no one would ever offer such a thing. Well, ok then, screw you, I'll use adblock and you get no benefit.

superasn• 6 years ago

Plus you get youtube music with it (in India at least) and I find their radio algo for similar music very good. So no ads and yt music - it's definitely worth the extra $1.7 mo.

thebeefytaco4• 6 years ago

I don't understand why more people don't pay for YT premium considering how much content is on there.

You also help support channels and content creators (apparently even if they're demonetized if you have premium).

Nextgrid6• 6 years ago

There's a big privacy issue with that as it involves giving out validated billing details to Google which is much worse than the pseudonymous identifiers they otherwise use for tracking.

Zealotux• 6 years ago

It'll probably be "solved" by the end of the week now.

hckr_news• 6 years ago

Whom does this fall under? SRE?

hidiegomariani2• 6 years ago

Probably SDE. It must be a CORS config somewhere in the code/config

umvi2• 6 years ago

Hopefully the googlers here in this thread reading this message will fix it for the masses but still put a shiboleet workaround in there that hackers can still use

joering2• 6 years ago

Its even better than that - once you enter any "extra dot" youtube link, all other youtube links on that page will have dot as well :)

whymauri• 6 years ago

It also works on several pay-walled sites.

nawgszy• 6 years ago

Makes sense that they'd use relative to / urls, no? Otherwise how could you handle youtu.be versus youtube.com versus...

meroes• 6 years ago

YouTube Vanced for Android removes all in-video ads in case anyone doesn't know.

grawprog3• 6 years ago

And newpipe lets you download videos, stream and play them using an external audio or video player, has a built in background and popup player, lacks ads and is open source.

oehtXRwMkIs• 6 years ago

And is on F-Droid. Also supports other services including PeerTube. I probably forgot other useful features. Always irks me a little when people recommend Vanced.

argiope• 6 years ago

newpie is excellent, I switched last year and never looked back. It offers exactly the features, that I as a user want. It made me realize afterwards in how many ways the official app is lacking.

aspenmayer• 6 years ago

Is there a similar project for iOS?

lostinroutine• 6 years ago

Last I tried it, there was no way to sign in and get personalized recommendations. Is that still true (or did I just miss it)?

samanator2• 6 years ago

Wow! Thanks for the tip! I've been using YouTube on Firefox mobile in order to avoid the ads. This looks like it could be a better experience.

naugtur• 6 years ago

Somewhat related self advertising. I made this tiny tool that lets you take a YouTube playlist or channel and turn it into a podcast RSS that works with any podcast listening app that still supports RSS sources. And the final audio URLs are pointing to YouTube anyway.

https://github.com/naugtur/handsfreeyoutube

mey2• 6 years ago

Firefox Preview / Firefox both can run uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger and work very well with Youtube's mobile website. The only thing I notice that is missing is Chromecast integration, but I fine living without that.

Upside is one less native app on my devices.

chin123• 6 years ago

Why is having one less native app an upside? From my experience, mobile websites are much more cumbersome than native apps, especially in this case because NewPipe is so much better than the YouTube mobile website.

samanator2• 6 years ago

It seems it only works by casting to another screen. And the app itself is hypocritically overflowing with ads more intrusive than YouTube ads...

nikeee2• 6 years ago

Why should I trust the creators of YouTube Vanced? Last time I looked, it was closed source.

TheGoddessInari• 6 years ago

It's a modified version of the official YouTube app, which is also closed source.

It doesn't really affect whether you can trust it or not, but it's probably unreasonable to expect them to deliver something they don't have.

Nextgrid6• 6 years ago

Invidious (https://github.com/omarroth/invidious) is a server-side proxy for YouTube that removes all the bullshit (ads, background play restrictions, etc) while requiring no client-side support (so no need for side loading and will work on iOS).

There is a hosted instance at https://invidio.us if you want to check it out, but for continuous usage I highly recommend deploying your own as it's much faster.

t0astbread• 6 years ago

If you deploy it yourself and you're pretty much the only user of your instance, don't you loose the anonymization benefit of a proxy?

hackcasual• 6 years ago

Also used this trick to get around my high school's internet filter.

JMTQp8lwXL• 6 years ago

I have seen filtering of only http, but not https. https://facebook.com was accessible, for example. But that was back when https wasn't omnipresent, either.

neilparikh• 6 years ago

Yes, that was the case at my school as well when https wasn't prominent (~2010). I doubt filters still allow https through, now that most sites implement it by default.

kn0where• 6 years ago

Back in the day, my high school used OpenDNS to block all kinds of sites. Of course, setting 8.8.8.8 on your laptop got around that trivially. They also had separate WiFi networks for teachers and students, and because they didn’t pay for a fast enough connection, the student WiFi was always unusably slow whereas the teacher WiFi was less used and quite fast. They also didn’t use Radius or anything, just WPA personal, so the teachers all shared the same WiFi password. Since the student WiFi was unusable and the seniors needed to be able to work on their college applications, they were given the teacher WiFi password, and then they would share it with some of us in the lower grades and it would spread from there until the admin changed the password again.

There were also Ethernet jacks in the walls of each classroom by the teacher’s desk. I had a free period in a classroom where the teacher didn’t use the Ethernet, so I would plug in my laptop and torrent at high speed. High school sucked, but moments like that were satisfying.

rudiv• 6 years ago

This is still how many websites are blocked by the government in India.

signaru2• 6 years ago

Perhaps Youtube shows differently where I am, or perhaps the ad block extension I have installed is helping. But I also just noticed that Youtube is now occasionally showing skippable ads before starting the video.

I actually find the workaround quite interesting. But for me, for now, it is just simpler click skip than to type a dot on the URL.

sbarre• 6 years ago

Yeah skippable ads is a reasonable compromise in my mind.. Show me an ad, but if I'm not interested, let me skip it after 4-5 seconds..

I can live with that in exchange for otherwise free content.

rixed• 6 years ago

Actually, with adds you are not paying the content but its hosting and quick delivery.

signaru2• 6 years ago

It's different for me.

The youtube page just starts with a whitened stationary placeholder where the video should play. It has a "skip" button and I don't have to wait 4-5 seconds (watching an ad video).

This is probably Youtube simultaneously testing different stuff to different people. The version I am seeing is not as bad.

Previous ads where I have to wait 4-5 seconds are already dealt with by my installed ad blocker.

chadlavi3• 6 years ago

Very neat but now I'm sure they'll fix it and close the loophole

gruez4• 6 years ago

or you know... install ublock origin

edit: add "origin" qualifier

Avicebron3• 6 years ago

The amount of people I know who don't use adblocker/ublock etc is ridiculous. Many are non-technical, but it's not any more difficult than installing an app on your phone. Does anyone know if there is some philosophy to this I don't understand?

omginternets• 6 years ago

Serious question: is there a way to get ublock (or similar) on a iPhone?

chadlavi3• 6 years ago

I already use it! When I say neat, I mean it in the abstract. Or maybe in the "Bender taking a picture" sense.

jniedrauer• 6 years ago

Presumably you mean ublock origin? ublock is a commercial product that sells whitelist slots to advertisers.

thebeefytaco4• 6 years ago

Or pay $9.99/mo for YouTube premium and actually support the creators of content you consume.

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986

The rightmost domain label of a fully qualified domain name in DNS may be followed by a single "." and should be if it is necessary to distinguish between the complete domain name and some local domain.

sbmthakur2• 6 years ago

I am being redirected to youtube.com when I try this in a Firefox window where I am logged in with my Google account.

It worked as explained when I tried it in a private window.

darth_avocado• 6 years ago

Goddamnit, why'd you have to out the secret? Now everyone's going to plug it. T_T

umvi2• 6 years ago

Yeah, never put something like this in a LPT unless you want it immediately fixed.

Like most nice things, it gets ruined once everybody starts using it.

not2b• 6 years ago

Looks like the NY Times already fixed it.

paulpauper• 6 years ago

ITT "You could bypass YouTube ads by adding a dot after the domain "

gruez4• 6 years ago

Tangential rant: I hate it when sites ask for your domain name (eg. for setting up hosting) and say that they want the "fully qualified domain name", but they don't actually accept the FQDN. eg. they reject "www.example.com.", but accept "www.example.com" (without the trailing dot). But the FQDN by definition includes the trailing dot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_qualified_domain_name

code4tee• 6 years ago

Yes, it’s silly. See it all the time. Insist on FQDN and then aparently don’t understand what a FQDN actually is.

oneplane• 6 years ago

It gets worse. Some think the FQDN is the domain zone. Some think it's with elements you find in an URL like the protocol or a part of a path. Humans. Ugh.

dylan604• 6 years ago

But the accepted answer on SO that I copied the code that I have no idea what it does should work, right? There's no bogus accepted answers. The community would have fixed that, so it's trust worthy for me to use as is.

vinnymac• 6 years ago

I never knew this bothered other folks as well. There are dozens of us!

riedel• 6 years ago

Yes!! For 19 yrs in this case: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134402

StavrosK3• 6 years ago

I never realized this but now it thoroughly bothers me as well, so +1.

sedatk• 6 years ago

Dozens!

Max_aaa• 6 years ago

our numbers are growing.

neals• 6 years ago

I've never heard of this. When / how / why would you use the trailing dot? I checked my sites and they redirect to the non-trailing version. Is that bad?

eropple2• 6 years ago

The trailing dot tells your resolver to not attempt to use your local list of search domains.

adrianmonk• 6 years ago

A trailing "." represents the root of the DNS namespace like a leading "/" represents the root of the Linux (or Unix, etc.) filesystem.

The root has children like "com", "net", "uk", etc.

There are DNS records at the root level. Try this command:

    host -t ANY .

Also, just as Linux searches PATH (in order) when you run a command, the DNS resolver searches a path when you look up a host. (Usually the resolver path is specified by directives in /etc/resolv.conf.) Just as Linux will skip this process if you specify a leading "/", the DNS resolver will skip that process if you specify a trailing ".".

It used to be pretty common to put your organization's domain in /etc/resolv.conf so that you can use the short version of a hostname. If your company is example.com and you have example.com in the DNS search path, you can type a command like "ping www", and it will do the same thing as "ping www.example.com". Most software still supports this, but it isn't used by that many people. (Some organizations don't put their domain in /etc/resolv.conf, and many users don't know they can abbreviate hostnames in this way.)

You would typically use the trailing dot if you want to be sure the DNS lookup doesn't use the search path and checks only against the root of the DNS namespace. You also use the trailing dot in some data files for DNS servers.

In many cases the trailing dot is not necessary, practically speaking, because the DNS resolver has special logic where if you give it a string that contains any dots (not just trailing), the search order is rearranged to try the root first instead of last. (In /etc/resolv.conf, this is controlled by the "ndots" option.)

So if you look up "www.example.com", it will check for the existence of "www.example.com." before it checks for "www.example.com.example.com." instead of the other way around. Which is good because only the first is likely to exist. If you look up "www", it will check for "www.example.com." before it checks for "www.", which again is a good heuristic because again the first is the one that likely exists.

taborj• 6 years ago

Heck, I still find sites that don't like "nonstandard" TLDs in your email address. Try putting an address that's not .com, .net, etc and it throws an error.

pmiller24• 6 years ago

The sin here isn't not accepting "nonstandard" TLDs. It's that validating an email address is extremely hard to do correctly, and that you often really want to know if the person entering it has access to the address. The only way to do that is to accept pretty much anything that has an @ sign in the middle of some other characters, and then attempt to send email to that address with a clickback link.

The thing that really annoys me though isn't email address handling. It's credit card number and social security number entry fields.

For credit cards, the number of times you should have to specify which type of card you're entering is literally zero. All credit cards of the same type (e.g. Visa) begin with the same number sequence. Visa always starts with 4, so, if I type 4 as the first digit, just call it a Visa card. Do the Luhn checksum validation to make sure it's a valid number and that I probably entered it correctly, and try to run the charge. If it fails, then provide an appropriate error message.

For SSN fields, the thing that annoys me is that there are basically 2 common ways of entering the number: XXX-XX-XXXX and XXXXXXXXX. So many sites and apps only accept one of the two and will complain about the other. It's ridiculous, because the presence or absence of the dashes literally has no bearing on the validity of the number. Just let me enter it the way I want.

efreak• 6 years ago

I bought my last name in the .family TLD. Most websites take it just fine, but not my insurance or my bank(?). To them, they just don't exist.

loeg• 6 years ago

If you think that's bad, you should see what those folks do to "email address" parsers.

inopinatus2• 6 years ago

My pet peeve is case folding the LHS (or worse, downcasing) despite the standard defining it as case sensitive.

pizza• 6 years ago

Interestingly, if I go to news.ycombinator.com., I get the logged out version of the site. Probably because my browser treats it as a different site entirely

jakub_g• 6 years ago

It's technically a different domain. HN cookie is created for a domain without dot at the end, so there's no match when you open a domain with the dot.

In the same way, if a website does not do www->nowww / nowww->www redirect (example.com / www.example.com), you might have www version be logged in and nowww version be logged out or vice versa (depending how exactly it creates its cookies).

surround2• 6 years ago

Once it was decided that domain names should be arranged hierarchically, it became necessary to decide what sits at the root of that hierarchy. That root is traditionally signified with a single ‘.’. In fact, ending all of your domain names with a ‘.’ is semantically correct, and will absolutely work in your web browser: google.com.

- The History of the URL, https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/

jackcosgrove• 6 years ago

But apparently won't work with the HN hyperlink regex.

amatecha• 6 years ago

Reminds me of sites not accepting "+" in an email address, even though it's a completely valid character to use before the "@".

u801e• 6 years ago

Some websites accept them when creating an account, but not when trying to log in with that account.

mike_d• 6 years ago

In 100% of cases, this is either because someone copied a bad regexp, or they made an explicit decision to not allow local-part wildcarding.

I have in the past normalized email addresses per the rules I know specific providers have to help people login. Did I sign up with mike+hn@ or mike+hackernews@?

Avamander• 6 years ago

That's not the worst, most websites totally reject any form fields not US-ASCII, very anglo-centric and annoying.

walrus014• 6 years ago

I have an address that is firstname@lastname.com and am unable to use it on a number of ecommerce sites, because they're doing some sort of validation to filter out people who are too clueless to know what an email address is. Or something. There's no + or other special characters in it, or xn-- international domain name.

Zobat• 6 years ago

The discussion about valid email addresses reminded me of this article:

https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validat...

For any programmer that's ever tried to validate email addresses it's an eye opener.

throwaway9d0291• 6 years ago

Fastmail has a feature it calls "subdomain addressing" [0], where instead of "me+thing@mysite.com", you use "thing@me.mysite.com", which is much better supported.

Other hosts (e.g. Mailbox.org, the host I'm with now) can support the feature as well, with some configuration.

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html

rntksi• 6 years ago

I have a 4 letter tld to my domain name for my email address. The two times that I had to chase up someone to let me create an account was absolutely bonkers. And it only happened with two systems that were crucial: my bank, and my company's payment system.

fomine33• 6 years ago

The FQDN syntax is what we learn from editing DNS records.

derefr• 6 years ago

It bothers me that a “fully-qualified domain name” is still relative to some implicit DNS network class. There’s no syntax for specifying whether you mean an Internet domain, or some other kind. Because of this, there’s no way to have a URL that resolves from an Internet-relative origin to, say, a Chaosnet-relative origin. Lame :(

dolmen• 6 years ago

From the RFC about URLs: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.2.2

The presence of a host subcomponent within a URI does not imply that the scheme requires access to the given host on the Internet. In many cases, the host syntax is used only for the sake of reusing the existing registration process created and deployed for DNS, thus obtaining a globally unique name without the cost of deploying another registry. However, such use comes with its own costs: domain name ownership may change over time for reasons not anticipated by the URI producer. In other cases, the data within the host component identifies a registered name that has nothing to do with an Internet host. We use the name "host" for the ABNF rule because that is its most common purpose, not its only purpose.

So, the fact that the host part of http(s) URLs are resolved using DNS is not a limitation of the URL spec. Instead that's an implementation restriction.

laszlokorte• 6 years ago

Seems to fixed already. If I include the trailing dot I get redirected to the youtube homepage.

sbmthakur2• 6 years ago

Can you try it in a private window?

ghostbrainalpha• 6 years ago

Still working for me here.

fwip• 6 years ago

This also works to bypass the NYT paywall.

MayeulC• 6 years ago

IIRC, blacklisting the <something>-graphql subdomain is enough to evade private window detection. Can be done easily with uMatrix, a DNS or a hosts file.

unnouinceput2• 6 years ago

Ads? On desktop? not in a million years with uBlock Origins. I forget how shitty internet is actually since several years now. Occasionally a new client doesn't have and I'm reminded of it, but it takes all of those 30 seconds to install it and no ads baby.

tomp2• 6 years ago

Actually I just started getting ads again, with uBlock Origin, both in YouTube and in newly-redesigned Facebook. I wrote a simple script that removes FB ads, but I need to "productivize" it and make sure it auto-loads...

JaRail• 6 years ago

When that happens, I usually just do a manual update on my filters. More often than not, someone has already updated it.

petargyurov• 6 years ago

Facebook's "sponsored" content is a disgusting mess of <span> elements with autogenerated IDs in order to bypass ad-blockers. How did you get around it?

parliament322• 6 years ago

Try updating your filters.

Kelamir2• 6 years ago

Perhaps the issue is that UBlock Origin allows some ads. AdBlocker Ultimate, recommended by Firefox, faces that issue, removing all adds. See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblocker-ult...

EDIT: I don't think UBlock Origin has acceptable ads anymore :)

rconti2• 6 years ago

I've never routinely run an adblocker in, whatever, 25 years online.

I've experimented with them here and there, and tend to find that the unintended consequences are as much of a hassle as the ads.

I keep meaning to try a PiHole but I'm not sure I'll have much better luck.

svdr• 6 years ago

I never really used an adblocker as well, but now I'm using nextdns which does really good filtering at the dns level (not affiliated).

nhooyr• 6 years ago

What unintended consequences?

y-c-o-m-b• 6 years ago

unintended consequences

That is a rare thing for me these days with uBlock Origin. I assume you're referring to broken websites when using ad blocking.

schwartzworld• 6 years ago

this technique also works for paywalls, which I don't think ublock can get around

unnouinceput2• 6 years ago

And I like it that way actually. If I can't see your site with my adblocker I am not going to ever land it again there. I also have NoScript and what I do is something like this:

Step 1 - open your site. Can't see it? I try to allow JS in NoScript

Step 2 - Still can't see your site due to shitty various techniques? Then I re-enable NoScript and add it to blacklist to never land on it ever.

Step 3 - You're not unique, your info is duplicated by several other dozens as well.

SimeVidas2• 6 years ago

Do content creators get ad revenue if you block ads via that extension?

lexicality• 6 years ago

Unless you have youtube premium, no

hanspeter• 6 years ago

I hope this was a sarcastic comment and not a genuine question from an adblock user.

I mean, I hope all adblock users are aware that if everyone did as they do, the content they enjoy would not exist.

rakoo2• 6 years ago

uBlock Origin also works very well on mobile, but you have to use Firefox. Mobile Chrome doesn't allow any extensions and I think we know why.

codegladiator2• 6 years ago

Because the APIs where too permissive and plugins would be a threat to privacy of the user because they could intercept everything.

seddin• 6 years ago

Now we need a trick for the mobile app too

ship_it• 6 years ago

Is's called Vanced.

the_arun• 6 years ago

I use Brave browser to get rid of ads from most of the sites including youtube.

bobsoap• 6 years ago

...and you get Brave's MITM attacks in return, like URL hijacking for their affiliate links and more fun stuff.

DarmokJalad1701• 6 years ago

Same trick can be used to bypass paywall on nytimes.

gguevaraa• 6 years ago

Layluh [0] removes ads on videos, along with literally everything else so all you're left with is an iframe (shameless plug).

Use it like outline.com, so just put layluh.com in front of any YouTube video (layluh.com/URL)

[0] https://www.layluh.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o

easterncalculus• 6 years ago

In a similar tangent, if you want to bypass age checks without logging in, you can use the embed link for a video.

For a link like this (this one is not actually age restricted or NSFW):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScVi_L817ec

Just visit this instead:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ScVi_L817ec

This one is a lot more interesting, though. I guess I assumed that sites wouldn't even respect the FQDN like that, but it's definitely interesting to see a changed site returned instead.

userbinator4• 6 years ago

Unless the uploader has also disabled embedding, in which case there is a way which I forget at the moment since I usually don't watch YouTube videos on their site.

buzzert• 6 years ago

Gotta throw this out there; if you hate ads but actually like YouTube and want to support YouTube creators, I’d highly recommend YouTube Red. Totally worth it IMO.

DanTheManPR• 6 years ago

FYI, it has been called YouTube Premium since 2018. I pay for it, as I can't stand advertisements. For the amount of Youtube content I watch, it's one of the more cost effective services I pay for.

Someone1234• 6 years ago

Which was a positive name change.

"YouTube Red" sounded like some adult service. Whereas YouTube Premium leaves most people knowing what it is before you tell them.

monadic23• 6 years ago

Youtube Premium is quite expensive for paying to remove ads and to download videos on mobile unless you’re also willing to use Youtube Music as your dedicated streaming service (and last I checked on the desktop there wasn’t even a way to disable the video part, which is an absolutely colossal waste of bandwidth).

covercash• 6 years ago

It’s insane to me that they don’t include Premium with a YouTube TV subscription. I’d immediately switch from AT&T Now (formerly Directv Now) if they included Premium, even as a discounted add on.

t-writescode5• 6 years ago

I use YouTube premium in the browser, and there's no video visible in Google Music. I haven't checked to see if the stream I'm getting the data from is more than just an audio stream.

Nextgrid6• 6 years ago

This involves giving out validated billing details to Google which from a privacy point of view is much worse than just letting the ads be (they still track you but at least it's pseudonymous).

t-writescode5• 6 years ago

How is it much worse? If you're already using Gmail, they know _way_ more than your billing address.

t-writescode5• 6 years ago

It's also worth knowing that, at least according to Linus Tech Tips in a recent one of their WAN shows, they informed their users that YouTube premium pays them better than regular YouTube ads, so that's something valueable, too. I don't remember which one of the WAN shows it was; but, I think it was in the last 2 months. Definitely since the quarantine.

xiphias22• 6 years ago

Why do you think it helps creators?

I'm also a Youtube Premium subscriber, but a creator told me that Google pays less after my views than views from non-premium youtube viewers.

s_gourichon2• 6 years ago

a creator told me that Google pays less after my views than views from non-premium youtube viewers.

What? It feels like a deterrent to me.

Citation needed, please?

benmmurphy• 6 years ago

I'm surprised adding the '.' after a website works as well as it does. I would have expected lots of broken vhost configurations because the browser sends the '.' at the end and I would have expected TLS errors from some clients.

For example if you use erlang you will get a TLS error like:

'TLS client: In state certify at ssl_handshake.erl:1774 generated CLIENT ALERT: Fatal - Handshake Failure\n {bad_cert,hostname_check_failed}'

I don't think it is clear from the rfc6125 what TLS clients should be doing. However, if foo.com. resolves the same as foo.com then it makes sense that a certificate for foo.com can be used for foo.com. and vice versa.

borismus• 6 years ago

Not for long

nmstoker• 6 years ago

On mobile you can post a YouTube video in WhatsApp and it won't show you ads when you view it

Karuma• 6 years ago

Using Firefox on Windows, doing this this will create a folder in "%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[yourname]\storage\default\https+++www.youtube.com." which can't be deleted at all without some kind of hack.

rmellow• 6 years ago

I would really appreciate an explanation for this:

(1) why does this get created

(2) why it's not deleteable.

StavrosK3• 6 years ago

This is great! Now let's just hope nobody who works on YouTube reads HN.

wnevets• 6 years ago

I'm sure google will fix it now

subsubzero• 6 years ago

Also fun fact, get around bloomberg's paywall on their news site by using this trailing dot trick:

Free of paywall: https://www.bloomberg.com./news/articles/2020-06-10/second-u...

paywall: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-10/second-u-...

peterburkimsher• 6 years ago

Thanks for the info! Sorry to say it didn't work on CouchSurfing.

oriettaxx2• 6 years ago

Great! and you can redirect automatically by using a redirect browser extension/plugin :)

I just set it up with my favourite: https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/

* Include pattern: ^https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v=(.)

Redirect to: https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=$1

* (check "regular expression)

you can check it's working by adding, e.g.

* Example URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfdsfasd

(I see the code is not rendered well here, see https://pastebin.com/LVqWMgAM )

oriettaxx2• 6 years ago

(you can also select all checks in the advanced option)

ezoe• 6 years ago

So, adding a dot after the domain FQDN and identical but it cause the cookie mismatch and CORS. If we have a browser extension that force CORS for any domain including the identical one, does it work as a powerful adblock?

SubiculumCode• 6 years ago

How come HN doesn't think I am logged in when I go to ' 'https://news.ycombinator.com.' ?

jdright• 6 years ago

This remembers me a bug I came across while developing a game for an <old game console here>.

Implementing a network feature, I had to poke a service server. But the OS DNS resolver returned broken results and sometimes hanged or crashed the system.

After a lot of head scratching and exchanges with the first party support, we found the issue to be a misread of the cache line of the CPU, delivering broken data to the OS and causing havok.

The problem was that as the cache line was 32 bytes, if the url being resolved was exactly 32 bytes long, it would trigger this edge case (probably the OS missing the ending null character).

The first party support said there was nothing they would do to solve this and suggested creating an DNS alias, but the domain was a third party address specific per project which in our case with our project codename was 32 bytes, they also were unwilling to modify or create aliases.

My solution was to add a dot in the address and this fixed it, as now the address was 33 bytes and the CPU fetched two cache lines. The first party technical support was surprised by the fix and called it "sneaky ;)"

Fun times.

userbinator4• 6 years ago

You can also bypass YouTube ads by watching the videos using a different player, like VLC.

(I find it ironic that their "polymer" redesigned site is also ridiculously slow and bloated, yet my computer, which is many years old now, has zero problems playing the videos themselves; somehow it takes more resources to render a UI --- which I could probably make easily in static HTML --- than to play an HD video...?)

xwowsersx2• 6 years ago

You could easily make YouTube with static html? For each of these as they currently exist, how would you implement them in static html: comments, liking, subscribing, video annotations, livestream chat, etc?

firethief2• 6 years ago

Does anyone actually want that stuff?

userbinator4• 6 years ago

comments

Comments are essentially a tiny subset of the features of an Internet forum, which is definitely possible with static HTML. (Some things come naturally with that too, such as pagination so you can continue reading from exactly where you left off without the cursed O(n^2) of "infinite" scrolling.)

liking, subscribing

HTML forms.

video annotations

I thought annotations disappeared long ago?

livestream chat

That's one which could do with some AJAX, but...

http://blog.johnkrauss.com/html-only-live-chat-No-JS/

I remember using a few in the early 2000s which didn't require JS either, and probably worked on a similar principle.

fomine33• 6 years ago

Playing(decoding) video is mostly offloaded to GPU's video decoder rather than CPU.

f1refly2• 6 years ago

You can try using invidio.us, it's free from excessive javascript shenanigans and uses the simple html5 player to present videos. It even supports subscriptions, you can import them from regular youtube.

smashah6• 6 years ago

Get YouTube premium. You won't regret it.

The added benefit of listening to audiobooks on YouTube while doing other things on your phone make it worth it.

YouTube premium = no ads, Spotify + audible + supporting creators + more productivity on mobile (pip mode). Also you can download videos for a flight/later.

ben-schaaf2• 6 years ago

Google doesn't get to dictate what/how their webpage works. Firefox on Android can run extensions like "Video Background Play Fix" to let videos play in the background. Youtube-dl is a great way to download videos for watching later.

I prefer supporting creator directly.

smashah6• 6 years ago

the_pwner224• 6 years ago

If you're on Android, NewPipe is a lot better than hacking extensions into your browser. Plus FF will add a convenient button in the address bar to open a youtube page in NewPipe.

chc• 6 years ago

Eh, I don't think there's much of a selection of legal audiobooks on YouTube other than public domain stuff, so it's not a great substitute for Audible.

smashah6• 6 years ago

Fair enough, however for someone with audible, it may be a easy first step to get a lot of audiobooks and listen easily which was my main point.

TheKarateKid• 6 years ago

Agreed, but you'd be surprised how many people will blow $10-15 on one drink but balk at the idea of paying for something they use for hours every month.

smashah6• 6 years ago

Totally. I'm sure a lot of people here spend at least 3x more time on YouTube than Netflix. Just makes sense to me.

soheil• 6 years ago

I have a gut feeling that the people who try not to spend money on drinks end up drinking before they go out possibly causing traffic accidents etc. Which makes your comparison unfair. The act of paying for shitty UI should not be related to the virtue of abstaining from drinking until at a social gathering or a bar.

anewdirection• 6 years ago

So... pay them to be shitty, but slightly less shitty to you? That just seems like funding them to make the world worse.

smashah6• 6 years ago

Try it. You'll like it

dazhbog• 6 years ago

Or get YouTube Vanced on rooted android. ;)

smashah6• 6 years ago

Yeh I used to use that before. Good alternative

pier25• 6 years ago

I agree. Streaming video is expensive and content creators deserve to be paid.

mandeepj• 6 years ago

It did not work on this - https://www.wsj.com./articles/zuckerberg-lieutenant-returns-...

s_gourichon2• 6 years ago

Reminds me of a solvent metaphor for adblockers.

Ads on web pages are like stains on a surface.

Browsing with ublock origin is like cleaning a surface with alcohol-based product. It worked for a while.

Cat-and-mouse game tends to yield ads that bypass these. Like sticky dirt that won't go away with alcohol.

Enters uMatrix. Browsing with uMatrix is like cleaning the surface with a mix of stronger solvents, like acetone. It's much more effective, but it will more or less ruin the surface/web page in many cases.

Tuning uMatrix allows to find a mix that works. For geeks that are okay with contributing, or just clicking on colored cells in a grid, uMatrix is best. Like wolves, ads bite the laziest part of the flock, leaving the strongest clear.

You can bypass YouTube ads by adding a dot after the domain

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