They always could. What appears to be happening is that channels now have the option to turn on “a switch” so that content wont play if a VPN is detected. Most VPN ip addresses are well known, because they arent a secret. Everyone who uses the VPN goes through it.
If you come across the above message, its because the content creator turned it on. I had it come up with “stick to football”. Its the only thing that it comes up with. I just unsubbed and wont watch anymore. Im not turning off my VPN for anyone or anything. Id rather just go with out. I encourage all of you to do the same.
You could probably just record the users ID and it’s IP address. IP addresses that see a lot of different user IDs are either VPNs, companies or universities.
Another thing that only very large companies can do is see the response time and compare packet size from different servers to narrow down your location, effectively defeating the VPN in a lot of cases.
Hypothetically, a specific amount of bytes gets sent to server B, response time indicates it was received 300 miles away which matches the response time of going from Server B to Server A where the user lives.
Of course it’s still important to use a VPN, if only because those big companies don’t want us to.
This…sounds a bit like bs. Can you share a more detailed writeup? At best you could get a radius, but that wouldn’t really be helpful
I imagine they could compile large datasets of ping times and server locations and do some extrapolation. I don’t think it ever goes past a best guess but they’d have an idea (if what this person said actually happens).
Dude, I seem to find more sites that break when using my VPN than those that allow it. The bastards are winning
I’ll change servers a couple times, and if it still doesn’t work, I’ll just move on
The “best content” being ip-located ads, probably.
probablyTIL ads are content!
My ISP has started throttling YouTube to ~2mbps when viewed from desktop. Using a VPN gets around this and lets me watch in HD. Luckily I’ve not encountered this error yet, but if I do I guess it’s no more YouTube for me, 480p is just way too blurry to put up with.
Why would your ISP do that?
They’re 5g based, so I suspect it’s within the terms of service somewhere that they can limit the streaming quality? Historically I’d only ever noticed deprioritization, never a hard bandwidth limit.
Rip net neutrality
I wonder if there’s any workaround besides VPNs like changing DNS or something?
Phone->revanced
Smart tv->smart tube next
I don’t ever watch YouTube on my laptop but I’m sure there are utilities available.
Revanced is only in android right?
I think so. Only apple product I ever had was an iPod, so I’m extremely unfamiliar with their ecosystem.
When I see content blocks like that anymore, I just leave the content behind and go elsewhere. Malicious companies will not get my clicks. They can fuck right off.
Good sign though, means they are getting desperate. It is our duty to starve them of traffic.
Sure, but there are also lots of other ways around it. Non-chrome browsers (or Chromium-based browsers) still allow for good extensions that can block YouTube ads.
Firefox + uBlock Origin still works great, even when all the front-ends are broken.
locate the best content
Hell nah, please dont
Well, they need to make sure the right people are watching the right propaganda.
They lobby both parties, people are just talking about the Trump donations now as he is currently in power
That only covers political donations, not outright payoffs.
Revanced ftw.
Pipepipe has been more reliable for me, lately.
But who knows how long these alternative front-ends will last? It’s a constant cat and mouse game between volunteers and Google.
How does this app survive economically?
Apps don’t need finances to survive. The creator of the app could be working on it entirely because they want to, and not because they get paid. As far as I know, NewPipe is just a front-end. It doesn’t host anything, and just runs as a client.
Labor of love, I suspect
I encounter VPN blocks everywhere frequently. I usually just reroll my selected server until the block goes away
VPN ads seriously need to stop promising that you can get around content restrictions.
People should educate others on how to get content not available in their area for free without the hassle.
If media isn’t available in your area, then the company is telling you they don’t want your money. There is a $0.00 loss to them if you pirate it.
Unless you calculate it using the Nintendo formula, in which case you owe them $3 million.
Which is why there needs to be better pushback “Okay, so where exactly are you selling a functional SNES cart that I can plug into my SNES and play?” as an example.
Or they need to do a better job at getting around content restrictions
Yeah they need to start rotating egress ips regularly. It’s a cat and mouse game
Proxies still have an IP address.
The real highlight is the contradictory text.
To continue, turn off your VPN/Proxy. This will allow YouTube to locate the best content".
“We refuse to serve you anything other than the best ‘located content’.”
A fat lie. Combining refusal with the completely unrelated supposed service improvement of location-based content. To disingenuously sound like they’re doing you a service.
People don’t realize how much shit youtube/google ignores over time, for whatever reasons (but mostly because it’s cheaper to ignoer I’d guess). With most major consumer VPN providers, this is very easy to detect. Adblockers are easy to detect. Tampering with the website structure? Believe it or not, quite easy to detect when someone hide a component or change a title or a button.
If they decided to seriously get after people that circumvent geofencing, people that block ads, people that change the interface to their liking, or people that plainly use alternative websites, they could easily. And it would require far less effort on their end to keep things complicated than it would require on our end to keep things working at an acceptable level.
Only kind of true.
If they did implement all those measures, all you do is launch a puppet browser rendered off screen and scrape the content you want. This could work for any site and it is impossible for anyone to detect.
For ads, as a nuclear option, you can detect when they occur and black the stream out.
I would personally do this if left with no other option.
Cue detection of “realistic” human activity on the UI and preventing streaming if the server determine this activity does not match a human enough pattern.
I’m exaggerating on that one, but… that’s not even that implausible these days.
My point was, dancing this dance with “big website”, whoever it is, will always be an endless uphill battle.
They can’t do that because of accessibility reasons. If they did that, a disabled person has grounds to sue them for proper aria hints & controls.
It doesn’t matter what kind of content it is, either. It must be made accessible.
Uh. I don’t know how it is on the other side of the ocean, but around here, it’s a nice goal, but there’s much more care going into making messes than implementing accessible websites. Even official government services sometimes just barely slaps an “accessibility conformity: partial/none” and keep going on.
I’m not sure having an accessible web is enough to overcome the thirst for ad money and control.
Sometimes I do get YouTube telling me that I need to disable my adblocker to access a video, so they do try to block that stuff (though I suspect that the infrequency with which this happens combined with the fact that not everyone does experience it when some people do report this happening suggests that they’re just testing methods of detection and blocking)
Usually when it happens, I just go into my Ublock settings and update stuff. I can’t remember that ever not working. It feels like a low-key arms race, in a cold-war kind of way
i use vorapis v3 cause they fucked with the video player.
