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YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

That's out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?

For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:

if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {

    setTimeout(function() {
        c();
        a.resolve(1)
    }, 5E3);

} else {

    c();
    a.resolve(1)

}

It's possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.

And I expect it's likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven't had the time to check it myself, but there's probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The code is not obfuscated. The person i linked to even formatted it nicely. I do not have the time or energy to go through all of youtube's JS. But the 5s everyone is talking about does target every browser the same. Serverside the code isn't altered based on browser detection.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It can be formatted "nicely" with no issue. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy to understand.

What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP().... it's a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn't necessarily match up with what you'd expect would be the flow.

In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren't pedantic enough.

Like, for example, there's this function:

function vc() {
    var a = za.navigator;
    return a &amp;&amp; (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
}

Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that's just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there's also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too... and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.

And I'm not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem.. it's entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else... but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of "nicely formated" messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.