Skip Navigation

dan

@ dan @upvote.au

Posts
0
Comments
1082
Joined
3 yr. ago

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.Coding since 1998..NET Foundation member. C# fan https://d.sb/Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog

    Jump

  • The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it's a very old approach for adding ads to video streams. I mean, it's essentially how regular TV works.

  • Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code

    Jump

  • Depends on your country/jurisdiction. Consumer protection is weak in the USA, but much stronger in some other countries. It'd depend on how much it changes the experience. For example, if you buy a product because it advertises a particular feature, but then the manufacturer removes the feature in the future, that can be a reason to get a refund, at least in Australia and some European countries.

  • Youtube has fully blocked Invidious

    Jump

  • Most residential ISPs would frown upon a large amount of upload traffic for a public service, and request that you switch to a business plan with a much lower contention ratio. Contention ratio is essentially the number of people the bandwidth is shared with. For example, if you have a 1Gbps connection with a contention ratio of 50:1 (common for residential ISPs), 50 people share the same 1Gbps bandwidth. That's designed with the idea that not every user is using all their bandwidth at the exact same time. Constant uploads all day (like with a public proxy) breaks that assumption. Business plans usually have a contention ratio of 10:1 to 20:1.

    The CEO of my ISP (Sonic) explicitly mentioned that they don't like people hosting servers on their forum:

    We don't want folks hosting publically accessible servers on Sonic fiber. Primarily because while household consumption can be estimated and averaged, and is roughly limited by your ability to consume (how many TVs will you stream to, plus downloads and other activities, during the peak bandwidth usage time of the day?), when you host the usage is instead limited only by the REST of the world's interest in what you're offering.

    So while a family of six with five 4K TVs might see peak average usage under 100Mbps if absolutely every device is on and all consuming full-scale content -- a single Raspberry PI web server with a single video hosted on it might swamp a gigabit port if that video file is something everyone in the world wants to see.

    While we can provide the fastest residential connection in America, it's pricing relies upon typical use cases. That pricing is not sustainable if someone is hosting a popular website, sharing with neighbors, feeding a wireless ISP, acting as a TOR exit node, etc etc. Servers belong in data-centers (aka "the cloud"), for practical network scale as well as economic reasons.

    They don't block it though, and they're fine with low-bandwidth things like Home Assistant, VPNs, etc.

  • Youtube has fully blocked Invidious

    Jump

  • other companies needing a video hosting solution that they can rely on to run their storefronts is a perfect use case.

    Many companies use Vimeo for this.

  • Youtube has fully blocked Invidious

    Jump

  • I'm a millennial and sometimes I feel like we're the only generation that learnt how to use computers properly. Boomers / Gen X often aren't great with computers, and neither are Gen Z / Alpha since they use phones and tablets far more. There's outliers of course.

  • Youtube has fully blocked Invidious

    Jump

  • Losing a few thousand subscribers is still nothing if they made more money with the addition of ads.

    It's the same with increasing the price of a service. Usually, the extra revenue from the price increase is far greater than the revenue loss from people that unsubscribe. If a business has a choice between a large number of customers with a small amount of profit per customer, and a small number of customers with a larger amount of profit per customer, they'll always pick the latter. Fewer customers reduces other costs, for example less support load, less bandwidth usage, etc.

  • Youtube has fully blocked Invidious

    Jump

  • They said:

    You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore.

    and I imagine that most people that host something like this do so using a VPS. Homelabs tend to be the minority use case.

  • What browser is visiting the page?

    Jump

  • User agents are essentially deprecated and are going to become less and less useful over time. The replacement is either client hints or feature detection, depending on what you're using it for.

  • What browser is visiting the page?

    Jump

  • Most developers just write their own feature checks (a lot of detections are just a single line of code) or use a library that polyfills the feature if it's missing.

    The person you're replying to is right, though. Modernizr popularized this approach. It predates npm, and npm still isn't their main distribution method, so the npm download numbers don't mean anything.

  • What browser is visiting the page?

    Jump

  • That's exactly what you're supposed to do with the modern web, via feature detection and client hints.

    The user agent in Chrome (and I think Firefox too) is "frozen" now, meaning it no longer receives any major updates.

  • Palworld maker vows to fight Nintendo lawsuit on behalf of fans and indie developers

    Jump

  • Right. I just feel like they'll find it even harder to successfully sue over patents, especially if the patents are fairly generic. The defendants just need to find prior art that predates Nintendo's patents. It's weird that Nintendo aren't saying which patents are being violated.

  • US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues

    Jump

  • There's a bunch of newspapers already with the option between pay for privacy plus or accept tracking.

    The EU has ruled that this isn't sufficient and that people shouldn't have to pay for privacy.

    Of course, companies in the USA won't care, except for customers in California (thanks, CCPA and CPRA).

  • US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues

    Jump

  • Shopping apps aren't really needed, I mean people could use the websites instead

    You could say the same thing for probably half the apps in the app stores, and yet people keep installing the apps. On iPhones, I think part of it is the fact that iOS had such poor support for PWAs.

  • US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues

    Jump

  • Didi (Chinese Uber) is very popular in Australia too.

  • US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues

    Jump

  • You can just click deny instead. The law says the site must make it easy to do so.

  • US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues

    Jump

  • That's Hyundai/Kia's fault though. For whatever reason, they cheaped out and didn't include an immobilizer in 2011-2022 models (meaning the cars don't actually verify that there's a key in it, so you can just remove the key hole and turn the ignition with a screwdriver or USB cable or whatever to start it).

    Before TikTok, this would have just spread on different platforms...

    I'm not defending TikTok though.

  • US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues

    Jump

  • I understand blocking TikTok, and China already blocks US social media sites. I don't really understand blocking a shopping app, though. TikTok are grasping at straws.

    Wouldn't this set a dangerous precedent? If the government blocks a shopping app, what else will they block in the future? It's a slippery slope to government censorship. China may do the same thing and block US stores, which would hurt the US economy.

  • Palworld maker vows to fight Nintendo lawsuit on behalf of fans and indie developers

    Jump

  • The fact that Nintendo are going for a patent claim rather than a copyright claim makes me think that they don't think a copyright claim would be successful.

  • Google has been blocking many tools/IP ranges that try to synchronize with YouTube

    Jump

  • Which is actually a good thing. Might sound scarry and counterintuitive at first, but is the right way to go.

    My point was more that if you do change email address, you should change to your own domain, since then you won't have to change it again in the future :)

    using aliases for all the different places...

    Yeah this is great. I use a catchall email so anything @ my domain goes to me.