Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
social.treehouse.systems
Attached: 3 images Today I learned that YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux. It will give you lowered video resolutions. If you just replace "aarch64" with "x86_64" in the UA, suddenly you get 4K and everything. They literally have a test for "is ARM", and if so, they consider your system has garbage performance and cripple the available formats/codecs. I checked the code. Logic: Quality 1080 by default. If your machine has 2 or fewer cores, quality 480. If anything ARM, quality 240. Yes, Google thinks all ARM machines are 5 times worse than Intel machines, even if you have 20 cores or something. Why does this not affect Chromium? **Because chromium on aarch64 pretends to be x86_64** `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36` 🤦‍♂️​🤦‍♂️​🤦‍♂️​🤦‍♂️​🤦‍♂️​ Welp, guess I'm shipping a user agent override for Firefox on Fedora to pretend to be x86. **EDIT**: The plot thickens. Pretending to be ChromeOS aarch64 *still gets 4K*. Specifically: `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS aarch64 10452.96.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36` still works. **EDIT 2**: OK, so the plot *really* thickens now. Chrome is not affected even if it claims to be aarch64. Turns out there is another codepath: apparently YouTube thinks aarch64 Firefox is... a HiSense TV?!?!?!?! Specifically, model 65a67gevs...????? This is *server-side* sniffing now and it's *specifically* looking for Firefox aarch64 (or at least "Gecko and not Chrome/CrOS/something else known to pretend to be Gecko"). And it's the "TV" platform that is triggering the resolution crippling.
  • sugartits@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    I was tempted to state that I was wrong, clearly you have thought about this, but I don’t agree with this perspective at all and won’t be changing my opinion.

    I guess we’re done here then.

    The ‘nobody has a gun to your head’ approach to laissez-faire mercantilism likes to ignore how important free market access is.

    Oh, were still going. Okay.

    Erm. YouTube is free. It’s only not available where countries have blocked it.

    Lack of access can be just as bad as a gun to the head, if not sometimes worse.

    What? YouTube is not a necessity to human existence. It’s not food or shelter.

    That’s a stunning level of entitlement on show there.

    I don’t think YouTube has ever left me feeling like it had any regard for me as a consumer or even valued my time. It appears, from the many complaints I’ve seen by YouTube content creators, that many of them don’t feel valued or respected either. By the time Premium came along it had long lost me as an interested customer.

    Fair enough. So you’re going the ad route then?

    There’s no feeling that one should honor a one-sided social contract because that requires an actual relationship. If I felt that YouTube actually cared about anything other than being the middle-man that ensures that I get served ads, and demands–but not delivers–respect for it, then maybe I would reconsider.

    Ah, so you’re freeloading.

    Until then, I will enjoy their competing products. Ad-Blockers and supporting alternative hosting sites that make me feel more valued. They’ve assisted in creating their own black-market for ad-avoidance, and that’s the free market working.

    If you don’t want to pay, or view the ads, you should opt out and use an alternative or go without. That’s the ethical choice.

    • YouAreLiterallyAnNPC@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Excellent argument all around. I like that it stayed on point and didn’t devolve into something else entirely. I know you and I don’t necessarily agree, but I respect that you stood your ground and as a result, you as a person. I do feel that you could put more value into the demand-side of things, AKA, the consumer but there’s a bit of nuance there and we probably have different approaches that solve the same ideal. My follow on points would have been to argue that YouTube isn’t deserving of being given a social-contract of ethical conduct etc etc. I would also address that YouTube is central to some livelihoods and the financial well-being of others. I really wanted to highlight the sense of irony that I get that you would call a group of people crybabies and then feel personally attacked when someone took you to task and stood their ground on the counterpoint; however, I concede that if I had known you would have felt personally attacked I would have picked a softer tone and for that I apologize. I think we can both acknowledge that we’d only be arguing nuance at this point and that’s not a worthwhile use of our time. You sir (edit: or ma’am, or something in between, if it pleases), are not an NPC. (also edit; upvotes given for the statements except the original statement I disagreed with)