Unfortunately this has been going on few several months now. YT is actively blocking IPs if they think they are from data centers, VPNs, or proxies.
They’ve also been doing some under the hood cryptographic changes that cause breakages from time to time in Invidious (the backend for FreeTube)
Let’s Backtrack a little bit
You could almost play the game: “Linux Distro or Weed Strain?”
Other than my Steam Deck, I daily drive NixOS and it runs on all my servers. Can confirm the glory (hole).
Valve over here puttin’ everybody on Arch
I never really used Flatpaks until I got a Steam Deck and started doing a little game dev on it.
I now have an init script that I run after every SteamOS update to install paru and other libraries via pacman instead, lmao.
it’s an app on Flatpak called Flatseal, it’s a GUI to give flatpaks permissions and such.
I spend hours writing a bash script to automate something I know I’m only going to do once.
I see, I’ve never looked super deep into F-Droid or released anything there, I didn’t realize that a requirement for releasing on F-Droid was that they build it. Just read their inclusion criteria, interesting.
ETA: Read through the whole article, and godamn. I don’t really trust anything Android any way, but this is actually a pretty damn big WTF from F-Droid. Thanks for sharing!
I’m just not convinced it can fool google and meta
Yea, this is a great and healthy skepticism to have. It’s why I went deep on this little research tangent.
Besides browser fingerprinting, there are many other ways to tie you to online behavior. For instance, the DAITA thing has nothing to do with browser fingerprints, but specifically the size of your inbound and outbound traffic. The NSA uses that to figure out your behavior and link on-VPN and off-VPN traffic together with great success, regardless of how many hops you go through. It’s the behavior that gives you away.
I’m always on my VPN, reconnect at random times, and have all the extras turned on. Something else that may be a factor is that I have Mullvad Browser installed via Flatpak and is sandboxed to hell. Maybe you installed via .deb or something in Mint?
Any way, thanks again for humoring me in this! I think you’re right that at least you are sorta getting lumped in with others, but it’s never going to be 100% foolproof and we should all plan for that.
Shhh, that’s too advanced. Besides, CLI is outdated and slower than GUIs, this is just insane behavior /s
I honestly didn’t even need to specify tab-completed. It’s still less typing than their comment unless your paths are miles long.
hahaha… indeed what a silly name!
That’s a bummer though. It’s only going to get more difficult to view anything on YT privately.
I guess they didn’t require their HR team to have good written communication skills.
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Cool! I think you meant Newpipe? Probably autocorrect. I usually use that one as well, since I don’t really watch YT on my phone not having sponsorblock or dearrow doesn’t really bother me.
And yea, the proxy/VPN thing is a widespread issue that affects all YT alternatives. The root cause is YT themselves blocking ranges of IPs if they determine it is a data center or VPN (and also random nsig changes). Every once in a while it will start working, but then you’ll get blocked after watching one vid.
This same reason is why the amount of public Invidious instances has dwindled and they now recommend self-hosting it. Even with FreeTube, I can’t use a VPN. You might still encounter some issues from time to time even with Newpipe through a VPN.
Interesting, thanks for coming back with some info. It brings up more questions, but I understand if you don’t want to dive deeper. No worries!
Just to make sure we aren’t testing two separate systems, I am using the site hosted on GitHub from the maintainer: https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
What operating system are you running? I see some discourse online about even Tor being identified as long as it’s run on Windows 11, but in Linux it is not identified.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/113ukg9/is_creepjs_able_to_break_tor_antifingerprinting/
Under prediction, what is the crowd-blending score you see? In mullvad, I see 75% ©, in my other browsers I see 60% or less (D/F). Admittedly, I don’t fully understand this section too much. I was under the impression that 0% here was a good thing, but the way you described it is the opposite. Trying to locate clarification on this and will edit when/if I find it. Edit: from the README it says failing = unique, but also goes on to say that a lower trust score is not necessarily bad. I’m still a bit confused at exactly what this is telling me, especially when I’m being clearly lumped in with a lot of other users in Mullvad, and very clearly being unique in Firefox. Yet, both datasets are almost entirely 0% under Predicitions.
And just to round it out, I’m curious what you see for the visits count at the top, and when the first visit was. When I’m in Mullvad, the visits count is almost touching 1000, and the first visit was at the beginning of January. These are definitely not me, as I have only run the test a handful of times, and yesterday was the first time I had ever used or heard of creepjs.
I still think there is potentially something I am misunderstanding about creepjs, so I may be wrong here. From what I understand, if the FP ID changes, visits is at 1, and first visit is timestamped right now, then you likely have been identified. The FP ID changing or remaining the same doesn’t really indicate anything without the context of the rest of the data, especially the visits counter. It’s clear that I am being lumped in with many, many other users.
Lastly, I think that you are making yourself standout from the crowd by manually installing the dark reader plugin (I assume that’s what you meant). That defeats the purpose and is likely why you are being identified so quickly. There’s a reason why Mullvad and Tor don’t make it easy to install plugins, and also why they recommend not maximizing the browser window. They actually specifically force the viewport to be a specific resolution, even if you maximize. This makes you look even more like everyone else, because out-of-the-box you are configured the same as everyone else. As soon as you add anything unique, you become unique.
Oh man, since I know very little about developing at the kernel level, I bet I’d get some sweet and soul-crushing novellas.
Mmm. I like your veracity.