Hulu Munging HTML With JS To Protect Content

N!NJA writes "Hulu has started encoding the html that they send to people's browsers, and then decoding it using javascript before rendering it. [...] They then run the character stream through a series of javascript functions to convert it back into plain text before pushing it into your browser using DHTML. That's quite a lot of effort just for fun, so I assume that is to stop screen scrapers from parsing content." I really can't understand all this effort. Boxee displayed the Hulu advertising perfectly. I suspect Alec Baldwin is to blame.

Comments

Cat & Mouse.

[0100010001010011]

The XBMC guys already made a plugin after the last hulu change. It'll take a few hours and a new one will be made.

Especially if you SEND the user all the info they need, how hard is it to decode functions? There are crackers out there that take decoded assembly to figure out how to bypass DRM, what makes Hulu think their implementation will be any more difficult?

Re:Cat & Mouse.

[pionzypher]

They've already worked around it.

In the OP link: 2.6.7: Changed Hulu code to deal with their new encoding of web pages. Note, this slows it down a fair bit, so UK-only users are advised to do a custom install to turn off US.

Re:Cat & Mouse.

[tweek]

It has nothing to do with piracy. It has to do with revenue from cable company contracts. The problem the "content providers" had was that via Boxee and other set-top pcs, people could forgo cable all-together and that would be a huge chunk of lost revenue. Hulu is popular but the ad revenue from Hulu is nothing compared to the money the cable companies pay "content providers".

* I quote "content providers" because Hulu liked to use that phrase when Boxee was shut out. The fact of the matter is that Hulu is co-owned by two of these "content providers" so in essence, Hulu *IS* the "content provider"

Re:Cat & Mouse.

[illumin8]

Do you really believe that all of this content is going to get less available over time? Note that this would essentially contradict all of history.

Actually, yes. Because Hulu is controlled by content owners, who seem to want to create tons of content and then keep honest viewers from ever watching it (see Fox scheduling sci-fi shows during the worst possible time slots), there have already been a lot of cases of Hulu removing content. The show It's Always Sunny in PA was pulled from Hulu by the content owners. Also, most shows only show a few episodes from the latest season, and when the season is over and a new season starts, the old seasons are removed.

There are a number of reasons why it might be nice to have an archival copy of the shows available on Hulu. Personally, I prefer to use a combination of Netflix + Handbrake/MetaX + iTunes + AppleTV for my video archival and streaming purposes. I get great quality with DVD rips encoded in H.264, and a nice menu system with cover art and tagging (thanks to MetaX) that works beautifully on my HDTV through the AppleTV. It's also a system so brain dead simple that normal people can use it.

Re:Cat & Mouse.

[Idiomatick]

The documents in Alexandria WERE copies. The reason the library was so great was that when people came to port the librarians would copy travelers' stuff. I think it would be kind of impressive if the riaa drmed some of their stuff and protected it so well that it dissapeared entirely... like top secret documents in the us gov.

Re:Cat & Mouse.

[Sleepy]

I can't tell if you are kidding or not, but if you think programming is easy, feel free to try it on your lunch break.

FYI - programmers don't require usability testing. I think you have programmers confused with your CUSTOMERS (or your Program Manager). They DO require pesky documentation. Most programmers have the urge to dive in and code without planning.

Re:Cat & Mouse.

[Zordak]

True story: I worked for a government contractor in 1999. Our customer maintained an old DOS program that talked to little boxes on military aircraft. The program had a Y2K issue that the customer wanted fixed, so he issued a contract to us (sole source, of course). The budget was somewhere between $500k and $750k. The timeline was about 9 months, including writing documents justifying why the fix was needed, documents about what the fix would fix, documents about how we would fix it, documents about how we would test it, some actual coding, travel expenses for several people to fly halfway across the country to where they had airplanes, several days of extensive acceptance testing, more documents about how we tested it and what the results were and so forth.

In reality, the fix consisted of tweaking maybe 20 lines of Pascal, and I had made the changes within the first few weeks of getting the contract (while we were still in the phase of justifying why we need to change it; technically, I was not supposed to so much as touch the source files yet). The hardest part of the task was rebuilding their kludged-together make environment with hard-coded DOS paths since the thing would only work with the specific Pascal compiler they had used on their old system back in the 80s.

The best part: as soon as we were finished, and we had fully tested and qualified the shiny new Y2K-compliant code, the software got preempted by a new release of a bigger Windows-based system that rolled in the same functionality (basically it was a land grab by a program office responsible for another part of the same aircraft). As far as I know, my code was never deployed on a single computer.

Re:Cat & Mouse.

[fprintf]

Don't bother! I was being totally serious. You see, from a business/MBA standpoint (yes, I know there are very very few of us here on Slashdot.. I think we might be outnumbered by the women) it all looks like stonewalling. And the thing is, the project architect is going to get blamed, probably when he is long gone from the first project, when it takes $500K to add a table to a data warehouse.

Here is the problem. The MBA type guys don't have a clue what works or doesn't work from an IT perspective. We can only make suggestions of what we want, and encourage folks to seek acceptable alternatives. But if we say we have $5M to do a project, and you say it can't be done for less than $10M we have to trust you. Since we only have $5M you get to recommend either doing the project half-assed, with half the functionality required, or you don't get *any* work and the funding goes to some other project. So what ends up happening is a "multi-year" project is born. "We'll build the foundation and some of the features required and do the rest next year when more funding is available" the project manager will say. And yet, when next year rolls around then there is no funding 'cause a 100 other projects are requesting priority instead. It is a maddening circle. The MBA types, like myself, blame the IT team for incompetence and failure to deliver when they promise a certain feature set. The IT types blame the MBAs for being inflexible and unrealistic. Finally everyone blames the customer for being too demanding.

Phase One is Over

[wonkavader]

TunerFreeMCE couldn't scrape the data. Mission accomplished. Oh, wait... Tada:

"Update- version 2.6.7 is now available to download to work round this new tactic."

And now, I supposed, there will be a DMCA attack as phase two.

Huh?

[AlterRNow]

My father gave me some HTML that was decoded with Javascript. To get the raw HTML was pretty simple IIRC..

1) Load page in Firefox
2) Open DOM explorer/inspector
3) Export as HTML
4) ???
5) PROFIT!!

Re:Huh?

[AKAImBatman]

The particular situation here deals with compressed/encoded HTML in an effort to prevent screen-scraping. This leaves two options for screen scrapers:

Option 1
1) Figure out how the decoder works
2) Replicate the decoder functionality in the screen scraper
3) Parse the decoded HTML
4) Make changes as the encoding scheme changes
5) ???
6) Profit!

Option 2
1) Link a Javascript engine like SpiderMonkey, Rhino, V8, or SquirrelFish into the screen scraper
2) Run the Javascript to decode the HTML
3) Parse the decoded HTML
4) ???
5) Profit!

Re:Dumb question here

[ynef]

Yes, in fact, HtmlUnit is my preferred browser simulation library in Java for this very reason: it allows you to write very easy to understand Java code, and it uses Rhino as a JavaScript interpreter. Completely brilliant, and yet few people know about it.

Re:I can't understand...Boxee displayed ads perfec

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just about the advertising. Their goal is to prop up the distinction between watching something on your TV and computer; if you're going to watch it on your TV, they want you watching from the TV networks it came from and not the theoretically inferior Internet. Unfortunately the distinction in the displays themselves continues to blur into nothing, so all they have left to maintain it is the interface, which they're doing their best to make as home theater remote driven unfriendly as possible.

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always knew there was something different about liberals.

Re:Brand dilution guys....

[MightyYar]

They are being knuckleheads. Their "website" is analogous to a traditional TV channel and Boxee is analogous to a set-top cable box. You'd still get the Hulu ads, still get the Hulu branding.

To be fair, it seems like Hulu would very much like to be on Boxee - the distaste of the content providers' policies is palpable on their blog.

Re:Can you blame them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hulu IS the content providers, and Hulu charges more for ad time than cable does in most markets.

Re:Ad revenue on TV Ad revenue on Hulu

[sricetx]

Sure, it beats piracy (a little money and control over how long your content is on there) but if people were to cancel cable or watch Hulu on their Xboxes more, both cable/satellite providers and the content providers themselves would be unhappy.

I already watch Hulu on my xbox 360 and I don't have cable. I run MediaMall's Playon server in a Virtualbox Windows XP image on my Linux machine and it works fine. I can watch cbs.com, Netflix instant viewing content, Youtube videos and a lot of other content with this setup. Oh, and I also stream all my Mythtv recordings (ATSC local broadcast only) to the xbox via Fuppes. It's great. I've always had a deep hatred of cable companies, and it is really satisfying to cut them out and get all this content legally and essentially free (well, Playon is $39, but it is a one time fee). Goodbye to these customer unfriendly companies that are just middle men that add no value.

Re:Fail

[emurphy42]

That was mentioned on The Daily WTF, wasn't it? *googles* Yup, here we go:

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/9204/172301.aspx

http://www.careercc.com/