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Microsoft YouTube App Strips Ads; Adds Download
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft appears to be sticking a finger in Google's eye with the launch of its new YouTube app for Windows Phone. The app, ReadWrite has confirmed, strips out YouTube ads when it plays back videos and allows users to easily download video by way of a prominent 'download' button."
Give them a day. I'll bet it stops working tomorrow.
Not to be mean to you personally, but we don't fucking care. Just like we don't fucking care that ABC doesn't like us recording shows on our DVRs and watching them later without having to suffer through the horrible, loud, insulting-to-the-intelligence ads. We don't care that Sony and BMG want us to buy entire CDs of music, rather than download songs, or worse yet, find other music to listen to.
So, if your profession is making videos, and your income is based on ads played during those videos on a communal website, you may want to think of a better revenue stream. This one isn't going to last, whether Microsoft can pull this off or not.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Theoretically...
There are ways to blackhole ad servers at the router, if you use DDWRT or openWRT, assming MS hasn't deeply rolled the ad server In with the live server.
This means that you could inject alternatives to adverts and movie files, based on the structure of the query, and the remote IP. Eg, you could put a "no" sign around a $, in place of static image ads, and a "static screen loop" in place of streaming video ads. Unless the MS dash does some kind of data hash checking, it would display the downloaded content instead of the intended adverts.
(Makes you wonder if you could force MS xboxes to display trojanized swf files, or trojanized EMF or TIFF files, for clandestine execution jumping fun....)
I haven't tested this, and it is clearly against MS's ToS, (which as worded, says you cant even have wireshark running at the same time your xbox is turned on, let alone meddle with the replies the box gets.)
Danger if MS does a super dick move, like double verify image checksums of adverts the console downloads, and if "known surrogates/malware" are detected, ban the console though.