oh shit, I did not even consider that could happen. I uh… need to go tear down an instance I don’t really use anymore.

Excellent, I hadn’t come across this yet, many thanks!

Just fyi, you typed the link to their main source code as github.org instead of .com :)

I don’t think the SPF / DKIM / DMARC stuff is overly complex nor the core of the problem.

It’s not the core of the issue, but the average joe that is a hobbyist self-hoster it will be.

IMO, the core issue is that there is no standard whatsoever. People just do whatever the hell they want with these records, pretty much. Microsoft and Google do it differently than each other, even.

The only solution for me is that we move on from email as a society.

Mmm. I like your veracity.

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.