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The dutch cable company 'Ziggo' (owned by Liberty Global) also does Incognito mode detection in their web-based tv player and does not allow streaming. https:/

by NKCSS 7y ago

The dutch cable company 'Ziggo' (owned by Liberty Global) also does Incognito mode detection in their web-based tv player and does not allow streaming. https://imgur.com/a/TacdDRm https://imgur.com/a/TacdDRm You can check it yourself here: https://www.ziggogo.tv/ https://www.ziggogo.tv/

Mindwipe 7y ago
I don't believe that's actually their fault, HTML5 EME implementations don't work in incognito mode in Chrome. But that is another way in which newspaper sites could do this detection is they wanted to, send an HTML5 EME clearkey to a one pixel video in the corner and get back the error response. I think Google are on to a complete loser here tbh, and I'm not sure why they're wasting development resource. As much as using incognito mode to bypass soft paywalls might be fun for a user, there's no real moral justification. There's no privacy issue here in a newspaper giving a clear and unambiguous statement before you enter that you've got to disable incognito, and a user can either choose or refuse to do it. It's probably the clearest consent screen in the world.
- NKCSS 7y ago
  Yeah, I know, but the article seems to not know about this. Another avenue could be that they just check the uniqueness of your signature; if it's too generic: block content, and only lift it after installing a first party extension or something, that way, for most people it will just work and for the few that are false positives, you have a workaround. The whole goal of the incognito modus is also a way to detect it. It's the same for adblockers; just serve a unique content key with the ad and check back via the ad provider if it was loaded before proceeding to serve content. Only serving ad-free content to crawlers is no problem either, because ip ranges for the big ones are known and you can't spoof them in TCP. It's all a question of effort Vs reward. They probably know just a very small percentage of users will abuse it, so it's not worth it for them to spend a lot of effort blocking it. For example: in a retail store, if there's a difference in expected vs actual money of ~€4, it's not even worth it to investigate, because it will cost more than you'll get back from resolving it. It's sometimes hard for me to comply because I always want to have stuff match 100%, but it's always a effort Vs reward dilemma that you have to work with.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  The moral justification could just as easily be turned around: a website does not get to run arbitrary code on my computer, so I can (and do, by default) turn of javascript.
  - Mindwipe 7y ago
    If you want to you're very welcome to. That's really not the same thing as Google actively developing a tool to block soft paywalls, that will primarily be used by people to just not pay for things who really don't give a stuff about people running things on their computer or not.

by NKCSS 7y ago

Mindwipe 7y ago

I don't believe that's actually their fault, HTML5 EME implementations don't work in incognito mode in Chrome. But that is another way in which newspaper sites could do this detection is they wanted to, send an HTML5 EME clearkey to a one pixel video in the corner and get back the error response. I think Google are on to a complete loser here tbh, and I'm not sure why they're wasting development resource. As much as using incognito mode to bypass soft paywalls might be fun for a user, there's no real moral justification. There's no privacy issue here in a newspaper giving a clear and unambiguous statement before you enter that you've got to disable incognito, and a user can either choose or refuse to do it. It's probably the clearest consent screen in the world.

NKCSS 7y ago
Yeah, I know, but the article seems to not know about this. Another avenue could be that they just check the uniqueness of your signature; if it's too generic: block content, and only lift it after installing a first party extension or something, that way, for most people it will just work and for the few that are false positives, you have a workaround. The whole goal of the incognito modus is also a way to detect it. It's the same for adblockers; just serve a unique content key with the ad and check back via the ad provider if it was loaded before proceeding to serve content. Only serving ad-free content to crawlers is no problem either, because ip ranges for the big ones are known and you can't spoof them in TCP. It's all a question of effort Vs reward. They probably know just a very small percentage of users will abuse it, so it's not worth it for them to spend a lot of effort blocking it. For example: in a retail store, if there's a difference in expected vs actual money of ~€4, it's not even worth it to investigate, because it will cost more than you'll get back from resolving it. It's sometimes hard for me to comply because I always want to have stuff match 100%, but it's always a effort Vs reward dilemma that you have to work with.
tomjen3 7y ago
The moral justification could just as easily be turned around: a website does not get to run arbitrary code on my computer, so I can (and do, by default) turn of javascript.
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  If you want to you're very welcome to. That's really not the same thing as Google actively developing a tool to block soft paywalls, that will primarily be used by people to just not pay for things who really don't give a stuff about people running things on their computer or not.