3 ms·
A future in which YouTube will refuse to stream you data because you didn't pass client attestation is definitely coming and I wish we could stop it. It is a d
by therein 2y ago
A future in which YouTube will refuse to stream you data because you didn't pass client attestation is definitely coming and I wish we could stop it.
It is a dark future where some of us will accept it, and rest of us will be constantly taking part in a cat-mouse chase in which we glitch out attestation tokens from vulnerable devices to get by.
- userbinator 2y agoWe need laws against user-agent discrimination.
- knowaveragejoe 2y agoCan you describe in a little more detail what exactly client attestation is, and why you would need other devices to achieve it?
- JoshTriplett 2y agoClient attestation is a mechanism for servers to get cryptographic proof from a client about what software the client is running. Modified browsers, or software like yt-dlp, would have a harder time providing such proof. How hard a time would depend on the security hardening of the attestation mechanism. It'd almost certainly be broken, just as most attempts at DRM get broken, but it would be one more speedbump. There are legitimate purposes for attestation; for instance, server attestation can allow a user to run software on a server and know that software matches a specific build and hasn't been subverted, so that the client can trust the server to do computation on the client's behalf. But one of the leading uses of client attestation is DRM.