How YouPorn Tries To Hide That It's Spying On Your Browsing History

from the what,-no-rot-13? dept

There's a fair bit of attention being paid to a Forbes article about some new research concerning how a bunch of websites, including YouPorn, are exploiting a simple security hole to see what other sites you've visited:

How does it work? It's based on your browser changing the color of links you've already clicked on. A script on the site exploits a Web privacy leak to quickly check and see whether your browser reveals that the links to a host of other porn sites have been assigned the color "purple," meaning you've clicked them before.

This isn't a huge surprise, but what I found most fascinating was how YouPorn sought to hide this bit of javascript by "encrypting" it. And by "encrypting" it, I mean switching letters one letter up in the alphabet. As Kashmir Hill explains:

The script on YouPorn’s site that checks a user’s history (which you can see for yourself by going to the site and checking out its html with “View Source”) looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
function ypol(){var k={0:"qpsoivc/dpn",1:"sfeuvcf/dpn",
2:"bevmugsjfoegjoefs/dpn",3:"ywjefpt/dpn",4:"uvcf9/dpn",
5:"yoyy/dpn",6:"nfhbqpso/dpn",7:"nfhbspujd/dpn",
8:"yibntufs/dpn",9:"bxfnqjsf/dpn",10:"sfbmjuzljoht/dpn",
11:"csb{{fst/dpn",12:"yuvcf/dpn",13:"cbohcspt2/dpn",
14:"gmjoh/dpn",15:"gsffpoft/dpn",16:"nzgsffqbztjuf/dpn",
17:"efcpobjscmph/dpn",18:"qbztfswf/dpn",19:"nbyqpso/dpn",
20:"wjefpt{/dpn",21:"bfco/ofu",22:"qpsopsbnb/dpn"};
var g=[];for(var m in k){var d=k[m];
var a="";for(var f=0;f<d.length;f++)
{a+=String.fromCharCode(d.charCodeAt(f)-1)}var h=false;
for(var j in {"http://":"","http://www.":""})
{var l=document.createElement("a");
l.href=j+a;document.getElementById("ol").appendChild(l);
var e="";if(navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft")!=-1){e=l.currentStyle.color}
else{e=document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(l,null).getPropertyValue("color")}
if(e=="rgb(12, 34, 56)"||e=="rgb(12,34,56)"){h=true}}if(h){g.push(m)}}
var b=(g instanceof Array)?g.join(","):"";var c=document.createElement("img");
c.src="http://ol.youporn.com/blank.gif?id="+b;document.getElementById("ol").appendChild(c)}ypol();
</script>

That list of gibberish contains the sites that YouPorn is checking to see if you’ve visited, but disguises them with a bit o’ simple cryptography. Dial back each letter by one, so “qpsoivc/dpn”, for example, becomes “pornhub.com.”

What's amazing is that anyone actually thought this was a worthwhile move. It's not that hard to "decrypt" and it's almost obvious to the naked eye because it's not too difficult to figure out how the "encryption" (and I use that word loosely) works just by noticing all the terms that end in /dpn. You'd think even a rot-13 would throw a few more people off the scent.

Filed Under: browsers, encryption, history, javascript, spying
Companies: youporn

Does Capital One Offer Different Loan Rates Based On Your Browser Software?

from the give-IE-users-the-sucker's-rate dept

Consumerist is pointing to the claims of a guy who noticed that Capital One offered him really different car loan rates, depending on which browser he was using. He was using Firefox, and saw a rate of 3.5%. That was different than a rate promised to him in an email, so he thought perhaps the calculator wasn't working properly in Firefox (since he was using the beta version of Firefox 4). So he opened up Safari... and got a rate of 2.7%. Then he checked chrome: 2.3% and Opera: 3.1%. No word on how much more (and you know it would be more) you'd have to pay if you used IE.

I just tried it myself and saw the same thing. Here's the loan rate page if you'd like to try for yourself. For me, it's 3.5% in Firefox and 2.7% in Chrome. I found an old machine that still has IE... and it's actually showing the same Firefox rate of 3.5%. I also checked it out with Dolphin Browser on my Android phone... and got offered a 2.3% rate. It's kind of strange. A commenter on the Consumerist article suggests it's random -- saying that if you reload, you get different rates, but that doesn't appear to be the case for me. It might be that the initial display is somewhat random however, though that does seem like incredibly misleading advertising from Capital One...

Filed Under: browsers, loans
Companies: capital one

Mark Cuban: It's Okay For Broadcasters To Block Access Based On Browsers, Because They're Making Billions

from the ok,-let's-tackle-this-one dept

Like many tech sites, we recently wrote about the fact that the various TV networks were discriminating based on the browser, blocking access to Google TV's browser, because they don't want people to watch the shows they're already giving away for free online on their TV (even though it's easy enough to just hook up a computer to a TV and watch via your preferred browser of choice). Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed us to the fact that Mark Cuban decided to respond to Newteevee's article on the subject, in which the author of the original article reasonably pointed out that this was a braindead strategy by the networks, who were shooting themselves in the foot.

Cuban called this analysis "moronic," noting that the networks are making billions in fees from cable and satellite companies, and why should they put that at risk:

What is at stake is the financial relationships between broadcast networks and tv providers and broadcast networks and their affiliates.

Broadcast nets are now getting BILLIONS of dollars from TV providers. Money they didnt get just 3 years ago. For some, just 2 years ago.

So in the last 24 months they take billions from tv providers (directv,comcast, etc) and you think its smart to give those customers of their the finger and offer the same product online ?

thats moronic

Now, that's a very similar argument to the one made by venture capitalist Bill Gurley earlier this year, who suggested that TV would beat the internet because of the amount of money the networks were making from cable and satellite providers. The amounts were just too high.

And while Mark Cuban is a billionaire owner of a TV network, I think he's blinded by his own prejudices here. Yes, it's true that the networks are making mad cash from cable and satellite TV providers. But the fallacy is believing that these numbers are sustainable and ignoring consumer preference. While the TV folks are living in a world of denial that people won't shift to using the internet to watch TV, consumers are actually moving away from expensive TV deals, and the more they do that, the less willing cable and satellite providers will be to pay huge dollar amounts for programming. The billions of dollars are a blip. A hugely profitable, impossible-to-want-to-lose blip but a blip nonetheless. It's not sustainable because it goes against what consumers want, and in the long term, it'll go away. The reason the billions of dollars are there is because consumers paid that money, but they're increasingly unhappy with what they're getting for it, and they'll increasingly seek alternatives, and then that billion dollars goes elsewhere.

In a separate blog post, Cuban complains that it's "the dumbest idea ever" that networks should give Google its shows for free. Except, um, that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. Google's not taking the shows. Google is providing a browser to the internet. The same thing that you could do with Firefox if you hooked up your computer to your TV. So, yes, for now the folks in the TV world want to milk it, but at some point they need to realize that the more they do to piss off their viewers, the more trouble they'll be in down the road.

Filed Under: blocking, browsers, google tv, mark cuban

If Google TV Has To Pay To Make Hulu Available To Viewers, Will Mozilla Have To Pay To Access Hulu Via Firefox?

from the yeah,-that'll-work dept

Ah, Hulu. The online TV streaming service has been leading a life of contradiction from day one. It's been trying to build a service that can successfully "compete with free," while being owned by the TV companies, who are scared to death of cannibalizing their own business. We've discussed in the past how this puts Hulu in an impossible position. The fact that it regularly has to have its engineers block access to any device or software that surfs the web over a TV is just one ridiculous example. Danny Sullivan perhaps sums it up best in his review of Google TV, after discovering that Hulu is (of course) blocking access to anyone using Google TV:

Hey Hulu -- you kind of suck. I'm not trying to access you from Google TV. I'm trying to access you using a web browser, which just happens to run through Google TV. Explain to me again why if I hook my computer up to my TV, and navigate to Hulu to watch the shows you offer for free, that's OK. But if I use my Google TV computer, that same free content is verboten -- and the only way for me to get to it is if in the future, you decide to make the free content available through your not-so-free $10 per month Hulu Plus service that's not even available beyond special invites on your own site.

Here's a thought. Enough of blocking Google TV and apparently other services like Boxee. Either block EVERYONE on the web or block no one, because in the end, you turn people who love you when they reach you on their computers (like me) into people who hate you when they're blocked in other places (like me).

Admittedly, Hulu is apparently getting pressure from the TV companies to do these blocks, but it still makes no sense. All things like Boxee and Google TV are doing is providing a browser. As Danny notes, if I just hooked up my laptop to the same TV, I could watch Hulu just fine. Why is it a problem if it's using a different piece of hardware? It makes no sense.

Of course, Google is now negotiating with the networks to "allow" their content to be viewed on Google TV. Is it just me or is this extremely troubling? How would people react if, say, the New York Times suddenly announced that it would not be viewable on Dell computers or in Firefox, unless Dell or Mozilla paid up? People would go nuts. Yet, that's exactly what is happening here.

In the meantime, we've already covered Hulu's ridiculous paywall plans, which even the company admits completely suck. Rumors are now spreading that so few people are interested in getting pretty much nothing for $10/month, that Hulu is now planning to cut the fee in half. Of course, if they're blocking access to random browsers for whatever ridiculous reason (and still not going ad free), then why would anyone pay?

Filed Under: blocks, browsers, google tv, internet, tv
Companies: google, hulu

Microsoft Debated Privacy vs. Advertisers In Internet Explorer... And Advertisers Won

from the of-course-they-did dept

The Wall Street Journal has a story detailing how Microsoft developers had worked out a plan to add serious privacy capabilities to Internet Explorer 8, which would specifically be designed to try to block tracking efforts by advertisers. The default would recognize if a third-party service/cookie/script appeared on more than 10 visited websites and would then assume that was a tracking device of sorts. The idea was to make this the default and make it easy for users to control their privacy settings. However, when word filtered over to the side of Microsoft's business that sold advertising, folks there went ballistic and forced the IE team to change its plans:

Executives in Microsoft's new ad business were upset when the designers of Internet Explorer hatched the plan to block tracking activity, say people involved in the debate. At a meeting in the spring of 2008, Brian McAndrews, a Microsoft senior vice president who had been chief executive of aQuantive before Microsoft acquired it, complained to the browser planners. Their privacy plan, he argued, would disrupt the selling of Web ads by Microsoft and other companies, these people say.

The folks on the other side realized that people were quickly moving away from IE, and thought (probably correctly) that the way to attract users was to actually (what an idea!) fight for the users and what they wanted, such as by implementing strong privacy tools. After fighting it out back and forth in a series of meetings, the advertising folks won... and Internet Explorer will continue to lose users. Admittedly, other browsers don't offer such privacy features standard either -- and Google clearly has the same conflict of interest to deal with. However, these days, if you are concerned about privacy, using Firefox with NoScript, AdBlocker and various other privacy protection extensions can certainly help.

Filed Under: advertisers, browsers, internet explorer, privacy
Companies: microsoft

Another Journalist Seduced By App Madness Predicts The End Of The Web

from the ah,-technology dept

We've talked a few times about the media's obsession with "apps" as the solution to what ails them. They get one glance at the control that an app appears to provide, and they go wobbly in the knees and fail to consider basic trends and basic economics. As a few folks have noted, locked down apps are like the CD-ROM craze among media types just as the web first became popular. Who won that battle?

The latest reporter to fall under the sway of the app-run future is The Atlantic's Michael Hirschorn -- a writer who's work I usually like quite a bit. He writes eloquently about the "closing of the digital frontier," and predicts that the days of the browser are dying, as the days of the app are rising. In the process, he misleadingly attacks the basic economics of free, the history of Silicon Valley, and some rather important trends.

He kicks it off, as nearly all attacks on the economics of digital goods does these days, by mocking the old "information wants to be free" phrase, which he falsely suggests led the world astray. Rather than recognizing the basic economic forces that made (and still make) digital goods to be driven towards free, he pretends it's just an idea a bunch of "hippies" had -- that somehow hypnotized everyone else:

With the long tail of Brand's dictum chopped off, the phrase Information wants to be free--dissected, debated, reconstituted as a global democratic rallying cry against monsters of the political, business, and media elites--became perhaps the most powerful meme of the past quarter century; so powerful, in fact, that multibillion-dollar corporations destroyed their own businesses at its altar.

It's a bit of a Schrodinger's-cat situation when you try to determine what would have happened if we had not bought into the IWTBF mantra, but by the time digital culture exploded into the mainstream with the introduction first of the Mosaic browser and then of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, in the mid-'90s, free was already an idea only the very old or very obtuse dared to contradict.

Of course, it wasn't some blind support for a mantra that resulted in so much being free online. It was the basic economics of content, and a recognition of how those models can work. But, Hirschorn is so sold on this idea that "free" was just the pipedream of a bunch of digital hippies someone tricked the rest of the world into buying, that the one story he uses to explain this sense of "gospel" actually seems to disprove his point. He actually suggests that the fact that the online world quickly and decisively debunked the infamous 1995 Time Magazine technopanic about online porn is an example of the unwillingness of the digerati to be open to new ideas:

At the WELL, the core gospel of an open Web was upheld with such rigor that when one of its more prolific members, Time magazine's Philip Elmer-DeWitt, published a scare-the-old-folks cover story on cyber porn in 1995, which carried the implication that some measure of online censorship might not be a bad thing, he and his apostasy were torn to pieces by his fellow WELL-ites with breathtaking relentlessness.... In retrospect, what seems notable is the fervor with which digital correctness--the idea that the unencumbered flow of everything, including porn, must be defended--was being enforced. In the WELL's hierarchy of values, pure freedom was an immutable principle, even if the underlying truth (that porn of all kinds was and would be increasingly ubiquitous on the Web, with actual real-life consequences) was ugly and incontestable.

Now, I put a brief ellipsis in the middle of that paragraph, because right in the middle, Hirschorn hides the key fact: that those folks who pointed out the massive problems with the story were correct! Hirschorn basically tries to hide that point in the middle of the paragraph, where the beginning and the end of the paragraph suggest that people pointing out the massive flaws and outright ridiculousness of both the "study" and the Time report based on the study, were somehow overreacting in this religious fervor to sustain the digital wild west. The fact that Hirschorn even admits that the study was flawed, and then still claims the debunking was "political correctness" is bizarre and, quite frankly, insulting. Those who responded to the report didn't do so out of some "porn must be free" ethos. They did so out of a belief that truth is more important than blatant lies.

Hirschorn then goes on to make a stunningly ignorant statement concerning how the entertainment industry responded to the "open and free" internet:

Ironically, only the "old" entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era's freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up.

Wait. Which "old" entertainment industry is he talking about here that put its most expensively produced products onto the internet for free? Last I checked, we seem to have a new story pretty much every single day about just how hard the old entertainment industry is fighting to stop its content from being online for free. Furthermore, in the few cases where they have put stuff online for free, it's not because they were "striving to prove they were fit for the digital era's freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar," but because they were dragged kicking and screaming after someone pointed out to them that others had already put all their content online for free, and that if you put your content online, you actually had some ability to monetize it -- whereas, if you left it to everyone else, you made that more difficult. Somehow Hirschorn doesn't know this. It makes me wonder if he even uses the same internet the rest of us use.

This is the myth of "the original sin of free" all over again, where otherwise smart people think the decision of some to go free wasn't actually driven by marketforces, and that there actually was a different choice back then. These forgetful souls don't want to acknowledge that paywalls and micropayments have been tried time and time again since the early days of the web -- and they almost all have failed.

But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. In the U.S., there are only three major cell-phone networks, a handful of smart-phone makers, and just one Apple, a company that has spent the entire Internet era fighting the idea of open (as anyone who has tried to move legally purchased digital downloads among devices can attest).

It's a weird sort of argument that plays up the benefits of a lack of competition in the marketplace.

Apple, for once, is swimming with the tide. After 15 years of fruitless experimentation, media companies are realizing that an advertising-supported model is not the way to succeed on the Web and they are, at last, seeking to get consumers to pay for their content.

Actually, plenty of media companies are finding that an ad-supported model works great. And, yes, while many publications are seeking to get consumers to pay, history has shown that it doesn't tend to work very well in the long run.

They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year, than they are to subscribe to the same old kludgy Web site they have been using freely for years. As a result, media companies will soon be pushing their best and most timely content through their apps instead of their Web sites.

That's one theory, but it seems unlikely beyond a certain niche. Yes, people will pay for some apps. But already some are realizing that the web itself is actually better. And, the key point that so few app-afficionados seem to recognize is that apps and websites really aren't that different. Most of the things that an app can do can also be done on the web. And, as HTML5 starts to catch on, the web will be able to do even more. Hell, the dirty little secret out there (which isn't really a secret -- it's just that a lot of folks praising apps don't realize it) is that a good percentage of these "apps" that they're so amazed by? They're really webpages. They're really HTML that's wrapped in a little app container. But there's no reason they can't just be HTML -- and as the inevitable market forces continue, many are likely to move to the web, and get out from under the withering thumb of control of Steve Jobs.

On a more conceptual level, the move from the browser model to the app model (where content is more likely to be accessed via smartly curated "stores" like iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix) signals the first real taming of the Wild Digital West.

Statements like this remind me back of the days when people would load up their computer desktops with all sorts of apps as well. And then the web got good. Those who don't know their history are doomed to miss the fact that it's about to repeat...

Apple's version of the West has nice white picket fences, clapboard houses, morals police, and lots of clean, well-organized places to spend money. (The Internet, it seems, is finally safe for Rupert Murdoch.) These shifts are seemingly subtle, but they may prove profound.

AOL's version of the West, back in the 90s, also had nice white picket fences, clapboard houses, morals police and lots of clean, well-organized places to spend money. And then people discovered the web. And all that got abandoned quickly.

Like the AOL of the 90s, it is true that the closed platform of the iPhone offers a nice on-ramp for people to learn how smartphones can work, and what they can do. But, in the long run, the openness of and raw innovation of the open internet won out. Why does Hirschorn think that the same won't happen again? Oddly, when he does get around to Google -- who is providing one extremely popular open road -- he repaints Google's position as being on the defensive and trying to preserve an old business model:

Google, which built its once monopolistic position by harnessing the chaos of Web search, has been forced to move aggressively to preserve its business model against this new competition: it has teamed up with the Apple-scorned Flash; is making conciliatory gestures to the content owners it once patronized; has reached a deal to purchase a mobile ad-sales platform; and is promoting its own vision of the future based on cloud computing. Phones using its open-source smart-phone operating system, Android, are outselling the iPhone. Even so, Google still needs for the Web, however it's accessed, to remain central--because without contextual search advertising, Google ceases to matter. Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.

Again, most apps actually are just webpages. And there isn't anything about Google's business model that requires the web to be central. I have plenty of apps on my Android phone that have Google contextual ads. Also, the last point: that smartphones are not driven by search, seems utterly bizarre to me. I use search pretty damn frequently on my phone.

All of this suggests that the era of browser dominance is coming to a close.

Except that most of the points leading up to that conclusion weren't substantiated or were blatantly wrong.

And then, Hirschorn really goes off the deep-end. He brings back up the importance of paywalls, which leads to this doozy of a statement:

If they don't end up licensing original content, networks such as Twitter and Facebook will become purely communication vehicles.

Wait, what?!? Twitter and Facebook are communication tools. That's why people use them. What does he think they are? That's like saying, a century ago, that if the phone company doesn't license radio programs, the telephone might just be used for communication.

Honestly, this article is one of the more bizarre ones I've read in this style. It's as if it's written by someone living in an alternate universe, and has no access to history or general computing trends.

Filed Under: apps, browsers, economics, free, web

How Depressing Must Your Job Be If Its Focus Is On Breaking What The Technology Allows

from the soul-sucking-work dept

Rob Pegoraro has a column up about the latest in the very long line of back and forth attempts of companies making browsers for television sets to get around silly blocks from Hulu. Despite the fact that these systems are really just browsers legitimately connecting to a webpage, Hulu's corporate parents freaked out and ordered them blocked for no good reason. Of course, the workaround is easy: just spoof the type of browser, so that Hulu doesn't know that it's a browser on a TV. However, Hulu keeps trying to block these, which leads Pegoraro to ask a good question at the end:

But when does Hulu get tired of playing this silly game? How do Hulu's own developers feel about working to ensure that their site stays broken for the "wrong" users? Do they not have one of the most degrading coding jobs in America? And to what end--so short-sighted suits can find new ways to annoy their customers?

While it may seem like a random question, it could actually be a big deal. When Hulu first came out, one of the points that people made was that it really was put together by folks who understood the power of the internet. That is, they were "internet people" rather than "Hollywood people," which is what allowed the service to work well for many (definitely better than most expected). But, with the corporate bosses continually trying to limit what the site can do, you'd have to imagine that the developers working at the company must be getting annoyed. What kind of developer wants to focus on limiting what users can do with technology, rather than allowing something great? At some point, Hulu is destined to lose its best developers who just get sick of spending all their time breaking their product, rather than building something cool, useful and innovative.

Filed Under: breaking, browsers, drm, kylo, online, tv
Companies: hulu, kylo

ISPs Hijacking Browser Functions, Continue Proud Tradition Of Value-Free Added Services

from the added-value-for-us-but-not-for-you dept

ISPs over the last few years have quickly rushed to embrace DNS redirection advertising. Instead of users being directed to a traditional page not found message (or Google in some browsers) should they enter a nonexistent or mistyped URL, they're redirected to an ISP-run search portal laden with advertisements. The concept creates a revenue stream out of your clumsy typing, giving ISPs an extra few bucks per month, per user (of course on top of whatever they make supposedly not selling your clickstream data). While many users don't like the practice, most ISPs provide some kind of opt-out mechanism (though they often don't work well), and users can often choose alternative DNS servers. Slashdot directs our attention to the fact that users continue to be surprised when they find out their ISP is hijacking user location bar results:

"Today I noticed that this great feature of Firefox (combined with Google of course) has stopped working, and has instead been replaced with an add-laden (sic) search result from another website. I've confirmed that my keyword.URL setting is still pointed at Google, so this must be happening at the traffic level, I would imagine either by use of a web proxy or something to do with DNS lookup, which makes me wonder if this new 'feature' my ISP (Netvigator by PCCW in Hong Kong) has introduced is also affecting my privacy?"

Here in the States one ISP (Windstream Communications) was recently busted for taking this concept one step further, going so far as to actually hijack Firefox Google search toolbar results. Windstream quickly backed away from the practice once users started to complain, insisting it was a mistake. However, the ISP wouldn't offer technical specifics about what technology they were using that created this "bug," and employees were told not to elaborate. To be clear, in Windstream's case this went well beyond DNS redirection, worked no matter what DNS servers were being used, and involved manipulating actual traffic streams using a new flavor of deep packet inspection. Whether this new layer 7/DPI is being used for copyright enforcement, surveillance, data mining or search result hijacks isn't clear -- but whatever it's being used for, it's being implemented with absolutely no transparency to the end user.

It seems unlikely that any U.S. ISP would take things further by hijacking toolbar results, given ISPs are busily trying to argue to regulators that network neutrality rules aren't necessary. Still, as deep packet inspection technology gets more sophisticated, precisely how ISPs are meddling with your traffic is something to keep a close eye on. ISPs already have a bad habit of offering value added services that fail to provide any value to consumers, and DNS redirection ads are only the latest example. ISPs were in such a hurry to grab this additional revenue, they failed to bother to make sure opt-out mechanisms for these "services" even worked, much less consider adding any kind of enhanced DNS functionality (as seen by companies like OpenDNS) that would make these services worth something to the end user. While DPI itself isn't bad, it holds a lot of potential for abuse among ISPs eager to make an extra buck at any cost.

Filed Under: browsers, dns, firefox, hijacking

Hulu Continues To Shoot Self In Foot: Blocks More Browsers

from the lemme-explain-how-the-internet-works... dept

Hulu, at the behest of its corporate masters, continues to shoot itself in the foot and make it an increasingly less useful platform. Last year, Hulu got a lot of attention for blocking Boxee, a specialized browser to show internet video on a computer-connected television. Hulu was apologetic about it, but admitted that it was pressured to do this by its owners (though, NBC boss Jeff Zucker appears to have lied to Congress about NBC's role in this). However, it didn't stop there. Hulu, it seems, is hellbent on trying to block any browser it doesn't like from showing its content. It's blocked the PS3's browser and mobile browsers as well.

The latest is that it wasted almost no time before blocking the new Kylo browser from Hillcrest labs that, like Boxee, was designed to better format the content for television.

This is typical short-sighted thinking from the likes of NBC bosses who are bizarrely afraid that people might watch authorized television shows on their television. Of course, the real fear is that if people start doing this, the cable and satellite companies might start losing business, meaning that they'll pay a lot less to NBC to carry their shows. This is such typical thinking from NBC execs, who seem to go out of their way to pretend that they can hold people back from doing what they want, because it doesn't agree with NBC's increasingly obsolete business model. So instead of letting people watch authorized content, with very high paying advertising, they're instead driving people to get the content through unauthorized means. It's bizarre that anyone could think this is a smart idea -- but, then again, we're talking about NBC management here. They think that downloading movies is hurting the American corn farmer... so logic has never really been a strong suit.

Filed Under: browsers, kylo, tv, video
Companies: boxee, hillcrest labs, hulu, nbc

YouTube Joins Hulu In Letting Content Holders Block Access For TV-Connected Devices

from the but-why? dept

We've already covered how Hulu has blocked Boxee and the PS3 from showing video content -- even though all they're really doing is using a different browser -- one that lives on your TV -- to access the same content you can freely access on your computer. techflaws.org writes in to let us know that users of a Western Digital media center recently discovered that the latest upgrade -- driven in large part by Google/YouTube demands -- added some features, but also began blocking content that the content creator deems "not available" for mobile phones or TV. Now it's not clear how long YouTube has offered this functionality -- just that it appears WD has just enabled it -- but it's pissing off some users, understandably.

After all, if it's just a browser, why should the content creators care -- and why is Google helping them out in this regard? The line is blurring between various devices anyway and setting a special toggle that lets users block access to videos seen in a perfectly legal fashion on different types of devices seems pretty backwards. It's too bad Google even makes this an option -- and that anyone actually pays attention to it.

Filed Under: browsers, connected devices, video
Companies: google, hulu, western digital, youtube