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A recent Youtube Web update has added a canvas whenever the seek bar is visible, an HTML5 canvas pops up. This was not asked for and not needed. If you disable canvases for privacy, this will cause a horrific red bad to cover half the screen until you hide the seekbar. Canvases can be used for fingerprinting, which I'm sure Google is doing here.

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[-] 0oWow@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago

You can keep canvas blocked on YouTube. To stop the red lines, do this:

Click uBlock Origin icon (top right of the browser, small red shield).

Click the gears icon ("Open the dashboard").

Click "My filters" tab. Make sure "Enable my custom filters" is checked.

Add the following string to the list of filters:

www.youtube.com##.ytp-gradient-bottom

Click "Apply changes".

Reload your youtube video page.

[-] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 4 points 2 months ago

Wait... so the red lines are added ON PURPOSE to deliberately degrade experience, and are not a side effect of having Canvas disabled?

[-] 0oWow@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Maybe, I don't know if it was on purpose. But the red lines are the red-fade-to-pink effect of the progress bar I believe, and I have not found a need for such a feature, so they might be using this feature as an excuse to claim the need of canvas.

[-] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 4 points 3 months ago

🔥🔥 thanks for sharing I tried blocking but couldnt find the element

[-] 0oWow@lemmy.world -1 points 2 months ago

You aren't supposed to find the element. Just copy the command into your filters and hit apply.

[-] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 7 points 2 months ago

No I tried to find the element before he shared this.

[-] BenLeMan@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Thank you thank you THANK YOU! I've been trying to get rid of that ugly thing for weeks now.

[-] Binette@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

Saved your comment cause I knew I would run into this issue. Thanks a bunch!

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago
[-] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 1 points 3 months ago

This issue impacts PCs mainly.

[-] FossilVerbrechen@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Glory to Peertube!

They had a redesign and it looks pretty and is usable.

[-] csm10495@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

99/100 people will not care. I'm one of them.

For that 1/100: sure it's infuriating but probably more than mildly.

[-] lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com 1 points 3 months ago

I'm once again asking you to self-host Invidious locally on your PC.

[-] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 1 points 3 months ago

Funny enough, I was just thinking about trying out invidious. I'll probably give it a shot in a bit

[-] Artemis@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

I was wondering what that crazy bar at the bottom was! Sometimes it's green for me. Yet another reason to keep on the degoogling train...

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 points 3 months ago

Google uselessly uses the canvas for its reverse image search. And I do mean uselessly - The image you upload is put onto the canvas, then immediately relayed to the server and never used again.

[-] Celestus@lemm.ee 0 points 3 months ago

This is probably a clever way of doing native JPEG image conversion on the front end, instead of pulling in (or reimplementing) a universal image conversion library

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 0 points 3 months ago

Yes because as we all know that's too hard for Google to achieve.

[-] Celestus@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I bet it would be trivial for one of their engineers to whip up a universally compatible, hardware accelerated image file converter in JS, using no external dependencies, and less than 50 lines of code. Hint: it uses Canvas

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 0 points 3 months ago

Yes because as we all know 100% of browsers have a canvas.

[-] lime@feddit.nu 0 points 3 months ago

which ones don't?

also, good goalpost moving.

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 0 points 3 months ago

LibreWolf

TinEye seems to have no problem with this. It seems weird to argue that something that doesn't work on every browser should be used because the alternative doesn't work on every browser.

Google could easily do both. Using JS if canvas fails.

[-] lime@feddit.nu 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

librewolf has canvas turned off, because it's fingerprintable. it's still in the firefox codebase. all major browsers support canvas and have for more than ~~10~~ fifteen years.

also, canvas is literally a JS API what are you talking about

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago

What exactly is HTML5 canvas image data?

[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago

It's just an API that allows a web page to draw in a box. The problem is, that for a bunch of technical reasons that I'm mostly not aware of, it can be used to fingerprint you.

[-] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

The canvas API needs specific access to hardware that isn't usually available via browser APIs. It's usually harder to get specific capability information from a user's GPU for example. The canvas API needs capability information to decide how to draw objects across differently capable hardware, and those extra data points make it that much easier to uniquely identify a user. The more data points you can collect, the more unique each visitor is.

Here's a good utility from the EFF to demonstrate the concept if you or anyone else is curious.

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
18 points (100.0% liked)

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