[tor-talk] Revisiting youtube blocking TBB, virtually all 1st attempts to load YT

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Hi,
 
On Saturday, March 14, 2020 at 11:40 PM, joebtfsplk at gmx.com wrote:
 
> On 3/9/20 12:49 PM, nusenu wrote:
>> Mirimir:
>>> On 03/08/2020 02:40 PM, nusenu wrote:
>>>>> What would stop a bad actor from creating a bunch of new circuits 
>>>>> and
>>>>> making all Tor IPs look bad if they were so inclined?
>>>> yes there are distribution strategies that can prevent that
>>>> or make that very expensive (an /48 IPv6 block has a **lot** of IP 
>>>> addresses)
>>> Sure, but wouldn't sites start blocking at /48, /64, etc levels?
>> the feature is primarily targeted towards reputation systems that 
>> look at the
>> specific IP address only. Maybe some will move to prefix based 
>> reputation but
>> the assumption is that not all will.
>>  
> This is all very interesting.  I read several of the links (bugs & 
> some
> non-tor-talk forum questions on this general subject.
> 
> I've now had more time + paying more attention to my procedures &
> typical results on youtube.
> I can't explain what I'm seeing, since apparently in theory (unless 
> it's
> outdated info), getting a new identity should be equivalent to 
> closing /
> reopening TBB.
> 
> By now, it's seems safe to say that if I've visited any other sites
> *before* loading YT in a new tab, the chance of YT *NOT* giving the
> "suspicious activity" warning, is very low.
> ** Which begs the question, why would cached data from other sites
> affect whether YT thinks the new exit shows suspicious behavior?
There seems to be a different factor that helps accessing Youtube
through Tor that was discovered by someone else:
When directly opening the URL of a video on Youtube (e.g. from a
search engine) with a fresh identity Youtube considers that to be
suspicious activity.
When you first go to the domain www.youtube.com instead and
afterwards visit the URL of the video you found, that is not considered
to be suspicious. (It's not even related to redirects, you can copy and
paste the URL from somewhere else.)

After a while of browsing on Youtube you get blocked again of course
and need a new identity.

I haven't tested it in a scientific way but whenever I tried it it 
worked, with
browser.cache.disk.enable = true in about:config.
It doesn't matter what other websites are cashed for that method.

So apparently Youtube considers users to be humans when they
pretend to be undecided about what they want to watch.
Determined people are bots. ;-)
 
> I DID discover just now, that the pref in my user.js file,
> user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false); - was NOT observed. In
> about:config, browser.cache.disk.enable was True - bigger than 
> Dallas.
> Further, when I toggled it to False, that is the default setting.  I
> can't 'splain why it wasn't using the user.js value.  It worked for 
> yrs.
> I've never seen it happen in any other browser.
> 
> In a VERY short trial just now (statistically meaningless), after
> changing "browser.cache.disk.enable" = false, I still usually needed 
> a
> new identity for YT to load. I don't know what a new identity oc
> clearing cache has to do with a site not visited since launching TBB
> each day.
> 
> But a new identity WITHOUT clearing the cache rarely worked on YT. 
> Can't
> say the same about other sites.  I tried it enough times over weeks, 
> to
> see clearing cache AND a new identity almost always worked.  Question 
> is
> why.
> 
> Just luck of getting bad exits when cache wasn't cleared before a new
> identity, or getting VERY lucky - with "good" exits when cache WAS
> cleared is statistically improbable.
 
>