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Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
social.treehouse.systemsAttached: 2 images
Today I learned that YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux. It will give you lowered video resolutions. If you just replace "aarch64" with "x86_64" in the UA, suddenly you get 4K and everything.
They literally have a test for "is ARM", and if so, they consider your system has garbage performance and cripple the available formats/codecs. I checked the code.
Logic: Quality 1080 by default. If your machine has 2 or fewer cores, quality 480. If anything ARM, quality 240. Yes, Google thinks all ARM machines are 5 times worse than Intel machines, even if you have 20 cores or something.
Why does this not affect Chromium? **Because chromium on aarch64 pretends to be x86_64**
`Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36`
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Welp, guess I'm shipping a user agent override for Firefox on Fedora to pretend to be x86.
**EDIT**: The plot thickens. Pretending to be ChromeOS aarch64 *still gets 4K*. Specifically: `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS aarch64 10452.96.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36` still works.
The web is based on open standards; that’s what made it universally accessible. How does limiting access based on how you access the web benefit anyone?
It doesn’t, but that isn’t their point. They’re simply pointing out that existing net neutrality laws in the US usually only apply to ISPs and telcos, not internet businesses.
Nobody is defending the practice, they’re just differentiating it from what we’ve previously referred to as “net neutrality,” which is 100% entirely about how ISPs process internet traffic, and not about the services being used within that traffic.
Unless I missed the memo, and “net neutrality” means something different now.
Since Google is both the service provider for the client browser and also provides last-mile internet services; they would fit the definition of a supposed neutral ISP but also neutral for applications and services further up the OSI stack.
Net neutrality is not just a service provider concept but has been viewed this way in the cases service providers have tried to game the system. It also encompasses the concept of an open internet; the neutrality of data is data and presentation, or lack of to the client is defined by open standards, not the desires of any one party.
Imagine a business making some smoothies with water provided by the utility company. The business decides to sell less appetizing smoothies to certain organizations. Are you saying that that’s a “water utility neutrality” issue?
Where did I say it did? The fact that it’s not a net neutrality issue doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Net neutrality is just a specific thing that isn’t this.