this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm out of the loop. What happened? Did someone decompile their code and find definitive proof of a throttle for Firefox?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

some explanation

To be fair, they used setTimeout() and not thread.sleep() because the latter isn't possible out of the box in JS ^^

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing

Yeah let me turn off the adblocker just for having an even more suboptimal viewing due to ads. They're lunatics.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the explainer! Also, Google's response is such a crock of shit.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

JavaScript is an interpreted language, so no decompilation is necessary, although this is repeatable by using a Firefox user agent.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can build a virtual machine in JavaScript and execute compiled code on it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh yeah, you shouldn't. But people do this for fingerprinting, bot detection, and other "adversarial" scenarios where you really don't like the person executing your code. It's somewhat plausible Google would use this technique to do something scummy like this (although that is not the case).

Relevant article and a great read: https://www.nullpt.rs/reverse-engineering-tiktok-vm-1