What is this shady code being loaded from YouTube website? | Hacker News Reader

What is this shady code being loaded from YouTube website?

6 pointsROARosen5 comments

When inspecting YouTube network activity I came across this[1] weird asset being loaded, it show just a single white dash on black. It seems to me like some sort of dicey fingerprinting behavior to see how the image loads.

I've found something similar in the form of a GIF being loaded q.stripe.com on sites that have Stripe enabled, does anyone know the purpose of these and/or why Google uses it only YouTube but not on any of their other services?

I can't even figure out what filetype this is, it's definitely an image of sorts but Windows keeps blocking the download.

[1] https://www.google.com/pagead/lvz?evtid=<RANDOM STRING HERE>

EDIT: This is what gets loaded from stripe: https://q.stripe.com/?event=<random string>event_count=<etc>

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The journalist Rocco Castoro, ex-Editor in Chief of Vice.com, has been working on a story about this for a while.

Roughly, and I might be misquoting here, what is now known is as follows:

1. The YouTube.com engineering team and internal Google networks are separate from most of the company and maintained by different engineers (for the most part).

2. There seems to be some internal investigation going on at Google as to whether engineers in the Los Angeles Playa Vista office of YouTube (the 440,000 sq feet Howard Hughes hangar from WWII just north of LAX) were accepting bribes.

3. These bribes were coming from ad fraud organized crime groups who were making money by making the YouTube apis and botnet detection algorithms less secure than they could be.

4. Because the YouTube division of Google was posting massive jumps in revenue and profit, the division was never looked into until recently as all was going well.

NOTE: I'm a former PSO Google Engineer (the GCP outside consultants that Google brings on to help customers onboard to GCP), so I am knowledgeable in this area.

Care to provide any reference? This seems outlandish and Google doesn't provide anything to confirm what you just said.

Could it just be a tracking pixel?

Sure, by why use it only on YouTube? Especially given that its loaded from the Google domain.

Who knows. Alphabet has something like 150,000 employees, and YouTube has 10,000. They're not fully coordinated. Perhaps YT wanted to use a specific piece of Google ad tech, or it was just more convenient to deploy something on the Google domain for some reason.

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