Google classroom and Google docs can not be used when YouTube is blocked | Hacker News Reader

Google classroom and Google docs can not be used when YouTube is blocked

support.google.com

130 pointsdoetoe86 comments

My kids are required to use Google classroom and Google docs for schoolwork and extracurricular activities. YouTube algorithms are optimized to create pointless distraction, so to improve their focus I blocked access to YouTube on their computers (with their approval even!), but now it turns out that they cannot use classroom and docs anymore!

I think the problem here is more so your method of blocking Youtube than anything Google is doing.

You should block DNS resolution of youtube.com and block outbound connections on port 53 to any device other than your router.

This wouldn't stop DNS over HTTPS, but that workaround can also be blocked.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configuring-networks-di...

Could that be done for individual but not all computers on the network?

Put a nat rule on your router to point a specific source address with target of UDP/53 to your desired dns server (and use the doh canary domain)

That's a flimsy solution as IP addresses are not generally static. Sure, you can manually assign an IP, but if the kids catch on, then they can just switch back to auto assign.

That’s a different threat model - the kids not wanting it blocked.

You can white list devices instead (so they’d have to spot a particular mac address), you can just add them to a different vlan in a different ssid (sane as you separate your IoT shit from your normal network), but you have to look at them establishing vpn to take traffic

In this case the user wants it blocked and wants to fight the their device which acts against them (google doesn’t want you blocking google services)

local dns-override is possible with hosts-file or a local dns-server. nextdns offers this as a service.

ublock with a cutom blocklist that is self-served (via gh-pages or whatever) could be the most simple solution.

Not without an authenticated proxy.

Otherwise, some routers allow you to set up separate rules for 'guests', which authenticate with different credentials. You'd have to do some research to find one that had different DNS policies for each zone.

A simpler, though more expensive, solution would be to just buy a second router for your kids to use, then connect its WAN port to one of the Ethernet ports on the main router.

You could, of course, just modify the hosts file to block youtube.com on their local machines, but that wouldn't affect mobile devices, and they'd eventually workout how to get around it.

Which did you block

   *.youtube.com 
   *.googlevideo.com

Only need to block the 2nd one to stop videos from playing

Would be surprised if Classroom or Docs required the 2nd one

The first actually, I'll change it, thanks!

I wonder if this is linked to something I noticed, where logging in to Google Sheets seemed to involved a redirection via a YouTube domain that was something like auth.youtube.com

Edit: As someone else has pointed out, it was accounts.youtube.com. Feels really weird that they're authenticating a Google Workspace service via YouTube, even if they're both Google properties.

Same thing with Microsoft. When you sign in on one Microsoft property, you get redirected through a whole bunch of Microsoft properties, including www.bing.com, login.live.com, outlook.live.com and www.office.com, setting cookies everywhere.

gee it's almost like all of those properties can then track you forever and maybe have like some sort of argument as to why they were tracking you - well of course we set cookies, they hit our domain!

When you log in to a Google account, as the 2LD is a cookie boundary, it has to do this redirect if it's to cookie/log you in across all Google things that run on other 2LDs, such as YouTube.

Seeing as YouTube doesn't have a separate auth db, and people would be confused if they logged in to google.com then weren't logged in to YouTube, this is sort of expected behavior.

It looks like Google uses the youtube.com domain for their auth process. I notice that they redirect to accounts.youtube.com everytime I use Google as my SSO.

Same thing happens when you use Google's platform.js[1] lib some of the time but not always.

1: https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/web/sign-in

Similar happened to me when accessing maps.google.com: I was redirected to consent.youtube.com for the privacy statement.

Maybe I'm getting old or jaded or something but I can't/don't get bent out of shape any more when I read what tech mega corps do these days.

Most days the story is a variant of "Tech Megacorp has done a thing that clearly makes them money and tells actual people to go fuck themselves".

From my perspective, for the last decade at least, tech megacorps have openly and brazenly put profit before EVERYTHING! Even human life! [0]

[0] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-humans-in-di...

Is there a point of having support forums if you're not going to have official replies to the questions posted. To me that just shows that no one cares about the product.

Google have managed well enough without giving a flying fuck about any of their products or users for over 20 years.

almost makes me miss paid private MS dev boards

On the bottom of the page we can see the way Google "replied":

> This question is locked and replying has been disabled.

But that's not an official reply. That's just "ok, this question is valid and bring out people's frustration. We're going to stop that now"

You're right, of course. It only goes to show that their attempts to offload their support requirements to sorts of "Community Support" don't solve the problem, and can sometimes (like here) only make it worse.

I'm a Googler working on an internal-only product. We do have an internal-only support forum and I can tell you: one can't give good expert answers to everyone even at three orders of magnitude smaller audience. Being a TL working on the thing for more than 3 years, you keep finding yourself taking a couple hours to answer a single interesting question. So, for the uninteresting ones, you leave the users to fend for each other. Which is the point of a support forum, instead of a support email alias (or any other form where you expect "an official answer" to everything).

For a long time I had the suspicion that Big Tech creates products that are only profitable because they externalize most of the cost factors on users or society, and your post confirms this.

Facebook also always argues that „sorry having humans monitor all Facebook posts would mean we would go out of business!“

Well, then maybe you should go out of business? :-)

Or at least have gotten too big and should be split up?

Too true.

Scale becomes an excuse for avoiding responsibility, whereas unfulfillable responsibilities should be a reason to not scale.

Well put.

Isn't that the whole point of having a forum? Otherwise they would have a phone number, if they wanted to provide official support.

Someone smarter than me will pop in with better info, but when you authenticate on a Google service, it will send you through something like accounts.youtube.com. My takeaway was that they use it as an authentication service for a lot of Google products.

My recollection is that's just because logins to Google bounce through any domains where they may need to update cookies

Perhaps this means the OP can blacklist www.youtube.com and whitelist accounts.youtube.com ?

just blacklist googlevideo.com

They set auth cookies probably, and Youtube has never been properly integrated with Google's auth flow.

That said, not a single Google service is really properly integrated into that flow.

It's actually because Youtube is integrated properly into their auth flow. It's so when you login to one of google's websites and visit another, you are already logged on and don't have to go through the auth-flow.

i.e. Without this trick, if you logged into gmail and then went to YouTube you would have to sign in again. This is because the YouTube.com domain can't access the mail.google.com cookie because of the same-origin policy.

(Note: Even if you use cross-origin resource sharing headers, cookies will still not work across domains for all users as several browsers such as Safari have third-party cookies disabled by default which stops the ability of sharing cookies over CORS).

Maybe sit with your kid while they're learning during the most formative years of their life instead of offloading the burden of raising a child to your DNS configuration.

Wow, OK. Weird having to reply to this with something so obvious. Most people can't afford to spend 6-8hrs during the middle of the day with their child(ren).

That's a little unreasonable as school time happens to be be during work hours.

And Google will be so moved by that that they'll stop having depraved business practices? I don't see how your suggestion solves the issue at hand.

They invest heavily into public opinion

Do you sit down with your kids while they're learning in classrooms?

Our son’s teachers set watching YouTube videos as assignments. So I had to unblock YouTube quite independently of this issue.

But I wonder if a workaround might be to block youtube.com and *.youtube.com but allow accounts.youtube.com as an exception? IIRC that is the only YouTube domain invoked during login to non-YouTube Google services. However, many blocking systems will not be smart enough to be able to do such a thing.

I'm SO feeling this topic. I'm finding it hard to control my son's YouTube access when he's given legitimate school assignments that need this access. It makes me wish education could just skip all of Google altogether.

Google's education tools are very well tuned for the job and very inexpensive, so it's no wonder they're as widespread.

If your kid's account is managed by your school, you can ask them to lock YouTube/enable company mode for the account. It will stop them from browsing public YouTube while logged in, at least.

Being dad of 2 y/o and 9 y/o. Where during lockdown younger kid was strategically getting "screen time" so older kid could study & wife and I could work...

After opening new or commenting on existing similar bugs/features reports to YT/Google, trying things mentioned in other comments (e.g.: /etc/hosts, router or OpenDNS filtering...) as well as (being software engineer) also experimenting with writing something myself.

Somehow accidentally I've ran into https://account.microsoft.com/family/about. And I couldn't believe how something that was produced by company that just "a couple of years ago" was the prime example of how bad big-tech can be (also forced employee performance bell-curve, "Developers! Developers! Developers!" and many other :facepalm" things)...

That M$ company produced something that literally "just fucking works exactly as you would imagine/hope it does".

Seriously - last email I got from M$ is: "Hi {my_name}, {kids_name} wants more screen time today. How much extra time would you like to give them? 15 minutes 30 minutes 1 hour 2 hours 8 hours I don’t want to give more time today"

And the one before that was: "Hi {my_name}, {kids_name} wants more time on this app today. Extra time starts right after it's added.

Roblox

How much extra time would you like to give them? 15 minutes 30 minutes 1 hour 2 hours 3 hours I don’t want to give more time today

To change the daily limits for Roblox, you can go to App and game limits."

For context - to earn "game time" he first did some reading and math today. So latter his "Roblox time" for today (weekend) was first to run out, followed by overall "screen time".

And really the only thing I've been wondering is should we ditch Android devices/tablets and get M$/Windows stuff instead?

Meanwhile the whole "Should we ditch Sony/PS for XBox (which plays along because it's M$)?" is resolved by simply not getting next gen game console and instead kid starting to play and appreciate PC gaming \o/

> That M$ company produced something that literally "just fucking works exactly as you would imagine/hope it does".

We used to use that with our son when he was younger. We found some problems with it:

1) Popping up a button saying "ask a parent for more time" was a problem – it was encouraging him in asking for more. I wish there was a way to turn that off, but at least at the time there wasn't

2) It was unreliable, sometimes we would give him more time and he wouldn't get it and he'd get upset

3) The monitoring data on how much time he used on each app was often wrong

We haven't used it for a couple of years though, so maybe it has improved since. I wrote my own parental control software and we use that now. Its big advantage is that it does exactly what I want, and I can experiment with changing how it behaves and observing how our children respond – can't get that with an off-the-shelf solution

How far in advance are the videos assigned? Could you download them once a day and give your child the mp4 files?

My kids' school use Google Classroom. I do block access to YouTube at `/etc/hosts` redirecting www.youtube.com to 127.0.0.1, and it does work. But some assignments include videos and so it's cumbersome (although it can be scripted).

Anyway, what I decided to do is, while keeping the technical option (and using it when necessary) is keep hammering into the kids the need to work on self control, to recognize what behavior helps them to be productive and what doesn't. Do your job, then enjoy and also important, most of the joy is offscreen.

I try to use the same message on me because I can also use it A LOT OF TIMES

> Anyway, what I decided to do is, while keeping the technical option (and using it when necessary) is keep hammering into the kids the need to work on self control, to recognize what behavior helps them to be productive and what doesn't.

Very good! What are the results?

It's an ongoing process, for sure. Even for me at 44, it is. But I think is worth the try, we all need to rationalize and interiorize the dark side of "tech addiction" instead of just rely on tools to control our compulsions

The linked thread doesn't contain any information about what these people actually blocked or in what way they can't use other Google services anymore.

If they blocked DNS resolution and SSO is causing trouble, like people here are speculating, then the fix is unblocking accounts.youtube.com.

If they blocked connections to YouTube's IP addresses they've just blocked most of Google, because YouTube is served from the same (relatively small) set of IP addresses as a lot of other services.

Practical tip for parents here struggling with the problem of 'distractions during school hours': use a DNS filtering service.

I use the Family package from SafeDNS and I'm generally happy. It is also cheap at $20/year. I like SafeDNS because they provide a Desktop client that prevents tampering.

You can configure different profiles such as 'Education', 'Creative' and 'Default' for different modes you want to put your child's computer on - remotely. So during schooling hours I configure their computers to be on 'Education' mode, but if they want to just do Scratch or some other brain-stimulating activity, I put it on 'Creative' mode. For free time I'll put it on Default which I've configure to allow YouTube.

I configure each profile to block preconfigured vendor-supplied site archetypes such as Videos, Gaming, Advertising, Shopping, Chat etc. I have full control over each profile type. I can also whitelist a domain if they get in a snag.

I'm sure there are other good DNS filtering service providers, but this one is the one that worked best for me.

I don’t have yet this problem, but I am wondering if blocking YT makes the kids a disservice instead of teaching them how to manage and handle constant (online) distraction.

With age comes responsibility, so with time and coaching we remove restrictions. But it takes time, and I'm not willing to sacrifice my child's education in the meantime for YouTube and gaming distractions. I've grown to recognize there are certain distractions that are simply too difficult for young children to refuse.

Thanks! Interesting perspective!

We've long been blocking a lot of youtube domains (over certain time periods, for our childrens benefit) and have noticed that, over time, more and more issues with other google services (and even 3rd party websites) caused by that. I assume it's down to ever tighter integration on Google's side (rather that deliberate design to increase control over the users).

> (rather that deliberate design to increase control over the users).

A happy accident, then.

My opinion as someone who grew up without internet. We always knew certain rules for how to behave, like first finish homework before playing. I wasn’t locked into a cell to prevent me from accessing my toys in my room and my parents didn’t have to be constantly monitoring that. I think with the addictive nature of some internet sites this might be more difficult but in some ways it’s similar to the olden days. Maybe the following strategy could work for some: install a DNS logger (like pihole) and at the end of the week go over the logs of your kids computer with them. Every time they went to YouTube to watch non educational content during school hours they’ll be penalized.

I try that kind of approaches as well, but the typical penalty would anyway at least include no YouTube, and since I unfortunately cannot fully trust them not to (not entirely blaming them, it is like forbidding them to have candies without asking but placing the candy jar right in front of them), I'd still have the same problem.

Yea i share your sentiment (dont like the spying part but hey :D). It is the most crucial skill today to be able to deal with the constant distraciton. Supplying a sheltered environment cant be the solution.

Can you think of a strategy without the monitoring? I also don’t like it but I’m not sure how to keep them accountable. Maybe some kids may behave on their own with only pep talks

Note that Google has in recent years started introducing a great complexity into people's life.

Different activities (in this case, watching videos and schoolwork) are being linked. Google provides an extreme nexus for web activity and don't provide meaningful support.

There is a risk of some sort developing here, between Search, Docs, Gmail and the cloud as Google becomes more entwined with the web. It'll be interesting in 20 years to look back with benefit of hindsight and see what sort of risk it is.

The only reliable way I've found to block YouTube (and other things) while still allowing kid to use Google Classroom/Hangouts/etc is:

1) Use Windows 10 with Kids/Family features 2) Switch my kid to use Edge instead of Chrome/Chromium

Nr 1 allows you to block apps (e.g. Calculator, Chrome, Roblox ...) as well as websites - either completely and/or during specific days/times. There's also "screen time" feature - both for the computer/OS itself, as well as per application.

So you can allow kid to have "unlimited" screen time on week days between 8am and 3pm (during "home" school) while block all apps/games except Edge. Then say in the afternoon allow 2 hours for Minecraft/Roblox/etc. Or not allow any - so when they try to launch it you get email/notification and can allow it for the next 5/15 minutes ... 1/3/8 hours.

Nr 2 is mostly because Chrome doesn't care/use Windows block/filter rules. Luckily Edge is basically Chrome that does honor those rules.

And yeah - while I didn't have luck with other ideas (e.g. DNS, /etc/hosts ...etc) because of that accounts.youtube.com or say wanting to still allow youtube for the other (toddler which was "home daycaring" because that was closed too) - somehow this Microsoft & Edge thing just works exactly as you would expect it.

And for the occasional "But teacher assigned us to watch this YouTube video" - kid can ask for permission to view particular URL.

That said - at that point we've usually went the route of just opening that particular youtube video on one of parents computers/phones and watching it together (or streaming to living room TV).

You can use something like Blocksite or Stayfocusd extensions that are available on Chrome and Firefox.

You really need to use a MITM proxy if you want to do more granular blocking/filtering of content. I've been doing that for adblocking/style modification/etc. for near 2 decades now.

GC is such a second rate product anyway. Lack of / inconsistent rich text support, weird single-to-multiple newline bugs in the comments UI. Crappily inconsistent behaviour for attaching docs / linking to docs in student work. No categorisation for “classes” eg clubs / academic classes / one offs for online exams. Email notifications instead of an intelligent notification centre UI on the site.

It’s the rock bottom level of features they could get away with and it really disappoints me. The intern that wrote it should feel proud. The multi billion $$ corporation that maintains it, should not.

This is true for most Google products. Example: Google chat, Google meet.

Related to this, you cannot download from google drive if third party cookies are disabled.

Anyone know the official reason for Google to do this? Is there some sort of dependency on YouTube?

I think it is mainly for SSO, so if you log in to some other Google service, you are logged into YouTube automatically. Required because YouTube is not under google.com, it has its own domain, and for branding reasons Google wants to keep it that way.

Also, you can embed YouTube videos in some other Google services, and the SSO may help in making that feature work correctly. What if a teacher creates a private YouTube video and embeds it into Google Classroom?

Thats quite reasonable speculation. I just wish in that forum an official google rep replied and explained this.

It could be an issue with a overzealous blocker blocking not just YouTube video URLs but also a bunch of APIs and/or CDNs known to be used by YouTube, which also happen to be used by several other Google services.

In Google's defense, they have no reason to set up a different API or CDN for each service they own and operate. That would be a maintenance nightmare.

So how have non of these high paid software "experts" been able to create a virtual browser to control distant learning. Give your teachers the ability to say "no" by giving them the students screen and access to the lock their screen. I have no idea how I use to come here thinking you were intelligent creatures. now idea anymore.

Just on the sidenote, Google Docs is really shite.

I don't use most features of Office, so Docs is much cleaner. Much better for collaboration too.

It's OK at best there's quite a few features missing that get in the way when I use it for client work

- Can't have numbered headings without them indenting - No image captions (have to use a separate styled paragraph underneath - Not enough text styles (only need a couple more)

There’s more than those but they're the ones I run into most frequently

Suspect the issue is no-one in Google uses Docs for writing documents that need quality formatting and production, sure they write lots of docs in it but how many are going to paying clients etc.

What alternatives do you suggest?

For general purpose, MS Office or LibreOffice? I tried GDocs once, I found some features missing like I couldn't do something (I'm forgotting what it was. It was some months ago and I never used GDocs again and totally turned my back to it).

I am sure the Google Docs developers would find your observation incredibly valuable.

I doubt they'd mind improving it even if I tell them.

Geez, people must be playing a lot for Google Classrooms given the amount of anger on that thread.

> Geez, people must be playing a lot for Google Classrooms given the amount of anger on that thread.

I'd say that people are exhausted by having to do their own jobs and simultaneously help their kids stay focussed and concentrated on their learning, while the needed tools (provided for 'free' by Google) include a totally unnecessary and unrelated requirement to enable distractions, trivial entertainment and advertising.

I've got YouTube plus at least, it helps somewhat to filter out some rather toxic advertising.

Whoever started pushing WorkSafe ads into this platform, I do not wish well for. It's the stuff of true nightmares, the sum of their worst fears, for children to see.

Edit: Eg this one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ffC9FfMYpW4

Not sure it's about cost. I think they are angry because their children can't access their online learning platform.

Or in my case because of the amount of crap I must allow my son to get access to, in order to receive his school assignments.

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