ytimg.com now needs to be unblocked to view YouTube videos.

Kizzume

What bugs me about this is that ytimg has been a server that a lot people block because it's associated with areasearch.com and a number of other suspicious sites. It's something that has been associated with spyware, and now it's required to view YouTube videos. This sucks! I wish something could be done about it, but alas--since all the buyouts, everyone's gonna be stuck probably in the future with having spyware on their machines to do normal things.

Thanks Google for fucking up a good thing! I'm wondering when Google will start requiring people unblock spyware servers to do searches.

technocrat · Joined: 04 Dec 2007 Posts: 216

That's basically how they get you. They bundle spyware and adware inside of things you really want or need, so you either find a way to circumvent it or deal with it. It sucks. There are several programmes I know to be adware and spyware, but I don't want to lose the service.

jouva · Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 1

I'll be honest and say I have no clue what these forums are about and only registered to reply to this because I felt it was necessary

*sigh* No no no no, and no. You've got it completely wrong.

ytimg.com WAS a site that was linked to and used by areasearch.com. The DOMAIN was purchased by google for the SOLE USE of serving images when visiting youtube. It DOES NOT contain spyware now. It USED to be associated with spyware hosting sites but does not anymore. Putting files (i.e.: images) on a single hostname is not efficient these days, since broadband users could be using multiple connections to a site to download many small images at one time. Browsers commonly limit how many concurrent connections you can have per hostname. Splitting the images onto a different hostname than the text content (even if it's the same machine) increases load time over broadband.

In this case, they decided to purchase an entire domain for this. They're also using it (more than likely) across multiple servers and it may just help them maintain the site better. It is SAFE to unblock this.

$ nslookup
> s.ytimg.com
Server: 69.16.169.11
Address: 69.16.169.11#53

Non-authoritative answer:
s.ytimg.com canonical name = static.cache.l.google.com.
Name: static.cache.l.google.com
Address: 209.85.239.39

Kizzume · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 10:31 pm Post subject:

Good to know. It seems rather foolish, however, for them to buy a server that used to have spyware associated with it. Again, it's good to know the server is safe now.