this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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39
Auto-expansion of certain video/article posts: Can this be turned off anywhere? (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 days ago by Mindfury@hexbear.net to c/hexbear@hexbear.net
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

So, weird request/suggestion based on the attached image, which is kinda funny in of itself but i'll get to that.

I remember people noticing that with a previous Lemmy update, sometimes links to certain content - from what I can see, specifically news website articles (maybe this is amp link related because it's clearly not every webpage) and some video hosts - seemed to "auto-expand" inline on the hexbear page, allowing people to read the article or play the video without leaving the hexbear post/opening a new tab. Seemed like a cool enough feature.

This morning, I go ahead and click through to comments on a post about Leavitt wanting to denaturalise Momdani or some shit, and I get the image attached. My work sysadmin has applied a block rule to Tankie Tube which I would generally find unsurprising (small video hoster, unvetted by them so easy to just block. they've done it before to smalltime video rehosters used on the soccer subreddit because they all get nuked regularly), except they've flagged it as porn.

I find this funny because of our strict hentai-free & volcel-police stance, but unfortunately i don't think it's prudent to request a review with my work IT department to vet the site, because i then have to explain that I'm spending some time shitposting on work hours.

However, it's now a catch-22 where either I explain that Tankie Tube isn't porno but reveal that I browse hexbear on company time and get in trouble/fired, or I accidentally click posts that would otherwise be interesting and get flagged for "attempting to view porno" and get fired. I trust that none of you are dumb enough to suggest that I simply do not browse hexbear while at work LIB

So, is there a way at user-level to disable this function? There's an "Auto Expand Media" checkbox under settings, but that instead auto-expands every single image on the frontpage/postlist and doesn't have anything to do with the inline expansion of content when viewing an individual post.

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[–] underisk@hexbear.net 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don’t know if this is possible in your circumstances, but when I wanted to hide my traffic and get around censors I ran cmder off a usb to make a reverse ssh tunnel to a cheap VPS then used a firefox extension that dynamically routes traffic through the tunnel proxy based on url.

In all honesty though the consequences of being caught doing that are probably worse than looking at porn at work since it looks way more nefarious, and isn’t really possible to play off as an innocent mistake.

[–] Mindfury@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

i'm mildly to moderately technical, but I read your post and said "yeah, that's a load of cool sounding words" lmao

second sentence is more my position though - i don't want to have to justify my shitposting time to my employer or attract any attention that would force me to explain my shitposting time

[–] underisk@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

It sounds much cooler than it is. Cmder is a portable terminal emulator that handily has ssh installed, which lets you log in to a remote shell and also for some reason has a feature that lets you map ports on the local machine to ports on the remote machine (a proxy).The Firefox extension is just a proxy switcher from the addons site. It really just boils down to one command:

ssh -D 8080 remote.host

Then you have a SOCKS proxy at localhost:8080 to point Firefox at.

I will say that I literally explained what I was doing to supervisors and coworkers and never got in trouble but I’ve worked at some pretty lax employers.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

However, it's now a catch-22 where either I explain that Tankie Tube isn't porno but reveal that I browse hexbear on company time and get in trouble/fired, or I accidentally click posts that would otherwise be interesting and get flagged for "attempting to view porno" and get fired

They will not notice unless someone is actively monitoring the firewall, which in a small company is unlikely unless someone's bored.

I'd just prepare an excuse for if someone does approach you and just say 'someone shared me/I clicked through on what I thought was a YouTube link' and leave it at that

[–] Mindfury@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

i got questions one time from a random low-level guy about catbox.moe, which i believe was just a small data host used occasionally on lemmy and reddit and i just said it was probably me trying to watch a soccer or wrestling clip

nothing came of that so i'm prob fine, but just got spooked by this one explicitly saying blocked for porn. I might just continue to roll the dice and hope a general helpdesk person asks me about tankietube if there's a concern, I'll tell the truth and say it's a youtube rehoster with no porn but they can keep it blocked if they want, hopefully they'll change the classification and won't tell my actual TL/manager

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 7 points 2 days ago

I try to maintain discipline with work computers with the idea that its all theoretically available to the boss. But its difficult with the whole internet right there.

Worse is the temptation to log on to work WiFi with phone. Its impossible to know what the phone is doing in the background while you just check one email or something. I just hope the huge volume of traffic of all the devices would prevent anyone trying to attribute specific devices.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago

What a busybody. Maybe it triggered more than just a firewall alert, like catbox being for bulk upload/download so could have been data exfiltration alert.

[–] Nakoichi@hexbear.net 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

lol I am too paranoid to browse hexbear on my office machine. I just use my phone, but it's annoying as hell because my cubicle is a total wireless deadzone.

[–] Mindfury@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago

understandable, it's a new job in the belly of the great satan. I wouldn't want to drop that bag.

I'm like 5 years in at this place, have slightly better protections in aus and would need warnings first i believe - unless it's something very egregious like arguably openly viewing porn on a work machine. Hence i'm worried about it for the first time.

[–] shath@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

hey my job uses the same software!

[–] stink@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 days ago

ZScaler gang 😎

[–] kristina@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Does tankietube work on archive.org?

[–] thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

yea, you can import videos via url

[–] Mindfury@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago

feeling like I might even need dessalines in here for this one - I could just browse the github i guess

[–] mathemachristian@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago

reroute tankie.tube in your hosts file?

[–] Meltyheartlove@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago

Searching on startpage gives you an option to view anonymously which connects to the website through a proxy view. I don't know if those are blocked but its worth a try. I have no clue about this one but would these

https://tankie.tube/about/follows

instances allow you to browse tankietube bypassing the block

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What are the chances you could run a VPN?

[–] Mindfury@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

unfortunately nil - it's work provided hardware with Zscaler Private Access allowing use of internal systems and has other Zscaler internet controls on, so effectively a VPN is already on and I have no admin access to install or uninstall anything. configuring anything at my router would do nothing, and days in the office would still face the same problem.

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Well it was a long shot lol. You could get an extension like tempermonkey, then use that to suppress the embed. Not sure of that would work here though. Maybe some hostname fuckery to black hole tankie tube to local host or something.

[–] Mindfury@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

yeah, i was thinking along those lines but then realised even chrome (also installed by company) is managed by organisation and only whitelisted extensions can be installed.

it absolutely fucking pissed me off when chrome suddenly said ublock origin was uninstalling itself due to dropped support and i couldn't even install the manifest v3 version (origin lite)

might have to see if edge is similarly locked down, or make an argument again for needing firefox for troubleshooting reasons

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

Wait are there portable versions of Firefox that you could use? Then you wouldn't need administrative access to run it.

[–] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

If it's DNS blocking, could you use a DOH to prevent sniffing & blocking?

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

i'm surprised your IT doesn't require ublock or the equivalent. ads are a security risk

[–] Mindfury@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

i swear ublock origin was installed by default previously until it depreciated.

fuck it, i'm raising a service request

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

They probably did, I know I enforce it where I work. I also flagged Chrome to extend the v2 support. That's going to go away at some point though. Then I'll be forced to deploy the v3 version which is far less capable. You could provide v2 with rules through deployment configuration which was useful when the plugin was bricking critical sites, allow me to push the site to all endpoints as "allowed" so it stopped performing adblocking on the site. Hopefully v3 has that function still.

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not sure I quite understand the question, but could a custom ublock rule help?

[–] Mindfury@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

this is honestly the smartest idea and i think redwizard was thinking along the same lines, but unfortunately i don't even have ublock anymore due to the browser being organisation managed too smh

i might put in a request today to get ublock origin lite approved because the normie internet has been unbearable lately on this laptop

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago

Please let me install ublock so I can support your efforts to control my internet usage. :s

If that doesn't work I guess you probably don't have access to about:config there might be some obscure way to block in there.