It drives me mad when I use PCs of friends and relatives and I see AdBlock Plus installed, but they still get ads and they never seem to stop and wonder why this “ad blocker” is not working! I do however enjoy their facial expressions when I install uBlock Origin for them and start refreshing pages.
Comment on YouTube’s anti-ad blocking test gets even pushier with a new timer
ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year agohave you ever searched “ad blocker” on your browser of choice’s extension store and scrolled down? or had a cheap/free VPN that advertised ad blocking functionality?
those. for some reason people install those. and they never get updated.
(some of them are outright malware too)
CumBroth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
PeachMan@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Not sure what you’re on about, Google is absolutely capable of detecting if you’re using Ublock Origin, Piped, ReVanced, whatever. The question isn’t if they CAN break those things, it’s just if they WILL.
And if they’re beta testing this system right now, I’d say it’s just a matter of time.
ricdeh@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wouldn’t be absolutely sure about this. In the end, everything on the web still boils down to (mostly) simple HTTP GET requests. If you open a webpage, then you are served the file you requested (usually HTML with CSS for styling and JavaScript for special actions) and your browser handles the display of them and the execution of their scripts. This means that you can program a browser to detect and remove ads directly from the code and also eradicate malicious detection scripts potentially employed by Google that are meant to find out whether the ads are displaying correctly. If Google would want to circumvent this, they would either have to make YouTube available solely over their own app or block such behaviour on the client’s end, for example by manipulating the browser’s code to block ad-blocking functionality. Google is actually pursuing the latter with their Chromium browser, which is also the foundation for some others, including Microsoft Edge. This is why it’s important that people start to move away and use Firefox for browsing, THE free/libre software non-profit web solution since decades. Because then Google is essentially powerless, if they don’t want to take YouTube off the web.
PeachMan@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Making YouTube available solely in their app sounds entirely possible and not unlikely here. They already sorta do that with age-restricted videos and videos that have voluntarily disabled embedding.
MajorHavoc@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Watching all this from the sidelines, I’m very pleased that I took the time to de-Google my critical daily services, already.
PeachMan@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Yeah, I’m glad I already have a cheap annual subscription to Curiosity Stream + Nebula. I’ll have to look for some other decent video platforms if they’re going to start being dicks about YouTube.
whats_a_refoogee@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
They are capable of detecting it because they aren’t putting much effort into being undetectable. If there was a need, uBlock Origin itself could be made entirely undetectable.
Of course the YouTube script running in your browser will be able to detect changes made to the page and request blocking. However, the said script can be modified by a different extension to either receive incorrect data about blocked requests and page information, or to send a fabricated result back to the server. Google can react to it by modifying the script, and the extension would need to adapt accordingly. It’s a game of cat and mouse.
If there was a need, we could have YouTube running in an entirely clean headless browser with no adblockers, while the real browser we use pulls data from it and strips out the ads.
Ultimately, currently we have the last word on what happens on our end. Unfortunately, Google’s webDRM, pushed by traitors to humanity Ben Wiser, Borbala Benko, Philipp Pfeiffenberge and Sergey Kataev, is trying to change that.
PeachMan@lemmy.one 1 year ago
I mean, you could do all sorts of wild shit but at a certain point it’s impractical for most people. You think Google has actually put effort into this so far? You haven’t seen effort yet, they’re just beta testing.