Yes, but the point their are trying to make is to gain the adblocking users, not lose them. They need more people to watch the ads, not less people to watch YT.
A question for the tech savy, free alternatives to youtube like newpipe relies on youtube servers to access content, right? I mean, if youtube were to disappear magically we wouldn’t have a palce where to upload and store so many Gb of videos?
Am I missing something (I know I’m probably missing a lot!)? Thanks in advance for the replies!
newpipe is just a client for accessing youtubes servers, yes, so if youtube went away we would need to use vimeo or something else (maybe peertube, open source yt alternative?)
There really needs to be a way to seed peertube videos without leaving the window open. A firefox extension even. They have extensions that do bittorrent, it shouldn’t be hard. Videos could end with a “click here to seed this video” message
Yeah I was really surprised when I started looking into it that there’s no “remote bandwidth runners” option. Although I think Peertube’s devs may be just starting to think about that kind of thing since they just added support for remote transcode runners
There is nothing on there that you couldn’t find an equivalent of in text form(web or paper) or in the millions of hours of TV and film available on and off the web(both legal and not so legal) or on other platforms like twitch/nebula/peertube/lbry.
I’m not a fan of either and would advocate everyone not consume large amounts of video content because of how heavy it is from an environmental point of view and move away from corporations from an anticapitalist/freedom point if view.
Let’s not kid ourselves though, as shit as twitch is, it does not come close to having the same grip google has on the internet and our lives.
Peertube is a completely different platform, perhaps you’re mixing it up with YouTube clients like newpipe or invidious?
No, it is your right to choose what code is executed in your browser and which isn’t. There’s a case to be made about accepting the EULA but if you never registered a Google account, then you never accepted any EULA. This is not the case with modded android/iOS apps as in those cases you are violating DMCA 1201.
I would argue it’s not “against all odds”. The add-on devs probably know better how YouTube is working than the bunch of underpaid, outsourced script writers that are tasked to implement the stuff. The latter also have to make sure that it doesn’t break for legitimate viewers (oh, sorry, I meant “impressions”).
The YouTube team at Google isn’t all outsourced and generally Google uses it’s top talent for the money making side of the business
The people in the ads side are some of the best around. The problem is: they don’t necessarily care about ad blockers.
My laptop came pre installed with Firefox and ublock origin. Google Chrome had ad blocking in it as well. The devs in the company don’t like ads any more than anyone else… Also ads are a major security risk, and using ad blocking is just good opsec.
Your perception of Google software engineers is way off. They’re more often than not some of the best software engineers in the industry because their hiring bar is very high, and they get paid like it. YouTube is an astounding complex problem to solve with thousands of moving parts and non-trivial problems. It’s honestly astounding people are able to build sites that complex, and that they’re not only common but extremely reliable.
The issue is there are even more extremely intelligent software engineers outside of Google than in, and many of them spend some of their free time working on FOSS projects including ad-blockers. It’s also almost always harder to be red team (attacker, or the ad-blockers devs) as opposed to blue team (defensive, or the people trying to stop them).
I always wondered why YouTube doesn’t stream the ad intermixed into the video? Like, it’s DASH, right? How does that work, can’t the server send a video then switch to another stream source (the ad) and back?
Meshkov said that assessment [that scriptlet injection is the only reliable method of ad blocking for youtbue] is accurate if you limit yourself to browser extensions (which is how most popular ad blockers are distributed). But he pointed to network-level ad blockers and alternative YouTube clients, such as NewPipe, as other approaches that can work.
How exactly do these youtube front ends survive Google anyways? Why can’t Google simply block all the traffic coming from these front ends in order to kill them off entirely? Kind of interesting that some ad blockers are having a hard time being effective on YT while these front ends seem to be having no issues accessing videos on the site.
In order for someone to experience the video, it has to go from digital to analog. That will always be the weakpoint of DRM. Someone can always put a middleman application in that point. Expect corporations to push for chip implants that allow them to directly control what you experience.
There is no way to determine if the request comes from an alternative frontend or a legitimate user. Even if they start blocking all public instances of alternatives, which is highly unfeasible since most of them use VPN and blocking all VPNs is extremely restrictive for legitimate users too, you can host them locally.
To use a metaphor: the internet is a mailperson, and a YouTube video is a package. The mailperson hands it off to me. Then I have to fumble with opening the box to get the item inside.
Well, let’s say I have a butler. The butler can take the package from the mailman, and rip out all the unnecessary stuff, and give me what’s inside the box. The butler is adblock.
YouTube/Google cannot mess with my butler. Why? Because it’s outside of their power. They can try to do things like force a signature before giving me the package. But guess what? My butler can sign off my package. YouTube knows to get to me, they have to go through my butler - period.
So there’s no “blocking traffic” because once the package is sent, they have to deal with my butler. And they can make all sorts of detectors on the package, but we’ll keep finding ways to bypass it and convince the package that my butler can totally sign for me.
I was gonna say, the Internet wouldn’t be what it is today without those so-called open source hackers. They’re the giants that Google and all the rest are standing on the shoulders of.
my wife watches a lot of youtube via PS4, so ads aren’t blockable. but she discovered when an ad starts playing if you go to the ‘i’ icon, select you don’t want to see this ad, then click resume video, the video starts playing again. not exactly a blocker and requires those manual steps, but beats watching 30 second unskippable ads every 5 minutes
the “open source hackers” are always going to win this one, for a simple reason. if the data of the youtube video is handed to a user at any point, then the information it contains can be scrubbed and cleaned of ads. no exceptions.
if google somehow solves all ad-blocking techniques within browser, then new plugins will be developed on the operating system side to put a black square of pixels and selectively mute audio over the advert each time. if they solve that too? then people will hack the display signal going out at the graphics card level so that it is cleaned before it hits the monitor. if they beat that using some stupid encryption trick? well, then people will develop usb plugin tools that physically plug into the monitors at the display end, that artificially add the black boxes and audio mutes at the monitor display side.
if they beat that? someone, someone will jerry rig a literal black square of paper on some servos and wires, and physical audio switch to do the same thing, an actual, physical advert blocker. i’m sure once someone works that out, a mass produced version would be quite popular as a monitor attachment (in a timeline that gets so fucked that we would need this).
if that doesn’t work? like, google starts coding malware to seek and destroy physical adblockers? then close your eyes and mute your headphones for 30 seconds, lol. the only way google is solving that one is with hitsquads and armed drones to make viewers RESUME VIEWING
as long as a youtube video is available to access without restriction, then google cannot dictate how the consumer experiences that video. google cannot win this.
Without talking about the resources it would require, youtube could totally only serve the ad until it has been “watched”. And no amount of sponsor block or similar software would help. These software only work because youtube allow you to navigate the video. If they decide that you have to fully download a 30s ad video, and that you can’t ask for the video for the first 30s, then you wouldn’t be able to do anything (or at the very max, just hide the ad and wait 30s on a blank screen).
Sure but my point was if there’s a practical way to do what the guy above me was proposing, then I would assume those sketchy ass sites would employ the same tactics. Not a programmer though.
People could do that out of protest, and upload videos as proof of them doing it. Advertisers would start pulling out if they think they’re being ripped off like that.
Eventually at some point, the nuclear option would be if the government decided that sending back false information saying an ad had been viewed is computer fraud.
I don’t think the relative amount of people that would do that would be high enough to really end up mattering, and it’s not like, in that circumstance, advertisers can tell whether or not people are actually watching their ads anyways, which has always been the most dubious part of ads. And, is the biggest advantage of the internet and youtube, is that you can tell, you’re allowed access to those metrics. I don’t see a reality where youtube just goes to basically like, shittier cable advertising, forcing everyone to watch all the ads all the time, and that becomes somehow attractive to advertisers. I think, if that were the case, advertisers would probably pull out just on that basis and go where they know exactly what content they’re putting their ads in front of, which has always been the disadvantage of youtube.
Even if they did that it’s not impossible to find some exploits. No software is free of bugs which can be exploited, especially networked ones which are often finicky because they have many systems in place to pretend flawless execution. Just look at the TCP protocol, it’s dropping packets left and right but users usually don’t notice because they get spammed till one gets through
This type of war happened 15 years ago with Hulu vs Xbox. Hulu won because despite there always being an exploit it was always several days before a work around was uploaded. Eventually it was Hulu on xbmc for 1 day, then 3 days no Hulu on and on until everyone gave up.
It’s how we did it with MythTV and over the air or cable tv. The algorithms will just save a file in post, that has the ads removed. And that was 15yrs ago.
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