I don’t agree with that. Anything they can do can be circumvented as long as there’s people willing and able to do the work. And because YouTube is so ubiquitous I see that continuing.
They could certainly be more aggressive though. I think their pace is elaborate. Boil the frog slowly.
If they wanted an almost impossible skip they could bake ads directly into the video stream as its served to you. Facebook already has ads that are basically impossible to remove, and that’s without the advantage of serving video content.
YouTube employs a wide variety of techniques to circumvent ad blockers, such as embedding an ad in the video itself (so the ad blocker can’t distinguish between the two)
Though a low effort search on my part just now couldn’t corroborate that. But even if current adblocking software can’t handle it, real time commercial detection software exists and could, I assume, be applied here.
Oh, yeah. Hadn’t thought of that. Or maybe it’d just blank out the ad while it was playing and you’d just have to wait. Either way, annoying.
I got to thinking you could crowdsource it, like sponsorblock. But that’d probably only catch popular videos, and YouTube could just randomize what ads and when.
YouTube could make it impossible to skip, or at least impossible to entirely skip. If there hasn’t been enough time between you requesting the ad frames and the frames at the start of the video it could simply refuse to give you the new frames
There’s a lot of very motivated people trying g to stop adblockers on many platforms, I’ve never seen one that works without severely limiting the user experience.
And remember these are the most convenient and useful form of adblock. I don’t think there is anything a site could do to stop the user just throwing a black box over the ad and muting the page.
Ultimately, no security works when the attacker has absolute control over the hardware.
I think the ad black box is where it will end up. A lot of people would probably not see that as much better than having an ad at that point, though. They don’t even really need to make something impenetrable, they just need to keep breaking adblock so much so that people no longer see it as reliable and adblock developers grow increasingly tired of rewriting. So far, I can only recall a handful of times where adblock has straight up stopped working on YouTube.
Compared to other sites, and their relative costs to run, and amount of ads. YouTube has been fairly ok. They have balanced the consumer friendly skip this video and sometimes short ads with the probably higher engagement metrics from them.
However YouTube the lite plan being discontinued right before this mostly means I’m going to move from Gmail to Zoho and wait for the ban.
The final YouTube lite plan didn’t include removing ads from music, which seems to suggest the reason why YouTube music is bundled and maybe even exists, is in part the music industry being shitty.
Add no-script to the mix and you are golden. On mobile I use adguard to filter ads from pretty much every single app and website. As soon as I can figure out a couple of things bothering me with FF mobile I’ll be moving over to it with extensions.
To be even absolutelier sure no one gets this wrong - use uBlock Origin on Firefox (or one of it’s forked versions) because every other Browser runs chromium under it’s hood which heavily restricts ad blocking abilities
I apologize for my strongopinion but I believe yours is misguided or similar. Ublock origin is objectively the best ad blocker , they are an extremely talented team, dedicated and have been for a long long time.
The enemy is getting stronger, not the defense not working well.
And I am fucking loving it. With this move, Google has effectively started an arms race between the team they have implementing this Adblock-blocking crap and the vast majority of the technically competent internet users in the world.
Unless the rules of how the internet works fundamentally change, Google is not going to win.
i wouldn’t be surprised if this was partly a war between the team they have implementing this and the team they have implementing this, in their spare time
I’m not that optimistic. They could implement some sort of aggressive DRM. In the US, all they have to do is label protection as DRM and then it becomes illegal to even have any discussion of how to circumvent it. The overwhelming majority of users aren’t going to bother with any ad blocking. In the end, this could end up hurting Google if people build decentralized Youtube alternatives and then they could take viewers away from Youtube.
Well, in the US you can legally talk about it so long as you do not actually do it. It’s similar to how an actor is able to talk about commiting murder without getting in trouble.
By some argument, section 103 of the DMCA (which is what grandparent post is referring to) does make it illegal to even talk about DRM circumvention methods.
illegal to: (2) “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in” a device, service or component which is primarily intended to circumvent “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work,” and which either has limited commercially significant other uses or is marketed for the anti-circumvention purpose.
If youtube implements an “access control measure” by splicing the ads with the video and disabling the fast-forward button during the ad, and you go on a forum and say “Oh yeah, you can write a script that detects the parts that are ads because the button is disabled, and force-fast-forwards through those”, some lawyer would argue that you have offered to the public a method to circumvent an access control measure, and therefore your speech is illegal. If you actually write the greasemonkey script and post it online, that would definitely be illegal.
This is abhorrent to the types among us for whom “code IS free speech”, but this scenario is not just a hypothetical. DMCA has been controversial for a long time. Digg collapsed in part because of the user revolt over the admins deleting any post containing the leaked AACS decryption key, which is just a 32-digit number. Yet “speaking” the number alone, aloud, on an online platform (and nothing else!) was enough for MPAA to send cease and desist letters to Digg under DMCA, and Digg folded.
Thanks for the heads-up. Definitely hope that if something like splicing ads in that some country like Russia or any other country that doesn’t care about US law or US copyright law would be able to write, host, and update methods to get around it on a server they control.
They would end up shooting themselves in the foot. They are on shaky ground already and it would only take a new platform that can entice a few of their top content producers over to lose enough chunks of their revenues to hurt. And all they have do is keep fucking around to find out what a tech-literate group of nerds who hate big corps can do when they are aligned in a certain direction.
Yeah, that is easy enough to build into the algorithm. Deprioritizing that sort of nonsense effectively would mitigate it gaining a foothold. The only reason why the current platforms don’t (in fact they prioritize it in many cases) is because discord is being equated with engagement and they see that as good for business. If you aren’t worried about business, then you can set up your priority algorithm to be more rational and egalitarian.
Ads are a genuine real security concern if it became a choice between YouTube and adblockers it’s bye YouTube for me.
Its a battle YouTube isn’t going to win, and to be honest YouTube has never and will never be a viable business their best bets just asking for donations and playing nice to anyone using it.
At least one popular ad blocker, AdBlock Plus, won’t be trying to get around YouTube’s wall at all. Vergard Johnsen, chief product officer at AdBlock Plus developer eyeo, said he respects YouTube’s decision to start “a conversation” with users about how content gets monetized.
ABP has always been a shitty adblocker because it’s meant to make money rather than actually block ads effectively. They’ve been accepting money from ad networks to allow their “unintrusive ads” (an oxymoron) for over a decade now, and I’m sure Google is paying for this to happen now.
I’m okay with unobtrusive ads as long as the place serving them up has a modicum of common sense sensibilities about their impact and has a rigorous enough vetting process that they’ll never be used as payloads for malicious software. Ads can be a way to find out about products I might otherwise never know about. I’m not outright against all ads as a concept. Hell, sometimes it’s an actual art form in rare cases.
I’m just against them taking up more space than the content itself, impeding my access to the content in any way, hijacking my property, or getting hijacked by malware which then hijacks my property.
Too bad Google doesn’t want to have a conversation, at least one that isn’t at gunpoint. I wouldn’t mind unintrusive ads. If it stayed at banner ads and things like that, I would probably enable them. Shoving crap in the middle of videos just makes it a horrible experience, so I’m going to get rid of them.
An Adblocker allowing ads to… start a conversation that’s already been had and over for decades at this point.
People don’t like intrusive ads. Give intrusive ads and we’ll always find ways around them. It’s a story as old as the internet. Google is no exception. You may have billions of dollars and thousands of employees but nearly everyone in the damned world hates ads. You can try to fight it all you want. The only reason that nearly anyone puts up with ads is they want to support the creator or don’t yet know they can avoid the ads. Even those supporting the creators don’t like the damned things.
I’ve seen so, so many people watching ads on their phones
“against all odds” lmao what. Anyone who’s been paying attention since the dawn of the internet would know that youtube isn’t winning this one. The odds were 100% in the favour of the hackers.
I remember the mini-war between AOL and third-party IM clients. There were days where AOL would send 15kB patches to AIM multiple times a day to break compatibility with the other apps. And they would then fix it within hours.
So AIM was built on an existing chat protocol called OSCAR. The same protocol used in other services. So people eventually figured out how to make chat clients that could log into many different IM services on one app.
This was not sanctioned by AOL, but they allowed it at first. Then they decided you HAVE to use the official AIM client to talk to people on AIM. The third-party developers ignored AOL, so they entered into a tug-a-war match for a while.
Because AOL was using known software to make AIM work, there was only so much they could do to keep their client working while also blocking everyone else. Eventually it became too much of a hassle, so AOL relented and third-party clients kept working until the service was shutdown.
You just reminded me of DeadAim I used to use back in the day. More features. Could log into multiple accounts at the same time with tabs to view different buddy lists. Those were the days…
“against all odds” my left asshole. This is always the way of hacker vs defense, it’s always an arms race and the attacking side always has the advantage.
Defense is always playing reactive. Attack gets to be creative and figure out how to break whatever tools defense has. Defense has to wait until the vulnerability is found and then deal with it. It’s the nature of the arms race with regards to cyber security.
Except if all developers, who are also power users of the internet, switches to another browser which allow ad blockers, all web based apps and websites will shift to work better in Firefox then on Chrome. Then the regular user will also switch.
Yup. I’m a web dev. Switched from testing first in Chome to testing first in Firefox a few months ago. And I had been Chrome first for probably 10 years prior. Some of our customers (enterprises) also started deploying/spec for FF by default in the past year.
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