Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.

You know… in all my time upon this earth, I cannot look back and think of a single instance where I thought: “Gosh, this advertisement which has inserted itself in between me and the desired content has actually made me want to go purchase that product.”

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.

Shitty AdBlock Plus.

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.

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.

YouTube can't win this race when they don't control the platform you're viewing it on. You can always install 'something' to get around it.

The solution to that is to control the platform using Chrome, Android etc.

"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.

To ad blockers, thank you for your service!

Against all odds

lol someone hasn't been paying attention to how this stuff generally works...

Never under estimate the outrage of a nerd.

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.

In the end, AOL gave up.

What Google seems to forget or simply not care about is I can always just... leave.
I used reddit a lot more than I use YouTube.
If enough viewers and content creators were to jump ship, they'd scramble to change their tune.

Don’t be evil turned into straight up evil with Manifest V3. Already switched to FF as my primary and started shifting my use of Evil’s services.

"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.

YouTube's users when they adhere to the YouTube TOS:

Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.

sigh developers will ALWAYS be able to outsmart companies stealing from others.

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.

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

Anybody who thinks this is "against all odds" doesn't understand the Internet very well.

Against all odds? This is a game that's been going on for year, hacker vs Corp, and the hacker always wins. Same shit as anticheat in games, it's a constant arms race but the hacker is nearly always a step ahead.

Another day and another opportunity to say. Stop using youtube. Thankyou, and goodnight.

$ mpv "youtube-url" best youtube adblocker.

"opensource hackers" lol

Open source Hackers FTW!

Please donate and keep Open Source as it is

Youtube is vying X for a internet death while holding the door open for a less greedy rival

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!

To me it seems weird that YouTuber is doing this at all. They should know that they can't win, I doubt their CEO is that incompetent. Especially after all this time of wasted effort on their side to overpower a very small fraction of users who actually block ads online. Could it be to draw attention from something else that's actually more worrying?

Because as an AdBlock user, since I bothered configuring them and using only ublock I haven't had almost any popups and my experience, especially now on the later stages, is exactly like it was before the ban.

I can't help but think there's more to this because they can't be wasting resources, further damage their reputation and risk absolute monopoly on video platforms for a fruitless endeavor.

Even if YouTube isn't profitable by itself, which, given the user data harvesting and the ads I definitely doubt, google still is. I'd appreciate any takes on this because it's been bugging me for a while now.

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").

Could Google and ad services sue Firefox and extension writers?

I mean, nothing pisses off corporations more than someone coming between them and revenue, and the courts tend to agree.

Got this too couple of times, all I did was F5 and go on with my day. Nothing happened.

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?

Serious question: what is the best add blocker right now? I've been using ublock origin, but it doesn't seem to be working that well these days.

I'm on Linux and use Firefox with ghostery and AdBlock extensions. I've got hit with the "must watch ads to play video" thing on YouTube, but just end up activating a user agent extension and set it to report that I'm "running chrome on windows 10". Voila. I can magically watch YouTube videos without ads again.

Lololol it's been like 2 weeks.

Permanently Deleted

as soon as they start doing some sort of client verification it's over for ad blockers