have 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 updates.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, they absolutely are capable of telling if you have uBlock Origin installed. However, uBlock is also capable of blocking scripts, so you can make a filter to block whatever part of the scripts on the page it is that detect your adblocker. I’ve never seen an anti-adblocker that didn’t use Javascript, and the great thing about Javascript is that your browser can just… Ignore it.
It would be pretty trivial for them to just block playback completely for any agent that’s blocking their ad scripts. Or make their ad videos indistinguishable from the actually video you want.
The question isn’t CAN they enforce this, it’s WILL they enforce this? Thus far we’ve been succeeding at this cat-and-mouse game simply because the cat is too fat and lazy to chase us. But this cat is looking more hungry and motivated every day…we’ll see.
Ad publishers have been in a war with adblockers for a decade now, were it trivial to detect adblockers, they would have already won. This is the sole reason Google has introduced the idea of DRM for websites.
In fact, the only trivial thing is bypassing anti-adblock. There is no anti-adblock that relies upon Javascript that cannot be bypassed without issue. The way Javascript is executed on the user’s computer, unobfuscated, means it can be altered in whatever way you want before it is ran.
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.
have 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 updates.
(some of them are actual malware too)
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.
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.
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.
Yep, they are ramping up to disable all of the scripts and extensions.
Lately, I’ve been getting 403 errors in Newpipe after a video has been playing for about a minute. I think they’re starting.
Oh, they absolutely are capable of telling if you have uBlock Origin installed. However, uBlock is also capable of blocking scripts, so you can make a filter to block whatever part of the scripts on the page it is that detect your adblocker. I’ve never seen an anti-adblocker that didn’t use Javascript, and the great thing about Javascript is that your browser can just… Ignore it.
It would be pretty trivial for them to just block playback completely for any agent that’s blocking their ad scripts. Or make their ad videos indistinguishable from the actually video you want.
The question isn’t CAN they enforce this, it’s WILL they enforce this? Thus far we’ve been succeeding at this cat-and-mouse game simply because the cat is too fat and lazy to chase us. But this cat is looking more hungry and motivated every day…we’ll see.
Ad publishers have been in a war with adblockers for a decade now, were it trivial to detect adblockers, they would have already won. This is the sole reason Google has introduced the idea of DRM for websites.
In fact, the only trivial thing is bypassing anti-adblock. There is no anti-adblock that relies upon Javascript that cannot be bypassed without issue. The way Javascript is executed on the user’s computer, unobfuscated, means it can be altered in whatever way you want before it is ran.
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.