lol, good luck with that Google
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
620 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
59674 readers
3443 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Haven't seen an anti-adblock message yet, and I block ads in all sorts of ways across my devices.
merde ._.
Scheisse
Question. Wouldn't the catch-all solution for YT is to pair the AJAX calls for the video with a "view video key", and that key to be found out after running a deeply obviouscated javascript served with the html of the "view video" page?
They could even bundle some of the key-building-js with the ad being served.
At some point in order to "block the ad" , the ad blocker would have to run or analyze tons of JS code , making the ordeal to difficult to compute.
My guess is they can't afford the complication on the server side.
They could probably force the ad to be decoded by asking the client for proof. They couldn't prove that it was actually shown to the user though.
What I don't understand is why they don't block downloading the video during the period where an ad is supposed to be playing.
I think that is actually what they've already been doing for at least a decade?
Whenever you download a youtube video using something other than a js-enabled browser, then I think something like yt-dlp's jsinterp.py needs to evaluate some javascript to extract the key.
Switched to FreeTube. Problem solved.
with FF and ublock i can watch yt as always. Never got the poup. But as of today, the youtube page is just blank. I can search and watch anything, but the start-page is blank. (no account)
or at least they try to :P
not blocking ads, scripts. ctrl-shift-c