Pihole, if i understand correctly, works by blocking DNS requests and YouTube ads are not DNS based the way ads usually are. You’re stuck blocking them by uBO on each device or use Invidious.
I’ve run pihole for years. It works really well. The only problem I’ve seen is when you actually need a tracking URL to work. For example clicking a link in your emails to download a ticket for a concert. You just need to be mindful that when the browser fails to open a link it’s because of the PiHole. There’s no nice screen telling you. You just need to pop it into the whitelist to allow it although on a phone I just used to go to mobile data temporarily, click the link and then go back on WiFi.
I recently switched to using NextDNS, as it means all my DNS queries are encrypted and I still get filtering when I’m away from home. I also have three kids to manage so it allows me to set timers on their devices to block certain traffic. Good for blocking adult sites too.
I followed those instructions to the letter aswell as cleared all the cookies and I’m still getting the popup. I first came up with this code more than 3 months ago so it’s probably outdated by now.
There’s a popup that YouTube has started showing these days that tells you “AdBlockers are illegal. Stop using them” or something to that effect. This blocks that popup from appearing.
Somehow I still haven’t seen that message despite also using uBlock and Firefox. Perhaps I’m just further down the line and Google will eventually come for me too, but I wonder if my DuckDuckGo and Privacy Badger extensions may also have something to do with it.
I keep getting that pop-up, I have had ublock installed for years. I haven’t done anything special to unlock and just refresh the page and it goes away.
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
Huh, they seemingly have money to not fuck our eyes without lube for ads, but I guess they somehow just don’t have enough money, 156 billion dollars is really nothing after all. Probably more money in between my couch cushions. Such a small indie company that has to struggle to remain afloat, like an Etsy store.
This phenomenon is normally created by a bunch of mid level people without many stock options trying to get promotions. They need the big arrow to go up to get a good raise, be recognized, etc in their individual business units.
The people pushing things to go up are typically not motivated by the gross number as much as they are making their boss happy enough to pay them more. That’s why the change is all that matters.
There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.
Data aquisition for analysis, AI training, tracking and simply having monopolized a space. Theres a lot of positives and indirect profit that might make it feasible.
But does it “Good” for the public like say road improvement?
It does “Good” for the company by increasing the quality of the output of it’s AI/LLM, more data to track users etc.
There isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
It’s funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they’ve been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).
Prominent example is printer hardware and the ink. Hardware is sold at little mark-up or at a loss and then they force you to use their iteration of liquid gold. Printer ink is dirt cheap to manufacture and costs more than human blood.
Is that 10 million active users of uBlock Origin or 10 million active installs? Also relevant because I’ve seen workplaces that deploy UBO to all users thanks to advertising being an easy vector of getting users to click random links they shouldn’t
So I can’t find my original source for that one anymore, but I looked at the Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org and they show a total of ≈17m (10mil on Chrome, 6.9mil on Firefox).
I don’t see a good active users number on uBlockO’s website or anything, and I also don’t have a good way of estimating how many of those installs are second or third browsers; but an enterprise install probably wouldn’t go through the extension storefronts and would instead be delivered directly via MDM. Whether that means they’d count toward the browsers’ totals, I’m not sure.
Still, it seems to me that the vagaries around this probably cancel each other out decently well; sure, some might be double-counted or enterprise installs, but the actual uBlockO users are probably more inclined to be power users, online more often than other users. I’d say that 4% is probably in the ballpark at least. Maybe it’s 1%, maybe it’s 6%, but I don’t think it’s terribly far off.
I had this code saved and had suggested it to others before but now I didn’t take my own advice and had been struggling with those pop-ups for the past few days. I hope this solves it.
EDIT: Doesn’t work. Still got the popup despite having all other extensions disabled and uBlock on default settings
Semi-related: what’s a good frontend for android TV? I’m loving NewPipe on my phone, but on the TV it refuses to work in full screen and often in not-full screen too…
Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it’s not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.
Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don’t work for YouTube video ads.
If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that’s not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.
You don’t need to re-encode the video. Look up HLS segments, which is the standard for streaming video and I assume YouTube uses it.
Each video is split into many segments, like 10 seconds long (though the duration doesn’t matter). The browser first fetches a “playlist” which is just a list of these segments. Then the video player plays each segment in order. So Google could just insert ad-segments into the video stream, and if they did it cleverly, there would be no way to determine that they were ads.
They are legally obligated to show which part of the video is an ad (and contractually obligated to have a clickable link), which always leaves ad blockers a way to correlate and remove those segments though (essentially skipping forward during the ad, then lying to the backend when asking for additional segments as if the user had skipped through the video after the ad was over).
On Twitch they managed to outplay even uBlock, because the streaming is realtime and if you skip the ad segments, there’s no data to fall back to and the backend won’t send you the regular segments until the ad break is over (from what I understand). So at best you get a waiting screen instead of an ad.
However I’m not sure if it would make (financial) sense to apply a similar strategy on YouTube, as that would require preventing buffering the video until the ads have stopped playing (and wouldn’t work at all for midroll ads since the video has already been buffered at that point). Not only would this be expensive to do in the backend, but it would likely cause disproportionate buffering on low-end connections which couldn’t start loading the video while the ad is playing.
On Twitch they managed to outplay even uBlock, because the streaming is realtime and if you skip the ad segments, there’s no data to fall back to and the backend won’t send you the regular segments until the ad break is over (from what I understand). So at best you get a waiting screen instead of an ad.
Yes, you get a “commercial break in progress” banner, but it’s not loading ads when watching through HLS.
Ads on Twitch are not nearly as bad as on YouTube tho, so I actually have an exception for Twitch ads. I usually only watch esports tournaments and they make sure there are no ad breaks during games, just between segments. And on the rare occasion that I watch a regular stream, I get an ad or two maybe once every 45 minutes, which is fair.
The ads are really annoying if you streamhop frequently, because almost every time you switch stream you have to wait 30s-1m.
I pay for Turbo now so that’s fine, but the way it’s implemented seems really stupid to me, if you are looking for a stream to watch you sometimes get ad after ad after ad which can’t possibly be good for viewer retention.
Pre-roll ads are stupid, yeah. At least give me some time to figure out if I want to watch the stream… But that a thing that’s also worse on YT since they removed dislike count. Is it another clickbaity jump-cut-ridden garbage video or is it actually information? Roll the dice to find out!
At the end there will always be some way since to the user the text should be similar or the UI should be similar… So there will be always a way… But yeah it can get more complex.
The only exception is the case they implement the web integrity thing at browser level or equivalent.
But then others browsers like Firefox will gain popularity… I am okay whatever they do, I never see any ad or ad-blocker blocker and I doubt I will even see any of those.
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Let the cat and mouse games begin!!! Thanks for the heads up though
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I miss 3 days ago when the blockade was just some HTML
Get your FreeTube subs set up and ready to go. https://freetubeapp.io/
How long until youtube add an anti-anti-anti-adblocker?
Like a fuzzbuster. Radar detector detector detector
Who blocks the blocker?
Is the any way to add something like this to my pihole to block all this shit network wide?
Unfortunate, no.
Pihole, if i understand correctly, works by blocking DNS requests and YouTube ads are not DNS based the way ads usually are. You’re stuck blocking them by uBO on each device or use Invidious.
I just spun up my own invidious instance on docker today. I’m so mad that I haven’t done this sooner!
I’ve run pihole for years. It works really well. The only problem I’ve seen is when you actually need a tracking URL to work. For example clicking a link in your emails to download a ticket for a concert. You just need to be mindful that when the browser fails to open a link it’s because of the PiHole. There’s no nice screen telling you. You just need to pop it into the whitelist to allow it although on a phone I just used to go to mobile data temporarily, click the link and then go back on WiFi.
I recently switched to using NextDNS, as it means all my DNS queries are encrypted and I still get filtering when I’m away from home. I also have three kids to manage so it allows me to set timers on their devices to block certain traffic. Good for blocking adult sites too.
and the code doesnt work, cause the thing just appeared while im trying to listen to music with my gf
Got to try disabling all other addons/blockers. Some interfere or trigger the ad blocker detection.
i never use normal youtube otherwise and i shouldnt have to play detective for this to work
Lmao!
You shouldn’t, and you don’t have to. So enjoy the ads :)
So then fix it and then share the fix.
I followed those instructions to the letter aswell as cleared all the cookies and I’m still getting the popup. I first came up with this code more than 3 months ago so it’s probably outdated by now.
In human terms, what is that code saying? Never mind, it’s in the source link
There’s a popup that YouTube has started showing these days that tells you “AdBlockers are illegal. Stop using them” or something to that effect. This blocks that popup from appearing.
Somehow I still haven’t seen that message despite also using uBlock and Firefox. Perhaps I’m just further down the line and Google will eventually come for me too, but I wonder if my DuckDuckGo and Privacy Badger extensions may also have something to do with it.
Are adblockers even illegal? I didn’t think it was.
No. It’s up to the browser (and even above it, the user) how the data is displayed.
I guess it’s against YouTube’s terms and conditions.
I keep getting that pop-up, I have had ublock installed for years. I haven’t done anything special to unlock and just refresh the page and it goes away.
Well, that’s pretty dumb and ruins my good times. Glad people are cracking down on it
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
Huh, they seemingly have money to not fuck our eyes without lube for ads, but I guess they somehow just don’t have enough money, 156 billion dollars is really nothing after all. Probably more money in between my couch cushions. Such a small indie company that has to struggle to remain afloat, like an Etsy store.
Of course they don’t have enough money
The goal is (as always) to have all the money
This phenomenon is normally created by a bunch of mid level people without many stock options trying to get promotions. They need the big arrow to go up to get a good raise, be recognized, etc in their individual business units.
The people pushing things to go up are typically not motivated by the gross number as much as they are making their boss happy enough to pay them more. That’s why the change is all that matters.
How do you think they make that money? I mean yes it is an insane amount and do they need that much but they would still have ads.
Ah yes, Capitalism.
Yes but does YouTube it’s self make money? There isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
I am not justifying 17 ads in a 10 minute video, but no company keeps a product that doesn’t make money
True but data collection is still done and generates $$$
Think about gmail & Google docs
That’s why they want to run more ads.
There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.
Government ≠ Private/Publically shared company.
Google couldn’t care less about what it brings if it doesnt make more money than it takes.
Data aquisition for analysis, AI training, tracking and simply having monopolized a space. Theres a lot of positives and indirect profit that might make it feasible.
But does it “Good” for the public like say road improvement?
It does “Good” for the company by increasing the quality of the output of it’s AI/LLM, more data to track users etc.
You just confirmed what I said…
It’s funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they’ve been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).
That’s how they’re able to pull this anti-adblock nonsense, in fact. If they hadn’t killed off all competitors, everyone would just be going to them.
Yes there is a reason to run a part of your business at a loss. It is well known market strategy and it is called a Loss Leader.
You offer a product or services at a loss because it helps you generate more revenue in another part of your business.
And plenty of companies keep products that don’t make money, because they are Loss Leaders into products that do make money.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
Prominent example is printer hardware and the ink. Hardware is sold at little mark-up or at a loss and then they force you to use their iteration of liquid gold. Printer ink is dirt cheap to manufacture and costs more than human blood.
Just because a company is profitable it doesn’t mean they can’t ask users to pay for a service.
I don’t love Alphabet either, but in their shoes I’d block ad filters too. YouTube is spectacularly expensive to run.
Ok, I’m curious. Gonna do some math.
I’ll admit, that number is bigger than I expected. But almost any other line item on their budget sheet would be bigger.
ETA: it’s worth noting that YouTube has estimated operating costs of $5B, so this isn’t coming anywhere near making them unprofitable.
Is that 10 million active users of uBlock Origin or 10 million active installs? Also relevant because I’ve seen workplaces that deploy UBO to all users thanks to advertising being an easy vector of getting users to click random links they shouldn’t
So I can’t find my original source for that one anymore, but I looked at the Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org and they show a total of ≈17m (10mil on Chrome, 6.9mil on Firefox).
I don’t see a good active users number on uBlockO’s website or anything, and I also don’t have a good way of estimating how many of those installs are second or third browsers; but an enterprise install probably wouldn’t go through the extension storefronts and would instead be delivered directly via MDM. Whether that means they’d count toward the browsers’ totals, I’m not sure.
Still, it seems to me that the vagaries around this probably cancel each other out decently well; sure, some might be double-counted or enterprise installs, but the actual uBlockO users are probably more inclined to be power users, online more often than other users. I’d say that 4% is probably in the ballpark at least. Maybe it’s 1%, maybe it’s 6%, but I don’t think it’s terribly far off.
what does this mean? is it the stock market in general or google or is it tech co’s?
It’s Google’s parent company. Like meta to fb.
Fairly sure that Alphabet is google parent company
BIG NUMBER MUST GO UP
MUST APPEASE THE GOD OF CAPITALISM AND THE ALMIGHTY SHAREHOLDERS!
Does that stop YT from knowing you’re using an as block?
Can’t this just be a filter subscription or whatever in ublock origin?
I mean I’m pretty sure it is, I’m only using ublock and have no problems.
I had this code saved and had suggested it to others before but now I didn’t take my own advice and had been struggling with those pop-ups for the past few days. I hope this solves it.
EDIT: Doesn’t work. Still got the popup despite having all other extensions disabled and uBlock on default settings
Semi-related: what’s a good frontend for android TV? I’m loving NewPipe on my phone, but on the TV it refuses to work in full screen and often in not-full screen too…
SmartTubeNext is your best bet, I think Libretube devs will be working on landscape support too sometime, but that’s probably very far away
Thanks, it’s working great so far! 🫶
Glad you’re liking it!
From my experience, LibreTube simply doesn’t work without a kbm. I couldn’t even select an instance using the TV controller.
Maybe Kodi works? It does on the FireTV Stick, as long as you can install apps from play store, you’re good.
They’re going to randomize all vars and function names, mark my words.
Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it’s not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.
“I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.”
Who is going to tell him?
aren’t they already? It’s been some time since I worked in video. but I remember HLS manifest had ad insertion built-in.
Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don’t work for YouTube video ads.
If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that’s not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.
You don’t need to re-encode the video. Look up HLS segments, which is the standard for streaming video and I assume YouTube uses it.
Each video is split into many segments, like 10 seconds long (though the duration doesn’t matter). The browser first fetches a “playlist” which is just a list of these segments. Then the video player plays each segment in order. So Google could just insert ad-segments into the video stream, and if they did it cleverly, there would be no way to determine that they were ads.
If the browser itself could check those fragments though… 🤔
Yeah they are sooner or later going to do something like this. But then we can download videos and use Ai to remove the ads.
Will probably pop up YouTube proxys that does this on request so we don’t even have to download.
They are legally obligated to show which part of the video is an ad (and contractually obligated to have a clickable link), which always leaves ad blockers a way to correlate and remove those segments though (essentially skipping forward during the ad, then lying to the backend when asking for additional segments as if the user had skipped through the video after the ad was over).
On Twitch they managed to outplay even uBlock, because the streaming is realtime and if you skip the ad segments, there’s no data to fall back to and the backend won’t send you the regular segments until the ad break is over (from what I understand). So at best you get a waiting screen instead of an ad.
However I’m not sure if it would make (financial) sense to apply a similar strategy on YouTube, as that would require preventing buffering the video until the ads have stopped playing (and wouldn’t work at all for midroll ads since the video has already been buffered at that point). Not only would this be expensive to do in the backend, but it would likely cause disproportionate buffering on low-end connections which couldn’t start loading the video while the ad is playing.
Yes, you get a “commercial break in progress” banner, but it’s not loading ads when watching through HLS.
Ads on Twitch are not nearly as bad as on YouTube tho, so I actually have an exception for Twitch ads. I usually only watch esports tournaments and they make sure there are no ad breaks during games, just between segments. And on the rare occasion that I watch a regular stream, I get an ad or two maybe once every 45 minutes, which is fair.
The ads are really annoying if you streamhop frequently, because almost every time you switch stream you have to wait 30s-1m.
I pay for Turbo now so that’s fine, but the way it’s implemented seems really stupid to me, if you are looking for a stream to watch you sometimes get ad after ad after ad which can’t possibly be good for viewer retention.
Pre-roll ads are stupid, yeah. At least give me some time to figure out if I want to watch the stream… But that a thing that’s also worse on YT since they removed dislike count. Is it another clickbaity jump-cut-ridden garbage video or is it actually information? Roll the dice to find out!
Of course they are, for example when targeting HTML elements you generally need to target text not vars or function names.
At the end there will always be some way since to the user the text should be similar or the UI should be similar… So there will be always a way… But yeah it can get more complex.
The only exception is the case they implement the web integrity thing at browser level or equivalent.
But then others browsers like Firefox will gain popularity… I am okay whatever they do, I never see any ad or ad-blocker blocker and I doubt I will even see any of those.
it will be an interesting cat and mouse game or people will start to shift to another video sharing platform
The point being that if one can find the domain through which they push said script/the script itself, they can disable it (I use NoScript).