Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
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
Against all odds
lol someone hasn’t been paying attention to how this stuff generally works…
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.That’s a big if though. Unless an actual creator-exodus happens, it’s not going to happen.
And creators wont leave despite making less and less from youtube and relying more and more ftom direct support from fans, like through patreon.
I don’t disagree with you, I’m just saying that YouTube is nothing without both its creator and viewers.
A viewer-exodus and a creator-exodus would be tied together, they both feedback into each other.I even get why YouTube doubledown on catering to their advertisers over the creators and viewers, that’s just money talking.
I’m just saying I don’t owe them my time or attention.
They would hardly be the first Internet giant to fall, thinking they’re too big to fail, not that I see it happening soon though.Very true. But if Reddit didn’t fall I very much doubt YouTube will.
Perhaps you and I might leave, but it won’t be enough.
Not going to happen. Most of us, and the ones making the service profitable pay.
You have no value for Google and lemmy isn’t a population Google cares about in the first place.
I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.
The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.
As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.
What FOSS mobile OS are you using?
Non-Google Android.
What are you using instead for Maps and email?
Apple Maps and Fastmail.
Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.
I use Organic maps and K9 mail
k9 mail has a really poor rating on the app store. I hear Thunderbird will be revamping it though. Are you happy with where it is at right now?
Yeah, it works great. I haven’t had any problems
I’ve had good success with FairEmail its open source and on Fdroid appstore but google made it so it will only work if you download through the play store which is BS.
Exactly, I had people tell me that we should support YouTube, because it costs money and if we don’t it will disappear.
I would celebrate the day it would happen, YouTube is actually the reason we don’t have much competition there. They used their position and Google monopoly in other areas to establish this monopoly.
There’s creators out there running a non YouTube channel in parallel, mostly on Odysee. Good to see an alternative out there.
Never under estimate the outrage of a nerd.
They even made a series of movies about it.
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.
Wow that’s full on antitrust surely? Or was this before the regulatory precedents were set for Internet providers?
Well, not really.
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…
I miss trillium. Those were the days.
Ah I see. I thought the implication here was that they were doing this to ICQ and the likes
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.
They ditch the “do no evil” motto years ago when seeking military contract to help them kill people
I was suspicious the moment they said “don’t be evil”.
Non-evil people don’t need to say it.
“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.
How many assholes do you have?
Not really. There are lots of protocols and such that haven’t been broken in any meaningful ways. Attackers have advantage is a weird thing to say.
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.
YouTube’s users when they adhere to the YouTube TOS:
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.
Client side versus server.
To use a metaphor: the internet is a mailperson, and a YouTube video is a package. The mailperson hands it off to me. Then I have to fumble with opening the box to get the item inside.
Well, let’s say I have a butler. The butler can take the package from the mailman, and rip out all the unnecessary stuff, and give me what’s inside the box. The butler is adblock.
YouTube/Google cannot mess with my butler. Why? Because it’s outside of their power. They can try to do things like force a signature before giving me the package. But guess what? My butler can sign off my package. YouTube knows to get to me, they have to go through my butler - period.
So there’s no “blocking traffic” because once the package is sent, they have to deal with my butler. And they can make all sorts of detectors on the package, but we’ll keep finding ways to bypass it and convince the package that my butler can totally sign for me.
Really enjoying LibreTube on my phone, for listening to long videos without the video on screen. Its audio mode is very clean in my opinion.
Google could implement Widevine DRM for all videos.
Another day and another opportunity to say. Stop using youtube. Thankyou, and goodnight.
I refuse to use it.
You guys are missing out
On what?
There is nothing on there that you couldn’t find an equivalent of in text form(web or paper) or in the millions of hours of TV and film available on and off the web(both legal and not so legal) or on other platforms like twitch/nebula/peertube/lbry.
Are we really not okay with using YouTube but are okay with using Twitch?
And don’t deny that using Peertube amounts to using YouTube
I’m not a fan of either and would advocate everyone not consume large amounts of video content because of how heavy it is from an environmental point of view and move away from corporations from an anticapitalist/freedom point if view.
Let’s not kid ourselves though, as shit as twitch is, it does not come close to having the same grip google has on the internet and our lives.
Peertube is a completely different platform, perhaps you’re mixing it up with YouTube clients like newpipe or invidious?
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.
Open source Hackers FTW!
Please donate and keep Open Source as it is
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!
Youtube is vying X for a internet death while holding the door open for a less greedy rival
Vimeo: “Today is the day!”
PeerTube would be preferable, all corporate monopolies turn out the same in the end.
