Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
My blind guess is they are doing split testing with various ad-blocking measures.
Whenever someone interacts with the message, they know the popup worked. Best reaction is currently to use uBlock Origin's element picker or zapper to hide the popup.
The company is likely gathering data in various blocking methods to see which is the most foolproof.
This is similar to what viruses do to determine if they're on a real computer instead or just a sandbox. Most antiviruses will run an unfamiliar program in a sandbox (virtual machine) and if it starts doing malware things, flags it and sends it to quarantine. One known weakness of these sandboxes is that they cannot interact with the program, so a lot of viruses will put their payload behind a window. Any interaction with the window will signal to the virus that it's on a real computer and it will deliver the payload, otherwise it will keep quiet to stay under the radar.
Thank you. I'd forgotten that uBlock had the zapper function
I started getting the popups recently. Tried blocking the elements with uBlock, but in turn it would pause the video 2 seconds in. Pretty annoying. So I said screw it and installed an extension that would redirect the youtube watch page to an Invidious instance. Might as well make the transition now before they completely block adblockers for good. Screw Google!
What extension do you use to redirect youtube page?
I'll be a bit sad if YT becomes unwatchable without blocking ads but I'll get over it and watch something else somewhere else. Same as I did with Reddit.
I'll be a bit sad if YT becomes unwatchable without blocking ads
YT has been unwatchable without blocking ads for years now.
I disabled all extensions while trying to fight against that pop-up and I realized YouTube is almost unwatchable even with adblocker if you don't have sponsor block. How someone can sit thru the ads and sponsored sections just blows my mind. As if sitting on youtube watching videos isn't already waste of your time enough.
Well you can just skip over the sponsors manually, I did it for ages before discovering SponsorBlock. Nowhere near as bad as unskippable ads.
Plus there are the occasional Youtubers that will actually do entertaining sponsor reads, whereas YouTube ads are always unbearable. Haven't seen one on my own devices in... Well, I think I was running adblockers before the creation of YouTube. Pour one out for "The Proxomitron", ancient ancestor of today's adblockers.
The only Youtuber I know who shills his sponsors in really funny, creative ways is Jay Foreman - and specifically in the Map Men videos he does with his pal Mark Cooper Jones. He puts actual time and effort to make the fucking plugs amusing to watch (and I suspect he also sells his own talents as a comedian at the same time).
I watch his plugs. I'll never buy anything from the motherfucking advertisers who pay him but I sure watch him.
Umm I don't think they care. They have a monopoly on amateur video hosting and only make money off of it with ads. If you are watching without ads or premium then you are costing them money. They do not care about your outrage. This isn't reddit where it might have caused a long term permanent degradation to their content, the people posting stuff want you to pay or have ads as well. Users do not act as moderators or content providers (I mean I'm sure most content providers are users as well but they want ad revenue). They have just ignored ad blocking for long enough to get monopolies in their areas (browser, YouTube) and are now getting rid of that problem. I'm honestly amazed at how they took over the browser market. Almost everything is chromium based now. Even email. They may not have a monopoly, but they certainly made themselves the standard.
Tldr: they aren't doing it slow for fear of outrage. They did it slow to get a monopoly.
There's outrage alright.
https://lemmy.world/post/6811788
https://lemmus.org/post/1138230
https://links.roobre.es/post/451
https://lemmy.world/post/6755067
https://kbin.melroy.org/m/til/t/52393
https://lemmy.world/post/6702422
https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/3116340
https://infosec.pub/post/3519906
https://lemmy.world/post/6697059
Well just look at the youtube sub on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1792um0/let_that_sink_in_before_you_defend_a_billion/
99% of comments are youtube apologists
Hopefully most of those are bot comments & the mods are probably youtube employees
Looks like astroturfing to me
No offense, but you went to a subreddit that's likely to have people who enjoy google products and because of that are less likely to be critical even when they don't agree with the company. Have you looked at the r/technology subreddit posts about this issue? Or r/privacy or any of the other subreddits that might give a better view?
This is like going to the apple subreddit to find out if people are outraged bout the price of iPhones.
I would call it pretty fast, I got the popup for the first time less than a month ago and I already rely on the magic uBlock does to even be able to watch YouTube.
I got the pop ups for a while, then they went away. They are back again. Fortunately I am still able to ignore it and not see any adds. If there is a time where I am forced to watch adds, it will hurt, but I will give up YouTube. I hope others give it up and don't cave if it comes to that.
I gave up reddit the day apollo stopped working and I will quit youtube the day I have to see any ads whatsoever. It just frees up time to do other, more fulfilling, things.
What, you mean that clicking "not interested" in the fourteenth WW2 documentary in a row about "What if the nazis won" isn't fulfilling??
The solution is to use Firefox or even better librewolf with uBlock. If you already have these, purge the filters cache and then update it back again. If you still have problems with this after doing these steps, there's probably some extension conflicting with it or an extra manual filter you added. Cheers
Why librewolf is better?
It's a privacy oriented fork of Firefox. Removes telemetry, pocket button, sync to cloud, etc.
This project is a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom.
LibreWolf is designed to increase protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, while also including a few security improvements. This is achieved through our privacy and security oriented settings and patches. LibreWolf also aims to remove all the telemetry, data collection and annoyances, as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM.
Can those settings be disabled in firefox but are not as default?
Sorry for ly aweful English.
At some point YouTube kind of block your account with the message instead of the video.
FreeTube still works flawlessly.
You are goddamn right about that one. Though I think Youtube is being petty with this war against adblockers, none of the major browsers block Youtube ads by default afaik.
10 million on uBlock alone, easy to see how thats a huge untapped market
Sure. A huge untapped market of people who don't want anything to do with VPN ads.
How can YouTube interfer with adblockers in Firefox/Librewolf/IceCat?
Client side web DRM is coming, which is why Google makes browsers and OSs now.
Adblock will be prohibited for “security”.
Relevant link: https://interpeer.io/blog/2023/07/google-vs-the-open-web/
Bottom line: Google want to introduce a live certification process for web clients so that webservers can potentially discriminate against specific configurations.