141–150 of 282 posts
If you don't want ads get Youtube Premium.
If I'm gonna pay for a service it sure as shit isn't gonna be from a company with no customer support system
At some point, YouTube is just going to stich these into the main video.
This already exists on yt in the form of sponsored content in pro youtubers' videos, I use an extension called SponsorBlock that uses crowdsourced reporting to find and skip these portions... this crowdsourced approach will only work well for popular videos but unpopular vids are less often monetizable and thus not ad-ridden anyway
At some point, YouTube is just going to stich these into the main video.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be more effort than including a single html-script tag to import google analytics. I have hope that most parties would decide that the extra server load and difficulties would make it not worth it.
You underestimate the desire for precision tracking, unfortunately. Hiding behind custom subdomains is common. Stepping up to cloaking it to be delivered from the application is more effort but it'll happen.
Despite the title being about YouTube, this is fundamentally about Safari's declarative Content Blocker API being totally inadequate in the face of modern ad delivery technologies. Yes, it's fast and relatively more secure compared to old ad blocking techniques (which requires granting full access to effectively arbitrary JS), but ad tech has evolved since 2015 and Safari's Content Blocking API has not evolved with i…
You can already see what that’s like with podcasts where local ads are spliced right into the audio file. You’re not stopping that short of doing something like buffering the content and running it through an AI, and if that became widespread we’d just see more embedded placement (“Hey, protagonist, why are you so irresistibly sexy?” “It’s these new briefs from My Undies”).
Adtech is a multi billion dollar industry and the people making the content you want are enthusiastically supporting them. This is not a problem which technical tricks can solve – as soon as you do something effective, Google can deploy hundreds of engineers with huge resource budgets to foil you. That won’t change without something like regulatory changes to lower the financial pressure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't they just be proxied through a first party server?
Some trackers are having people setup CNAME records on their domains, so the tracker cookies appear to be first party: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09301
Despite the title being about YouTube, this is fundamentally about Safari's declarative Content Blocker API being totally inadequate in the face of modern ad delivery technologies. Yes, it's fast and relatively more secure compared to old ad blocking techniques (which requires granting full access to effectively arbitrary JS), but ad tech has evolved since 2015 and Safari's Content Blocking API has not evolved with i…
I think you’re right from the short-term perspective but largely irrelevant long-term. If Safari allowed arbitrary code execution, it’d be a little better for as long as it took publishers to deploy first-party ad injection. We’d still get the security problems, though. You can already see what that’s like with podcasts where local ads are spliced right into the audio file. You’re not stopping that short of doing som…
On side note on this topic, I am pretty sure I am being A/B tested on youtube with some form of dynamic ad inclusion. A friend sent me a youtube link, I opened it on Firefox for Android (with the latest ublock lists), it immediately served me an ad. This had never happened to me before, I actually assumed I opened it by mistake on Android's youtube app. The only way I found that I could block it was using the older e…
0: https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...
Part of the problem – as AdGuard concedes in the post – is that Easy List (which AdGuard and many other ad blockers use) is a woefully inefficient rule list with over 50,000 entries. Many of which are out of date, redundant and not optimised for performance. This leads to excessive memory use and performance slowdowns and is one of the reasons why there is a 50,000 rule limit in the Safari Content Blocking API. As a…
Removing whatever Ublock Origin needed to exist in Safari is one of the dumbest moves Apple has made. To get most of the battery advantages of Macs you're forced to use Safari. But when it comes down to having to see YouTube ads I'm willing to make the tradeoff and switch to Chrome.