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YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

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Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#261

Post by Dah00n »

bozzcl wrote: post #96
Dah00n wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more of a rant on Pi-hole than related to Youtube ads but... Pi-hole can be fine but it isn't effective if you want it to block not only the lowest hanging fruits which a browser adblocker could easily block too but also stuff that doesn't follow the rules and might use hardcoded DNS IPs if they can't get the reply they want from the DNS server. With some Windows PC's, Apple devices, Chromecasts and Androids…

Last year, I added firewall rules to my router to block: * Any outbound DNS and DNS-over-TLS requests coming from anything other than my Pi-Hole * Any outbound HTTPS requests to DNS-over-HTTPS providers that I know of It's surprising how many hits I got to those block rules. Makes me very worried about the adoption of DoH: all its privacy and anti-tampering advantages also apply to devices that violate privacy, like…

>Makes me very worried about the adoption of DoH

Yes, this is what made me look closer at what happens at my LAN and got me into this mess. It is a loosing battle but I try to block things like DoH and DNS IPs via blocklists[1]. Pfsense add-on pfBlockerNG does this pretty well. I then strictly only allow DNS over TLS from the DNS server out on WAN.

>how many devices do you have in your network that you need a load-balanced Pi-Hole setup!?

I can see it wasn't very clear in my comment but it wasn't the amount of devices that caused the problem. It only takes one or two misbehaving devices that hammers pi-hole to make it hang. Pi-hole worked wonderfully until I forced all DNS requests to be redirected to it. I then got many many requests a second from some devices (Edit: because they didn't like the NXDOMAIN reply they got). Try refusing access to Google DNS if you have some Cromecasts. As far as I can remember they really don't like this. Any Android phone with only one DNS IP set will also default to Google DNS as a secondary DNS IP...

1: Blocking DNS servers really isn't easy. Not only do some devices use other ports but they aren't all well known. I had requests to 216.239.32.10 for example and had no idea this is yet another Google DNS IP (ns1.google.com?).

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#262

Post by Dah00n »

jcastro wrote: post #86
Dah00n wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more of a rant on Pi-hole than related to Youtube ads but... Pi-hole can be fine but it isn't effective if you want it to block not only the lowest hanging fruits which a browser adblocker could easily block too but also stuff that doesn't follow the rules and might use hardcoded DNS IPs if they can't get the reply they want from the DNS server. With some Windows PC's, Apple devices, Chromecasts and Androids…

Have you tried self hosted adguard? It's very performant and can use any of the lists you can use with pihole: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome Switched a few years ago and it's great!

No I haven't tried Adguard but as far as I know it is another DNS server that blocks ads like pi-hole? To block everything there has to be a firewall like OPNsense in the mix and at that point I might as well use it as DNS too.

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#263

Post by Dah00n »

atommclain wrote: post #178
bozzcl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year, I added firewall rules to my router to block: * Any outbound DNS and DNS-over-TLS requests coming from anything other than my Pi-Hole * Any outbound HTTPS requests to DNS-over-HTTPS providers that I know of It's surprising how many hits I got to those block rules. Makes me very worried about the adoption of DoH: all its privacy and anti-tampering advantages also apply to devices that violate privacy, like…

would love to know more about this setup... I'm very worried about DoH

Sadly I don't think you can ever win a battle against DoH unless you control all devices on the network and can live without any that try to use it. I would hate to run an enterprise or school network these days!

My home LAN is a total overkill setup because I like tinkering with this stuff. If you want more control then my advice would be to look at enterprise hardware as often used enterprise hardware can be found cheaper than way worse equipment made for home users. Just make sure it doesn't have loud fans or that they can be disabled (which they mostly can outside hot server rooms). I swapped out my switches with some cheap HP 1910-24G managed switches and connected them with fiber. I got 3 of those cheaper than the one crappy Linksys I had before which last had a firmware update months before I bought it! But if I had to recommend a single easy solution I would buy a ready to go OPNsense device. I only know this shop in Sweden though: https://teklager.se/en/products/routers/

Basically what I did after I stopped using pi-hole was to setup pfsense (later switched to OPNsense when I found out that pfsense isn't actually open source) and broke up my LAN (via VLANs, which is where the HP 1910's came into the picture) into three pieces:

-DMZ that is totally open for Playstation etc. No access from or to this to/from anything on LANs

-LAN1 where only whitelisted things have WAN access. This is where all normal traffic is at.

-LAN2 where anything that need access from WAN are connected (this also have its own WAN IP)

Geeky!

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#264

Post by antris »

411111111111111 wrote: post #254
sangnoir wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely, they'd get upgraded to "first-party" tracking by acting as a CDN-layer where the ad networks do the proxying/caching to get the actual content upstream before merging it with the ads and serving whole thing in a single request. How would you block ads from Cloudflare if it became an ad network?

The same way you do now with ublock origin. By removing specific elements which match a rule. The networks will still be able to track you, but ads will be blockable until pages discard the DOM and switch to canvas rendering the whole page

Then you serve the ads on the same set of elements that also contain critical content to the user. You can't block ads from Twitch / YouTube with a rule if the ads are baked into the stream itself. Same goes for any other kind of "element" that doesn't explicitly set itself apart from the actual content.

The ads have long ago started evolving away from a simple "here's an ad neatly placed into its own semantic container so that blockers can target it".

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#265

Post by [deleted] »

Dah00n wrote: post #261
bozzcl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year, I added firewall rules to my router to block: * Any outbound DNS and DNS-over-TLS requests coming from anything other than my Pi-Hole * Any outbound HTTPS requests to DNS-over-HTTPS providers that I know of It's surprising how many hits I got to those block rules. Makes me very worried about the adoption of DoH: all its privacy and anti-tampering advantages also apply to devices that violate privacy, like…

>Makes me very worried about the adoption of DoH Yes, this is what made me look closer at what happens at my LAN and got me into this mess. It is a loosing battle but I try to block things like DoH and DNS IPs via blocklists[1]. Pfsense add-on pfBlockerNG does this pretty well. I then strictly only allow DNS over TLS from the DNS server out on WAN. >how many devices do you have in your network that you need a load-ba…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#266

Post by raydev »

Flow wrote: post #20
yliu wrote: post #6

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 use Wipr as a content blocker on both macOS and iOS. I never see ads on YouTube. But I've always felt that it might not be enough some day. Perhaps that day is nearly here.

Interesting. I tried Wipr on macOS Safari for a couple weeks about a year ago, and there was effectively no ad blocking on YouTube, Twitch, or Twitter, which is coincidentally where I spend the bulk of my time.

It was a frustrating experience, I've tried Safari multiple times over the years since it is so much better on battery life, but Chrome always wins in usability and adblocking.

I switched back to Chrome + uBlock Origin and could use those sites ad-free again. Well, except for Twitch, since they found a workaround for adblockers last year.

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#267

Post by Wowfunhappy »

StavrosK wrote: post #79
ameshkov wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I have the same exact experience and frankly, it is not what I intend to repeat again. At least developers can do that. But most of the people who maintain filter lists are not developers and cannot afford enjoying compiling WebKit for the sake of finding what exact rule has blocked this or hidden that.

Honest question: Why not just drop support for Safari? If Apple wants to make it hard to write content blockers, they can do without content blockers, and the users can see ads and eventually switch to a browser that doesn't show them ads.

The browser they switch to is more likely than not to be Chrome, furthering Google's control of the web.

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#268

Post by nexuist »

koolhaas wrote: post #214
nexuist wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire server-first computational model of today is a direct result of the disastrous adoption of NAT, which killed peer to peer applications and from which the P2P market is still recovering from (uPnP was one such [failed] attempt to fix the problem, now WebRTC and its friends STUN/TURN are up next). Google Docs doesn't have to run on Google servers. It could run on any operating system and work from anywhere p…

Your p2p Google Docs example is complicated. What if server applications as a paradigm won because it’s a much simpler approach? Centrally develop and release updates, keeping users all on one system. It’s especially important for network connected apps which want to handle user collaboration. You want everyone on one system, without competing versions. Not saying it’s best for users , but just smarter and more pract…

Generally the way P2P applications dealt with this is by assigning one peer as the "host" that would disperse one single source of truth among all the other peers (granted there are security problems here if the host peer is running a hacked or modded client). If the host dropped, the peers would use a consensus algorithm to pick a new host, exactly the same as how database clusters pick a new writer node if the old one dies.

It may be easier for devs to use the server model, but it's also more expensive - standing up centralized servers that can scale to millions of users is $$$. I think there would be a lot more P2P software competing with server-based software if NAT wasn't a thing, because software companies would be able to build extremely scalable software without having to pay for the hosting costs themselves. While Google Docs has to handle millions of users, if I were to "host" my own document I would only care about handling my friends - maybe two or three or up to a few dozen, but it would be very rare that I would host a document for 1000+ people. Developing an application that can handle a few dozen connections would be much simpler than one that handles millions, I believe.

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#269

Post by dwaite »

ameshkov wrote: post #38
floatingatoll wrote: post #11

Would migrating to the modern Safari extension API, which permits JavaScript injection into pages, be a better path forward here for this website modification tool?

Safari on macOS supports executing custom JS on web pages since forever, regardless of what version of API is used. It’s not supported on iOS, though.

More accurately, it is not supported automatically. You can do Safari App Actions, but who wants to hit a menu on every navigation?

Re: YouTube ads in Safari: you see them now, will you see them in the future?

#270

Post by mullingitover »

izacus wrote: post #216
mullingitover wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was YouTube losing money before they made this change? Their monetized content more than covered the bills for the content that wasn't monetized, and that free content their users gave them kept viewers on the site and watching ads. YouTube wasn't running a charity before they made this change, that free content they were given was valuable. They're just hoping that if they squeeze the golden goose harder it will lay…

They're a for-profit business, so again, why do you expect your content to be hosted at a complete loss while you monetize on external channels? Seems a bit entitled to expect corporations to give you things for free because other people pay for it.

> They're a for-profit business, so again, why do you expect your content to be hosted at a complete loss while you monetize on external channels?

This is begging the question that hosting non-monetized content is actually a net loss for YT. I'm saying it's actually not, instead the aggregate volume of free content keeps viewers on the site longer, and the higher viewership numbers result in a significant net profit.

More likely, YT decided that this arrangement, while profitable, wasn't making enough money for them, and because they must show their investors ever-increasing profit margins they decided to mildly poison their user experience in exchange for higher profits.

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