this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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I know the topic of whether adblock is piracy is debated, but I am guessing there are a lot of adblock users here and I was wondering if anyone has seen the youtube adblock warning message in the wild. I use ublock origin and still haven't seen it once.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I know the topic of whether adblock is piracy is debated

Its not debated. Its bullshit.

flat earthers existing doesnt put the earth's sensual curves up for debate either.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago

It's Cybersecurity.

100%

Absolutely.

Adblocking is good cybersecurity practice. It puts into stark relief how much of Marketing is actually just manipulation and malware.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Agreed. People need to stop giving that ridiculous idea market share in their head.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

It's one of Lienus's L takes. People are giving it the benefit of a doubt because he has a huge following.

I started parroting "using a VPN to bypass region block is privateering" in response. LMG taking any VPN sponsorships after that L take is hypocrisy in my book.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah it's even more ridiculous when you apply this logic to sponsored segments.

It's an ad, I skip it by seeking in the video, therefore it is piracy?

Also, people get arrested and fined for piracy where I live (because it is, well, illegal), so people blocking ads should go to prison?
When the face of LMG talks about things like this in a main channel video they should look into the consequences of the opinion they present.

Excuse the language, but what the actual fuck was Linus thinking?

Like what is the actual end goal here?
Linus says people should be punished for blocking ads, and the best way he thinks it should be executed is by law enforcement? Last time I checked that is how illegal actions are usually handled.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Google must be fucking salivating at the prospect of manifest v3 going live and adblockers being gimped.

I wish more people would switch to Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hi, could you give me a brief on how manifest v3 will help Google disable the blocking of advertisements?

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It changes how extensions work in Chrome (and derived browsers), notably it modifies the API that adblockers use to block requests and dramatically restricts the number of rules they can support. It’s a change pretty clearly designed to limit the scope of adblockers and make it easier for companies like Google to work around them.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which would mean that Brave and Ungoogled-Chromium won't work as well anymore

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Brave have said they’ll retain support for Manifest v2, but realistically that’s likely to be non-trivial amounts of work, and get harder as their upstream codebase moves away from it and the internals get switched over from the old webRequest mechanism.

They’ll have to patch things manually to keep it working, which is likely to get harder and harder. If Google want to make it hard for them to retain support, they can do so.

At some point they may not have the resources to keep doing that and might have to decide between forking the codebase and losing manifest v2. If they fork then they’ll have a load more work to do in backporting security changes etc.

They’ll also have to find a way to retain the old manifest v2 versions of extensions, as they’ll disappear from the Chrome store. Might mean maintaining a separate store. The authors might not care enough to maintain a Brave version of their extensions.

All in all it’s not great path forward for Brave. At best they’ll have an increased maintenance burden. At worst it gives Google the power to force them to drop Manifest v2 or be overwhelmed by maintenance. But this is what we get for handing an effective monopoly to Google.

Switch to Firefox!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd love it if Brave eventually starts building off Firefox just so there's another browser out there that isn't built on Chromium.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

In short, Google limits extension API access, which blocks extensions like uBlock Origin from reaching their full potential. Firefox doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

ReVanced and Newpipe on mobile, SmartTube on TV, uBlock origin on Vivaldi and LibreWolf (currently in the middle of switching).

Seen nothing on any of those. They're all working flawlessly, for now.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Mozilla Firefox + ublock = flawless experience.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I think it’s in A/B testing right now, maybe you haven’t gotten it?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you use uBlock origin you would never see it. I use both PiHole + uBlock origin and I would never see it lmao.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pihole does nothing on YouTube as their ads are served on the save server as the videos.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (16 children)

I know, but they help with the ads on the website itself. Not the videos.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do you know that? I’m fairly certain that google can tell if they have served you an ad, and cutting off access to their streaming services seems like a straightforward thing from their point of view. How could ublock (or anything) prevent google from blocking the stream? It’s not about blocking ads, or blocking messages to turn your adblocker off. It’s about google acknowledging that they haven’t served you an ad. You can’t force them to serve a video, I don’t think.

This “feature” is being rolled out slowly, which probably means they are taking lots of telemetry about how users try to circumvent this. It also means that just because you or I haven’t seen it does not mean we are safe against it. I’m not saying there is no solution, but I don’t think the solution is an adblocker or a sinkhole.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (39 children)

Youtube's ad policy is abusive, and online ads are not always safe. Regardless of whether adblocking is legal or fair to Youtube, not doing so puts you at greater risk of malware insertion so is a necessary safety precaution.

As YouTube profits from your engagement through more than ads, YouTube still benefits even when you watch videos without ads.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It boggles my mind about but people are upset about blocking ads in a piracy group. Chill out everyone!!

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I haven't seen it because I haven't used the default front-end in years :D

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From my understanding it has only been rolled out to Chrome users so far. Anyone using adblocks with Firefox will not have seen these yet.

However to ensure you don't, I suggest beginning your transition to some of the alternatives. I have been migrating to Piped which is essentially a scraper.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

We need to block the adblock blockers...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't even use browser to watch youtube vids anymore. Freetube -> mpv with sponsorblock plugin.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use Firefox with ublock origin and haven't seen it yet.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do the same. I also run pfSense with the pfBlockerNG module pulling in lists that block ad (and a tonne of other) sources. Also have a look at pihole as it can do a similar function.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

OP do you perhaps use a non-Chromium based browser? Because their adblock blocking is only active on Chromium based browsers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Brave Browser works great

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

no. never seen (yet). and using adblock is perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I use New Pipe on my phone, I also use ublock origin on Mozilla Firefox, but recently I've been watching more using mpv, don't know if they can do something about it

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