Anti-Anti-Adblocker uBlock filter to get rid of the annoying YouTube message (opens in new tab)

Elon should hire this person. Way more usable and informative than Twitter.

Appreciate ya.

The authors of the default filter lists definitely try and block these - the biggest problems seem to be YouTube changing things faster than the default filter lists normally auto-update, or other filters/extensions conflicting. Ref: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/173jmog/youtu...

You're 100% correct. PiHole is a DNS adblocker so, essentially, it's only able to block whole domains. My understanding is Google puts YouTube ads behind the YouTube domain so if the PiHole blocked YouTube ads, it would block the entire YouTube website which defeats the purpose.

Paramount+ on apple tv just crashes immediately for me (before even the profile picker) when I have the apple tv using my pi-hole as its dns server.

It’s not even the biggest reason why PP is my least favorite streaming platform, since I have a workaround (cast from phone, which for some reason works).

Youtube-dl (well, yt-dlp, the non-dead version) will ignore the ads.

Yeah I set up a pihole a while back and abandoned it because I couldn't get it to block YouTube ads.

This is the case.

I don’t know about OP, but, personally, the reason I don’t subscribe to premium is because they get aggressive on ads on purpose (waves of unskippable ads followed by a YouTube Premium subscription request the day after), which I believe is a dark pattern.

I would have been okay with paying for a subscription if it was to support the website or its creators – but I take manipulation attempts very badly.

What I don’t understand is why YouTube is going to these lengths to penalize ad blockers when they still gate Premium behind a bundle with another service nobody wants. They even trialed an unbundled Premium in Europe two years ago, but never did anything with it: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...

One can only conclude that some executive at Google is still dead-set on making YouTube Music happen, and YouTube Premium will continue to suffer as a result.

I think I've more than paid off my YT usage with how much personal data google has stolen/misused from me over the years.

Content on YouTube is shaped by the incentives Google sets on the platform. So what we get, mostly, is junk that best sells ads, best gets clicks, eyes, attention etc. etc. Just like TV was before pay cable came along. Notice how TV got better when you just paid HBO to show you good shows? Paying Google to watch YouTube without ads is like paying ABC to watch The Bachelor without ads. The content is still trash.

It's more about enjoying the challenge and nerdiness of defeating an anti-adblocker at this point, I would imagine. Also worth mentioning that Google's ad service is such a security vulnerability that even the FBI recommends an ad blocker.

Google is fully in the right for blocking ad blockers, banning users, or whatever. Might even end up having some profitable years for those bans.

I don't want to pay for what I don't use. I want a simple no-ad plan that I can share with my partner. I don't need and don't want to pay for Youtube Music, more than one other person, offline videos, etc.

I would also be incentivized by the ability to control how much of my money goes to each creator.

Good luck getting support from google/youtube if you have issues with your premium account. Like a friend of mine who recently decided to setup a family group on his google account, so he can include immediate family members in his household so they can access youtube via premium family plan. Nope. He got a message saying he can only switch to a new family group once every 12 months. He spent a day looking around trying to figure how to get support from an actual human being at google to resolve the issue. No luck so far. In the end, he cancelled his youtube premium.

Well, I do need $15 a month more than google needs it. Seems they aren't hurting for money either, they just want ever more of it. Between that overt greed and the psychological manipulation you have to go through in viewing ads otherwise, I find the whole thing a bit distasteful and not worth playing the game as it is. If I'm able to install tooling to bend the rules of the game ever so slightly in my favor for once in this modern world, that's whats going to happen. Letter of the law be damned.

To avoid giving an evil, untrustworthy corporation money?

I have no faith that they won't soon start pushing ads on paying subscribers and start offering a premium plus subscription to be ad free again.

Yeah, the amount of effort and money spent to maintain such system is easily more expensive than just do the subscription at this point

Yeah, you might be losing the game, you are winning the game as well.

Can't subscribe to premium without getting and using an account first.

I could probably be convinced to pull the trigger for ten bucks a month. For $15 it feels like I should put up with the ads.

Personally, my biggest issue with YouTube ads are how many of them are for transphobic propaganda. Paying for premium would just be rewarding them for profiting from hate speech.

But then you get to see an ad. Not really a workaround imo.

I just open the adblock settings and clear the cache.

Disable 'auto play next video'

I'd buy it, but $14/m is way too much for no ads imo. Especially since this is a "free" service where the justification for me paying X$/m is because i have to offset the ads i would have otherwise watched.

You're (Youtube, not OP hah) telling me i provided $14/m in ad revenue? Of course not.

I'd insta-buy if i could just pay to skip any ads i actually would have watched. Give me a stat showing me how many ads i missed, and how much i owe. Justify the cost you're forcing on me.

Instead i'll just drop youtube and give money to some other service that doesn't feel like it's focused on gaming me.

At this point, I consider blocking ads to be a moral obligation. By giving in, you enable Youtube to abuse users further

Youtube Premium is a waste of money, they bundle a crappy $11/m music service with it, for $13/m. It's worse than having to pay for cable or landline telephone to get internet.

I'd pay $2/m, or even $4 bucks, for ad-free Youtube, but I'm not buying an additional music service I don't want or need.

It costs too much. I wish they would unbundle it from that music service.

this comment never fails to appear on any Youtube blocker thread. Good for you that you pay Youtube , but stop rubbing it in our faces. each person has its own standards

Also, YT Premium is free with Google Fi phones and other things

That's the footgun in google's strategy. In the all-stick no-carrot spirit of modern marketing incentives, they made their unpaid access worse without improving Premium. That only works if the garden has walls, and logging in to youtube is optional. Now youtube use falls into three options:

1) Don't log in to google, block ads. Data collected by google is lower value, resulting in less targeted internet-wide marketing, including on youtube itself when you clear your browsing session.

2) Log in. Lose time to ads. Trying to avoid this may put your entire google account at risk. Also, you gain highly targeted marketing thanks to higher quality data collection. Youtube's viewing suggestions are targeted, limiting discovery, and may become highly pigeonholed over time.

3) Pay for Premium. All the same as 2) but with less ads.

As a consumer, logging out of google and blocking youtube ads has been made by google a better experience than their own premium product. Only the producers of the majority of youtube's product are required to consume what google is doing.

This is what i did when i got the "we are going to start blocking playback ...." Message and it worked great. Moral of the story is track content creators you like with rss and you dont need to be logged in.

Yesterday at least. Same for me initially but now not so much. Time will tell. Current process is to disable the blockers then refresh until the video is served without an add, usually after two or three times, then re-enable.

Valve doesn’t charge $14/month of which $12/month is for a premium music service bundle though, which in my books is a pretty big factor.

I agree. I used to watch youtube with ads, no problem. But then there was the infamous update that made ads really annoying, usually it was 5s before a video and then it became two unskippable ads in the star plus an ad every 10 minutes or so. That's when I started using an ad block.

They don't even need that. They can just to server-side ad insertion into the HLS feed.

yeah.

given that in-stream ads still have blocking/ignoring methods I think that if this arms race keeps going that ultimately the data (video, whatever) is going to be stuffed behind some hard authentication barrier of some sort -- and then traditional piracy methods will take over like single-user-rebroadcast/etc.

Well if they copy Twitch I suspect it will be circumvented very quickly. My adblock works just fine for Twitch, I do not see any adverts (unless I open using incognito).

Another option is to require Chrome for playback outside of authenticated apps, and lock Chrome down.

TBH baking it into the video stream is probably the easiest path. The whole video doesn't have to be re-encoded if the ad is spliced in. This is a "soft lockdown" since the ad can theoretically be manually skipped by the user, but its probably good enough.

> This, in turn, will spawn user scripts which work around the detection. Any client-side solution will be an arms race between Google and user script/adblock devs

No, you can't adblock remote attestation. Trust me, the whole idea is cryptographically sound (with a proper implementation of course), people have been building out the remote attestation/TPM space for 20 years now. It is unambiguously possible to use a TPM to detect modification of BIOS, OS, drivers, or anything else in the system, and you effectively cannot modify the TPM at all, and it has minimal attack surface (it just is a key-signing machine, essentially).

random practical explanation from someone's college papers: https://seclab.stanford.edu/pcl/cs259/projects/cs259_final_l...

Every time it's brought up (like I previously suggested that it could be used by NVIDIA/etc to disrupt mining operations from a VBIOS level) there's people who think there is some easy runaround and if there was the whole idea would be broken from the start. The TPM provides a secure root to start the cryptographic validation from, and while you can mod the software, it will be immediately evident from the attestation, and they will simply not serve the video. Or in the case of a GPU, you can have the PC attest to the drivers being official and unmodified, and if that doesn't happen the GPU refuses to clock up the memory bus, if the workload displays the characteristics of mining (100% memory load, flat and constant and low shader load).

At best it will be an arms race between TPM developers and adblock devs.

There is also the "analog gap", but that's been notionally plugged for years using HDCP. Early implementations were quickly broken, HDCP 2.3 is still doing pretty well, and it provides a massive speedbump to people who think they're just going to plug a capture card in and loop the video through.

Netflix and others have been doing this for years and the tricks are well-known at this point. Netflix doesn't push too hard, but they won't serve you the highest-quality video if you don't have a secure signal path either.

AFAIK at this point most of the "ripping" of decryption keys/etc for streaming content happens not by attacking the TPM, but by using android devices that are allowed to skate with reduced security modes, and just having a giant stack of them so when one device gets banned they throw it away and move onto the next.

Reminder to everyone to back up your Google account, and perhaps have separate accounts for email and regular usage (better yet transition away from gmail).

Enable remote fonts loading in uBlock for YouTube and your problem will be solved, I suspect...

I had that a few weeks ago, but that was fixed by a uBlock update (I think)

Screenshot?

Then subscribe and pay for the service. One way or another someone has to pay for the content.

As long as ads don't show up at inopportune times and break the flow of the video.

Maybe don’t watch YouTube while you’re driving?

More than the $0 ad blocking gives them?

There are anecdotes from creators in this thread explaining they get a lot more from premium than from ads.

I hate ads. I like supporting creators. And I like paying for services I use.

YouTube premium is absolutely worth it. The number of people I know with very good salaries who refuse to pay a small amount a month for something they use constantly (this or other examples) never ceases to amaze me.

According to LTT, it's a *very* good option for them.

Why do you care? You are using Google's platform, just pay them.

Premium actually gives more money to creators you watch on YouTube than ads do. It's win-win IMO. Save yourself time, give them more money. Also comes with YouTube Music which is quite good (arguably worse than Google Play Music was but eh)

Aren't you entitled!

Nope, just once when purchasing it.

"a place where there are fewer ads" requires some alternate form of monetization. If "paying for it" isn't acceptable to you, what's left?

I mean paying $2.70/m vs $13.99/m works for me.

Dns leak

Team are heads down working on beating this.

The entirety of HDCP exists to prevent this. That has literally been the driving factor in Secure Enclave adoption since day 1 too (along with bitlocker, but, video DRM has always been the other big one).

There will always be vulnerabilities and improper implementations and workarounds, but, the entire point of secure enclave is for someone at netflix or your employer's HQ to be comfortable knowing they have a toehold in your machine that can't be broken via Remote Attestation, and that there is no way for you to get the keys out of it when it's acting as a HSM.

You can always disable it/etc, or use another browser (like firefox) that doesn't provide a secure enclave. But then, google won't serve you video, just like netflix reduces the stream quality for people who don't have the hardware DRM set up right.

Since 95% of the world is already using chrome anyway (other than ios), this is a pretty low-risk move.

>a piratebay of YouTube videos

that'd be infeasible to do given the sheer volume of videos uploaded per day. even if we limited it to the most subscribed creators (10m+ subs) it'd be hard for pirates to keep up.

Not to mention seeding. If we had enough seeders to keep that sort of volume up, those p2p video services would be in a much better state.

Who even uses Pirate Bay anymore?

As more people block ads, revenue falls. So companies stick on more ads to make up for it.

That annoys more people, so they learn how to add block (or ask their friends for help).

It’s a vicious cycle and it’s part of why the ads are just getting worse.

We’ve only found three income models for web content:

1. Cover it with ads 2. Sell it/paywall 3. Patronage pays for it

That’s basically it. People don’t want to see ads. And don’t want to pay.

I won’t view ads plus I won’t pay equals almost everything goes.

I don’t, I just put them in their own library and then watch and delete as they come in, kinda like a news feed

I haven't set it up yet, but youtube channels have RSS feeds so programmatically feeding a list of channels into a watch-later folder should be straightforward.

Some extension triggers the AdBlock detection, even if ublock is updated.

The party that is being inflicted damage are the creators who don't make any money from producing content for you.

This is my hope as well. If the majority of a content-creator's revenue comes from in-video sponsor segments, what difference does it make where the video is uploaded. Most podcasts follow this model, with the exception of ones that have a lucrative exclusive arrangement with a particular service, like Joe Rogan's on Spotify.

This already happened with many of the right-wing creators that were banned from YT some time back. Many of these creators upload to multiple 'alt-tech' sites (e.g. Rumble), and rely on sponsors or direct support, which isn't locked to YT.

You want a government-run YouTube?

That is crazy

Turns out, that's exactly what YT Premium and Twitch Turbo do.

Origin is maintained by the original µBlock author.

Yes yes! I am hinting that someone needs to make the dropbox of a less shitified youtube!

That's correct

So pay if you hate it so much. Do you think people make the content for free?