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YouTube Reportedly Bypassing Ad Blockers On Google Chrome
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube users have lit up twitter today, angry about an apparent change of policy by Google, which now seems to be showing ads in front of videos on YouTube even when using Adblock. Neowin reports: "Google's workaround seems to be applicable to all similar extensions and isn't exclusive to just AdBlock Plus. The company has not stopped at just skirting the extension, however. Users with AdBlock enabled will now have to see full-length video ads with no option to skip them half-way through, a feature YouTube has offered for a very long time. The only way to get the option back is to disable AdBlock, or to whitelist YouTube."
Yeah, that's how you kill your own browser off, Google.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
... use YouTube with ad blockers on Firefox. It feels good solving the world's problems.
Just switch to another browser.
Chrome is an advertising platform, nothing more. Expect similar (and more invasive) behavior if you buy Google's new wifi router. People seem to conveniently forget that Google is the world's biggest advertising company. Their sole reason to exist is to fuck you coming and going, by showing you ads on the front end, then compiling every bit of data they can about you on the back end and selling it around. Google is the pimp and you are the whore.
I for one will not use a browser made by an advertising company.
the ad wars have
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, I don't like the ads myself, but I don't blame youtube for trying to circumvent the adblockers, it's their right to do so..
what they've done here what Internet Explorer and mozilla always wanted. Now everyone will move away from Chrome. You cant fight the users cause you will lose. You have to win somehow by giving them what they want and this is not it. I've always used Internet Explorer so that's not a problem for me. I still don't see ads at all.
Another stupid idea they might go with is blocking the others from seeing the video all together if we don't disable the adblock. That's what dailymotion and vimeo are hoping for. Then users will eventually move away and youtube will be a thing of the past. watch it go.
FTFA, this change only affects the YouTube "app" installed in Chrome. Uninstall the app and you're golden.
Google is the pimp and you are the whore.
I for one will not use a browser made by an advertising company.
What about Firefox, whose entire existence depends on money from Yahoo (an advertising company) and previously Google.
Even the user switching menu being permanently on and taking space from my tab bar is enough to have me wanting to switch.
I will say too that it seems like YouTube also has ads when having DNS ad blocking turned on. (http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/) This behaviour is not something I've noticed before a month ish ago. It also seems like background audio on iOS is not possible when using the YouTube webpage. Just more extinguish of the EEE.
From the twitter posts in the linked article, it seems this started on the 5th. My most recent ad revenue data from YouTube is for that day, I made $11.68, normally I make $5-$8 per day. I've been seeing some spikes recently, but I assumed that was from heavy back to school advertising, maybe it could have been from this.
Any other tubers out there notice something like this?
Seems like forks of the open-source version should be able to disable this.
works fine for me, as this only effects the youtube app, course you would have known that if you bothered to read.
chrome still loads and runs faster, especially on my old / ultralight computers, and doesnt eat 2/3rds of my ram just sitting there
Just drop the whole show and do something else - drink a beer or have a good smoke or tea - enjoy life without all those suckers.
It may even work...
What does the app even do in the first place?
I've been copying and pasting this into my hosts file every couple months on top of using ad block. I haven't seen adverts in a long time. http://someonewhocares.org/hos...
Download the YouTube video using youtube-dl, livestreamer, or use some other video views (like maybe VLC and SMplayer).
Won't work with the for-pay stuff (Hollywood movies and whatnot), but it'll work with most normal videos.
The compressed firefox download is 47 megabytes. Sure, a program that size is easy to write.
Many years ago they did a complete rewrite, and the effort almost bankrupted them.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
People viewing the internet as "a capitalistic system" is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Somebody fucking answer this question goddammit.
I tried to yell to wake somebody up, but the shitty filter won't let me.
What other browser is available on netbooks? The only operating system sold on netbooks nowadays is Chrome OS. They don't make netbooks with preinstalled desktop Linux anymore, and even if you use Crouton to install a "normal" Linux distribution, a Chromebook's bootloader still prompts you "Press space to wipe all your files and reinstall Chrome OS" every time you turn it on.
Those aren't the only options. The other option if to FUCK YOUTUBE.
Pale Moon x64 is Firefox with adult supervision. With Pale Moon, use Pale Moon's own ad blocker, AdBlock Latitude.
Firefox is becoming less and less stable. It's so unstable that it often doesn't report crashes, so the crash reports aren't reliable, they show far fewer crashes than actually occurred. Mozilla Foundation needs better management.
Good luck with boycotting YouTube's advertisers when your power company, your ISP, your car insurer, your health insurer, or the gasoline chain with a station near you is running an ad campaign.
At some point, I think you need to get your own website instead of copy-pasting your entire spiel all over Slashdot.
Google can introduce a paid subscription model for those few willing to pay-up for using the service without ads
Google announced "Google Contributor". When I signed up, I was told I would be put on a waitlist, and I've been on that waitlist for months with no reply. That's one of the problems with Google: "no reply."
And if they want to put the tabs on top
I have them on the left (Tree Style Tabs). They also load and unload themselves from memory (BarTab), block ads (uBlock origin), and run only desired scripts (NoScript).
.: Semper Absurda
An AC said it: It writes www.youtube.com in the address bar so you don't have to. I think it used to be able to download some videos, but not anymore.
.: Semper Absurda
Capitalism has nothing to do with advertising. Advertising is propaganda done by private businesses in an attempt to brainwash simple minds. Advertising is so ubiquitous that everyone has become a simple mind, expect those who have achieved to block all external information from their life. No matter how hard you try to convince yourself that you don't even notice adverts, you are just like everyone else and you are influenced by the adverts.
I don't know what kind of 'ism' advertising belongs to, but it is not capitalism. When I take a step back and look at the most popular sites on the Internet, I would say it is even the opposite of capitalism. Most popular sites are for free (as in free beer). But they are not free (as in free speech). If you really want to compare the current Internet as an advertising platform I would not compare it with the capitalistic system where you have to pay for everything you want, but with that other system that used to exist in Europe until the late 80's/early 90's: Communism. In Communist Internet you get the information 'they' want you to get for free, but in Communist Internet the Internet owns you(r privacy).
Just look at it. You get everything for free, even when you want to pay for stuff you can't even get it, with the system of blocked regions or messages like 'not available in your country'. Just like in the Communist countries where there was a high demand for Western products but they were not allowed to buy them.
... mediocre at best. Just like in the Communist countries the only alternative to official channels is ... the shadow economy (torrents, warez sites, ...). Just like in the KGB, Stasie, ... in the Communist countries, there are agencies monitoring the entire Internet population in secrecy.
Just like in Communist countries you get most basic things for free, but the quality is
If I want to compare an Internet whose only revenue is advertisement with a political/economical system than it is Communism and not Capitalism.
And to me it is no surprise that only the most communist like movements can survive on the Internet, like GPL and BSD and Creative Commons, ... They are not really communist of course, but they are bought for free (as in free beer) and free (as in free speech) and give you the tools to reclaim control over your data.
If the purpose of Chrome is to get rid of ad blockers, why haven't they gotten rid of any ad blockers in Chrome? One specific ad blocker isn't 100% effective with the Youtube app. Few people even use the Youtube app. This doesn't have anything to do with the browser, you know.
I've been noticing it's doing the same thing with Safari on Mac. If you have Adblock on, the ad videos are unskippable. Turn off or pause adblock and there's no video ads.
No, it does not.
Required reading for internet skeptics
My computer, my rules. Don't like it, buy me a computer, pay my electricity bill and internet bill. I'm totally down with that. Otherwise, too bad. Or better yet, if you don't like people doing what they like with their computers because your site wants them to do something they refuse to, take your site down. Please do that. Hilarious.
Here's the thing, I control what my computer does and the more irritating the advertising is, the more effort I'm willing to put into making sure it stops. My computer, my control. The more advertisers try to force the issue, the more people like me will turn our attention to making sure our computer does what we want and doesn't do anything we don't want.
It's not a new phenomena. You can only push people so hard until they rebel. In this particular war, all of the power lies with the computer owner. You can't force people to consume advertising, you can only ask them to in return for something valuable. I don't mind some advertising as long as it doesn't cross the line from interesting into irritating, but it seems like about half the sites on the internet crossed that line. So yeah, I'm blocking advertising. That doesn't mean I don't want to support the content I love. Slashdot got money from me, even though I already had the ads blocked. Pandora gets money from me. There's a handful of others I directly support, but most sites don't offer the option, even if they offer the content I'm interested in. Why not?
Want to turn a million dollars into hundreds of millions? Take my money! People like me would pay ten dollars a month (easy) to get an advertising free internet. Get the top 500 sites to tell you how much they'd charge per month to offer an advertising free version and then see how many potential customers you could get. I'm betting you'd find out there is a ton of money to be had and people happy to pay. Why isn't anyone already doing this? Won't somebody please take my money?
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Yes. Because just imagine what life would be like if you couldn't watch the latest funny cat video on Youtube! It would hardly be worth living!
Google is a company that sells ads. That's all. Our ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years without ads, and can live without them again.
I find that just about every website I visit these days has some sort of incredibly invasive advertising on it. I really don't mind a few clickable links off to the side or a small banner, but what I do mind is the whole new level that advertising has stooped to on the internet. I remember in the mid-2000's how pervasive pop-up advertising became and it reduced the experience of the internet of a crawl. Now the overlay ad has become the new popup. Everywhere I go I find that I sometimes have to click off three or four ads just to get to the useful content I want. I also find that the density of the content I am accustomed to is falling and is also becoming ever more obnoxious too. Advertisers did this to themselves, they got more in-your-face and the internet reacted in a hostile way with ad blocking software. What were they expecting? I never thought the day would come where I actually wanted to use Lynx or another text-only web browser, but I legitimately think the model of the internet being dependent on advertising has crushed the experience to the point where it is no longer usable. At least with advertising driven television you got free signal over the air. Now you pay for the connection and also have to endure an awful experience to have a basic level of information exchange.
So, you are saying you cannot purchase items on eBay using Pale Moon?
Put the ad at the end, not the beginning. It will be seen less but also hated less.
Do you really want to associate your brand with interruption and irritation?
When you click on a video, you're eager to see it, and here comes an add to kill the mood.
On the other hand, when you're done with a video, you're usually laughing or smiling or in a good mood, and there's maybe more of a lull as you try to decide what to do next.
Easy - they need the research. If you're wanting to work around ad blockers, you need to figure out how they work, so having them in your catalog is a way to do that. Plus, if you don't have ad blockers, people will quickly realize it.
And the "Skip Ad" thing is still present - it's just Google rigged it so that the ad blocker sees *that* as the ad! In other words, the "Skip Ad" link is made to appear as an ad, so your ad blocker will dutifully block it.
It's happened a few times before - many sites that go and show historical ads often put the content up as "ads". Which often triggers ad blockers, and you can easily tell because they always put up comments as "I can't see the ads!".
Just use an ad blocking hosts file like MVPS. no Google ads regardless of browser. I have it set up on my AP.
This Sig does not Exist.
It's the site owners who are entitled? Slashdot is a parody of itself sometimes.
They can deliver the content in whatever means they want. Don't like it? Don't visit. Google are under no obligation to deliver content in a way that meets you personal preferences. You don't have a right to ad free content. You can try to bypass or not receive this content but Google are perfectly free to come up with ways to ensure they won't serve you one thing without the other.
You have no automatic right to access their servers and content and it's perfectly within their rights to control access, just like you as a user can turn off JS and disable cookies.
The link you provided is interesting. The discussion gives an extremely good impression of the thinking behind Pale Moon.
Here is a quote:
'What Firefox does is a rather crude "try, try again" with lower reported maximum supported TLS settings in this situation where secure renegotiation is not supported. This (unsafe) fallback allows Firefox to "connect at all costs" (the cost measured in terms of security, in this case) although it's not part of normal protocol negotiation or any standard.'
The discussion gives an extremely good impression of the thinking behind Pale Moon. [...] 'What Firefox does is a rather crude "try, try again" with lower reported maximum supported TLS settings in this situation
They are both wrong. The right way is to inform the user that unsafe behavior will be required to proceed, and then let them do that. That's how Firefox handles questionable certificates, and it's how Pale Moon should handle questionable cipher suites.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People want to be paid for their work? Pfff. I deserve it for free because I'm a self-entitled millennial!
The exclusive right to prepare derivative works and the exclusive right to distribute are listed as distinct exclusive rights under 17 USC 106.
Most Chrome Apps contain html/css/js so when you visit a page you don't have to download these. It's a pre-packaged website. You'll only need to download dynamic content.
Still no tabs on the side? How do you manage lots of tabs without them in a vertical bar, nested, colored and grouped?
In a portrait monitor configuration, I can see 60 tabs without any scrolling or overlap. (Firefox with tabkit 2nd edition)
I let them play ads... The reason for that is they revenue share with the content creators. I would actually gladly go to a twitch-style x bucks a month model where some of the x is divided up by the content creators, but they aren't offering that. I heard they're starting someting like that for other websites, but not youtube :(
That being said, they've shown me the same exact advert for a restaurant about 30-40 times in a row now and I'm starting to feel like its not worth it. I don't want your 'apps', Chilli's.
You think a company like Google needs to see a browser extension to know how people block ads?
I've been using an OS-level blocker for years (privoxy.org). No complaints.
There are other browsers that will allow ads to be blocked on youtube. I should really stop with that statement but the more I think about this, the more it annoys me...
Google preventing ad blocking from working on their sites, within their browser, shouldn't be much of a surprise but it is a another dangerous step away from browser being a neutral tool to show website content to visitors. Maybe MS will change IE to show their own ads instead of ads from Google - they have already turned Windows into Spyware... Firefox has already forced plugins on users that we can't remove and shown a willingness to compromise the privacy of users to make a bit of money.
Open source browsers can be forked to get around the sleazy tactics of developers but that requires people willing to take on the development work required to support that fork.
To download the videos and bypass the YouTube player completely using any number of available options.
What you're suggesting is that the web page, with ads, is copyrightable, and that the end user with a legal copy is not allowed to modify it in that way.
The first is highly questionable, as adding ads is an algorithmic process that does not appear to involve creativity. (In the US, nothing is copyrightable that doesn't involve some minimal level of creativity.) The second is highly questionable, as it would seem to violate the "first sale" doctrine. If my (currently unhosted) website sends you a collection of files, you now have lawful copies of those files, and have quite a bit of liberty in what you can do with them, just as if you were to buy my (hypothetical) book you could do all sorts of things to modify it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Because I don't use Adblock, Adblock Plus, or any other adblocker that bends to the whims of advertisers. Instead, I use uBlock.
That is idiotic. You should know better.
Fucking troll.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.