Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
Meshkov said that assessment [that scriptlet injection is the only reliable method of ad blocking for youtbue] is accurate if you limit yourself to browser extensions (which is how most popular ad blockers are distributed). But he pointed to network-level ad blockers and alternative YouTube clients, such as NewPipe, as other approaches that can work.
How exactly do these youtube front ends survive Google anyways? Why can’t Google simply block all the traffic coming from these front ends in order to kill them off entirely? Kind of interesting that some ad blockers are having a hard time being effective on YT while these front ends seem to be having no issues accessing videos on the site.
Client side versus server.
To use a metaphor: the internet is a mailperson, and a YouTube video is a package. The mailperson hands it off to me. Then I have to fumble with opening the box to get the item inside.
Well, let’s say I have a butler. The butler can take the package from the mailman, and rip out all the unnecessary stuff, and give me what’s inside the box. The butler is adblock.
YouTube/Google cannot mess with my butler. Why? Because it’s outside of their power. They can try to do things like force a signature before giving me the package. But guess what? My butler can sign off my package. YouTube knows to get to me, they have to go through my butler - period.
So there’s no “blocking traffic” because once the package is sent, they have to deal with my butler. And they can make all sorts of detectors on the package, but we’ll keep finding ways to bypass it and convince the package that my butler can totally sign for me.
Really enjoying LibreTube on my phone, for listening to long videos without the video on screen. Its audio mode is very clean in my opinion.
