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YouTube runs experiment addressing users with ad blocker

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Bicurico:
https://eupolicy.social/@thatprivacyguy/111261130799704016

PwrElectronics:
This started to affect me a week ago.  I found refreshing the page got me past it.

Then, yesterday it would not.

So, OK lets turn off the adblocker I was using selectively for youtube.  I noticed it was already off!  Hmm.  I clicked the box they put up to allow ads and it basically has instructions on turning off the blocker for them.  Something I had already done.

So, unless there is a hidden blocker I don't recall having  :-//

This is on Firefox BTW.  I am logged in on youtube on that browser since I have my own channel with some stuff on it.

So, went to use edge as a browser where I am not logged in and don't generally use for youtube and even tho that also has a ad blocker on it, it works.   :-//

madires:
BTW, YouTube ran its ad-blocker detection experiment in Germany last weekend. It's unclear if users were selected randomly or if they share a common feature, e.g. logged in. And it seems that YouTube tried different levels of nagging.

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: tom66 on October 19, 2023, 08:40:36 am ---
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on October 19, 2023, 02:04:08 am ---I wonder if it might be possible to send TCP ACKs early when it downloads the ads. Some packets can get dropped but you don't care about the content anyways. I suppose there would be the problem of getting too ahead of the server and the scheme getting detected, some adaptive scheme can counter that.

I think stealth adblocking would become a lot more common if there's a good reason to use it.

--- End quote ---

TCP ACKs alone wouldn't work, because TCP packets are max 64KiB each.  The average advertiser video is going to be larger than that, and the length is probably not deterministic (due to how streaming video works).  But on a modern connection downloading that in full won't take much time.  There's a bit of DASH going on in the background as well, managing the max bitrate the client can handle. 

Even if Google enforces the "wait N seconds to get your video" I can see the adblockers winning by just showing a "loading" screen.  That would still be better than watching an ad.

--- End quote ---

Yeah. It's not hard from the server's pov to ensure that *all data* has been sent to the client. Detecting only partial transfers is not rocket science. And yes, streaming can easily be bound to a max rate, so that the client can't download a streaming video faster than the streamer source intends it to. So yeah, as I said, the only thing always possible will just be for browsers to act exactly as if nothing was blocked at all, but just not display the parts that the user doesn't want to see. (Having to wait for 30s before each video would be annoying though, but if you have no choice...)

The only way that could be prevented would again to have the browsers themselves make it impossible, and of course that's something that could happen with closed-source software, but it's pretty impossible to ensure that with open-source software.

Ranayna:

--- Quote from: madires on October 19, 2023, 02:10:15 pm ---BTW, YouTube ran its ad-blocker detection experiment in Germany last weekend. It's unclear if users were selected randomly or if they share a common feature, e.g. logged in. And it seems that YouTube tried different levels of nagging.

--- End quote ---
Must have been quite random. I am a regular user, one at work, not logged in with a chrome based browser: no change. And at home, logged in and with firefox, also no change.
But on both browsers i have uBlock Origin enabled, from what i heard that can supposedly circumvent the block, so maybe thats why i noticed nothing.

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