Technology

59578 readers

2825 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

783

Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies. (www.engadget.com)

submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

255 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Laticauda@lemmy.ca 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Sponsorblock only works on specific, known timed segments.

That's not true though, sponsorblock is user reported, that's why it works for sponsor segments and in-video ads of all lengths and locations in videos. If ads get baked into a video they can't be taken out or changed, since that's what getting "baked in" means in this context, and as soon as a single user reports the ad it will be blocked by sponsorblock for anyone who uses it. If it can be taken out or changed, then it's not truly baked in and that can be exploited.

[–] CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ah I think we have a different definition of "baked in".

What I mean is that the video does not change urls or sources when playing the ad and the video. So it looks like an unbroken video feed but on the back end, YouTube added the video between the designated time frames.

I get what you mean that if ads never change and are forever in the video file then sponsorblock will continue to work. But I don't think this is what YouTube will do.

[–] Laticauda@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

If they make it in any way removable no matter which end its on then other people will be able to figure out how to remove it too.

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

All they need to do is fuzz the time when the ad plays to defeat this.

The ads would be baked into the stream, not the source video. This is a fairly trivial problem, and I'm surprised they aren't doing it already.

[–] Sowhatever@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 11 months ago

As soon as on user does it? Welcome, DoS attack!