I know the topic of whether adblock is piracy is debated, but I am guessing there are a lot of adblock users here and I was wondering if anyone has seen the youtube adblock warning message in the wild. I use ublock origin and still haven’t seen it once.
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I know the topic of whether adblock is piracy is debated
Its not debated. Its bullshit.
flat earthers existing doesnt put the earth’s sensual curves up for debate either.
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Please drink verification can.
Exactly. You’re being fed HTML etc and then deciding how to render it (or part of it in the case of ad blocking). This isn’t piracy. There’s no rules that come with the HTML in terms of how to render it. Different browsers can render it a number of different ways so how is not rendering part of it any different?
It is indeed a ludicrous idea.
Don’t give them any ideas. lol Otherwise, cable boxes around the world are likely to receive a firmware update that blocks you from changing channels during commercials.
All future displays will have built in cameras that start dimming and turn off the screen if it notices you aren’t paying attention. They’ll say it is a power saving feature, but not put in an option to disable it.
This kinda already exists. There’s that smart tv you can get for free by agreeing to built-in ads via a display underneath the main one or something. LTT discussed it recently; I think I saw a WAN show clip about it.
Edit: Found the clip I was thinking of, this goes into decent detail on this.
That’s creepy.
We officially live in a Cyberpunk dystopia, and I am 100% here for it. Ride the synthwave, choom.
When it comes in exchange for rocket legs I will concede.
It’s Cybersecurity.
100%
Absolutely.
Adblocking is good cybersecurity practice. It puts into stark relief how much of Marketing is actually just manipulation and malware.
But it is you are using the service without “paying” for it. What would you rather call?
I won’t use the term “piracy”. Just because the man says “up is down” doesn’t make it so. Piracy, historically is using threat of force and/or harm to force capitulation. In history past, pirates would fire across the bow to allow the target to choose to fight/flee or capitulate and pay the pirates, which is extortion. Technically, ransomware hackers are, by the historical definition, the true pirates. Individuals watching videos without ads is, by definition, individuals watching videos without ads.
Another issue which is connected to labeling users “pirates” is the data caps and bandwidth throttling by mobile carriers and ISPs. Users make agreements with carriers for data and bandwidth for x.x price, but YouTube “steals” data limits and bandwidth by ads. Shouldn’t we expect them to pay us for our lost bandwidth and data caps?
It can’t be a one way street for a corporation to label users as unethical reprobates or “pirates” while he steals my paid for data limits and bandwidth.
People typically associate piracy with actions that can land individuals in legal trouble due to it being law breaking. I don’t know that there is a country yet that sentences people for using Adblocker. Even the FBI recommends it.
Like I can see how companies don’t like people consuming their service without seeing ads, but this isn’t people copying or cracking and stealing account credentials to get access to something that is paywalled like some Netflix account. This is a flaw on their end and people are accessing it legally.
It’s like some drive in theater getting mad someone who lives across from there can just watch movies from their backyard without paying and then saying they are committing piracy. They aren’t sneaking into a theater.
Service is still paid for with user’s data, including the datapoint: is intolerant of ads.
Agreed. People need to stop giving that ridiculous idea market share in their head.
I agree that it isn’t but I didn’t want an argument in the comments.
It’s one of Lienus’s L takes. People are giving it the benefit of a doubt because he has a huge following.
I started parroting “using a VPN to bypass region block is privateering” in response. LMG taking any VPN sponsorships after that L take is hypocrisy in my book.
Why hyprocisy? It’s a fair point to say circumventing paying in some way is piracy. It’s possible, so anyone can decide for themselves.
If blocking ads is enough to constitute piracy then piracy ceases to lose meaning since then every act of using any website with an Adblocker is an act of piracy. At that point piracy becomes a meaningless phrase when even the FBI endorses the piracy tool.
For Linus to insinuate that a crime is being committed by comparing it to piracy is ridiculous, since last I checked there isn’t a country where adblocking is a crime. He can argue it’s morally unfair for people to legally visit YouTube and legally not disable Adblock to view his channel, but it’s not a crime. He’s basically implying that people should be running around without Adblockers on the web, which itself is a security risk to do. But, hey blocking ads is piracy and you wouldn’t want to be a criminal would you?
I don’t remember whether Linus said blocking ads is a crime. It isn’t a crime, and that’s really important.
At that point piracy becomes a meaningless phrase when even the FBI endorses the piracy tool.
I don’t think it’s right to call something a piracy tool. We have the similar discussions about “hacking tools”. Nmap can be used for commuting crimes, just like BitTorrent, the Internet or my kitchen knifes.
With this it isn’t a problem for the FBI to promote “piracy tools”, since almost everything can be used for good and legal purposes. uBlock is one of the most important tools to be secure on the internet, just like nmap to make sure systems are secure.
He can argue it’s morally unfair for people to legally visit YouTube and legally not disable Adblock to view his channel, but it’s not a crime.
Agreed.
Yeah, I brought up the crime aspect, since piracy to me is an act where laws are being broken that can result in fines or imprisonment. Pirates were outlaws and hanged, so kind of reason why digital lawbreakers got the moniker pirate. Not really in the category of even legal malicious compliance.
Was meant to draw attention to how ridiculous it was to even label a completely legal action as an act of piracy just because he was upset about adblockers. Might as well call out Brave browser next with it blocking ads out the box.
The hypocrisy lies in Linus preaching “ad blocking is piracy” while taking VPN sponsors which enables piracy in another way.
Gotta work on that reading comprehension friend.
LTT also did videos about PiHole and YouTube Vanced, so I personally don’t think it’s hypocrisy advertising VPN’s (as long as those VPN ads don’t lie about it’s benefits).
I do believe that Linus once again uses words in ways not commonly used. I.e. if they define piracy as
consuming content without paying how the creator intended
then blcoking ads is piracy. But the commonly used definition is more like wikipedia’s
[…] Online piracy or software piracy is the practice of downloading and distributing copyrighted works digitally without permission […]
Yeah it’s even more ridiculous when you apply this logic to sponsored segments.
It’s an ad, I skip it by seeking in the video, therefore it is piracy?
Also, people get arrested and fined for piracy where I live (because it is, well, illegal), so people blocking ads should go to prison?
When the face of LMG talks about things like this in a main channel video they should look into the consequences of the opinion they present.Excuse the language, but what the actual fuck was Linus thinking?
Like what is the actual end goal here?
Linus says people should be punished for blocking ads, and the best way he thinks it should be executed is by law enforcement? Last time I checked that is how illegal actions are usually handled.
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It boggles my mind about but people are upset about blocking ads in a piracy group. Chill out everyone!!
They are so upset about this non-argument that they firigot to answer OPs question
use Odysee or Peertube /s
Freetube is good too
havent heard of it, thanks
I use New Pipe on my phone, I also use ublock origin on Mozilla Firefox, but recently I’ve been watching more using mpv, don’t know if they can do something about it
Google must be fucking salivating at the prospect of manifest v3 going live and adblockers being gimped.
I wish more people would switch to Firefox.
Hi, could you give me a brief on how manifest v3 will help Google disable the blocking of advertisements?
It changes how extensions work in Chrome (and derived browsers), notably it modifies the API that adblockers use to block requests and dramatically restricts the number of rules they can support. It’s a change pretty clearly designed to limit the scope of adblockers and make it easier for companies like Google to work around them.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
Which would mean that Brave and Ungoogled-Chromium won’t work as well anymore
Brave have said they’ll retain support for Manifest v2, but realistically that’s likely to be non-trivial amounts of work, and get harder as their upstream codebase moves away from it and the internals get switched over from the old webRequest mechanism.
They’ll have to patch things manually to keep it working, which is likely to get harder and harder. If Google want to make it hard for them to retain support, they can do so.
At some point they may not have the resources to keep doing that and might have to decide between forking the codebase and losing manifest v2. If they fork then they’ll have a load more work to do in backporting security changes etc.
They’ll also have to find a way to retain the old manifest v2 versions of extensions, as they’ll disappear from the Chrome store. Might mean maintaining a separate store. The authors might not care enough to maintain a Brave version of their extensions.
All in all it’s not great path forward for Brave. At best they’ll have an increased maintenance burden. At worst it gives Google the power to force them to drop Manifest v2 or be overwhelmed by maintenance. But this is what we get for handing an effective monopoly to Google.
Switch to Firefox!
Good thing I primarily use Librewolf on PC, but I’m using Brave on Mobile. Unfortunately, I believe even Bromite is based on chromium.
Firefox on mobile is likely not going to have all of the privacy features of librewolf. I’m waiting for someone to make the port, I’ll switch ASAP
I’d love it if Brave eventually starts building off Firefox just so there’s another browser out there that isn’t built on Chromium.
Which would be pretty funny, since the Brave CEO only started the project, because he got booted off Firefox (Mozilla) for being an asshole.
In short, Google limits extension API access, which blocks extensions like uBlock Origin from reaching their full potential. Firefox doesn’t.
I use it on iOS with uYou+ and I haven’t seen it, I also used Video Lite’s Adblock as well as on Safari with normal ublock and haven’t seen it either. Maybe it’s not on mobile yet
I use Adblock Plus on my desktop, and I have not had the message yet.
I recommend Ublock Origin over Adblock Plus with Adblock Plus whitelisting some ads.
Are you talking about the option you can untick in the settings?
Generally I’m going to opt for the ad blocker that doesn’t whitelist by default, and Ublock Origin is often recommended over Adblock Plus. I haven’t seen a reason to use Adblock Plus over Ublock Origin.
It’s one recommended by privacyguides, and if you use Firefox on Android also available to use there.
Your choice is understandable, I haven’t come across any reason to switch as of this moment however.
If you use uBlock origin you would never see it. I use both PiHole + uBlock origin and I would never see it lmao.
How do you know that? I’m fairly certain that google can tell if they have served you an ad, and cutting off access to their streaming services seems like a straightforward thing from their point of view. How could ublock (or anything) prevent google from blocking the stream? It’s not about blocking ads, or blocking messages to turn your adblocker off. It’s about google acknowledging that they haven’t served you an ad. You can’t force them to serve a video, I don’t think.
This “feature” is being rolled out slowly, which probably means they are taking lots of telemetry about how users try to circumvent this. It also means that just because you or I haven’t seen it does not mean we are safe against it. I’m not saying there is no solution, but I don’t think the solution is an adblocker or a sinkhole.
Interesting! So if I’m understanding correctly, the scare about YouTube stopping adblocked users was being caused by the Enhancer for Youtube extension? If so, that’s a relief.
Not really. The “Enhancer for YouTube” was causing problem with the YouTube anti-block to show up. So disabling what effectively allowed uBlock to block those anti-Adblock notices. I think they now fixed the issues with “Enhancer for YouTube” extension.
Uhhhhh not quite, the fact that we’re probably not going to see the “stop blocking ads plz” message doesn’t mean that Youtube can’t block access to their website with an adblocker. It’s entirely possible, there are websites that already do it.
Pihole does nothing on YouTube as their ads are served on the save server as the videos.
I know, but they help with the ads on the website itself. Not the videos.
But you have ublock? It’s just redundant at that point.
It would help on other websites and on some in-app ads from mobile devices
Yes but on the same browser it is redundant.
Redundancies being a bad thing is a very capitalist point of view.
how? lol
uBlock is NOT redundant as many ads today are not served from 3rd party domains. PiHole is redundant as it doesn’t do crap.
do you realise that ublock origin blocks ads from remote domains right? Enable “I am an advanced user” and be shocked to see how many external resources it allows and blocks.
Did you even read my comment?
I think the main issue of your comment was that you may be mistaking what redundant means.
Did you read mine? Like how fucking stupid are you to just regurgitate my exact point.
But you have ublock? [PiHole] is redundant at that point
What? PiHole doesn’t block YouTube ads yet. It’s needed. Having two Adblock’s isn’t a problem either.
It’s needed.
no it’s not. It’s convenient, but not needed. Same goes for adblockers, they are not needed, but are very convenient.
Having two Adblock’s isn’t a problem either.
Yes it is. Is there any advantage to having 4 different adblock extensions on your browser? No, it only increases the attack surface to your browser. PiHole is useful for everything but web browsing since you can use an adblocker, such as ublock origin.
Pihole works wonders for mobile apps in general. Especially games. Ublock and pihole are similar but different enough to use both. Yes, ublock is overall better for browsers. But for network wide coverage, including smart TV’S, mobile apps, iot stuff like ring cameras etc.
I agree with this since I myself use PiHole, but it is redundant on a browser which uses ublock - and that was my original point.
Piehole would be the “whole house/device” Adblock protection. Ublock is the one device Adblock. Fair to use both in my opinion.
no. never seen (yet). and using adblock is perfectly fine.
I don’t even use browser to watch youtube vids anymore. Freetube -> mpv with sponsorblock plugin.
Freetube is basically another browser though (Chrome in a shell to only browse YouTube) with a few fancy plugins.
You can achieve all of that in a browser more or less.
I haven’t seen it because I haven’t used the default front-end in years :D
OP do you perhaps use a non-Chromium based browser? Because their adblock blocking is only active on Chromium based browsers.
Brave Browser works great
