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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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