YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

Talos@lemmy.world to Technology@beehaw.org – 507 points –
YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
bleepingcomputer.com
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I'm certainly not an expert in this, but surely there are ways to get around this right? Pihole? Could ad blockers fake ads being played?

Yes. I give it like a week before the FOSS community figures out how to bypass again. LOL.

At least for me, and as far as I know, Pihole doesn't block YouTube ads. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong because I'd love a network-level solution. Currently just have uBlock Origin for blocking YT ads.

uBlock Origin does a good job for me. On occasion, I will try watching YouTube on a platform where I don't have it and I'm amazed how unwatchable it is. This reminds me to try to find alternate platforms for watching the creators I care about. Nebula is a good option for a lot of them, although it probably will never have the variety YouTube has. I haven't tried PeerTube yet...I suspect I will run into the same issue.

Pihole will not block YouTube ads. I think it’s incapable of doing so without blocking YouTube.

I can confirm this - the content comes from the same DNS name as the ads, this means pihole cannot distinguish between them

The solution then falls on something like ublock origin - sadly layers of ad blocking is needed in this day and age

The problem is that unlike a lot of other ads YouTube serves its ads from YouTube.com and because of SSL PiHole can only act on YouTube.com as a whole, so there's no way to block just the ads without blocking all of the site.