Recently, YouTube has been ramping up its anti-adblock effort, and I’ve been watching this closely due to personal interest. This blog post is where I write down what I know.
Some Background
Here’s...
Really interesting read about the history of YouTube adblocking, how the new detection works, how uBO is responding, and how not to block the new popups.
EDIT: as I wrote here, I am quite confident that my YT account has already been “rolled out” because of the many ads in the last 5–7 days. Before, I had 1 or 2 before some videos; now there are also pop-ups. I have made some experiments with VPNs (Mullvad) and browsers in several fresh VMs. uBOL works differently than the standard uBO and, from what I’ve seen, it seems to work fine. I’ll just stop repeating that.
Comments like these is literally the first thing the article warns against.
YouTube is doing this in a staggered and flaky rollout. Seeing the videos fine as an anecdote is no indication of anything. The only people who can claim a method works are those who have gained access to affected accounts, know how they're affected, and have issued a fix.
I didn't pay much attention about the warning in the article, you're right. 😅
I'll edit the post since I've been too concise, and I have a lot of negative downvotes.
I am quite confident that my YT account has already been "rolled out" because of the many ads in the last 5–7 days. Before, I had 1 or 2 before some videos; now there are also pop-ups. I have made some experiments with VPNs (Mullvad) and browsers in several fresh VMs.
uBOL works differently than the standard uBO and, from what I've seen, it seems to work fine. I'll just stop repeating that.
This is wrong. If it's working, it may be just because YT hasn't rolled their adblock defeating code to you just yet. And other extensions may interfere with uBOL and cause it to stop working. Even there aren't other extensions running, the built-in tracking protection in the browser can sometimes trip YT's code. The uBO reddit post (written by the author of uBOL) points out that YT changes the relevant scripts twice a day, so even if you have a perfect setup, there are going to be windows of time where it doesn't work.
IOW, you can't just install another extension and make the problem go away. Your whole setup matters.
New macOS Sonoma VM, brand new Firefox installation with just uBOL (not uBO). YouTube does not show any ads.
ISP dns and no pi-hole or others.
