this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
1711 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59190 readers
2588 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
laughs in firefox + uBlock Origin
If I understand correctly, there's nothing about Firefox that makes ad blockers any harder to detect. What can Firefox and uBlock do to stop Google from blocking adblock users on the site?
That said, I use Firefox and uBlock myself, and I've yet to see YouTube stop me from using the site.
They don’t care about Firefox. Chrome is the browser market, they have weakened extensions, they implemented DRM, and here we are.
Coming to you later… “Your browser violates YouTube’s Terms of Service.”
This would become an Anti trust suit I would imagine.
They can just phrase it a little differently and argue semantics in front of a bunch of 70 year olds who don't know what a browser is in a hearing or two. Maybe a couple campaign contributions through completely legal channels and that's that. Anti trust enforcement has been falling in the US for decades.
I am cautiously optimistic of that new gal heading the FTC, she's preparing suits I to Amazon and Google, so we'll see how that goes
I know you're joking, but it's genuinely pathetic how much of a paper tiger the FTC is. The world we live in is one in which a company like Google can and will just tank the FTC fine and continue anti-consumer practices.
You could use an extension that changes your user agent but I'm not sure how well that'd work
They have control of Chrome, so they could always implement some kind of API into Chrome to check.
C-C-C-C-Conflict of interest!
Everybody thought this was OK because Chromium is open-source.
And that may help if a group of developers decide to fork it in their own direction.
Sure, but most people will still use Google Chrome, and good luck getting Microsoft and Opera to switch to the fork. Google will still have full control over Chrome, and the layperson won't understand why a browser that looks the same as Chrome but doesn't work with Google's sites is better.
That's the issue.
Laughs in useragent switch
They're TRYING, but for now, it would be a user agent extension matter.
It doesn't matter if YouTube can detect uBlock. The great thing about uBlock is you can just block the anti-adblock script. Since Javascript is executed on the user's computer, it's trivial to just tell your computer to ignore it. And moving it to server side would cost them too much money in processing power.
That's why they want everyone to adopt their DRM, so they don't have to worry about it.
This logic is so flawed lol. It's also completely trivial for them to detect when their anti-adblock script has been blocked. If it gets blocked, then they can just stop serving you videos.
There are websites that already do this; it's not theoretical. The website just doesn't work if it detects an adblocker.
Whether or not it's trivial to detect depends on the method used to block it. It already is an arms race, and said race will continue.
Ok but do they know we know they know we know they know?!
Didn't Spotify do this a while back, they made threats of account bans as well. In the end it was bypassed and you can still use Adblock in the browser or adfree clients on desktop (or just block ads across device with Adguard or Portmaster), though honestly Spotify kind of sucks in my opinion (usually doesn't have the music I want and has UI unresponsiveness).
OK, show us an example. I've never run across a website that adblockers just didn't work on, but maybe you know of one. Give us an example, and we'll see if we can bypass that. Then we'll know which of us understands how Javascript works, and which doesn't.
Firefox currently enjoys protection from being "relatively niche" in the browser market (aka not Chromium based trash).
But if I had to place a bet on which browser would put effort in to protecting your privacy, including which extensions are installed, my bet would be on Firefox over Chrome.
i think it's mainly the list maintainers staying on-the-ball with changes to sites. they can move quicker than a giant corporation can develop, test, and roll-out potentially site-breaking changes that could adversely affect 'billions' of users.
It has always been my understanding that uBlock and uBlock Origin were two totally different extensions for ad blocking. Is this not correct? Back several year ago when ad blockers were new, I recall seeing two different Firefox listings for them, and people would caution users to get uBlock Origin and not the other truncated named one
Ublock fucked the creator who made ublock origin
I am assuming that is metaphorical?
Yes, it is metamorphical lol. Gorhill is the creator of both uBlock and uBlock Origin. However, he gave the uBlock github repo to another dev, who sold it to adblock plus. Do not download uBlock.
However, he did fork uBlock and continued to develop his own version, now named uBlock Origin. Do download uBlock Origin.
PSA: ublock.org is not related to uBlock Origin.
The difference is Firefox is not a chromium based browser and thus not subject to googles fucking bullshit, esp when we come to things like web drm
Not sure if you question is serious ... but just in case, Mozilla is one of the few non-profit orgs that is fighting for an open web
and uBlock Origin can literally work its magic because firefox provides the necessary APIs that allows it to work. (old ref. but AFAIK still relevant: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox)
Just another Firefox fan boy. They do this shit when as blockers get brought up too as if Brave, Vivaldi, etc isn't going to strip out the ad blocker nonsense when they build their versions. Just because these versions use Chromium as a base in no way means they have to use their code. Firefox fan boys are too busy talking about Firefox to understand this.
Except WEI is going to make it so the website can detect and block you if you don't allow the ads, regardless of your browser and extensions
At the moment WEI has been rejected by mozilla, so it wont be implemented into firefox. if google decides to add it into chrome and to their services, they will effectively lock out all firefox users. - A very anarchistic part of me actually would like to see how that would play out ... but at the moment i am unsure if google would actually dare doing this, but i guess, it will only be a matter of time and we'll find out.
Not sure if this move would actually damage the open web ... since basically google would single itself out as the enemy ... and i dont see many users appreciating such a move.
But if the worst happens and the whole web follows googles example, i guess we can just call this iteration of a "open web" a failure and start over with something much simpler ... maybe something like the gemini protocol as its base, which isnt polluted with clientside javascript garbage and bloated CSS/XHTML parsers and rendering engines .
I fully expect that without a change of current course, Google will ensure yt will just stop working on Firefox at some point.
I guarantee there will be a workaround. It's not magic it's just code. And once that code is on your machine there's not much they can do about it.
With streaming media they created this tiny DRM blob (you might have have heard of widevine.drm) which every browser needs to have to decode certain types of streaming media. Now imagine if something like that would be required ... the website would only be loaded and rendered if the module would "validate" that nothing has been tampered with (think: signing and checksum validations). - Suddenly no more content filtering/adblocking or maybe just enhancing websites with userscripts. That is the web google is trying to create. Totally under their control and static. The user will again just like with television be a receiver without any influence. I personally find this to be a very scary, degrading and sad thought so much ... that i would likely turn my back on this kind of web as much as possible and look for other networks (maybe something like i2p, gemini , ... )
I don't see the W3C or any of Google's competitors jumping on board to give Google the keys to the web.
With chromes marketshare, they basically already have one half of the keys. If they can get a significant amount the server/backend owners to adopt/use their "features" (maybe lie like they tried with MV3 that it's all about security and keeping bad actors out) ... it's game over.
Firefox + uBlock Origin user here. I started getting those popups a few days ago.
Purge and update your filter cache, check to make sure you have Anti-adblock filters enabled. If that doesn't work do some troubleshooting with the extensions, one user found that other extensions were interfering and after disabling the problematic extension it worked.
I'll try this. Thank you very much!
Laughs in Invidious