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A comment on Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law. Parent comment

Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti... by rented_mule on Saturday October 28, 2023 @12:53PM (#38051354)
With SponsorBlock, blocking such ads on YouTube is already a solved problem for sufficiently popular videos. Unless YouTube goes further and disables seeking during the portion of the video with ads. Then we're back to ad blockers removing some page functionality (the Javascript that disables seeking).
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Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti... by CrendKing on Saturday October 28, 2023 @01:29PM (#38051736)
They can switch to HLS and dynamically insert ad segments randomly in the video duration. Of course it costs them to build such a system, but if the adblockers are already costing them money to begin with...
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Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti... by toomuchtodo on Saturday October 28, 2023 @03:10PM (#38052530)
You could detect transitions and strip the ads client side with ffmpeg. Bonus points if you advertise the output in the torrent DHT using the YouTube id as the torrent identifier.
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Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti... by warkdarrior on Saturday October 28, 2023 @04:55PM (#38053276)
Easy to create per-user ad insertions.
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Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti... by toomuchtodo on Saturday October 28, 2023 @05:23PM (#38053503)
Also easy to fetch more than one stream to fingerprint content vs ads for trimming. Admittedly whack a mole and cat & mouse.
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Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti... by beached_whale on Wednesday November 01, 2023 @02:04PM (#38102281)
Right, but that’s just a problem with not inserting it in the same places for everyone. Don’t even need JS to disable syncing, the events can be tripped but the service can just ignore them, it’s one video stream
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