Okay well they're about to not show you the videos. You support their latest announcement right? It is completely in line with the the philosophy you just put forward.
"They are free to ignore any request I shout at them"
I don't have any opinion on, nor care about their latest announcement to do with their hardware as they please. Their announcements are theirs and of no concern of mine. It's just a random website the has content duplicates available at a hundred more places. Bing video search has fifty times more results than youtube for example for any item I search.
Given that, of course, they're always going to show me their videos, because about a day after whatever change they make, software (that runs on my computer against my data) will catch up. They've made changes like this many times over many years. For about a week awhile ago the ads were not blocked and I stopped clicking youtube videos and just typed the title into bing and in 5 seconds played the same video from another source. Worked 100% of the time.
Sorry if that's not the gotcha you were going for.
Exactly: it just takes one bored or determined hacker to investigate their changes and update the ad-blocking software, and suddenly everyone is able to see the videos and block the ads again. The ad-blockers don't seem to have trouble keeping people around to do this work.
Exactly. That's why they're blocking ad-blocker users now. You're describing the exact thing they are doing and going to do more. Guess you're actually supporting Youtuber's policy.
Are you typing up an email right now? I can't tell, I'm on HN on my computer. To be able to tell what you're doing, I'd need to be on your computer. Hope that helps explain things.
When I shout on a public street "sing me the Francoise Hardy version of I'll Be Seeing You," no one has to reply. If they do reply, but they decide to sing a 2 minute ad for a pyramid scheme first, I am free to cover my ears till the song comes on.
Google's servers have a public internet IP. I can "shout" a request to them. The data they send back to me, is mine to do with as I please. I am free on My computer, from the memory buffer on a RAM stick I own, to ignore some of the bytes, in My RAM change some of the bytes, or save some of the bytes to a file on my HDD. They are free to ignore any request I shout at them, but they have zero say in what I do on equipment they do not own.