this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yup. Pi-hole does DNS-level blocking which would only work if YouTube put their ads on some separate (sub)domain.

I actually experimented the other day by turning off ublock origin and letting Pi-hole try to do the work, but I saw ads.

Theoretically, YouTube could set up their infrastructure in such a way as to put the ads in the video stream you receive, but that is complex and has other risks and trade offs.

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