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Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder (www.theregister.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 23 points 7 months ago* (6 children)

Most of the time I dont see any ads on YT and I watch a lot of content there. It's getting harder to not get ads there on all my devices but it's doable.

But when I go see my parents, I use their smartTV to watch YT. And I realize how horrible the experience is with all the interruptions and the impossibility to just focus on what you are watching.

And yesterday I got multiple time ads for a crypto scam called Ryxero or something. The scam was using AI clones of Bernard Arnault, a french billionaire, pretending you could win 1000€ a day...

The scam also had deepfakes of news outlets pretending that people in France were "queuing to ATM" to get their money...

I think it's absolutely unacceptable that YT let them serve crypto scams to millions in complete impunity.

I will try to report the scam to authorities. I also reported it to YT but I dont expect them to act. The 3mn long ad was paid by an american business called "EX" which I think serves their scam abroad through YT in complete impunity.

For me the scam and AI clones is obvious but how many got scammed with the complicity of YouTube ? Hundreds ?

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    BTW you can/should install an alternative YT frontend on smart TVs, if you want to watch YT and are forced to use a smart TV. Even something semi-suitable like Pipepipe will do, but there are also frontends more suited for TV use, e.g. SmartTube

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    Interesting ! Thanks for the suggestion.

    Although I usually have issues with third party clients all the time.

    On Android for example I used the following clients so far :

    • Vanced YT
    • Revanced YT
    • Freetube
    • Newpipe
    • Morphe
    • Grayjay

    All of them eventually failed or were down for extended durations. Point is, these third party apps are always vulnerable to YT purposefully sabotaging them.

    But I will try it out anyway I don't have much to lose.

    PS : Hmmm, on Smart Tube's Github :

    My development environment was infected by unknown malicious software, as a result of which a few builds may have been affected. Once the issue was detected, I secured everything with a full disk wipe, restored a clean setup, and now all builds are scanned with VirusTotal. The F-Droid version will also be verified before release.

    PS2 : My SmartTV is on WebOS, LG's proprietary OS...

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Well, yeah, the dev environment was compromised but the author restored everything and checked that it all works.

    Personally I use Pipepipe and Outertube on my android phone, and just watch through a browser with adblock on my Linux phone. Although I don't watch youtube too often, especially on my phone (maybe twice a month or so), I didn't notice any issues with either of those methods, and never got any ads either.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I'll be honest that's a bit of a red flag to me. Anyone can get hacked, sure, but we don't know what malware was shipped with the builds, we don't know what vector the hackers used to infect the builds.

    So I'm not sure I would be willing to give my YT credentials in this context.

    Anyway, since I have a WebOS TV :( I guess I will have to endure the official WebOS app for now...

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