Technology

1928 readers

7 users here now

Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it's technological news, it probably belongs here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

320

YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

293 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder how? Unless ad-blocker extensions are currently leaking some piece of info indicating to the website that we're using them?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are numerous ways to detect ad-blockers. The most robust way is to default to assuming the user has an ad blocker (fail-safe design), loads an ad script, and the ad script continues loading the page (video, article content, etc). If the ad script is blocked, the page will stop loading, and the default adblock state will be rendered.

A more brittle option is to load the ad script with an error handler (or detect if it is blocked via a timing attack) and then the error handler changes the page to reflect the ad script was blocked. The reason this is more brittle is that the user can simply intercept and remove the error handler. (In contrast to the above approach, this is fail-deadly design.)