Last time I disabled an ad blocker to try it on desktop, I was getting scammy looking product ads. On my phone if I browse Shorts (revanced doesn’t stop those ads) it’s all straight-up financial/health benefits scams.
But the other night I accidentally opened the 1st party YouTube app on my TV instead of Smart Tube Next and the ads were for big brands. So there’s probably a different level of desirability based on content type and device type at play.
They get some control but it depends on the content how exactly it works. I think for normal videos they get a say right from the start where the breaks are. But I know one guy who does YT and he live streams and has to clean up every VOD because they just randomly pepper ads all throughout.
On rare occasions YouTube will play exceptionally long videos as ads. When YouTube Red came out I got multiple entire hours long shows as ads (as a “free preview!”) I’m pretty sure Ive gotten one of the movies they put up for free viewing as an ad before.
Obviously you can skip after 5 seconds or whatever but they hope to catch someone playing stuff in the background. Probably to increase their crappy view count for those features to sell actual ads later.
Those issues are ones that it’s hard to just walk back with a mea culpa, especially when the apology comes precisely when it starts to impact your career.
It is, it’s deadline is just a little farther out.
They were paying for its development for about a year and a half.
The Apex Legends hacking situation was unrelated to the anti-cheat despite initial reports. It didn’t stop the hack but it also wasn’t the vector for the attacks.
Genshin Impact’s anti-cheat however was an unmitigated disaster.
ZLUDA was an open source translation layer for CUDA. So basically developers could take code from projects written for Nvidia’s CUDA and use ZLUDA to run them on other hardware. Originally the dev was focused on Intel but AMD started paying him and he focused on AMD hardware. They stopped funding him earlier in the year and now it appears AMD legal has gone back on their earlier permission for him to keep distributing the code.
Has the same SoC as the new $100 Google box as well.
It’s also built with the same SoC as Walmart’s Google TV box that sells for $50.
This $100 box from Google runs on the same SoC as the $50 streaming box from Onn (Walmart). The only major differences are the Google box as 4GB of RAM vs 3GB, a 1Gb Ethernet port instead of 100Mb (both have WiFi 6), and the Google box has a USB Type C port for power/data and would need an OTG adapter/hub while the Onn box has a Type A and a barrel plug for power.
It’s also twice the price of the Onn 4k Pro (Walmart house brand) that’s built on the same chip and has the same features running the stock Google TV experience.
I don’t really use Brave as I don’t want to support the Chromium/Blink/V8 monopoly, but aren’t it’s built-in “Shields” functionally equivalent to uBO but not reliant on the extension APIs?
How could he see me?
It’s especially bad on reels/shorts for pretty much all platforms. Tons of financial scams looking to steal personal info or worse. And I had one on a Facebook reel that was for boner pills that was legit a minute long ad of hardcore porn. Not just nudity but straight up uncensored fucking.
Yikes btw, their arbitration agreement is rather nasty. A bunch of weird convoluted rules about mass arbitration. Some situations where it looks like they could demand in person appearance at hearings. Rather intimidating language about settlement offers made just before the arbitration hearings – basically if you turn down an offer and then get awarded less than what they offered you’re on the hook for paying all their fees from the time of the settlement offer, etc.
You have to give notice via email to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com that you’re opting out of the arbitration agreement by May 15 (or 30 days after starting a new account). I included a short bit stating this was a notice opting out of the arbitration agreement and then my name, etc
For Android on phones and tablets look up Revanced. You have to download the YouTube .apk from somewhere like apkmirror, then use the Revanced manager to apply patches to block ads and change functionality. Then you log into your account with their own version of MicroG/gmscore. It was briefly affected by the issue in the main post but was working again in a few hours.
For Android-based smart TVs and streaming devices there’s SmartTube (SmartTubeNext). Not sure how well they’ll do if YouTube goes cat and mouse though.
And for a wider variety of devices (including Apple TV and now WebOS) there’s also Kodi which has a YouTube addon although logging in with it is kind of a pain as you need to get API keys, etc.
& finally on a desktop browser uBlock Origin alone handles all the ads pretty well, and you can optionally add Sponsorblock.
Oh. And check out some of the over the top TV services and see if there are any cheap ones that might meet your needs to replace cable. Though the way the cable companies do their bundling even that might not save you much as the net might jump up to more than $80 standalone.
When YouTube Red first dropped they were putting hour-long pilot episodes of their shows as pre-roll ads. Now I notice ads on shorts are full of obvious scams related to “new monthly health credits”. Still better than getting an ad on Facebook reels that was uncensored hardcore porn.
Using the permission to record audio triggers an on-screen indicator that the mic is recording. Someone would probably notice it on 24/7 recording. Someone would have also by now found the constant stream of network traffic to send the audio to be analyzed, because they also aren’t doing that on-device.