Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
If ads are inserted at random time stamps and the client reports the watched intervals, then the server doesn’t need to communicate which intervals are ads.
That could still be bypassed by building a library of ads in the ad blocker, then examining the video feed when an ad is encountered, looking it up in the DB, and automatically jumping ahead as many seconds as its expected duration, but that would be a substantially heavier operation than what uBlock Origin currently does.
It also wouldn’t enable forcing users to watch the ads, since the client wouldn’t know to enforce an unskippable segment from 1:38 to 2:08. And that’s probably the real reason it won’t be implemented - an executive probably has “must preserve these features” as a constraint, so an engineer wouldn’t even propose this feature to them.