UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I'll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
Newpipe is accessing the videos straight from the backend. There is no chance to splice any ads into, unless youtube were to modify the source material, and that's highly inconvenient. And then we'd just use sponsorblock anyway.
They tried to change the code to access the raw video material many times over, but unless they encrypt it and enforce decryption via keys uniquely embedded in the official youtube app while somehow finding a way to prevent a disassembly to use their keys in unofficial apps, I don't see that happening.
They don't need to splice ads in, they could just render NewPipe inoperable. I'm sure it would be fairly trivial to detect which page loads are from NewPipe.
Not trivial at all, else they'd have done that already instead of playing cat & mouse. How would they differentiate whether it's the official app, some mobile browser, or newpipe? Changing the user agent or cloning a fingerprint from a browser is the trivial thing here.
Have you heard of shape from f5 or similar services?
Nope, what's that?
Well if they're detecting active ad blockers then presumably they're running some client side js to decode the url if certain conditions are met.
I don't think think they've been playing cat & mouse with newpipe, they just break it by accident.