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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

So long as we're on the topic of fighting ad targeting... if you've never heard of uBlock Origin, you should get it. It's probably the reason YouTube still thinks I'm Hispanic.

I love my poorly targeted ads. Easier to ignore.

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The article claims ublock origin won’t work on sites that implement this.

The current version doesn't but there's not really a reason to believe it can't be updated. I think the author overstates the complexity of documenting these proxies and URLs for sites that run them.

You're going to lose this cat-and-mouse game, it's the same one that gets played with malware C2 domains (except it's worse because both the proxy operator and the actual domain operator are colluding). Add in the zero-cost nature of subdomains as opposed to needing to pay for new DGA root domains and the fact that they can run the whole thing behind e.g. cloudflare to prevent IP blocking? Forget about it.

> You're going to lose this cat-and-mouse game...

History is full of sentiments like that, from power structures that were never able to stop subversion. The game itself is perpetual, so there's always another turn coming.

Google’s recommending that people set a A record in their own domain for the server, and change the name of the script. Given this, documenting such proxies and URLs and maintaining that documentation doesn’t seem practical.

On the other hand, I wonder if you could just block all IP addresses associated with google, or those associated with their cloud/app engine? I suppose that could be handled at the firewall maybe? Are there ASNs google uses specifically for their app engine and cloud computing resources? Others have mentioned that a lot of government agencies rely on google app engine, but it’d be nice to kill all traffic to/from anything google.

Just use Brave and you won’t see any YouTube ads at all. It even works on mobile.

Youtube via Brave on my iPad refuses to stream anything above 720p most of the time. As a result I just use it less.

Frankly, that's a win IMHO

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