YouTube.com Bypassing Adblock?

[elaine-jackson]

List the website(s) you're having issues:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZDUS8RcRl0

What happens?

YouTube appears to be bypassing Adblock Plus and displaying advertisements. One thing to note is I run a Pi-hole on my WiFi Network that performs DNS Based Adblocking, I doubt it's causing this issue but it's worth noting.

List Subscriptions you're using:

Your settings

• OS/version: macOS High Sierra
• Browser/version: Safari
• Adblock Extension/version: Adblock Plus

Other details:

[elaine-jackson]

I'm going to ad that after switching to uBlock Origin the issue stopped, this is exclusive to Adblock Plus, the question is why. I might open up an issue with Adblock Plus. Let me know if the easylist team has any thoughts on this.

[ryanbr]

If you hit "F12" during the ads showing and show a list of Adblock elements being hit, might help here.

[elaine-jackson]

@ryanbr The issue seems to be Adblock Plus Safari Exclusive, I was not allowing non intrusive ads, it wouldn't surprise me if they snuck code in allowing YouTube Ads regardless of setting or list. People reading this will call me paranoid or say I can't prove it, and they'd be right, then again only Adblock Plus has this issue, switching to uBlock Origin fixed it, I reported the issue on their forum. I figured I'd make you guys aware as well.

[ryanbr]

If there is bug, report it; https://issues.adblockplus.org/ then every safari user will benefit :)

[elaine-jackson]

@ryanbr Would you consider re-opening this issue? I just had the same issue with uBlock Origin. This doesn't seem to be Adblock Plus specific anymore.

[crusader-mike]

FYI -- not exclusive to safari anymore. Since today my Chrome shows ads on youtube (Win7)

[crusader-mike]

Hmm... I removed it, closed all chrome instances, installed it again and problem went away. Looks like it's state got corrupted or smth. I've been getting a lot of crashes watching certain type of youtube videos for ~10 mins (I suspect a hardware problem -- certain games (like Witcher3) were doing the same after about 10 mins of play). Working theory -- during crash smth happened to adblock. Maybe chrome blamed it for my youtube crashes and blocked it somehow on related webpage?

[elaine-jackson]

@crusader-mike Like I've said over Twitter, GitHub, and to people in the security community it wouldn't surprise me if Team YouTube is exploiting a security issue in Adblock + uBlock. I do not have conclusive proof however it's difficult to get that proof.

It's worth mentioning that should my suspicions be correct, it would be very "ungoogly" as Google has contributed a lot to the security community, it'd be very out of character for them to knowingly exploit a security issue rather than report it and contribute to a fix.

[crusader-mike]

@nsuchy FYI: about those crashes -- I figured out why. Overclocked memory triggered crashes with certain video codecs (I imagine certain codecs use GPU<->main memory DMA transfer quite a bit and that mechanism is more sensitive to memory timings, than usual CPU <-> main memory). Resetting memory timings in BIOS caused all crashes to go away.

I bet those crashes caused either corruption of ADBlock state (maybe corruption of Chrome extension manager state?) or maybe caused Chrome to mark ADBlock as unstable.