Gemini said:

The Issue: YouTube Error 153
Error 153 is specifically a Referrer Policy error. It appears when YouTube’s servers cannot verify the website where the video is being embedded.

What changed? Yes, YouTube recently tightened their security and API enforcement. They now require a valid HTTP Referrer header for embedded players. This allows them to verify that the domain embedding the video has permission to do so (and to apply domain-level restrictions set by video owners).

Why it fails: The Makeability Lab webpage likely has a security setting (in its HTTP headers or HTML meta tags) set to no-referrer. This tells the user's browser not to tell YouTube "I am watching this from makeabilitylab.org." Because YouTube receives the request anonymously without a referrer, it blocks the video and displays Error 153.

The fix, also from Gemini, is simple (and I verified it):

Option 1: Update the Iframe (Recommended) Add the referrerpolicy attribute to the YouTube <iframe> tag.

<iframe 
    src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/..." 
    referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" 
    ... >
</iframe>

This attribute explicitly tells the browser it is safe to send the website's domain to YouTube, which satisfies their new security requirement.

Option 2: The site might have a global Meta tag or HTTP header like this: Referrer-Policy: no-referrer Changing this to strict-origin-when-cross-origin usually resolves the issue for all videos on the site at once.

To investigate and test strategies, I tried Option 2 using dev tools in the browser.

Scroll to the top of the Elements panel and expand the <head> tag.
Right-click <head> -> Edit as HTML.
Add this meta tag: <meta name="referrer" content="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" />
Click out to apply.
Note: You will still need to force the iframes to reload (by right-clicking them -> "Delete element" -> Ctrl+Z to undo) for them to pick up the new global policy.

This fixed it:

All videos have "Error 153" #1211

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