his happens from time to time and usually doesn’t last long.
This time I installed LibRedirect and had it forward me to piped.video whenever I click on a YouTube link.
Google has been adopting code for “experiments” to block users running ad blockers from using YouTube at all, giving them an ultimatum sort of like those annoying “Admiral” pop ups that appear on some sites when you’re just trying to get a recipe.
YouTube’s site is full of junk and other obnoxious crap, like automatically playing unrelated videos that I did not ask to see, so that it can run more ads in a video I did not request.
If they ever develop a system I can’t bypass, I simply won’t watch YouTube links anymore.
Four or five ads per video, many unskippable, are simply not worth it. They’ll destroy the platform trying to get people to watch ads. Moreover, there’s always someone with a loud obnoxious piece of shit phone that has ads blaring out of the speaker now and they fumble around trying to use the “one button” idiot interface to make it stop, then they look around like ‘MY, where did that come from?”.
And since Google can’t be bothered to profile their own site code (Why? Chrome can just split the garbage up and run it on all your processors!) trying to use YouTube in SeaMonkey (outside of DuckDuckGo or going directly to a Piped instance that Google is trying to shut down) stalls SeaMonkey out and then I have my ChatZilla, Mail, and other tabs unusable until I hit “Wait” a few times from GNOME detecting a hung application. 
Before “Polymer”, which was the bloated and shitty “New Reddit” of YouTube, it did everything it does now that I wanted to use it for fine on most any Web browser. Bloat on top of bloat on top of garbage, with a side of bloat.
I get it that they want to stop taking huge losses (YouTube never made a profit when Google broke it all out and likely still doesn’t) but attacking users is not the right thing to do here. There are a lot of smart people who don’t work for Google who will figure out a way around this.
Google has proven that they can’t be trusted with the Web. If their “Web Environment Integrity” proposal gains support from major Web sites it will be the end of the Web unless you’re using Edge, Safari, or Chrome, and it’s doubtful that any of the browsers trusted by these companies will work on Linux.
Moreover, WEI will certainly be used by governments, starting with the United States, to enforce the usage of software and operating systems that they know they have put backdoors into. The user will no longer be able to say “I can examine the code of GNOME Web and I don’t think that anything malicious exists in this browser.” because it simply won’t be allowed into the Web sites that use WEI. No Free Software browser will.
WEI is the ultimate “clipper chip”. The United States government has been trying to sabotage computer security and replacing it with something it can monitor since the 1990s. This concept isn’t new. But once WEI browsers are all that can access the Web, then even communications that are End-to-End encrypted will come through on browsers that have backdoors in them. Even if the site you use isn’t spying on you, your browser and operating system certainly will.
Communist countries only wish they had this sort of power. The adoption of WEI is being pushed immediately after the US federal government started paying for the Internet accounts of millions of people. (Yeah, let ’em pay your Internet bill, but use Linux and a good VPN and Tor! Why? Because everyone should use these if they are an Internet user in the United States! Of course!)
I believe that the timing is too coincidental to be a coincidence. They want people on the Web, as they build in the devices to trap them, spy on them, and blast propaganda at them. If Google succeeds with WEI, we may even find that browsers that use it are enforced by the OS or the ISP, which are sitting at a higher level blocking alternative protocols.
Even if they leave other protocols alone and allow you to browse with _something_ on Linux, it will be like some horrible new “Secure Boot” for trying to entrap people on Windows, only now it will decide who can use online bill pay and shopping and watch YouTube videos that Google did not even create, got for free, and sticks ads in.
I have no confidence that any government officials in the United States will stop Google. If they were going to, they’d have done it.
Maybe Europe will fine them and then give them a license to continue. They like taking hundreds of millions of dollars from US tech companies, because Europe is a rotting festering pile of kleptocracies in union.
But just like the “browser choice” or “Windows N” didn’t get in the way of Microsoft (because it was all about the money), the EU will give Google a pass once the right “price” is determined.
Roy posted an article that shows that the Web peaked in 2018 and then started to come crashing down. The interesting stuff is all things Google deletes due to governments not wanting people to know about it or copyright trolls telling them delete the entire Web why not.
I don’t even use Google anymore. It performs too poorly as far as quality of results. It actually returned better results in 2005. It’s not about the quality of results anymore.
Around the time Google announced that they were Alphabet was when they became extremely malicious. They went from a kind of goofy “chocolate factory” as people phrased it to being like “If Facebook ran a search engine.”.
It’s a surveillance monster full of ads and propaganda, designed to keep you glued on their own sites.
Now is the time for users, the public, competitors of Google, to take action.
Everyone needs to stop what they are doing and file complaints with their government officials and authorities. Competitors of Google should sue Google in court to get them to agree to stop this before it becomes entrenched and their businesses are ruined.
The Web needs to be too big for one country or company to control or it will not be the Web anymore.
Mozilla is obviously a thrall of Google, but they still do have competitors, like Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, whose products could definitely be locked out (even though they are based on Chrome) and whose businesses could be ruined, unilaterally, by Google.
As individuals, we also need to replace Chrome. You can export your data to other browsers that do not support WEI and which have stated, on the record, that they will not support WEI.
It will be harder for Web sites to demand WEI if users will not go along with it quietly.
As for YouTube, I really do appreciate Piped, but Google is like some sort of polymorphic virus that figures out how to use code and lawyers to control the user.
Their new “You are not allowed to use YouTube with an ad blocker.” is just revolting. The browser used to be a “User Agent”, the user told the browser how to display the site and then that’s what was happening.
I was talking to Roy Schestowitz about how Canonical/Ubuntu (now a sockpuppet of Microsoft and doesn’t even hide it) gave the SeaMonkey package the knife over a decade ago, when it ran everything on the Web as well as Firefox because there hadn’t been much divergence yet.
The way Ubuntu rationalized getting rid of the SeaMonkey package was defamatory. [The way I recall it.] Typical Ubuntu. Make up bullshit defamatory reasons for deleting the package. Don’t consider user input. Ban everyone who comments by whacking them with MAH HUGE CoC!
One of the specific [in my opinion] defamatory accusations [that I recall] was that it was neglected, rotting, and not getting security updates upstream.
None of which has ever been true. It gets security updates. It is developed. [The user can even make it more secure and functional with add-ons and Preferences and about:config toggles.]
It still builds fine, even with Clang 16. [My current about:buildconfig says 16.0.6 on Fedora for Clang version, using C99 and C++ 2014 and compile time binary hardening for security.]
SeaMonkey has less of those “features” that are the cause of so much attack surface in Firefox. I use “features” liberally here. Most of it is GULAGshit that they just dump into the browser that very nearly nobody uses, which hands sites more ways to run binary programs and get at your graphics card, memory, camera, and microphone. Also, bluetooth devices, the file system(!), and telling them if you’re present at the computer or not.
Web MIDI, Web Bluetooth, FileSystem API, Battery Status, User Presence!
You know, FEATURES! BEAUTIFUL LOVELY FEATURES!
-Me on TechRights IRC
By the logic of deleting things that allegedly don’t get security updates, they should delete Firefox and Chromium for adding more vulnerabilities than they patch in almost every release.
Yes, it is up to an OS vendor what they want to do for a default Web browser, but pretending like this garbage is “secure” when you have to take on ~15 CVEs for every 10-12 they fix is puerile nonsense.
As far as I’m concerned, the first browser on my system that implements WEI (and we all know who that’ll be, Firefox!) will be the first one that gets condemned to Silicon Hell. ⬆