The Judge RANTS!
Date: 24/03/25
Alphabet: 'A' Is For 'Assholes'
Many times here, I've linked to channels or specific videos on YouTube. More than that, I have spent an inordinate amount of my days in recent years simply watching things almost (but not quite) at random.
So far, so normal. Except that at various times my viewing pleasure has been interrupted by a snotty pop-up telling me that ad-blockers violate the Alphabet corporation's terms of service. There's no consistency in their doing this, however; I can go months without getting pointed at. Even more curious is that it comes up when I use the Vivaldi browser, but not when I browse with Firefox. This is odd because I have an ad-blocker enabled in Firefox at all times which doesn't trigger the message, but Vivaldi's built-in blocker does set it off.
I've been getting around this by having Vivaldi and Firefox open at the same time, and copying the video's URL from the former to the latter. Then, on Sunday evening, on calling up YouTube in Vivaldi, instead of getting a front page full of thumbnails, I got the following nag:
Grimacing, I went and opened the same page in Firefox, only to be met with the same obstruction.
Now, I hardly ever actually sign in to YouTube, only on the rare occasions that I want to comment on something. That has not stopped me from being able to view anything, but now - if I take this new development at face value - I will have to log in to be able to see anything at all.
Confused and annoyed almost beyond endurance, I signed in (reluctantly) and went to adjust my settings. I say 'reluctantly' because I begrudge these corporate monsters even the most minimal amounts of information about me. Going back to the front page, I found that, while I could now see thumbnails, they were based on my browsing from a good couple of years ago. Fat lot of use, then.
I then got all technical on its ass. I logged out of YT, closed both browsers and then went into my Firefox profile and deleted the sqlite database which stores the cookie information (having made a copy of it first, natch) and re-opened Firefox. That bloody history nag again!
I closed Firefox yet again, copied the original sqlite database back in to the profile folder, and re-opened the browser. Nope, still there, the bastard!
I then went and searched for some possible solution, but that produced only, a) what I'd already tried, b) what I couldn't try even if I wanted to, or c) what I wouldn't try if you gave me a big clock.
As a last data point, I went into Google's very own Chrome browser, which I seldom do, and then only to check if this website is displaying properly. The result was the same, and so I was in effect being forced to call up the various channels I regularly visit in order to re-establish them in my profile.
I pondered this latest development in the long and storied history of Alphabet making 'improvements' which simply screw things up for their users. What purpose, I wondered, could possibly be served to their business plan by shutting out casual viewers, who must constitute a fair percentage of their traffic? It makes no sense, although 'sense' has never been a prerequisite behaviour for these bit-behemoths: I mean, Windows Vista, anyone?
My searches for a solution seemed to indicate that this has happened before, and that the site had reverted to 'normal' within a couple of days, which suggests that this is a cock-up rather than something more sinister. But it does raise the question of how much we are in thrall to the techno-gods of our age, and how helpless we are in the face of both their incompetence and their applied malice.
