I don’t remember whether Linus said blocking ads is a crime. It isn’t a crime, and that’s really important.

At that point piracy becomes a meaningless phrase when even the FBI endorses the piracy tool.

I don’t think it’s right to call something a piracy tool. We have the similar discussions about “hacking tools”. Nmap can be used for commuting crimes, just like BitTorrent, the Internet or my kitchen knifes.

With this it isn’t a problem for the FBI to promote “piracy tools”, since almost everything can be used for good and legal purposes. uBlock is one of the most important tools to be secure on the internet, just like nmap to make sure systems are secure.

He can argue it’s morally unfair for people to legally visit YouTube and legally not disable Adblock to view his channel, but it’s not a crime.

Agreed.

LTT also did videos about PiHole and YouTube Vanced, so I personally don’t think it’s hypocrisy advertising VPN’s (as long as those VPN ads don’t lie about it’s benefits).

I do believe that Linus once again uses words in ways not commonly used. I.e. if they define piracy as

consuming content without paying how the creator intended

then blcoking ads is piracy. But the commonly used definition is more like wikipedia’s

[…] Online piracy or software piracy is the practice of downloading and distributing copyrighted works digitally without permission […]

Why hyprocisy? It’s a fair point to say circumventing paying in some way is piracy. It’s possible, so anyone can decide for themselves.

The instance or the project? How could a interface violate a license?

In short, Google limits extension API access, which blocks extensions like uBlock Origin from reaching their full potential. Firefox doesn’t.

How did you make sure that the internet can only be reached through the VPN?