...and a viewer is supposed to be signed in to view them for some reason.

By doing a search and see the same video without signing in.

I don't (and won't) have a youtube account, but I do know every now and then a random video won't be available to me unless I sign on, and the excuse youtube gives is that the video is age restricted, but I'm not sure how youtube would know the age of the people who do sign in.

It asks you to provide proof of age such as your credit card or phone number. Like we're all going to blithely give this out.

Should be age restricted but that's often a completely arbitrary decision that makes no sense, such as historical WW2 videos.

A short form type of link. Or it could have something to do with your browser or with cookies.

detected unusual browsing activity, call me a bot, etc. If memory serves me correctly, there was a round of these happenings a couple of months ago. They stopped but have now begun again. This time it was definitely just after I did a software update. I’m now wondering if that was the case last time, and I missed the connection.

My in-house tech expert AKA spouse says Apple may be incurring the wrath of websites as it helps us lock down our privacy controls (or words something like that).

Or maybe to do with my Eero Wi-Fi system? I can’t remember when the last update was?


My iPhone and the Eero shows an update available to be done tonight. I’ll try the iPhone first and see what happens. I have to warn family about the Eero at midnight.

Edit: I see the iPhone is giving me the option of a iOS 17 update or going to iOS 18. I’m going with the 18 after I do a backup.

only seems to affect my idevices, not my husband’s androids, etc.

And so far it seems to be working now. Went with the iOS 18 update.

I wonder if the update cleared my browser cache? I saw something recently about doing the iOS 18 update that mentioned the cache and history.

I don’t know the details on how to do that but you might try clearing it.

I get that if I'm running my VPN. I disconnect the VPN and it works fine.

I just switch locations and that usually works for me.