YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#41

Post by userbinator » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:35 AM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #20

userbinator wrote: post #7

What's next, cracking and reverse-engineering? Debugging? (Anti-authoritarian) programming ? As usual, Stallman tends to be quite prescient: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html (perhaps more like "right to watch" in this context.)

I always think he’s mostly right, but a little too uncompromising, but then everything he says comes true. I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the time, it’s humbling. As a software author working at startups, am I part of the problem? I don’t understand how to make a good living without locking down the code to some extent, with few exceptions (it’s hard to found red hat)

I think he was a bit off with regards to source code/open source, because while having source code helps in understanding and modification, it's not essential; you could similarly imagine a world in which open-source wasn't a huge movement but instead the right to reverse-engineer (or basically, understand) software was guaranteed, and it would have as great an effect on freedom; perhaps even more so, because now it'd be the norm for people to disassemble/decompile anything they wanted, and the lack of any "chilling effects" would greatly increase advances in program analysis in general. It could even be argued that the rise of open-source lead to a decrease in interest and skills of RE.

In fact, PC magazines of the 80s and early 90s used to contain articles specifically about patching software to do interesting things, complete with instructions of the form "change byte at X to Y"; AFAIK they didn't violate any copyrights because they didn't distribute copyrighted material. Then there's the whole series of "undocumented DOS/Windows" books written by people like Matt Pietrek, Andrew Schulman, and Mark Russinovich; all of which required substantial amounts of reverse-engineering and analysis, but instead of them being persecuted, two of them now work at Microsoft.

"If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#42

Post by Swizec » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #9

aiscapehumanity wrote: post #2

Overbearing youtube, 10 years from now if it's still a medium it may be a far-cry from an expressive and genuine platform (Even worse-so than it is now). How long until biohacking, and other things are blocked based on the same sensitivity triggers for the topic?

>an expressive and genuine platform (Even worse-so than it is now) Yeah it already is hard enough to dig through the sea of YouTube personalities who mimic each other and start up with the YouTube-isms. Nothing is worse when someone you follow stars doing reaction videos, rants... YouTube drama :( I already rarely leave the handful of channels I follow. Too much garbage to dig through.

My fav part is repeatedly getting recommendations for many years old videos when something like a week’s worth of new comments is uploaded every minute ... why youtube why?

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#43

Post by narrator » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

kpU8efre7r wrote: post #23

jammygit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always think he’s mostly right, but a little too uncompromising, but then everything he says comes true. I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the time, it’s humbling. As a software author working at startups, am I part of the problem? I don’t understand how to make a good living without locking down the code to some extent, with few exceptions (it’s hard to found red hat)

He is technically correct, idealistic, and uncompromising. Unfortunately that doesn't really work in the real world unless your name is Richard Stallman. It's not pragmatic. I ignore him.

You know what else is technically correct, idealistic and uncompromising and works in the real world: Bitcoin.

That system requires the power of a small European country to do 7 transactions a second generating a max of 1 mb of data volume every 10 minutes. That's like 1970s transaction speeds. Who the heck is ever going to use that?

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#44

Post by narrator » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:38 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #33

bouncycastle wrote: post #8

It's like banning Karate & Judo because it teaches violence. (When it actually improves personal security/safety)

YouTube is less and less about You.

It's like they've got too much content anyway, so why not just start banning stuff?

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#45

Post by izacus » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:43 AM UTC

ssalka wrote: post #38

izacus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cracking and reverse-engineering DRM is already illegal with the accepted US laws, so it's not far fetched for YouTube to be forced to remove those videos as well.

No one here mentioned DRM, though that would be a valid subset of videos to delist under this new rule. What if I want to reverse engineer my toaster, and make a video about it?

I'm sure there's a way the toaster company can interpret your video as a copyright or trademark infringement.

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#46

Post by save_ferris » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

bouncycastle wrote: post #8

It's like banning Karate & Judo because it teaches violence. (When it actually improves personal security/safety)

Or banning gun videos because they could teach someone how to shoot up a school.

It’s no surprise YouTube opted not to censor this genre based on their workplace shooting incident. Companies are getting more and more paranoid these days.

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#47

Post by celdon25 » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:45 AM UTC

I'm on the fence about this.

Script kiddies have always been the proverbial joke, but if you ask me, this category of hackers collectively is a bigger problem for the average person. They usually can't do much damage individually, but when you have so many of them that know how to cause even a minimal amount of mayhem and distraction for others, that adds up as a burden to society.

I also have no respect for hackers that have no desire to put in the time and effort toward the pursuit of becoming masters at what they do, and virtually everyone who is watching hacking tutorials on YT is just looking for a shortcut so they can hack a little bit on the side between League of Legends games.

So good riddance to the videos (though not sure how much difference it will make at this point).

However, the real issue here is that Google is applying changes to its censorship policies at a gradual, subtler pace, rather than deciding on a coherent principle and applying it consistently. There's too much fear that Google will continue to tighten restrictions, and that next on the chopping block will be either our favorite content or stuff we produce/upload ourselves. Nobody really knows where it ends. This is something I'm definitely not okay with, and this ban is just another example of this trend.

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#48

Post by sneak » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:46 AM UTC

bouncycastle wrote: post #8

It's like banning Karate & Judo because it teaches violence. (When it actually improves personal security/safety)

Won’t be long until gunsmithing videos about how to manufacture machine guns (legal in most countries with the right license) are banned, too.

EDIT: Spoke too soon. It’s already gone.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/01/04/coat-hanger-m...

What’s next? Lockpicking?

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#49

Post by deathhand » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:52 AM UTC

izacus wrote: post #45

ssalka wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one here mentioned DRM, though that would be a valid subset of videos to delist under this new rule. What if I want to reverse engineer my toaster, and make a video about it?

I'm sure there's a way the toaster company can interpret your video as a copyright or trademark infringement.

If you could figure out the order of construction of the parts in the toaster that could be considered intellectual property/trade secret.

Re: YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube

#50

Post by celdon25 » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 2:54 AM UTC

hobs wrote: post #12

xwdv wrote: post #10

Has everyone forgotten that you can easily just host your own website and throw up whatever video content you want there? I can’t imagine creating a ton of educational content and then having it all depend on the whims of a single platform. This is not the end of infosec or hacking videos.

Its much much much more expensive to host video content than anything else.

This time is different, because hackers are more likely to have the ability to solve this problem (even if it weren't for the fact that YT already solved it once more than a decade ago). YT probably made a big mistake here.