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

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

#301

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sn_master wrote: post #89
sneak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Please no! The lock picking lawyer is my favorite :(

Some of those videos should be government sponsored infomercials -- here's how to open a nationally (USA) used door lock in 1s with a magnet.

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

#303

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ekianjo wrote: post #265
vmurthy wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase an old joke : "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too empty". What you describe there is the classic problem of Network effects. The limitation is not on the tech side of things. People don't use the decentralized services because either favourite content isn't there. Producers don't post to the decentralized service because the consumers aren't there. Unfortunate reality :-( I really don't want so much po…

The effort involved in pushing videos to one or two more platforms when you already did to one is close to zero. This is how you start while not leaving YouTube yet and making it possible for the alternative to develop progressively.

In theory you could make a json file with all the details and push it to 100 content libraries like YouTube/Vevo/Peertube/Facebook/etc. but most of them want to be exclusive, they're not there to host your content, they want your viewers. There's no way they're going to do anything to help democratise that content.

We need to stop feeding the beast.

I'm still convinced that Opera Unite, which fused distributed social + web client + web server, should have been the way forward to make the web truly owned by the people: if social sites were simply caches of content available p2p or through any social site of my choosing (that the content owner allowed) ...

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

#304

Post by bloaf »

StillBored wrote: post #123
bloaf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the spirit of the law is for youtube to have a way to remove "how 2 script kiddie" videos. But the letter of the law matters, and right now the letters say they can ban just about any video discussing the details of vulnerable systems.

That is true, but youtube is full of things which basically violate these principals. I will pick the second item "Extremely dangerous challenges" because its nice and safe/generic to talk about. I think everyone understands what they are talking about, but youtube has tons of instructional videos for doing things which could severely maim/kill careless or poorly trained individuals. The infamous Shanghi tower climb/…

I think the sentiment in this comic applies here.

http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=346

That is, even if your videos are in-the-clear currently, there is no reason Youtube couldn't decide to interpret its rules more strictly in the future. Maybe your video's genre just hasn't gotten any bad press yet.

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

#305

Post by pbhjpbhj »

izacus wrote: post #24
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.)

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.

Kicking someone in the face is illegal too, but there a million - or more - YouTube videos showing you how to do it, and most towns in my country have more than one class you can go to to learn how to do it (TKD, BJJ, Karate, etc.).

"Well you can use it for defence ..."

White-hat hackers are a thing too.

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

#306

Post by enterx »

rv-de wrote: post #290
patrickaljord wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vimeo recently banned Project Veritas (which is still up on youtube), Alex Jones and plenty of other channels. Not sure it's a less censuring alternative.

I think every platform has the right to censor and also the duty to do so. Like gore or cp etc. This shapes a profile for a platform. In vimeo's case they distanced themselves from some conspiracy theory fanatics which is fine with me. Meaning I endorse that profile as a visitor and who doesn't just needs another platform. And one reason why those outlets (like Alex Jones & Co.) often aren't accepted around for long…

does church in your opinion has the right to ban certain types of books too?

regardless of answer, please elaborate.

do you see the slipperness of that slope?

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

#307

Post by monocasa »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #296
monocasa wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, YouTube's definition is self serving, and breaks apart for many important use cases. Their real definition is "we allow/block whatever makes us look good in the court of public opinion", and to think they have any real definition beyond that is a fallacy.

I expect it's a slight more meta metric, I doubt they care about the court of public opinion beyond its relevance to company profit.

Sure, but the medium term relevance to company profit isn't a metric you meaningfully have until it's too late to do anything about. You can actually react to the court of public opinion, and reacting to that will pretty much give you a level of CYA as a decision maker, so there's not really a down side on that end.

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

#308

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

ripdog wrote: post #109
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Cloudflare has a history of censoring content as well though.

What? That... one time they took down a site? That site which claimed it was endorsed by cloudflare? One incident isn't enough to become a 'history', and their actions were perfectly justified.

Fair point. I thought I remembered more incidents than the one. But looking in to it more I don’t see any. I should have done more research before trusting my faulty memory.

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

#309

Post by kypro »

ilaksh wrote: post #107

I hope people will support distributed alternatives like BitChute.

BitChute is really nice. I use it quite a bit now. I've been trying out some Reddit alternatives recently too. They all get hardly any traffic, but they've reminded me how much I miss the "anything goes" culture the web had a decade ago.

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

#310

Post by spydum »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #173
roenxi wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the time, it’s humbling. As I cast my eye over the FSF's basic definition of free software [0] I can't spot much of a mystery. If a user don't have those freedoms, then someone else is in control of their software. It is inevitable that sooner or later the situation will change and the person who does have control the software is going to do disagree with what the user…

It's intriguing to witness this phenomenon live, for example with Google: first we were all in love with it, so refreshing, fast, humble when compared with Yahoo, Lycos et all. We loved their "do no evil" mantra. When they started to offer their free e-mail, we were queueing to migrate. Then the phenomenon you're describing started to happen and people are struggling to de-googlify their lives only to discover it's a…

It happens everywhere - similar concerns raised for cloudflare. Diversity is a good thing, big monolithic providers of services CAN be good as long as leadership is aligned, but once they start optimizing towards less altruistic goals it’s scary. You could argue government works the same way.
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