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YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

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Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#101

Post by Legogris »

drdeadringer wrote: post #24
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #7

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…

> Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things True Honest Question. What were these sights? I was a teenage in the 1990s. I seriously and literally do not know and now I want to.

I'd wager the lack of availability and communication of widely accessible videos were limited mostly by cost of bandwidth. Watching videos over 28k was no joy.

In the early 2000s before YouTube, IME it was a lot more about P2P than web-based publishing or streaming (as mentioned, streaming video was mostly horrible RealPlayer).

A lot of videos were shared and downloaded through DirectConnect and the FastTrack (Kazaa/Grokster/iMesh/Morpheus) and Gnutella (Limewire) family protocols. Some was discovered via search and some (especially at LAN parties) via browsing others' archives. People seem to forget that early day P2P was far from only piracy - this is how homemade content was spread as well.

More sophisticated people would have web sites linking to FTP archives of their own content. I also gather that file-sharing (mostly piracy?) via IRC was big, but it's not something I personally used.

The web was less conflated with the internet back then.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#102

Post by r_singh »

r_singh wrote: post #94
input_sh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have, let's say, a billion users, each of which can report stuff, and have some algorithm that weeds out 90% of bogus reports, how big would your customer support team need to be to handle the remaining 10% in a reasonable time span?

I get this argument about having millions of users reporting stuff. But just have a look at Facebook and Google's balance sheet, and the figures that other non profitable monopolies raise. However big the support team needs to be should be their problem, or rather part of their plan. And if they don't have enough money for a big enough team (or just don't prioritise support enough), then honestly, I don't think it's…

Update:

10% of 1B is 100M.

100M tickets in how much time? Let's say a year. And it takes on average 5 minutes to respond to 1. That is 500M minutes. So you need a team of ~1500 people to respond to 100M tickets in a year. Not that bad eh.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#103

Post by imhoguy »

Just came with an idea: IPFS shaddowing/mirroring, a browser plugin which seeds your public browsing cache as a source. Then as more people visit the URL and keep it cached then the resource would live the longer or forever. That would need to be zero-setup & interaction-free tool, Firefox killer-app ideally.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#104

Post by pizzazzaro »

motohagiography wrote: post #39

I learned security from t-files, 8lgm, phrack, and bugtraq. The people who taught me learned it from mentorship. The only meaningful progress in security is by people who work against it. It's a craft subculture, and the real value of it is in securing the freedom of people to not be subjects of platforms. YouTube is lame for doing this, but it's a net positive for innovation. Let them have their walled suburb. Innov…

Sorry, we're too busy getting concussions while working at fast food restaurants where the pay is so low, half the income goes to pay rent on the cheapest apartment possible.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#105

Post by pizzazzaro »

freyr wrote: post #99
diodesign wrote: post #11

Is this actually happening? Because it makes little sense when you consider that YouTube-parent Google is sponsoring security education videos. See this GCP-sponsored LiveOverflow video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-P9USG6kLs Maybe Google's killing off dodgy script kiddie vids, and leaving quality content up (and I mean the rest of LiverOverflow's videos et al, not just the paid-for stuff.)

If you read the comments in the Reddit thread, this is clickbait fear-mongering. It's a sad state of affairs when Reddit users are savvier than HN users.

Yes. We should all trust anonymous strangers on the internet over... anonymous... Strangers... On the internet...

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#106

Post by dredmorbius »

kipchak wrote: post #46

I hate how removed videos don't retain a title. It's one thing for a video to be taken down, it's another to see a mystery box taunting me from my favorites playlist. What forbidden knowledge (cat video) is forever lost to time?

Does the Wayback Machine help here?

Otherwise: I've got the same complaint. I've learnt not to rely on YouTube as a durable reference. I should remember to try the Archive more often.

Unfortunately, many third-party sites haven't, and frequently point at dead links.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#107

Post by sus_007 »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #51
pixelbath wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with the sentiment, that's not really what this is about. Youtube-dl does nothing for videos already taken down, nor does it help content creators.

The link is to a data hoarding subreddit. They could use it for archiving purposes, before videos get taken down.

Oh, you must be new to that subreddit then :D

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#108

Post by dredmorbius »

root_axis wrote: post #73
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #7

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…

I think this is just rose tinted glasses. The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude more content available today than in the 90s across the full spectrum of human affairs. Although highly visible to the individual content creators, the slivers of content that get removed from YouTube are drops in the ocean compared to the massive amount of content made availabl…

Agreed, in part.

The Internet audience as of 1999 was about 250 millions of users, with penetration of As of nearly eight years ago, it was 2.5 billions, and is probably on the order of 5 billion now.

https://bus206.pressbooks.com/app/uploads/sites/10536/2013/0...

And that's neglecting to address the amount of content and traffic available.

I'm not making a "more is better" argument, rather, I believe that "more is different", often in hard-to-appreciate ways.

The 1999 audience, and contributors, wanted to be on the Internet, for the most part. They didn't have to be there, and more importantly, most use was not directly remunerative, though some may have been self-interested (expression, proselytising, shingle-hanging, tech advocacy, targeted sales, and yes, a nascent advertising niche).

Creators could rarely hope for direct benefits, with rare exceptions ("Million Dollar Homepage", etc.)

Use now is vastly broader, it's all but essential, being widely recognised as a basic human right. Devices are easier to use, but far less generative. Even traditionally creative platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows) increasingly get in the way of, rather than facilitate, creation (the time I spend nursing rather than using systems is ... depressing).

And whilst many of the newcomers are welcomed, a large share really aren't. Their use is not aimed at general benefit, but at private and personal appropriation, often through deception and fraud.

More is different.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#110

Post by pjc50 »

m463 wrote: post #21
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #7

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…

At first I agreed with you - imagining walmart coming into town and bankrupting the mom-and-pop stores. But can't folks still create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? domain name, virtual server, upload? (don't know about monetization)

> create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? domain name, virtual server, upload?

If you become successful, this will lose you money. If you become successful on Youtube, you can gain money. That's all there is to it.

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