Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 273 posts

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#121

Post by colejohnson66 »

gambiting wrote: post #118
reflectiv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry...but what would the RIAA troll Github for exactly?

Github hosts tonnes of bittorrent clients - should those be taken down too? After all, bittorent can be used for downloading content illegally!

The supposed claim wasn’t that it could be used for piracy (despite many here parroting that claim), but that they advertise that it could be. I haven’t read the actual claim, but it seems they’re basing their argument on a block of test code that uses a video containing RIAA copyrighted music. It’s sketchy at best, but there’s a reason BitTorrent clients make no mention of piracy sites at all; The MPAA and RIAA are extremely litigious and will use any opportunity they get.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#122

Post by jasode »

arghwhat wrote: post #95
jasode wrote: post #37

Some example comments in this thread: >"People should move their youbube-dl repositories to servers hosted in Switzerland, " >"Time for a decentralized version control system?" >"The nice thing about fossil" ... those well-meaning suggestions are missing the true difficulty : The community wants a (1) Schelling Point [0] for workflow/issues/discussions/PRs that's also (2) censorship resistant. So far, (1) and (2) con…

> And SMTP mailing lists also ultimately depend on a server that holds the discussion archive and a well-known address for new users to send a "add my email" request. This is not entirely correct. The fault lies in the assumed importance of the list. When I send a kernel patch, I send it to the maintainer, then CC anyone I myself think should be involved, and finally CC the relevant lists (plural). The list acts as f…

>The fault lies in the assumed importance of the list.

The "importance" of the mailing list I'm trying to emphasize is the Schelling Point. This is the social discovery aspect you're not addressing.

Let's dissect your following example:

>When I send a kernel patch, I send it to the maintainer, then CC anyone I myself think should be involved, and finally CC the relevant lists (plural). The list acts as feed for lurkers, and as an archive.

The list also acts as a Schelling Point to coordinate and consolidate public discussions.

And consider the seemingly trivial action of "I send it to the maintainer". We have to unpack some hidden steps in that. How does a new contributor -- or a new non-contributing non-programmer enduser who just wants to file a bug request -- get a list of maintainers' email addresses ex nihilo[1]? A mailing list also has a Schelling Point aspect where people can discover email addresses of maintainers.

Right now, the yt-dl.org About[2] webpage is broken and therefore doesn't show the maintainers. I don't know the email address of the current youtube-dl maintainer and Google search results[3] don't quickly reveal it.

- "github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl" acted as a Schelling Point

- "yt-dl.org" also acted as Schelling Point

How would new people easily discover the maintainers' email addresses without any Schelling Points?

>It's a minor inconvenience at best, and mostly to those that were not part of the development flow

I disagree. Today, if I notice a bug where youtube-dl is broken, I don't have a canonical place to report the issue. Somebody said the official maintainer moved the repo to Gitlab -- but when I search Google for "youtube-dl gitlab" and click the top link[4], the repo owner says "I'll wait to see what happens with the GitHub repository and the current maintainer before I do anything with this clone."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_nihilo

[2] https://yt-dl.org/about.html

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube-dl+maintainer+email+...

[4] https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#123

Post by colejohnson66 »

optimuspaul wrote: post #120

am I the only one that doesn't support YouTube-dl? Are there use cases for it that are not downloading content that is not your own?

Valid question! On first thought, you would think the only reason to use it would be for media you don’t own (if you own it, you’d already have a copy). And you are probably correct. However there are valid reasons for doing so: many people have posted here that they use it for journalism (fair use) among other things.

I do remember years back, LinusTechTips admitted that their video archives were just on hard drives scattered around the building. So if they needed a clip from a previous video, they’d just download the video from YouTube and “crop” down to the clip they needed.[a]

[a]: They mentioned this in a video where there were building their “Vault” server that eventually turned into “Petabyte Project.”

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#124

Post by marcrosoft »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #119
AlexandrB wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >"Time for a decentralized version control system?" I have to laugh at this one. Git is a decentralized VCS, that was effectively re-centralized (via Github) for the sake of convenience.

I’ve heard this over and over, but I never understood it. How is Git supposed to be decentralized when you push and pull from one place? Would you just set up multiple “origins” with each one pointing to a head maintainer’s computer (and named appropriately)? Because that sounds like a massive pain compared to a centralized system like GitHub. Of course, there is the benefit of a VCS built on the idea of decentraliza…

People push and pull from one place by convention but it was designed to pull from anywhere. The problem is PRs, issues, code review etc has become centralized. As far as the code goes they just need to host all code at their own domain and use GitHub and other services as a mirror.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#125

Post by tweetle_beetle »

chmod775 wrote: post #53
mrtksn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the lawyers will move on when the thing becomes hard enough to use and gets contained to few techies showing off to their few friends and calling it a victory. The issue is that anything that scales needs an infrastructure and infrastructures can be extralegal only if they are not worth the time of the guys with the guns.

> Probably the lawyers will move on when the thing becomes hard enough to use and gets contained few techies showing off to their few friends and calling it a victory. youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways, and they specifically took down the code repository. On top of that youtube-dl is a commandline tool. This is not your typical "google how do I netflix" end-user. You can bootstrap an application tha…

> youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways

This is just speculation, but I think that there may have been a tipping point reached where it is no longer being just used by CLI "techies". It has been incorporated into other tools which appeal to a much wider userbase - many of whom will never know they are using it behind the scenes.

For example, there is: a user-friendly front-end for it in Kodi [1], an easy to use web interface [2], a polished desktop app [3], etc.

I suspect it's not so much the original CLI which they care about, but the lowering of the barrier to entry for "everyone else".

[1] https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl [2] https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube [3] https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#126

Post by mr_mitm »

jbotz wrote: post #64
DJHenk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean with "real" decentralization? Git is as decentralized as you can get. You don't need IPFS to make it decentralized, it's already there. It was designed that way. A lot of people are confused about this because GitHub and GitLab are the only intermediaries they've used to collaborate with git. If that applies to you and you would like to know better, read this: https://drewdevault.com/2019/05/24/What-…

I was pretty clear in what I said: Gitea and Gitlab are centralized. Git itself is neither centralized nor decentralized by design, it merely provides an infrastructure for replication and is agnostic about whether or not there is a "center" to the space of replicas. It depends on how you use it... but in practice the way it is used in nearly all projects is that there is one "main" (authoritative) upstream repo for…

I'm amazed at the number of people who can't seem to grasp the difference between Git and GitHub/Gitea/Gitlab, on Hacker News of all places.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#127

Post by sidpatil »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #119
AlexandrB wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >"Time for a decentralized version control system?" I have to laugh at this one. Git is a decentralized VCS, that was effectively re-centralized (via Github) for the sake of convenience.

I’ve heard this over and over, but I never understood it. How is Git supposed to be decentralized when you push and pull from one place? Would you just set up multiple “origins” with each one pointing to a head maintainer’s computer (and named appropriately)? Because that sounds like a massive pain compared to a centralized system like GitHub. Of course, there is the benefit of a VCS built on the idea of decentraliza…

> Would you just set up multiple “origins” with each one pointing to a head maintainer’s computer (and named appropriately)?

That's one way of doing it. There are others as well.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-W...

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#128

Post by jononor »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #119
AlexandrB wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >"Time for a decentralized version control system?" I have to laugh at this one. Git is a decentralized VCS, that was effectively re-centralized (via Github) for the sake of convenience.

I’ve heard this over and over, but I never understood it. How is Git supposed to be decentralized when you push and pull from one place? Would you just set up multiple “origins” with each one pointing to a head maintainer’s computer (and named appropriately)? Because that sounds like a massive pain compared to a centralized system like GitHub. Of course, there is the benefit of a VCS built on the idea of decentraliza…

"Fully offline capable" would be a better term than "decentralized" when describing git.

But, one relatively decentralized workflow that git has good support for is sending patches via email (git format-patch, git am). I believe the Linux kernel still does a large amount of its collaboration that way.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#129

Post by wing-_-nuts »

optimuspaul wrote: post #120

am I the only one that doesn't support YouTube-dl? Are there use cases for it that are not downloading content that is not your own?

There are all sorts of legit uses. There are some videos I've uploaded that I've long ago lost the original source to. Also, if I wanted to go home and see my parents, it's probably better if I download the ted talks, youtube videos etc that I might like to watch on my personal connection than theirs.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#130

Post by TrueDuality »

jasode wrote: post #37

Some example comments in this thread: >"People should move their youbube-dl repositories to servers hosted in Switzerland, " >"Time for a decentralized version control system?" >"The nice thing about fossil" ... those well-meaning suggestions are missing the true difficulty : The community wants a (1) Schelling Point [0] for workflow/issues/discussions/PRs that's also (2) censorship resistant. So far, (1) and (2) con…

I'd be curious if Mastodon could be extended to support this. It's not entirely censorship resistant but it at least diffuses the ownership and control.
Post reply on HN