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YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

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Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#321

Post by littlestymaar »

swiley wrote: post #46
toto444 wrote: post #14

A few days ago, I clicked an age restricted video on Youtube and usually I just state that I am above 18 but now they ask for a credit card number or an identity card to prove it. I am not going to send this just to watch some random video clip that users have declared not appropriate to a young audience because it features a zombie. Seriously!

You work so hard explaining to your friends good infosec practice like not just typing their credit card in because some site wants to "verify their age" and then Google and Apple just go and fuck around with stuff like this. At this point the best advice you can give your friends is "stay the fuck away from computers unless you're willing to sit down and read a bunch of FOSSS manuals."

Related anecdote: A few years ago, my father bought a android tablet to my grand parents (both 85+). After watching them use it for a few minutes, I realized how user hostile the technical world has become: tons of ads popping up and asking for your attention (“click me”, “download x”, “make your device run faster”, etc).

This and apps “redesigned” every few month, breaking the workflow they've struggled to learn (they usually needed to follow the hand-written note, they had taken when I showed them how to do).

They've used it a bit more than a year, with occasional breakage, and they now have stopped completely.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#322

Post by danShumway »

delusional wrote: post #198
jeroenhd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the age restriction credit card thing (inside the EU) is the result of some stupid law change (the Audiovisual Media Services Directive). Google probably doesn't want to validate users' age (because selling ads to impressionable kids is very lucrative) but they have to now.

I'm so tired of tech people saying "it has to suck because the law requires it", when they clearly haven't read it. You hear it all the time when discussing tracking banners or ID verification. NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck, and most laws give you plenty of leeway in how you implement it. This is really not personal, but I HATE the argument. Take this as an example. The AVMSD isn't new, it…

> NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck,

This is kind of an excuse though, because I have never seen an implementation of an age gate online that isn't kind of awful. You either make something that is trivial for kids to bypass, or you make something that is invasive, like Youtube's system.

So we get these laws that say, "solve the problem", and there isn't a way to solve the problem. But criticism of the law or criticism of the law's outcomes aren't allowed because the law doesn't technically require that your solution to be terrible. It just asks you to do something that's impossible to do well without violating someone's privacy.

In the US (at least for a while) this was solved by pretending that self-reported ages are an effective way to protect kids. And we pretended that would at least reduce exposure to this kind of content, even though in practice it has basically no impact at all. But if the law doesn't care about effectiveness, then why have the law in the first place? So we raise the standards a bit so that the law has some teeth. But again, nobody has ever in any context demonstrated a working age gate to me online that doesn't involve violating someone's privacy or collecting identifying information about them like a credit card or ID.

So it doesn't actually matter whether or not the law says the solution has to be terrible. The only outcomes that are possible from these laws are either ineffective solutions or invasive solutions. If there is only one method to accomplish an outcome, then requiring the outcome is effectively the same as requiring the method.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#323

Post by 63 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #316
alphabet9000 wrote: post #309

As someone else mentioned in the comments, the "get cookies.txt" [0] extension works to circumvent the age restricted measure and i have been using it with success for weeks now. get the extension, export the cookies.txt file to a folder, then run youtube-dl in that folder with: youtube-dl --cookies cookies.txt https://youtu.be/id it works as of right this minute [1] and in my experience that cookie continues to work…

But I don't want to use the cookies, I used youtube-dl exactly to watch age-restricted videos without signing-in. I don't want YouTube to track which videos I watch and make history-based suggestions so I never sign-in and reset cookies often. I occasionally stumble upon age-restricted videos and feel curious what's there but I don't want any of them to influence what does YouTube believe my interests are so I just u…

This feels a bit overdramatic. You can remove videos from your watch history and, in my experience, YouTube will cease to give you recommendations based on them. You could also create a separate account used solely for watching videos with YouTube-dl instead of using your main one if you're worried about recommendations. I agree that it sucks that a workaround is necessary, but I don't think this particular one is worth getting too worked up about.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#324

Post by syshum »

swiley wrote: post #46
toto444 wrote: post #14

A few days ago, I clicked an age restricted video on Youtube and usually I just state that I am above 18 but now they ask for a credit card number or an identity card to prove it. I am not going to send this just to watch some random video clip that users have declared not appropriate to a young audience because it features a zombie. Seriously!

You work so hard explaining to your friends good infosec practice like not just typing their credit card in because some site wants to "verify their age" and then Google and Apple just go and fuck around with stuff like this. At this point the best advice you can give your friends is "stay the fuck away from computers unless you're willing to sit down and read a bunch of FOSSS manuals."

Blame Government not Google and Apple.

I hate both, but this is purely a function of terrible regulations

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#325

Post by alerighi »

Spivak wrote: post #81
wyager wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is parents’ job, not Google’s. If you legally require Google to act like a parent, they have to do it to everyone.

Sounds good. Say I'm a non-technical parent that wants to give my child access to YouTube but not allow them to watch content that they're not old enough to consume on their own. How should I do this? I want to give them the freedom to explore topics they're interested in so downloading some pre-approved videos isn't going to work. And my kid is smart and will realize that any account-specific setting can trivially b…

Your argument doesn't make sense. There are a huge number of sites that host adult content that are easily accessible by a simple Google search. What can you do?

> What should I do? Not allowing my kids access to the internet at all is a non-answer in 2020. Hell it was a non-answer in 1995.

A non-answer is not allowing everyone else to surf the web without giving their credit card or ID to every website that hosts adult content. It would have a huge impact on privacy of the users and the freedom of the whole internet in general.

A parent should educate their children, but I know that is simpler to set a bunch of restriction, give to the children a computer, and let him sit hours in front of YouTube while you do something else.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#326

Post by Seattle3503 »

63 wrote: post #323
qwerty456127 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't want to use the cookies, I used youtube-dl exactly to watch age-restricted videos without signing-in. I don't want YouTube to track which videos I watch and make history-based suggestions so I never sign-in and reset cookies often. I occasionally stumble upon age-restricted videos and feel curious what's there but I don't want any of them to influence what does YouTube believe my interests are so I just u…

This feels a bit overdramatic. You can remove videos from your watch history and, in my experience, YouTube will cease to give you recommendations based on them. You could also create a separate account used solely for watching videos with YouTube-dl instead of using your main one if you're worried about recommendations. I agree that it sucks that a workaround is necessary, but I don't think this particular one is wo…

Does this work in practice? Most websites require text verification for accounts. With that they can just link separate accounts in the back end.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#327

Post by rorykoehler »

bejelentkezni wrote: post #295
rorykoehler wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the videos start in potato quality for me now. What is going on? Surely they can afford the bandwidth of all services?

If you mean a low resolution, you can use any of several browser extensions (I like Iridium) to automatically "manually" select the resolution right when the page loads for every video, and this will also increase your maximum buffer from 20 seconds (?) to 2 minutes, which is nice if you're on wifi. If you mean on high resolutions the videos still look terrible, that's because the av1 versions of many videos look ver…

Thanks for the tips. Will give the AV1 setting a shot. By Iridium do you mean "Iridium for Youtube"? It seems it's not maintained anymore? TBH this functionality was default working on Youtube for me until recently and suddenly stopped. I'm on a 4g based wifi at home (long story) so maybe this is the issue but it 1) only just started happening in the past 2 weeks and 2) really shouldn't be an issue as the speeds are pretty good. Everytime I switch to 1080 or higher even there is no buffering issue at all.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#328

Post by jdminhbg »

delusional wrote: post #319
kllrnohj wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so tired of tech people saying "it has to suck because the law requires it", when they clearly haven't read it. [..] The AVMSD isn't new, it was codified in 2010. It has a website[1] You know, if you were going to rant about people not reading things, you probably should have first validated your own assumptions. AVMSD was just updated ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a... ) which ju…

> if you were going to rant about people not reading things, you probably should have first validated your own assumptions I did, but I didn't stumble on this revision. Now that you linked it, I see hints everywhere that I should have noticed the first time around. Thanks for bringing it up. Although, I'm rather unhappy if my rant was taken to be about reading comprehension though. It really wasn't. I'm annoyed at pe…

> I don't think it's on my to find a better implementation for YouTube, but with all the smart engineers they have access to, I would think they could come up with something less intrusive.

So you don't even have any idea what a better implementation might look like, not even a completely technically infeasible one? And the thousands of smart YouTube engineers, whose jobs revolve around making access to content frictionless to the point of being accused of making it addictive, just haven't thought "we should make this not suck?"

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#329

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

miles wrote: post #310

The title should be updated to indicate that this change only affects EU-based IP addresses: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/28578#issuecom... https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/28578#issuecom...

It's definitely affecting at least some US users some of the time.

Re: YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

#330

Post by junon »

toto444 wrote: post #14

A few days ago, I clicked an age restricted video on Youtube and usually I just state that I am above 18 but now they ask for a credit card number or an identity card to prove it. I am not going to send this just to watch some random video clip that users have declared not appropriate to a young audience because it features a zombie. Seriously!

A screenshot: https://twitter.com/bad_at_computer/status/13996876854810583...

I got hit with it too. I even have a youtube premium subscription - they already have my card on file.

Google is so incredibly evil.

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