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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

#351

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. 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…

> So we get these laws that say, "solve the problem", and there isn't a way to solve the problem.

To give another obvious example of this pattern, there's "Make a crypto system which only lets the good guys in, not the bad guys".

In both cases, there's a "think of the children" imperative attached, but at least with laws about age restrictions there's more of a chance that the politicians' true goal isn't mass surveillance.

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

#352
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

is it just me, or are downvoters abusing their power to suppress divergent opinion?

Yup, and as per the Internet's one golden rule (of which we have at least a dozen), "Do not (ab)use downvotes to disagree, put your disagreement in writing or stay silent".

It is frowned upon here, but not against the rules. Downvotes on HN should, optimally, only be used to downvote comments that truly do not add anything to the conversation constructively.

qwerty's comment, imo, was constructive, as that is a common use case of ytdl: to watch a video without being explicitly tracked by Youtube; although Youtube still does track you, but in ways that probably violate EU law, and might violate US law too.

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

#353

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…

I'm not saying that the law requires that YouTube does this, all I'm saying is that this policy is the result of the AVMSD. Without the extensions to the AVMSD, Google would not have implemented this behaviour. You can argue that they've implemented an intentionally awful way to comply just to spite the politicians, or that they're overthinking the law, but there's still a direct relation between the update of the directive and the change in YouTube's policies.

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

#354

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…

youtube-dl does have “—-username” and “—-password” flags, or will prompt for a password if you just specify “-u”. https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#authentication-option... But as of a couple days ago it wasn’t working for age-restricted videos.

That is for HTTP auth.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The sentiment behind this sentence is the driving motivation for almost every single bad tech law on the Internet. Programmers aren't magic, there are limits to what they can and can't do. Almost every bad tech law starts out with…

> it comes from this belief that if you just require things, they'll magically happen

We should be somewhat sympathetic that non-experts may not know the difference between a possible and an impossible technical goal, and we have to accept that for a politician there isn't much electoral advantage to be gained from trying to explain the difference to their voters.

However, each time I hear an impossible goal proposed, I can't help imagining the politician saying "We managed to land people on the Moon and return them safely, so surely we can do the same with the Sun now."

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

#357
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Interesting, when does Apple ask for a cc for age verification? I don't think I've come across that UI. Edit: Looks like it might be an EU thing?

Not an EU thing.

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

#358
post #339

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…

I'm born in whatever far back year forms will let me choose in most internet services, over a 100 years old in a lot of cases, I assumed everyone did this.

Never had the patience to go all the way to the top, so I'm typically born in .

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

#359
post #343
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe it has to come to this to get a usable device for a growing segment of the population. Old people practically need their own IT department fighting for their best interests with how predatory tech companies have been towards them. They are SOL if their kid isn't a techie.

You should try using android trackphones. The instant it connects to a network it will download gigabytes of crap and launch it in the background. It doesn't matter what you're trying to do, whatever it is will get killed because all the malware needs more memory. Apps you want to install will be added to the end of the long queue. The (expensive!) cellular data will be instantly burned through by Facebook and friend…

The things that you complain about are the reasons why Apple has become the most valuable company in the world.

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

#360
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try using android trackphones. The instant it connects to a network it will download gigabytes of crap and launch it in the background. It doesn't matter what you're trying to do, whatever it is will get killed because all the malware needs more memory. Apps you want to install will be added to the end of the long queue. The (expensive!) cellular data will be instantly burned through by Facebook and friend…

The things that you complain about are the reasons why Apple has become the most valuable company in the world.

Apple has become the most valuable company in the world because they own everyone's computers so anyone that wants to publish commercial software has to bend over for them.

They're not valuable because of any service they provide.

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