The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues • Hacker News Board

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#61

Post by thristian » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 6:43 AM UTC

hunterb123 wrote: post #45

heinrich5991 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What wasn't maintained for you? >In that I mean what feature was missing or broken for you? youtube-dl got throttled, it took ages to download videos from Youtube.

Interesting. How did they identify youtube-dl to throttle it, and what was the workaround?

YouTube throttles the download speed of videos to the real-time playback speed. It also provides (if I recall correctly) a random token and a JS blob; if the client executes the JS and passes in the token, it gets another random token as output that if passed along with a request will unthrottle the downloads speed. As a result, full-speed downloads are only available to clients that can safely execute untrusted JS, which is mostly web-browsers and not command-line tools.

I believe the way yt-dlp works is that somebody manually ported the JS blob code to Python, which gets things working but leaves a lot of scope for arms-race escalation in future.

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#62

Post by johnny22 » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 6:49 AM UTC

branon wrote: post #7

colejohnson66 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone know why they block HN referral requests?

[flagged]

> He thinks he's unique.

The problem is that so many people on HN think that but end up spouting the same opinion. I'm sure that gets tiring to deal with after while.

I'm not famous, but I'm sure I'd be super annoyed to have the same 3 opinions spouted at me over and over and over again.

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#63

Post by vmception » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 6:53 AM UTC

“no copyright infringement” is clearly inaccurate but also isn’t a relevant standard here

so strange to try to reach a goal of less copyright infringement by going after access to this codebase

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#64

Post by na85 » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 6:54 AM UTC

colejohnson66 wrote: post #15

blendergeek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you click through to JWZ from HN, you will see an NSFW picture with the following text underneath: > Hackers News: A DDos by finance obsessed man-children and brogrammers.

“A DDOS” (aka the “hug of death”) makes sense, but “man children and brogrammers”?

>man children and brogrammers

Accurate description of a significant portion of this site's userbase.

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#65

Post by adhesive_wombat » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 6:54 AM UTC

CactusOnFire wrote: post #48

r3muxd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish something could be done about it all.

Use linux? My next PC I am making the switch.

Dual boot on your current PC, no time like the present.

Bonus: you add years to the useful life of the machine, because most Linuxes fly even when Windows chugs.

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#66

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 6:56 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #49

stuu99 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it Well if you've bought any client-server app over the last 23 years its a bit too late for computing freedom. They are locking down IO with trusted computing, there's been a 23+ year initiative to move to encrypted computing to take input/output control away from the user, this required the co-operation of hardware manufacturers. Windows 10 and…

So, if I don’t use Windows then I’m fine?

You'll be locked out of using your hardware's full potential, same goes for the software and media you use, too. Look at how Nvidia already locks nouveau developers out of using their GPUs' full power with cryptography.

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#67

Post by onion2k » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 6:56 AM UTC

askura wrote: post #13

jedberg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before when his posts got on the front page his own comments section would fill up with people who don't agree with him. He did not like this, so he made it slightly more difficult to see his content so that most people would just give up. Basically he only wants people who agree with him to read and respond to his content.

Pretty sad way to live your life to be honest. Healthy discussion and reflection is what stops you turning into a pillock and more people need it.

Healthy discussion..

I suspect it wasn't that though. When someone clicks on an HN link to an article, and chooses to leave a comment on the article rather than discuss it on HN (or as well as) they're probably not posting a nuanced and we'll reasoned point. They're likely just firing some sort of flamebait rubbish rather than participating in a discussion. If that happened every time your site was linked from HN you'd get tired of it very quickly and start to think HN is full of man-children and brogrammers.

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#68

Post by onion2k » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #57

askura wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sad way to live your life to be honest. Healthy discussion and reflection is what stops you turning into a pillock and more people need it.

Nah, not listening to the opinions of morons is crucial. 16% of the population has an IQ less than 85. Listening to them is a way to ruin your life.

The implication of that statistic is that 4 in every 25 people you meet are statistically not worth listening to.

I can assure you the number of people you should ignore is way higher than that.

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#69

Post by jimbob45 » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 7:01 AM UTC

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #65

CactusOnFire wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use linux? My next PC I am making the switch.

Dual boot on your current PC, no time like the present. Bonus: you add years to the useful life of the machine, because most Linuxes fly even when Windows chugs.

Fifteen minutes to get up and running with Ubuntu or Mint if you stay focused. A lot of people don’t realize that LibreOffice, Steam, and Discord are all fully usable on Linux these days.

Re: The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues

#70

Post by bryanrasmussen » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 7:07 AM UTC

infogulch wrote: post #26

MereInterest wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the most recent legal argument was the 2019 hiQ Labs Inc v LinkedIn Corp[0], in which the Ninth Circuit found web scraping to be legal, and forbid LinkedIn from blocking web scrapers. The exact same argument can be made for accessing YouTube via youtube-dl. The article does indicate that the decision in hiQ v LinkedIn was vacated by SCOTUS following the 2021 Van Buren v United States [0], to be retried by t…

Discussed on HN before: Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal hacking (2020) [1] (probably other discussions as well). My comment on this one: > ... it's the webmaster's own responsibility to "just not serve" if they don't want it to be served, and their failure to implement their own desires as software doesn't suddenly give them carte blanche to claim whatever they want was breaking the law. ...…

>The fact that Microsoft is too lazy to implement a solution that effectively implements their desired policy isn't material to what the actually implemented policy enables

This implies that at some point someone would be able to say, we have tried to implement a policy, we have spent this many man hours of engineers, we have had 5 different solutions that were broken through, at some point these things must become hacking.