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This analogy is completely off. A closer analogy is someone calls you on your phone letting you know they're here. You were expecting them, so you say "come on in." But, they were at the back door instead of the front door. I don't think anyone would consider that your friend did something illegal.
Yeah, the CFAA doesn't work by analogy unfortunately.
This is awesome, but I'm not sure what the long-term use case for the intersection of low-latency integration and non-production-stable is? I'm saying this as someone with way more experience than I'd like to in using reverse-engineered APIs as part of production products... You inevitably run into breakages, sometimes even actively hostile platforms, which will degrade user experience as users wait for your 1day win…
New pipe breaks regularly. It's almost like YouTube changes the API on purpose to hurt 3rd party clients that don't show ads.
I think it's pretty likely that they just don't look at or test Newpipe when they change their APIs. If the change doesn't break any official clients, it goes through.
With how large Youtube is, I iimagine API changes are not infrequent.
The best ideas are ones that start off with an internal painpoint. Congrats!
Anyway a lot of good points here about legalities she shifting APIs, but I think there are plenty of situations where this is great and none of that applies.
How do you keep up with the maintenance?
In my experience reverse engineering is often the easy bit, or at least easy compared to what follows: maintenance. Knowing both when and how it fails when it fails (eg in cases like when the API stops returning any results but is still otherwise valid). Knowing when the response has changed in a way that is subtle to detect, like they changed the format of a single field, which may still parse correctly but is now i…
From our experience, reverse engineering is still less prone to breakage compared to traditional browser automation. But we definitely want to make integrations even more reliable with maintenance features.
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I have to disagree, it is definitely not legal in the US to use unauthorized access points to access authorized data. Thats like saying you're allowed to get into your apartment through breaking your neighbors door and climbing between the windows In the US this is pretty simply covered by Computer Misuse Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, both federal laws Im not claiming you're liable, just surprised no lawyer p…
If my browser is downloading some data, then what’s the difference if my AI agent is doing the same? I’ll even tell you it’s my browser. Who are you to say what qualifies as a browser?
Computer programmers are not legal experts lol. The law is not a program.
The difference between you accessing it and a computer accessing it makes these things different.
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If my browser is downloading some data, then what’s the difference if my AI agent is doing the same? I’ll even tell you it’s my browser. Who are you to say what qualifies as a browser?
The law will say what qualifies as a browser. Computer programmers are not legal experts lol. The law is not a program. The difference between you accessing it and a computer accessing it makes these things different.