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Grayjay Desktop App

grayjay.app

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Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#201

Post by pmontra »

johan914 wrote: post #31
duxup wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding content is so hard. All YouTube wants me to watch are "OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS COP DID" content. I have no idea why they want me to watch those videos, I never do and I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming ... All I get are ads for weird suspect drugs and products, just going on these platforms is such a bad vibe.

YouTube has become especially horrific. It seems a couple years ago they gave up on video search- after 5 videos it will suddenly start recommending random videos under “you may like”. If I watch one UFC video I am flooded with recommendations of Joe Rogan, despite my subscriptions all being unrelated.

No idea about who Joe Rogan is, maybe because I'm not American and because I use YouTube via NewPipe on Android, almost never inside a browser on my laptop and anyway never logged in with my account.

NewPipe doesn't need an account. I can subscribe to channels, bookmark videos and save them to playlists. It's all I need.

Not having an account has the disadvantage that I don't have a common list of videos across my devices. I could export and import but it's too inconvenient. I just share videos to the other device if I have to, via KDE Connect.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#202

Post by pmontra »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #164
Joe_Cool wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't use any API (at least the YouTube plugin). So they are (according to their lawyers) not bound to any TOS. All it does is open the page (like a browser) and grab it and only show stuff to the user that's "relevant". You can check it yourself, while it is not "open-source" or "free" in the usual sense its source is available. More details from Rossmann himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqTYg6vnQvw edi…

Grayjay may not be bound to TOS but users of Grayjay are still accessing YouTube services in a way YouTube would prefer they didn't. OTOH videos are available without having to log in or having an account at all so I don't know if there's any implicit agreement between someone accessing a URL and the service provider.

I don't think that's a problem: you can browse to YouTube's home page and search for and watch videos without logging in. Grayjay is just another user agent, as if it was another web browser.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#203

Post by moeffju »

josephcsible wrote: post #134

Please remove "Also available on FDroid" from the page. This app is not available on F-Droid and isn't allowed to be added to it since it isn't open source.

Maybe F-Droid should just call their official blessed repo "F-Repo" to end the confusion, because this is clearly available through F-Droid, just not in the F-Droid official repo...

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#204

Post by [deleted] »

bisby wrote: post #190
karlgkk wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're launching it as "Portable", and you're launching it from your home directory, it's going to place the mutable data in the current directory. This is very standard for portable apps. So no, "portable" is not what you want. If you launch it as non-portable and it drops a folder in ~, then that is a problem.

In both modes it creates a ~/Grayjay directory, even when launching from ~/tmp/grayjay/Grayjay.Desktop-linux-x64-v2/ so ~/Grayjay was inevitable. In portable mode it makes the directory and does nothing with it. In non-portable mode it dumps a ton of data into the directory. I didn't pay attention to what the data actually was. So yes you're probably right. But either way, Portable mode isn't behaving portably becaus…

[deleted]

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#205

Post by lrvick »

I love the right to repair work Louis Rossmann does, and this project goal as a whole, but this license is a major step backwards for software distribution with high assurances of security, freedom and privacy.

Debian, Arch, Guix, F-droid or any other independent signed reproducible build channels require a true Open Source license to function legally.

The license thus forces users to download unsigned non-reproducible binaries off grayjay servers and trust blindly that their build server is creating binaries from exactly the published code and not compromised to inject tracking or malware not in the public repo (an increasingly common attack they may not even know about for years!). Or say the grayjay domain is hijacked or even a BGP attack or a LAN MITM. All sorts of ways they could be helping distribute malware and not know it with no signatures or reproducible build proofs.

Thing is, your team would not have to solve these problems if you licensed it so the community could solve them for you, as we do for thousands of open source software projects.

I really want to see a project like this take off and would gladly donate, but only if it can be opened up for accountability via third party compilation and distribution channels so it can never be backdoored or co-opted for surveillance if your leadership or release engineers are ever compromised.

Said license: https://github.com/futo-org/Grayjay.Desktop?tab=License-1-ov...

There are other licenses like AGPL that would kill any attempt for someone to rip your code off to make their own proprietary offering, without locking yourself out of established freedom, security, and privacy preserving software distribution channels.

If anyone from the team is reading this, I would be happy to detail and discuss my concerns further as a software supply chain security specialist. Hit me up.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#206

Post by lrvick »

moeffju wrote: post #203
josephcsible wrote: post #134

Please remove "Also available on FDroid" from the page. This app is not available on F-Droid and isn't allowed to be added to it since it isn't open source.

Maybe F-Droid should just call their official blessed repo "F-Repo" to end the confusion, because this is clearly available through F-Droid, just not in the F-Droid official repo...

Being able to side-load a random unsigned binary via the fdroid app, or getting it from the F-Droid repository where they do independently signed (and ideally reproducible) builds, are very different things.

The F-droid team does not have a high bar to be dicks. They do it to ensure their users get binaries that match the published code to prevent increasingly supply chain attacks.

The standards are there for good reason, and if you do not understand those reasons, then use a license that allows the people that do understand to distribute your software for you.

Very very few software engineers understand supply chain attacks or how to prevent them.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#207

Post by gtsop »

Suppafly wrote: post #194
freedomben wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent is not wrong, but definitely could have some improved manners and tact. As a linux user I wanted to make sure to say thank you for supporting and thinking about linux!

>Parent is not wrong, but definitely could have some improved manners and tact. I don't understand the weird tone policing that people are trying to do, there is literally nothing wrong with the parent's comment and pretending otherwise is weird.

I didn't see it as tone policing. From my point of view, I saw a very interesting application being shared and I hoped it would be good and prosperous so i can use it. When the first comment says "i hate that you do X" it is a bit discouraging towards a team of developers who have probably poured tons of free hours into making this. Words play with psychology, and it is my personal interest that these devs have good morale to make this app great, and that meand giving them feedback about obvious mistakes in a tone that does not hurt this morale. I hope that make sense

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#208

Post by exikyut »

SquareWheel wrote: post #172
coconut08 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where it says available on fdroid it links to their personal fdroid repository. plenty of projects both open source and not have their own fdroid repository. fdroid is both a repository that only allows open source software and a packaging infrastructure tool for people hosting their own repositories. based on the fact their claim that they are on fdroid literally hyperlinks to their fdroid repository i don't see how…

Yep, as a user I didn't find it confusing at all. F-Droid is designed for and around adding custom repos. FUTO links to their own repo and it all works fine. I'd definitely consider this as being "available on F-Droid".

Should say "Available Via", that would further reinforce the status quo.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#209

Post by easyKL »

pmontra wrote: post #201
johan914 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has become especially horrific. It seems a couple years ago they gave up on video search- after 5 videos it will suddenly start recommending random videos under “you may like”. If I watch one UFC video I am flooded with recommendations of Joe Rogan, despite my subscriptions all being unrelated.

No idea about who Joe Rogan is, maybe because I'm not American and because I use YouTube via NewPipe on Android, almost never inside a browser on my laptop and anyway never logged in with my account. NewPipe doesn't need an account. I can subscribe to channels, bookmark videos and save them to playlists. It's all I need. Not having an account has the disadvantage that I don't have a common list of videos across my de…

On your desktop please try Freetube. You can also import your NewPipe backup (history and subscriptions) Freetube will also allow you to have different profiles, that you could use one per device and regularly import their backups.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#210

Post by harryvederci »

Arnavion wrote: post #144

For anyone who wants a lo-fi solution to subscribing to a youtube channel without having to deal with the youtube.com website, every channel has a built-in Atom feed that contains an entry for each video. My pipeline for watching subscribed channels is to just run a feed reader in one terminal (newsboat) and then copy-paste new videos from that into an adjacent terminal running a loop that runs `yt-dlp` on each paste…

You can use yt-dlp to get:

- the channel id by youtube channel url

- the duration + aspect ratio (- whether or not it's a live / future video

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