This is great news for tutorial sites. I wonder if channels like 'Lockpicking Lawyer' will also get targeted?
It's only a matter of time. When LPL gets ousted, I'm going wherever he's going.
YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
31–40 of 182 posts
Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#32This is great news for tutorial sites. I wonder if channels like 'Lockpicking Lawyer' will also get targeted?
I can see that happening. And then what next? Rossmann mac repair?
Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#33Time to mirror and self host your channel. Check out my open source package iSpooge Live on GitHub... it’s git a script to download, HLS encode for 3 playback rates, and generate a static site that’s all tuned for a CDN. Been using it for over a year myself.
>iSpooge
That is a really unfortunate name. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spooge
Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#34Time to mirror and self host your channel. Check out my open source package iSpooge Live on GitHub... it’s git a script to download, HLS encode for 3 playback rates, and generate a static site that’s all tuned for a CDN. Been using it for over a year myself.
You might want to reconsider the project name if you expect anyone to take it seriously. Especially with how you add "Powered by FreshSpooge" to the sites.
Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#35This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…
I put together this website over the past three or four days partly as a response to the same feeling.
But also because I was bored and googled for the old StumbleUpon and was surprised to discover it no longer seems to exist.
Basically my goal here is to find a bunch of weird, random, and unique sites and give people a way to randomly explore or adventure through them.
Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#36This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…
Now is your chance to start one with whatever videos you can snag off YouTube before they're gone.
Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#37I feel like more and more educational youtubers are going to be moving to platforms like Skillshare, Brilliant, and other next-gen educational/learning subscription services that already sponsor them, more or less because they're undoubtedly going to be fairly compensated for their work on those platforms vs. YouTube, and catering to an audience that is passionate about learning and doesn't post asinine troll comments.
YouTube is undergoing the same transformation that happened to TLC, Discovery, and The History Channel; toy reviews, mainstream media and music, zany (yet soulless) influencers, and good-for-all-audiences content are ruling the platform because they bring in the most most advertising revenue, creating a beautiful moment in time, creating a lot of value for shareholders.
Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#38Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#39I learned security from t-files, 8lgm, phrack, and bugtraq. The people who taught me learned it from mentorship. The only meaningful progress in security is by people who work against it. It's a craft subculture, and the real value of it is in securing the freedom of people to not be subjects of platforms.
YouTube is lame for doing this, but it's a net positive for innovation.
Let them have their walled suburb. Innovation happens at the edges, and the social-sphere had made people lazy. The bar for entry to being a hacker is so low, it's the equivalent to governments setting up programs to train people to play punk music.
Tech giants have become like baby boomers who still think they are rebels.
I look forward to a new generation of kids who will spit upon their hands, hoist the black flag and make hacking dangerous again.
Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
#40This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…
Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios. This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the fi…
YouTube has helped to improve the product, but I am of the opinion that the most of the best YouTube channels are produced by a single person who post weekly at most. They seem to have struck a good balance between audience
engagement and information value. Consider Ben Eater or Technology Connections videos. The former may be more education oriented while the latter is well geared towards my quirky tastes in entertainment, yet both of these are producers who clearly respect their audiences by being interesting and to the point.
In contrast, the channels that have large production crews and publish more regularly usually feel thin on content. There is either very little value to the information or the density of information is incredibly low. There are exceptions. Vox comes to mind because they clearly respect their audience, has many more people involved in production, and produces more polished videos.
Yet those exceptions feel rare. More often than not I find new channels through those small time producers, either directly from the creator or through YouTube's automated recommendation while watching an interesting channel.
Now Google is sanitizing educational hacking videos, which is disconcerting because a lot of those videos are either lectures or produced by small producers. Google is probably doing that to protect their reputation, and there are likely cases when I would agree that it is a good thing. On the other hand, hacking is filled with a lot of grey areas. I enjoy some of those educational videos because it offers a glimpse into how hardware and software works, or demonstrates some interesting uses of everyday software. (At least for a Unix user, The other day, I was watching a video on reverse engineering firmware where I have regularly used all but one of the Unix utilities in the demonstration.) If Google takes that option away one of the best avenues for discoverability disappears. That hurts audiences and producers.