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Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

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Re: Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

#61
post #37
post #12

Domains are an area where blockchain technology could help a lot. A domain could cost a fixed amount of X per month. So you could pay 100 years upfront and be sure to not lose it in that timeframe. To move a domain,the registrar and the owner could have to sign the move. So it would not be possible anymore to lose a domain due to the regsitrar making a mistake.

Can you explain in detail what problem blockchain solves here and why it can't be solved without blockchain?

Well, if it's solved via blockchain, there's an opportunity for speculation among early adopters, which I think is the major selling point for most blockchain "solutions"

Re: Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

#62
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One idea that's been around for awhile is to identify files by their hash. That has pros and cons. The good side of that is that the file is immutable; you can't accidentally link to something else unless someone can manufacture a hash collision somehow. The down side is that if the file is corrected in some way, you don't get the fixes. In a lot of the peer-to-peer distributed hash table designs, all you need to ret…

Problem is, you have to download the entire video to check the hash. That's not how video embedding works; the client browser is just handed some link, and it obtains pieces of the video, rendering it instantly. Basically, little segments of the video have to have a signature which is continuously validated. Or something like that.

I don't have expertise in video codecs or file formats, but couldn't you hash the first N bytes of a stream? Stream those N bytes to the client and if it matches start the video, else stop the download and not start the video.

Re: Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

#64
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One idea that's been around for awhile is to identify files by their hash. That has pros and cons. The good side of that is that the file is immutable; you can't accidentally link to something else unless someone can manufacture a hash collision somehow. The down side is that if the file is corrected in some way, you don't get the fixes. In a lot of the peer-to-peer distributed hash table designs, all you need to ret…

Problem is, you have to download the entire video to check the hash. That's not how video embedding works; the client browser is just handed some link, and it obtains pieces of the video, rendering it instantly. Basically, little segments of the video have to have a signature which is continuously validated. Or something like that.

Assuming there is no malicious intent behind the embeds you could have the hash in the header of the video.

Re: Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

#66

We can't and shouldn't expect people to keep their old domains forever. We need a way for pages to be signed and hyperlinks to enforce authorship. When we link to stuff, we should have a way to say whose stuff we're linking to. It's no different from installing signed software and using trusted repositories. This is one of the reasons I created a proof-of-concept web extension that verifies links and pages using PGP.…

I had a personal project that I got bored with so I let the domain expire. Then I got emails from former users saying that the domain was now hosting malware. So yeah I would like it for all the old links to the site to somehow know that the owner has changed. Not sure what a reasonable solution would look like though.

Re: Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

#67
post #51

I'd get it if it was Goatse, but this is just regular porn. If they simply wanted to earn money from ads, serving something more milquetoast would make more sense, because now there's a rush to remove old embeds. Why?!

> serving something more milquetoast

Never gonna give you up...

Re: Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

#68
post #2

4 years ago, Archive Team backed up "nearly all" of Vidme (according to Jason Scott). It was uploaded to the Internet Archive here https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_vidme so you can fix your vid.me URLs by pointing them to the Archive. (And you can help keep them there, too https://archive.org/donate But honestly, using the Archive more keeps the bigger donors involved, so don't feel guilty or anything. Just us…

I wish they'd been doing that when Google Video shut down. Lost a lot of good content I didn't download.

They did: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Google_Video

Re: Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

#69
post #48

We can't and shouldn't expect people to keep their old domains forever. We need a way for pages to be signed and hyperlinks to enforce authorship. When we link to stuff, we should have a way to say whose stuff we're linking to. It's no different from installing signed software and using trusted repositories. This is one of the reasons I created a proof-of-concept web extension that verifies links and pages using PGP.…

One idea that's been around for awhile is to identify files by their hash. That has pros and cons. The good side of that is that the file is immutable; you can't accidentally link to something else unless someone can manufacture a hash collision somehow. The down side is that if the file is corrected in some way, you don't get the fixes. In a lot of the peer-to-peer distributed hash table designs, all you need to ret…

Sounds like something subresource integrity[1] could be expanded to include.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

Re: Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

#70

The weird thing about this to me is, the company or person who scooped up the domain... in order to get their plan working so quickly, wouldn't they have had to set up a site perfectly beforehand so the embeds would work as desired and then just sat there waiting, hoping, ready to hit the button to scoop up the domain at just the right time, praying nobody beat them to it? Isn't that a lot of work for almost no gain?

depending on how vidme stored their videos it could just be as simple as returning any request for a video file with whatever they were showing.
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