Origins of the youtube-dl project
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Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#2[deleted]
Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#3I don't know if this is related or not but back when Flickr was popular in like 2005 or 2006 my friends and I were uploading pictures of our events there (they're all still there AFAIK. We'd upload them to either our own accounts or for certain events to a shared account. One shared account is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sourpower/albums
I wanted copies of those pictures and the easiest way to get them was the write a tool to download them rather than have to coordinate with 3 to 15 friends and ask them to copy the images to a CD or USB stick or some other nonsense. Dropbox wasn't a thing and not all my friends were tech heads that would want to setup FTP servers.
Flickr had also come out with an API. APIs for online services seemed kind of new at that point and Flickr was one of the first AFAIK.
So I wrote the app https://blog.greggman.com/blog/flickrdown/ and a few months later it was accused by other users of flickr of being solely for the purpose of downloading copywritten images. Not once did I ever use it for such a purpose nor, AFAIK did any of my friends. None of us had any interest in other people's images on flickr, only shared images of mutually attended parties, bbq, picnics, events.
Those users reported the app to Flickr and the app was banned.
It was banned by the app's id. That meant you could register your own app and then hack in your app's id and still use it. IIRC I continued to use it to download pictures from our events but it always pissed me off they banned it. It also pissed me off because it wasn't accessing anything you couldn't just scrape for. The API made it easy to get a list of URLs, search for albums or people etc but you could easily write a script that just scraped the HTML to find all the same data. Didn't matter, flickr didn't budge.
It further pissed me off that over zealous flickr members accused me of lying about its purpose. Like many topics today, there is often absolutely nothing you can say that will convince someone else your intensions are not bad.
Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#4Thanks for this. It is weird how long it’s been. I totally forgot that Wireshark was once called Ethereal.
I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue. Especially in a world where anyone can stand up a Gitea or Gitlab CE instance.
Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#5Thanks for this. It is weird how long it’s been. I totally forgot that Wireshark was once called Ethereal. I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue. Especially in a world where anyone can stand up a Gitea or Gitlab CE instance.
My first tech book after Mike Meyers "All in one A+ 4th Ed" was a book written on Wireshark by Laura. I never got too deep as it was taken from the desk I pulled CQ duty at.
Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#6Thanks for this. It is weird how long it’s been. I totally forgot that Wireshark was once called Ethereal. I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue. Especially in a world where anyone can stand up a Gitea or Gitlab CE instance.
What I had totally forgotten, was libflashplayer.so :) it was so flaky. Glad I do not have to worry about this anymore.
Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#7Thanks for this. It is weird how long it’s been. I totally forgot that Wireshark was once called Ethereal. I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue. Especially in a world where anyone can stand up a Gitea or Gitlab CE instance.
gitlab isn't evil. One of my short life lessons is that, in general, when I do business with evil, sketchy, or nasty organizations or people, I generally come out behind.
If the good guys have an inferior product and charge double, I'll sometimes pick the bad guy. And more often than not, I get burned, costing me tenfold what it would have cost to just go with the high-integrity choice in the first place.
I'm not leaving github over this, but I'm mostly starting new project on gitlab instead.
Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#8What a wonderful little retrospective. It's a nice walk down memory lane, and I really appreciate how clear and sensible his thinking was around handing off the project when the time was right.
Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#9What a wonderful writeup that touches on both the original author's personal history, little technical tidbits, and so many ethical and societal aspects of computing!
Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project
#10Thanks for this. It is weird how long it’s been. I totally forgot that Wireshark was once called Ethereal. I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue. Especially in a world where anyone can stand up a Gitea or Gitlab CE instance.
gitlab isn't evil. One of my short life lessons is that, in general, when I do business with evil, sketchy, or nasty organizations or people, I generally come out behind. If the good guys have an inferior product and charge double, I'll sometimes pick the bad guy. And more often than not, I get burned, costing me tenfold what it would have cost to just go with the high-integrity choice in the first place. I'm not lea…
I've been using GitLab for a while now.
GitHub did many, many decisions that I found sketchy.