The problem here is that "hacking techniques" to a black hat are also, equal-and-oppositely, legitimate security research and prevention -- to a white hat / security researcher / ethical hacker...
In other words, they're aspects of the same thing...
The idea that you're going to ban something because one aspect of it has a negative social purpose is philosophically unsound... We don't ban videos on electricity or electrical engineering because people can be electrocuted... We don't ban videos on chainsaws because they could be used to cut a person in half... We don't ban videos on cars because they could be used to run people over... Everything in the universe can be used for a positive or negative purpose, when you start banning things because some people use these things for negative purposes, you misunderstand that those effects are caused by the actor, not the information and/or the tool that's being used...
Ironically, I tracked the real world identity of someone using stolen credit cards in my ecom site BECAUSE he posted a tutorial/how-to on YouTube showing the vulnerability tool (script kiddie), under his real name. SMH.
This won't stop this information from being disseminated, but it may save some idiots from themselves.
> We don't ban videos on electricity or electrical engineering because people can be electrocuted... We don't ban videos on chainsaws because they could be used to cut a person in half... We don't ban videos on cars because they could be used to run people over...
I think the real problem is the obsession with a centralized video silo, when internet video hasn't been "hard" for nigh on a decade. Chuck a video on a host (hell, Cloudfront is just an SFTP transfer away), and drop an HTML video tag onto a web page and you're done.
Everyone who wants to run some sort of "channel" can trivially use cheap hosting and open syndication tools.
"we"? In the UK you are not allowed to carry a knife with you, unless you just bought one and are bringing to home or are a certified chief who needs one for work, or are going camping.
Actually, in the UK you are not legally allowed to carry a hard fruit such as for example a squash or miniature pumpkin in a plastic carry bag if you end up using it for self defence when attacked.
Yes, that's right, in UK carrying in public any object that can be or is used as a weapon (including defensively) is considered a crime. This is normally applied to knives, but if the letter of the law was to be adhered to someone who did defend themselves against an attack with a small pumpkin could be arrested for the possession of the said pumpkin... This is the madness of UK law.
I remember few years ago a situation where a dog attacked a small child and wouldn't let go, someone ran home, grabbed a kitchen knife, killed the dog and saved the child. When the police arrived they had to arrest the person who saved the child life because of the knife... Thankfully the person didn't end up being charged as no witness would testify that that person has indeed used a knife as a weapon.
You're not allowed to carry a hard fruit in a bag with the intention of using it as a self defence weapon. But if you go shopping and happen to have it on you when you're attacked you're allowed to use it to defend yourself. (And you don't need to wait for the attacker to land the first blow, you're allowed the first strike if you're genuinely trying to defend yourself).
EDIT: also, you seem to misunderstand the purpose of English arrests. Of course if you stab an animal to death you're going to get arrested. The arrest allows the police to question you, and it _protects your rights_ -- you get a free lawyer for that interview; they have 24 hours to charge or release you etc.
That's not actually true, the law states, "Without a reasonable excuse", so any reasonable excuse is fine. The idea you'd need to be "certified" to carry a knife is fiction to drive an agenda.
Ok, by "certified" I just meant that if you say you are a chef, you better be employed as a chef and be able to prove it. I don't mean that you need to produce a diploma from a culinary school. If you get stopped with a knife on the London metro saying you're off to cook some food at someone's place(and you need your own knife for some reason) that's probably not going to be accepted without some brief investigation.
Hmm, how is it actually regulated? So, e.g. if I am going to my friends and carrying a bottle of wine altogether with pocket knife bundled with a corkscrew to be sure I will be able to open it, then I am in a grey zone or even illegal?
That's dangerous advice in many areas of the United States. In NYC if a police officer finds any kind of folding knife, regardless of how harmless, if he wants to arrest you he probably can under NYPD's absurd perversion of the law by considering it possession of a drop knife. If the officer can open the knife by holding it and flicking it open via inertia then he can arrest the victim for possession of a drop knife. They usually don't hold the handle to try and flick it open either, they'll hold it from the tip of the blade as that makes it very easy to just arrest anyone with a pocket knife.
Try with a slightly-stuck Opinell. You're more likely to throw the knive or cut/puncture your finger than you are to flick it open. You can push it open with the thumb while retaining the handle with the ring? finger, but that's not flicking.
If the blade is under 3" and isn't a locking blade you don't need a reason. If the blade is longer than 3" you need a reason. "I'm taking this bottle of wine to my friend's house and they don't have a corkscrew" would be fine.
Many states in the USA are similar once you get above a certain blade length to allow for common pocket knives. Then again the same rules will get you in trouble for having a baseball bat and don't seem to have a good reason.
Banning guns is philosophically unsound, for the exact reasons this guy just listed. Look at Britian where they are now having unprecedented amounts of stabbings and are actually confiscating things like pliers and forks.
I'm uncertain about this idea that increase in knife crime means gun control is pointless. I'd much rather get stabbed than shot given the differential in mortality. Even if all gun crimes were replaced with knife crimes the per capita homicide will be lower.
Look at Chicago for an example: It's one of the most restrictive states in the union on 'gun control' yet has some of the highest murder rates and death by guns across the board.
If by kosher, you mean "allowed, without monetisation, and under some arcane, opaque and onerous restrictions that mean you never know if this video will get you a strike or not", then yeah, they are
The video is captioned if you want. But the TL;DW is that there's an ethical spectrum of security content; on one end is sketchy content that has little educational value - like, say, a tutorial on how to make a phishing page - and on the other end is educational content that could be applied maliciously but isn't intended that way - like a general web programming tutorial (or a DefCon talk). YouTube seems justified in demonetizing or removing the former type of content, but the difference between these two types is not always obvious if you don't have a security background, and so it's expected that there will be some false positives / negatives in YouTube's filtering. In practice, educational content (from LiveOverflow, for example, and from the other security channels he knows) hasn't been banned, and the few false-positive bans appear to have been reverted quickly, so it seems like this is largely a non-issue. If YouTube actually starts blocking educational security content, and not being responsive to appeals, then this would worth being upset about, but right now it seems like a non-issue.
(Note that YouTube has plenty of other problems; I'm just summarizing LiveOverflow's take on this particular controversy)
Oh man thank you so much for that. Totally makes sense and glad live overflow won’t be (hopefully) affected.
Videos aren’t working at all because the speakers on my phone are busted. On an iPhone, they won’t load even if the volume is set to 0. It has to have an output :(
> In a subsequent comment, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that Cyber Weapons Lab’s channel was flagged by mistake and the videos have since been reinstated. “With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call,” the spokesperson said. “We have an appeals process in place for users, and when it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”
It is always same story. If a problem concerns someone "well known" who is able to attract attention, than Google, Facebook, etc. are stepping back.
If it were some random "amateurish" hacker channel, it would be banned and nobody would give a crap. The problem is that many valuable things started as some "amateurish" stuff put together by some clever guys in a garage.
I'll actually be a counter example to that, I recently started a security podcast with a couple friends, talking about the latest in exploit development and mitigations, and whatever news we find interesting.
Shortly after we uploaded our 4th episode we were banned on Youtube. We appealed the ban and were allowed back on pretty quickly (hours) and we are by no means a large channel even now (~50 subs).
I'm happy for you that you speak a language google happens to have support in, and that you have the time to besides creating and uploading content, to monitor it is not censored at a later, random, date by google. And that you were able to provide the US based documentation they required and that your videos content happened to not be in the blacklist of any nation state.
YouTube is a private company. They are under no obligation to provide support in 5,000 different languages. Or to host your videos at all. This post reeks of entitlement.
This poster is a customer and has every right to complain about a service.
The fact that you think they are entitled tells me you view the services as a gift and they should be grateful for whatever they get. The services provided are not gifts.
Yes, because the viewers are the product being sold to the advertisers. Content creators, meanwhile, are essentially independent contractors that get free video hosting and a little cut of the ad money (assuming they fulfill a lengthy checklist) in exchange for giving the platform any real reason to exist. You'll find that this is the exact angle that the folks at Google like to spread until the second one of their advertisers starts to hesitate.
So in essence, you have a bunch of kind-of employees complaining about their kind-of employer's insistence that the customer is always right, even if it undermines their livelihoods. That sounds like what you'd expect out of any other customer-facing job, so what's the problem here?
They control the pathways of modern speech. It's not like a baker where you can just get your wedding cake somewhere else. If Google doesn't like you they can damn near erase you from public view. If you have an internet business they can ruin it. There is no way to escape their influence.
Because of this, they have a responsibility to uphold people's natural right to expression. In many ways Google now has more control over speech than governments historically have.
If there was a viable competitor this would be different, but there is no such competitor.
Not true. Almost all modern speech doesn't take place on Youtube or any Google platform. It's possible to broadcast without Google, publish without Google, disseminate without Google, gather without Google, dissent without Google, make phone calls without Google, chat, email, text, audio, video, everything - literally all forms of speech and expression are possible without Google, both on and off the internet.
>If Google doesn't like you they can damn near erase you from public view.
Also not true. Plenty of people Google "doesn't like" are still in public view. Name one person Google has effectively "disappeared" in this way, and I'll bet they still have a presence elsewhere on the web, still participate in society, still can communicate publicly, be contacted, etc.
>If you have an internet business they can ruin it.
Maybe. But then so could Amazon. So could your ISP. If losing SEO would ruin your business, the problem isn't Google's power, it's your crappy business model.
>There is no way to escape their influence.
Really? Do they control you here? In your home? Do they moderate other sites? Do they control Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News?
It's arbitrarily easy to escape their influence. They control one platform, not the internet, not society, not governments.
>In many ways Google now has more control over speech than governments historically have.
Governments can imprison you, torture you, kill you, run over your friends with tanks, nuke entire cities, fill shallow graves with dissidents, burn down libraries and make it legal. Google has no more control over speech than the governments whose laws they must obey by definition. They don't claim a monopoly on violence or sovereign immunity.
>If there was a viable competitor this would be different, but there is no such competitor.
There are plenty. Google is not the only search engine, and Youtube is not the only video streaming service.
Almost every part of your comment is falsehood, hyperbole and nonsense.
>Plenty of people Google "doesn't like" are still in public view. Name one person Google has effectively "disappeared" in this way, and I'll bet they still have a presence elsewhere on the web, still participate in society, still can communicate publicly, be contacted, etc.
Alex Jones was attacked by Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple in a short span of time and this certainly does bring noticeable harm. Your argument that Google isn't a monopoly so much as a participant in an oligopoly is pointless.
>Maybe. But then so could Amazon. So could your ISP. If losing SEO would ruin your business, the problem isn't Google's power, it's your crappy business model.
It's amusing how people raise this same argument about advertising and how newspapers or other publications can die for all they care, but then newspapers are ''important to Democracy'' and shouldn't need to exist like others do and the other publications are just trying to make end's meet and can't do anything else. Maybe letting large businesses buy or crush everything else is a bad idea?
>Really? Do they control you here?
No.
>In your home?
No.
>Do they moderate other sites?
Yes. Large chunks of the WWW contain Google malware or are at the behest of Cloudflare and that makes avoiding these two difficult, as it's likely at least one place one visits is involved with one or the other. I can't even contact some businesses because of Gmail and its strangulation of the email protocols and with ReCaptcha it becomes increasingly harder to do certain things without giving Google free work.
>Almost every part of your comment is falsehood, hyperbole and nonsense.
You're either misguided or purposefully arguing in bad faith.
"noticeable harm" was not the claim. The claim was that Google alone could, at a whim, "damn near erase you from public view."
Alex Jones has not been anywhere near "erased from public view."
Also by "moderating other sites" I clearly meant moderating content - as in comments, videos, what Google moderates on its own platform. Obviously, they don't do that, and can't. Putting up a captcha or ads isn't the same thing.
>You're either misguided or purposefully arguing in bad faith.
OK, there's the personal attack, so I'm done with this thread. Good day.
> Alex Jones was attacked by Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple in a short span of time and this certainly does bring noticeable harm. Your argument that Google isn't a monopoly so much as a participant in an oligopoly is pointless.
Alex Jones is not a victim of anyone but his own avarice. He defamed victims of horrible violence and refused to stop. He kept ending up in court trying to use defenses like, "I am actually a comedy show and everyone knows it is a joke." It became so absurd that his liability was spilling over onto other broadcast networks who couldn't deny he was deliberately slandering people.
I'm saying: his speech is about as valuable as shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theater. So maybe he is not your go-to example. May I recommend instead Dan of "Three Arrows," who has been banned for explaining Nazi history in a factual way with the highest standards of evidence, but ends up being banned or demonetized because of brigading organized by pro-fascist elements lead by reactionary channels failing the same standard like Tim Pool.
But I agree that you could probably make a case YouTube is a monopoly.
> Large chunks of the WWW contain Google malware or are at the behest of Cloudflare and that makes avoiding these two difficult,
Your problem is with site runners who do not consider it malware. You're demanding a product with a price of $0, but such things don't have $0 cost. And of course, you can instantly 0 it out by using tools like noscript. But you can't try to blame Google or CloudFlare for the presence of these tools. That's a conscious decision by website engineers who could offer their content free of charge, but cannot afford to. Ain't capitalism great?
May I recommend doing what I do, which is using NoScript on Firefox? I won't lie, FireFox is worse than Chromium and the plugins are worse, but sometimes we gotta take a hit for our principles.
> ReCaptcha it becomes increasingly harder to do certain things without giving Google free work.
Exactly how many street sign identification tasks do you think Google needs for Waymo or Maps? I'll give you a hint: a kid with tensorflow can solve those captchas using off the shelf parts. The primary value of those captchas is forcing a human to interact with the captcha in a very short span of time, which raises the costs of using cheap contract labor solutions to evade the captcha several orders of magnitude.
> You're either misguided or purposefully arguing in bad faith.
"People who disagree with me are all wrong or liars" isn't a very "good faith" argument either.
> Not true. Almost all modern speech doesn't take place on Youtube or any Google platform. It's possible to broadcast without Google, publish without Google, disseminate without Google, gather without Google, dissent without Google, make phone calls without Google, chat, email, text, audio, video, everything - literally all forms of speech and expression are possible without Google, both on and off the internet.
I actually challenge you to find a credible alternative to Youtube that is a genuine contender and doesn't rely on webtorrent (which would very much DOS the entire internet into tiny fragment networks if it tried to service Youtube level volume).
Who's the alternative? The closest thing is broadcast television, which is under extremely tight government regulation.
>I actually challenge you to find a credible alternative to Youtube that is a genuine contender and doesn't rely on webtorrent (which would very much DOS the entire internet into tiny fragment networks if it tried to service Youtube level volume).
Yeah, see, you're using subjective weasel words like "credible" and "genuine" and assuming that no site operating at anything less than Youtube's scale would be effective - yet plenty of other streaming sites demonstrably do exist and have communities and users.
Even most videos on Youtube don't even have nearly the traffic that would necessitate that scale - "youtube level volume" isn't necessary. Convenient, cheap, reliable, but not necessary.
So... Vimeo? Twitch? Dailymotion? Metacafe? Veoh? Pornhub? The Internet Archive? Whatever they use in Asia? Most social media sites that let you upload videos directly? There seem to be a few here[0].
Until Youtube can stop other streaming sites from existing, it's absurd to say they have any real control outside their own platform. They're popular, but that's it - popularity can wane. They don't control video distribution or streaming the way JP Morgan controlled the railroads, they don't control the infrastructure nor can they enforce monopoly control over the internet, and they certainly do not control "the pathways of modern speech."
> Yeah, see, you're using subjective weasel words like "credible" and "genuine" and assuming that no site operating at anything less than Youtube's scale would be effective - yet plenty of other streaming sites demonstrably do exist and have communities and users.
Okay, but they don't do archival at even a fractional scale. It's true other streaming contenders exist. They are all much smaller than youtube.
> So... Vimeo?
Doesn't really compete in the same space anymore. It's a lot more focused on corporate offerings.
> Twitch?
Big site. Run by a massive company that actually has the networking capacity to make a competitor. But doesn't do archival of all content. That makes it a lot, lot harder.
Edit: Don't get me wrong! Twitch is an incredibly impressive piece of work despite its technical flaws. They do things Youtube has failed to do. But the long tail of content distribution they need to deal with is smaller, and that redefines the problem the resolve.
> Dailymotion? Metacafe? Veoh?
All of these aren't really competitors to Youtube, now are they? Dailymotion is more of a hosting service for corporate offerings as I see it. I also think you pay them for hosting, but I'm happy to be corrected about this.
> The Internet Archive?
What?
> Pornhub?
I know a bunch of SWE and SRE there and they're good folks. But uh... well if they want to explain to you how this is misguided I will let them.
> Until Youtube can stop other streaming sites from existing, it's absurd to say they have any real control outside their own platform.
YouTube is bigger than any 3 of your other alternatives combined, and that's ignoring the fact that they're doing broadcast TV now. The only site on your list that has any credibility in the space of user-generated content is Twitch, and they don't do archival unless you're a Partner still, right? It's been awhile since I've run my twitch channel.
> They're popular, but that's it - popularity can wane.
The following is my opinion:
I have become much harder on youtube since joining Google because I learned how absurdly difficult it would be to do what Youtube does. You've gotta be an international mega-corp to compete with what they're doing. While I am enjoying understanding how the internet actually works, I also confess to a certain degree of despair over its reality.
YouTube could grow to meet its demand because of its affiliation with Google. Other sites would need to build a global scale supercomputer with network to match to do what Youtube and Youtube TV does.
Further, the internet itself cannot handle the amount of media streaming users want to do. That's why otherwise noble ideas like PeerTube can't be used to route around this damage. And as we've seen with search and human interaction, the network effects of concentrating media all in one place are just too overwhelming.
Perhaps you feel more optimism about it. If so, I encourage you to try. As it stands, only Amazon's Twitch could possibly pivot into this position and they seem disinclined to do so for now.
Why do they have to be a "genuine contender"? I get that the discoverability of YouTube's platform is desirable to creators, but why is it important at a societal level that creators have access to that?
What will ultimately determine if Youtube is a monopoly or not is if there are credible contenders of similar size that aren't just reselling Youtube with a branded player.
The public demand itself is enough. Search for Google is already subject to regulation in the EU.
A monopoly is only illegal if YouTube is using anti-competitive practices to stifle competition. It's not illegal if people just prefer YouTube's product.
> A monopoly is only illegal if YouTube is using anti-competitive practices to stifle competition. It's not illegal if people just prefer YouTube's product.
This isn't strictly true even in America, and it's worth noting that every sanctioned monopoly in American history has tried to use this line of reasoning.
> It is strictly true as far as the law is concerned.
I think maybe the problem here is that you're assuming that "active" interference needs to take place. All you need to do to hurt competition is set your monopoly-backed prices too low for other competitors to match and if you lack any competition, you're not stifling it.
> So what? That's like saying "every criminal has claimed they were innocent". It doesn't mean that innocent people don't exist.
Right, but that means "I am innocent" doesn't constitute an ironclad defense. Which is the only point I'm trying to make.
And I think the ugly part about this is that YouTube actually does an amazing and in fact peerless job on the technical side. I know how a lot of it works and it's breathtaking.
But that's part of why they can set their price for hosting at $0/byte. And that's hard for anyone at a less superlative scale to compete with.
> All you need to do to hurt competition is set your monopoly-backed prices too low for other competitors to match and if you lack any competition, you're not stifling it.
YouTube has stayed the same price since it was created, long before it became a monopoly.
> Right, but that means "I am innocent" doesn't constitute an ironclad defense. Which is the only point I'm trying to make.
Obviously. My point is that you haven't shown any examples of YouTube abusing its monopoly to stifle competition, thus the argument that they are in danger of violating anti-trust laws does not seem to be correct.
We both agree that YouTube has the largest market share, but can you explain to me why you believe YouTube's market share is the result of anti-competitive practices and not a result of a superior product?
You're not wrong, but it's also bad customer service. Given Youtube has essentially no credible competition, you'd think that they'd be more worried about being the focus of multiple new national government regulatory frameworks.
The important think to recognize about Youtube (as opposed to search, or ads) is that YouTube has no real competition and it's absurdly difficult to compete with Youtube. They're like Facebook but moreso. As such, they may end up being subject to different rules from other businesses if they're not careful.
They are way more likely to face regulation for not attempting curating. The mainstream of small minds is why we are in this shitshow.
Mainstream mentality has always been to freak out when something goes outside what they consider acceptable even if it is harmless. It goes back to the Oscar Wilde and he certainly wasn't the first.
Including the observers commenting on the stupidity with "So long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses." While callous and somewhat homophobic by today's standard it pointed out how society really should be reacting - not giving a shit unless it leads to an actual danger.
At what stage does a private company need to become a public service? There's examples of this happening throughout the ages where private companies like fire fighters, telephone, etc went from being private to public, and sometimes back to private.
They're a private company and GP is complaining about their poor service. They're not obligated to support multiple languages, but a service that big not supporting multiple languages seems like an incredibly bad move even from a purely business perspective. Doesn't seem entitled to me.
I'm not entirely convinced it is. I started a exploit development/security podcast with a couple friends a few months ago, we were banned on Youtube shortly after the 4th episode for a community guidelines violation.
We appealed it and were reinstated pretty quickly (hours), which was a genuinely surprise to me given all I've heard about the Youtube system and the assumption that channels only got unbanned by being able to attract attention.
It's certainly true now, but once upon a time the Google search engine was also a "neutral platform that didn't directly compete with other web properties shown on search pages."
It is not just this isolated case. Youtube changed their terms and conditions in such a way that affects all educational content related to infosec, more info in the other HN thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346865
To be fair, it's reasonable to forbid instructions on how to attack specific online third-party systems, just that the phrasing of YT's policy is too ambiguous and can be extended to any educational infosec content.
>I hope the infosec community can come up with some kind of decentralized way to actually share free speech. If anyone is capable, they are.
There are decentralized/open/ethic friendly services alternative to big corporations services. In the case of Youtube there's PeerTube[1] for exemple (even if in that case there's a IP leak due to the p2p protocol if I remember correctly).
The sad thing here is that people decide to stay on the "big" services due to the network effect, and few people decide to boycott them just to follow principles.
In some video sectors people issue "preview" videos on YouTube (for discovery, network effect) and have a full video elsewhere that doesn't have to comply with YouTube's terms.
That would probably work here until YouTube move on to "can't signpost content that's not allowed here".
This is why we need a solution that separates the social network from the storage platform. Maybe as a first step, have a system that combines your peertube, bitchute and youtube accounts together, like a semi-rss feed. Maybe you should be able to use your google account on the alternate platforms. Google won't like such adversarial compatibility, but if done client side there won't be much they can do.
Don't be so pessimistic. There are still plenty of resources and places to discuss whatever you want.
Youtube is like that big commercial avenue in the city, where you can only see mainstream stuff. If you look for the bookstore that has hacking/engineering/pyscology books, you'll have to go elsewhere. But it has always been this way.
YouTube got popular with mainstream TV shows and movies. Then after it won all the market share with that content, Google bought it and turned it legit.
Yeah that's utterly wrong, YouTube got popular because it was the best platform to upload any video and find and watch any video.
Then music got big on youtube.
Right now they are trying to go into movies, not sure how it will work out for them.
there's plenty of niche content that finds its home on YouTube. It's as if the commercial avenue was infinitely large and could contain every shop you could wish for.
Pornhub has good enough porn, can find something for most any niche.
Soon you’ll find though, if you’re really into this or that, individual studios that cater to your niche create videos with high production value that are all around better than what you dig up on pornhub.
There are marketplaces for small studios like clips4sale.com (nsfw).
Also aggregators for specific niches / topics, etc.
Maybe anti-YouTube people can look to porn for the way out?
Nah, all the old services are still out there and still work. You can still use irc, you can still set up your own mail and web server. There are even new alternatives, from tor to other hidden/dark/free...nets.
But people are too lazy, and find the "just use the largest corporate platform" very convenient, especially if it's "free".
edit: ...which is a problems, since also your viewers only use that "one big" platform, and don't check elsewhere.
There is nothing to come up with. Serving video is a well understood process, both as a service and self-hosted. YouTube's popularity is based mostly on network effect and Google footing the bill for a top notch experience for your viewers. Few people will pay the Vimeo prices, or build something at multiple the cost, if they can get the whole package for free.
Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, so can't help you with estimating the cost. But a few years back the research community had some reasonable-sounding models. Plug in current hardware and you can get an idea.
That's entirely reasonable. My plan of record in for YouTube no longer footing the bill of disseminating videos of my children to extended family is similar (seeding them on bit torrent).
Edit: note that peer to peer doesn't exactly solve the economies. Instead of advertisers, you're asking your viewers to provide the resources. Depending on the audience, this will or will not work.
Well, the internet is still there. It's just that the majority mistook private spaces for public ones.
Well, it is convenient I guess. Your content is being found, the interface is great, someone else is paying for servers, storage and bandwidth. All of that for a little control and advertisements...
And honestly, I want platforms to regulate content. They have millions of users, some of them are underage or even democratically unstable.
It's okay to put a little effort into finding knowledge now and then.
"Well, the internet is still there. It's just that the majority mistook private spaces for public ones."
Exactly. Using Twitter or Facebook in place of Email/IRC/Usenet/WWW is wrong so many ways, but good luck telling that around without getting laughed at.
> The internet promised so much, but is being ruined by corporations and governments.
No, it is ruined by normal citizens who largely don't understand democracy and its value. As long as the dictator doesn't bear the label "dictator", people generally prefer dictators, and then at times they are surprised that dictators abuse their power.
The internet will route around this block, just like it has always routed around other obstacles.
Infosec people tend to be crafty (it's a job requirement imo) and quite a lot of the greybeards were part of building the infrastructure from the beginning, so no need to despair yet.
But regular laymen never look beyond youtube (everything non-advertized and popular in general). There is no business model in being underground greybeard publisher.
Considering that you can pull in 100-300k as a security professional at a company, and a multiple of that as a consultant, I don't think that YouTube ad money is that big a deal
Google/YouTube/FB/etc made the web more accessible, fun and useful to normal people. The profit motive was great for cutting through the more idealistic 'open web's" occasionally stubborn^ roadblocks.
YouTube, for example, got online video bigger/better/faster by doing centralisation, flash & such.
After they win though, they effectively become squatters. YouTube or FB could go offline today and tomorrow we'd probably see new services, possibly free and decentralised, popping up to replace them. But, while they monopolize their areas... they probably create negative value.
But YouTube having faster servers isn't an "open web" roadblock, Facebook's social graph isn't either -- neither of these shed any light on your previous comment for me.
In the original comment you mentioned the open web put roadblocks in the way of progress due to idealism. So, if you could say what those roadblocks were, and how the idealism supported them ...
Presumably you're not accusing "open web" activists of having ideals that favour inhibiting bandwidth, or hosting content on slow servers, so noting that proprietary ["closed"] services had those facets is irrelevant to your original comment.
If you felt that people wanting to use PNG, because GIF was closed and contrary to [the nebulous concept of] "open web ideals" has retarded progress on the web, then that might be an example? I'm struggling for an example, because I don't know of any examples, which is why I asked you because you spoke implying you know [many] examples!
No. I just meant that for whatever reason (a large array), closed ( different types of closed) solutions like Facebook and YouTube were more user friendly for the majority who came online post-2000... and these things played a prominent role in moving things forward.
Flash made online video work. Facebook & YouTube made contributing & sharing content accessible. IRC, host-your-own webpages, later attempts like RSS and such, which were more idealistically "www" were also not right for Aunt May. They were right for 1990 users, who were a self-selected bunch.. not alway representative of the majority.
Even jewels like Wikipedia (a brilliant achievement of the www idealism, imo) are relatively inaccessible (the editting part) to the average person. That works very well for Wikipedia specifically.
Or banning gun videos because they could teach someone how to shoot up a school.
It’s no surprise YouTube opted not to censor this genre based on their workplace shooting incident. Companies are getting more and more paranoid these days.
Aren't there any corporations that market to people who like guns, violent videos, etc? Is if you like guns you don't exist or consume anything? I bet that a lot of people that like guns drink a lot of coca cola and eat a lot of junk food.
It would be sad if they removed the videos with 3 click in the last 6 years, because those are the ones of your granddaughter, living thousands of km away, taking her first steps, or reading her first reading primer by herself. These are the things that help families stay in touch. Just because they don't attract mass clicks (and aren't intended to) does not detract from the value they have for the small number of viewers to whom they matter.
It is actually probably kind of like that, although not as part of a moralistic panic or a political purge as seem to be the common assumptions. What they likely have is too much content that makes too little money and attracts too few advertisers, so they're willing to lose the content they can most afford to lose. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis to them.
Social media sites which depend on user supplied content use that content to advertise the platform. Maybe no one told Youtube content creators that they were really doing sales work for Google, but that's always been the nature of the modern social media model. They don't work for you, you work for them.
I agree it is stupid to ban such items on such grounds but:
with "actually improves personal security/safety" I do not agree. If you are not training daily watching video about martial arts does nothing to improve your personal safety. Though there is guy having gym in China who is explaining it better than me and he has martial arts channel. But that is one guy vs tons of "self defence bullshit".
I've not had YouTube around when I was learning karate, so I don't know if I'd be using it if I was learning karate now. However, I did use it to learn some dance moves, and although I was just sitting in my chair and watching it, it did help a lot with many "aha" moments and practiced them later. Sure, there is a lot of crap on there, but I can filter that myself. Things in karate that you could just learn by watching without much training are pressure points and how to get out of someone's hold. The other stuff needs training (especially conditioning), but a good video can give you directions for how to do it.
Isn't this the problem of the viewers' own doing? Youtube would not give a shit until someone feels offended by it and complaints. So we can blame corportions all we want but we should also think how much of it is influenced by us.
Note: above only applies to the comment about violence. Infosec thing most likely is different.
I always think he’s mostly right, but a little too uncompromising, but then everything he says comes true. I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the time, it’s humbling.
As a software author working at startups, am I part of the problem? I don’t understand how to make a good living without locking down the code to some extent, with few exceptions (it’s hard to found red hat)
> I don’t know how he predicted so far ahead at the time, it’s humbling.
As I cast my eye over the FSF's basic definition of free software [0] I can't spot much of a mystery.
If a user don't have those freedoms, then someone else is in control of their software. It is inevitable that sooner or later the situation will change and the person who does have control the software is going to do disagree with what the user wants to use the software for - and at that point the user is the one with the problem.
Stallman isn't using a genius level of insight, but he is avoiding some very common shortcuts people take where they assume that because people are on 'their side' today that they will remain on 'their side' even if the incentives change. They are then shocked to discover that when the incentives change that nobody was ever actually on 'their side', it was just that the shark swimming placidly alongside wasn't hungry before.
I'm usually with Stallman's theories, it amazes me people keep being surprised that liking someone doesn't mean that the person is immune to the incentive structures that surround them. People have a remarkable and underappreciated capacity to make decisions that are good for them rather than good in the abstract.
It's intriguing to witness this phenomenon live, for example with Google: first we were all in love with it, so refreshing, fast, humble when compared with Yahoo, Lycos et all. We loved their "do no evil" mantra. When they started to offer their free e-mail, we were queueing to migrate. Then the phenomenon you're describing started to happen and people are struggling to de-googlify their lives only to discover it's already too late to do it 100%.
It happens everywhere - similar concerns raised for cloudflare. Diversity is a good thing, big monolithic providers of services CAN be good as long as leadership is aligned, but once they start optimizing towards less altruistic goals it’s scary. You could argue government works the same way.
I think he was a bit off with regards to source code/open source, because while having source code helps in understanding and modification, it's not essential; you could similarly imagine a world in which open-source wasn't a huge movement but instead the right to reverse-engineer (or basically, understand) software was guaranteed, and it would have as great an effect on freedom; perhaps even more so, because now it'd be the norm for people to disassemble/decompile anything they wanted, and the lack of any "chilling effects" would greatly increase advances in program analysis in general. It could even be argued that the rise of open-source lead to a decrease in interest and skills of RE.
In fact, PC magazines of the 80s and early 90s used to contain articles specifically about patching software to do interesting things, complete with instructions of the form "change byte at X to Y"; AFAIK they didn't violate any copyrights because they didn't distribute copyrighted material. Then there's the whole series of "undocumented DOS/Windows" books written by people like Matt Pietrek, Andrew Schulman, and Mark Russinovich; all of which required substantial amounts of reverse-engineering and analysis, but instead of them being persecuted, two of them now work at Microsoft.
"If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."
Sometimes I wish people had developed an expectation that commercial software should come with the source code, rather than as (only) a binary blob. Licensing terms could be the same, but people would look at you funny and feel cheated if you tried to sell them a binary blob.
The only domain where I have seen this is with commercial scientific software that is designed to be run on supercomputers. This is mostly due to the difficulty of producing high performance binaries that work with the MPI implementation.
One interesting implication is that since people can view and modify the source code, patches and modifications to the software are shared.
This has always lead me to wonder if a diff file violates copyright as it includes some of the original source as context.
I'm not a lawyer but this reminds me of how game mods are shared for old games. They are shared at patch files to avoid sharing the copyrighted original binary/rom file.
My understanding is that use a patch file as long as your patch doesn't include any copyrighted material it is fair to share.
A patch file does not necessarily have any of the original code, just the location info and the new value.
This is still how custom themes for the switch are distributed since the menu file is considered copyrighted they distribute a file and a tool you can use to apply the file to the menu file on your system.
YLLMV (Your Local Legislation May Vary), but reverse engineering and subsequent modifications are completely legal here, if they're more for compatibility than competition.
This was a shift in viewpoint -- earlier in the life of computers, the hardware was seen as the really valuable part of a computer. So companies would provide the source code because that was simpler (the software was "just a toy"). But then software became the valuable component, and so businesses (as is a recurring theme in capitalism) didn't want to give away something that might be potentially profitable. And so we now have proprietary software. This shift in viewpoint by users was an intentional move, pushed by soon-to-be proprietary software businesses.
I think you may have missed my point. I want businesses to profit off of their software... I just also want them to provide customers with the sources used to produce the software they just paid for.
Copyright law can still apply. Just because I have your sources doesn't mean I can go and use them in my own software, or re-implement your patented algorithm.
"But how can I be sure that my customer isn't stealing my work?"
Well, ask someone to look at the source code they provide to their customers. Remember, we're in an imaginary world where source-included is the normal way to sell software, and anyone peddling binary blobs is seen as shady.
You having the sources does not change the incentive of the software’s creator. The unwanted functionality (which the software creator is pressured to include) will instead be put in:
1. Obfuscated code. This is a classic, employed back in the day when raw machine code wasn’t quite as much of a barrier like it is nowadays. Less common now since its importance has lessened, but still ever-present, and could be re-employed instantly.
2. The very design of the software. For instance, the software might require a phone number for every user, and this is baked in at the very fundamental design level, making it impractical to change. Other design choices might encourage you to share your contact lists, for say, backups, and your data is now leaked.
3. The software is merely a collection stubs calling a cloud service. Very common now with so-called "apps" for phones. This design has come to its pinnacle with “web page apps”, where only the front-facing UI portion sits on the user‘s control, and the rest runs remotely.
This is why “shared source” and the like is not enough. The end user must have the practical ability to, reasonably easily change the software, either by themselves or by hiring anyone they like and/or trust to do it for them.
Kinda how commercial game engines often came with the source code. Not open source, heavily restricted with license, but available for the user (licensee) to look at and make modifications to it required.
I find it interesting you are harping on an aside I made in the middle of an accurate (though very abdriged) description of the history of proprietary software.
But, to your point -- yes, companies can do altruistic things. That doesn't mean they always do altruistic things, nor does it mean that they tend to do altruistic things. This should not be surprising -- companies are designed to maximise profit and altruism is rarely as profitable as other avenues. Companies which contribute to or sell free software are in the overwhelming minority today, let alone 30 years ago.
I didn't mention socialism, nor redistribution of assets. More importantly though, if you feel the need to protect the concept of capitalism whenever there is even the hint of criticism, then you should take a page out of Hamlet -- "the lady doth protest too much, methinks".
Also, free software isn't socialist. If you feel the need to tie to it a political ideology, it's much closer to anarchism.
> while having source code helps in understanding and modification, it's not essential
It technically isn't, much like having an excavator isn't essential to digging up ground for a new mall, when you can technically do this with a shovel too.
I get your point, but right now, I'm sitting in front of a 22-years-old game I spent a great deal of time even trying to get to run. I want to restore it. There's no source leak of it that I know of, it has no clear relation to prior titles and there wasn't any reversing effort I could find either. Half of the formats used by it are obscure, and from causal inspection seem to be dumps of in-memory structures.
Having source code, my main problem would be to build it - but it's essentially a straightforward task of finding and patching or mocking various 1990s-era peculiarities, until the whole thing builds correctly with an reasonably current compiler. The source code would assist me with reversing the data formats too. However, I don't have the source code, just a barely-32bit application with a 16bit installer. The game plays really weird tricks with your screen, so attaching a debugger will be a PITA (unless I figure out how I can run a debugger on a different machine and remotely debug the game on the one computer that it manages to run in half-broken fullscreen mode). Best I can do now is poke it and see what changes.
> It could even be argued that the rise of open-source lead to a decrease in interest and skills of RE.
I think so too - simply because being able to ask decreases interest in and skills of figuring stuff out yourself. Has its good and bad sides.
The game plays really weird tricks with your screen, so attaching a debugger will be a PITA (unless I figure out how I can run a debugger on a different machine and remotely debug the game on the one computer that it manages to run in half-broken fullscreen mode). Best I can do now is poke it and see what changes.
Two suggestions for you: 1, VMs are your friend. 2, decompilation technology has gotten very good. I'd "statically analyse" the binary in a disassembler/decompiler for a while first and figure out what it's doing before actually trying to run it.
I don't think source is necessarily always making things easier either --- I've had a few times where, even with open-source software, it's easier to find the right bytes in the binary to patch than to figure out where in the (huge) source that would be, and then how to build the rest of it (along with all its hairy web of dependencies) completely unmodified from the original binary.
Especially if it's a fundamentally trivial change (like a string constant somewhere, whose desired value is the same or smaller in size), and I don't expect to make any more complex changes, I'll definitely choose opening the hex editor for a few minutes (at most) over spending perhaps hours downloading a few hundred MB of source and dependencies and figuring out how the original was built and how to reproduce that.
> because while having source code helps in understanding and modification, it's not essential
You're right that it's not essential -- and he does mention this in most of his talks. But reverse engineering is very time-consuming and difficult, especially if you need to do it for every program you use.
So his view that software freedom requires the source code to be available to users is much more of a practical requirement than a philosophical one. This is why the GPL requires the preferred form of modifying the program be provided -- to ensure it's just as easy for users to modify the program as it is for the developers.
in the US DMCA did infact make alot of Reverse Engineering a violation of Copyright
Most EULA's prohibit Reverse Engineering and companies like Oracle have entire legal teams dedicated to prohibiting reverse engineering going as far as prohibiting people from reporting security vulnerabilities discovered using "reverse engineering techniques"
Further the wide interpretation the courts have allowed under CFAA can easily be applied to reverse engineering as well, i.e "Exceeding authorized use" making reverse engineering of software a felony under US Law
It's harder to argue that reverse engineering is harmed by open source, in a world of software patents and copyright protection that occasionally permits interop, but always prohibits competition
The alternative to working on favorably licensed OSS that you posit, is roundly illegal, unless you had no designs on modification and/or redistribution of a derivative work.
He is always right because his predictions about companies are as cynical as possible. He assumes every company acts entirely in its own interests and will do whatever they can get away with to make the most profit.
And of course this ends up being true almost every time.
I thought at first that he was a pompous ass who was out of touch and mostly wrong.
And slowly, I noticed that he was still a pompous ass, but he was right. And longer I observe, I notice that he wasn't wrong, but ahead of the curve. And instead of being an ass, he was calling these issues out before they reared their ugly heads... but lo and behold they did eventually.
You can not compromise on freedom, for once you allow a single exception that allows authoritarians to take your freedom in "limited" situations, they will quickly invent more and more situations to take more and more of your freedom until none remains
If you value liberty, uncompromising protection of that liberty is the only way to secure it
The system that prevents you from making a good living without locking down code is most of the problem. To the extent you support that, you are likely a part of it. No different from most people nowadays I think, myself included.
Its refreshing to see the sentiment among HN crowd has shifted and embracing RMS. Few years ago the comment section was dismissing RMS outright as not being practical.
We need people like him. He's the anchor that keeps the ship from floating away at sea. If it were entirely left to the more practical people, GNU wouldn't be a thing and the ecosystem would suffer. We would all be worse off.
No, the question you need to ask yourself is 'how small of a living can I stand?'. I make a living programming audio software that's GPL-compatible (I'm using MIT license on the grounds that nobody succeeds in the music business unless they allow themselves to be exploited). Stallman can use anything of mine, I just can't use the capital F free stuff GPL users create in exchange, but I get to feed 'em if anything I do is worth having.
I do make a living, it's just a very poor and insecure living. I sleep a lot easier, though, and it's very unmistakably a 'First World' living even if it's sort of constrained. How small a living can you stand? How rich do you have to be to have 'enough', and do your 'quality of life' calculations include personal guilt over screwing people over, or not doing that? Software freedom matters to my day-to-day life, but so does the fact that my income's low enough that I qualify for Section 8 housing. Without that, I'd lose some things making it possible to be writing the free software.
Can you afford to be on the side of good, or do you have to play for team evil in order to keep the doors open? If it's the latter, can you plan for a heel/face turn and execute a dramatic betrayal of Team Evil? I did (sort of). I was selling the audio software for years and merely keeping all my code proprietary (and getting sucked into the hype mechanic, more and more) and when I made my exit and went full Patreon I executed a clear, very public transition from commercial to open source, even reserving that as a threshold for the Patreon to hit. Took a major loss in revenue right away, but made that threshold pretty soon, and now I don't have to go back. But I wouldn't have been able to do it without years of exposure as a commercial developer.
Just like doing an IPO or executing an acquisition strategy, you can execute a heel/face turn into Free Software if you handle it properly. You need to care about the values of it, that's part of the return for you, but I'm still seeing annual returns in excess of, say, index funds. I'm growing at about 34% a year (started out more, but that's over the last year and ignores launch) and I feel I can continue to expand at that rate through taking on more interesting (and costly) projects. Note that this is not passive, this is working capital and is continually funding new stuff I'm able to take on. Hey, if it works for Amazon… ;)
Using section 8 to fund cottage industry like free software is brilliant. The absurd exploitativeness of contemporary landlords in large part drives the perceived need to be a heel.
Frankly you're an inspiration, thanks for this post. Know that I hope your growth rate continues or even increases.
The free software movement is really a radical concept. It encourages us to go beyond capitalism and making a buck to more fundamental aspects of humanity.
I’m afraid we are all part of the problem, but we can also be part of a solution, particularly if we work collectively.
Honestly? Take the mentality you see in the world - the bottom line comes first, the consumer wants easy consumption, security comes first, whatever else - and try to imagine where that comes in conflict with the things you love. What would have caused that conflict? What, if anything, do you see coming out of it?
And if you think Stallman was the tinfoil-hat prophet, you gotta hear about this guy Karl Marx. He predicted the economic turmoil of automation back when the US had a war over "States' Rights" to choose whether Slavery was Legal.
I predict that the US will slide further and Further into being a 3rd world nation, until suddenly, another collapse happens. US citizens wont break right away... No, they'll suffer it for a while. They'll even go hungry for a while - and I'm not talking about Detroit or Chi-raq. Im talking Seattle, Houston, NYC looking like the Rust belt, complete with bridge collapses and deaths-via-crumbling infrastructure.
China's upcoming divorce from the US markets will insulate them from the crash, but their involvement in our real estate market will only worsen the crisis for Americans. Russia, China, and the Eurozone will finally band together with their currency-basket idea upstaging the dollar. And Americans will still think we're special.
Then, when the Hoovervilles have swollen enough to be dangerous, someone will have the bright idea to mobilize and radicalize us. Still, we'll do nothing, even in the absence of Netflix and Cable TV. But that wont stop the government from trying to herd us into camps, just like the immigrants... And in those, with the forced absence of soap, sleep, food..., something will snap, and the guillotine will be reborn in fire and fury.
The Climate Change problem? Will get so bad it starts on Xenocide before anyone does anything effective - the sole exception being economic collapse. And we're going to have to shoot a few CEOs for the rest of them to take any of it seriously.
Everything from human trafficking to drug use is going to boom.
You know slavery - just barely behind propaganda, it was the second biggest influence on modern management practices. Psychology just taught us how to sugar coat it better.
Speaking of Propaganda, 1984 aint got shit on 2019. And 2030 is gonna make today look adorable.
Really? the feeling of being secure may come first. Think of how much modems/routers/phones or any other embedded device comes with obsolete software pieces with lots of security bugs. The non-free methodology of software development, I feel, is actually killing security, and making everybody more vulnerable.
Most firms don't like giving the source code of the devices away. I understand that they have their own reasons for that (whether it is right is another thing). But at least, there should be an official way to unlock those devices and run custom software pieces (which of course, voids warranty).
These days more people are moving to "Open Source," but not "Free Software." See how Linux & busybox essentially making any hardware non-free. Hope people understand the difference and help make the world better.
Amazon. Failing infrastructure that other companies rely upon and expect to function adequately, will not pose the same challenges. They deal with the logistics of delivering items of necessity to people all over the globe at enormous scale. They have their own fleets, their own delivery people, and their own automation approach. In a decade Amazon won't need the post office or UPS. The barriers to entry in taking that on are enormous to the point of near impossibility. Heck, even their ability to sell counterfeit garbage to customers without significant penalty on themselves shows they even know how to disappoint people correctly...
He is technically correct, idealistic, and uncompromising. Unfortunately that doesn't really work in the real world unless your name is Richard Stallman. It's not pragmatic.
You can ignore him but the reality that he has been impressively predicting won't ignore you. It will come for you, just a matter of time, if you keep ignoring it.
He has shifted the Overton window in the direction of software freedom for a long time. That has made a huge difference in how all software developers work today. He's worth listening to as long as you don't treat him as an idol.
You know what else is technically correct, idealistic and uncompromising and works in the real world: Bitcoin.
That system requires the power of a small European country to do 7 transactions a second generating a max of 1 mb of data volume every 10 minutes. That's like 1970s transaction speeds. Who the heck is ever going to use that?
youtube is not the internet, it's a privately run silo. I think it's actually better if people stop using it for everything. We've somehow got to the point where we are demanding private companies somehow preserve our freedoms simply because we've entrenched ourselves in their commercial products and given them control over content. Let youtube curate their content, I wish they'd do it more. Then maybe we will start seeing some more diversity rather than these massive silos
Agreed. Youtube doesn't host pornography and, guess what, there are plenty of other sites that do.
I almost think the reaction to this is too pessimistic! "Oh YouTube is banning content the Internet is DOOMED". As long as we can freely connect to any service then there will always be an alternative.
There's a real threat in Google (Youtube) controlling what is shown on their platforms. We might be informed and willing to try alternatives, but the masses don't (yet). This gives Google enormous propoganda power, and it is clear they already use this power to further their own agenda. It's not about freedom of speech, it's about deplatforming: the ability for your speech to be heard by the masses. The argument that you can just go elsewhere is like saying you can hang up your manifesto in the forest instead of on the church door.
When I was 16, back in 1999 I came to basically the same conclusions as Stallman.
I came to that conclusion trying to “fight” a (non-existant) virus that could infect any non-volatile memory onboard.
Since I didn’t actually control (really I mostly didn’t understand) my hardware it’s always seemed natural to me that, for example, the firmware of a hard drive of a networked computer could be compromised.
Since I didn’t control anything, I was at the mercy of those who did. Therefore I was always very hygienic on the internet, for example.
Stallman’s an arrogant self-righteous bastard. But he’s our bastard, damit! And I love him for it.
To paraphrase an old joke : "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too empty". What you describe there is the classic problem of Network effects. The limitation is not on the tech side of things. People don't use the decentralized services because either favourite content isn't there. Producers don't post to the decentralized service because the consumers aren't there. Unfortunate reality :-(
I really don't want so much power concentrated in the Facebooks and Googles of the world.
It's gonna bite us in the ass pretty soon, because the direct consequence of this effect is that the ability to launch a successful network depends on marketing - you need to achieve a critical mass of users pretty much instantly, since each new user won't stay for more than a day or two if their friends and content aren't there. That requirement forces potential new tech to have massive backing by a strong entity like a tech giant.
I wonder if we'll end up seeing state actors (or supranational entities like the EU) promoting state funded networks as a public alternative, as is sometimes the case in industries that tend to be monopolistic due to the cost of starting - transportation, telecommunications, etc.
> I wonder if we'll end up seeing state actors (or supranational entities like the EU) promoting state funded networks as a public alternative, as is sometimes the case in industries
You make a good point but I'd like to think of it this way: If the said service is made mandatory, then it has a chance of succeeding. Else, building that critical mass entails a lot of customer acquisition costs that a Govt may just not be in a state to justify. And therein lies the beauty and danger of network effects. Once a company has them, it is very very difficult to dislodge it. Look at Visa and Mastercard: V has been around since 1958 and MC from 1966. Both are valuable as they have network effects.
The effort involved in pushing videos to one or two more platforms when you already did to one is close to zero. This is how you start while not leaving YouTube yet and making it possible for the alternative to develop progressively.
In theory you could make a json file with all the details and push it to 100 content libraries like YouTube/Vevo/Peertube/Facebook/etc. but most of them want to be exclusive, they're not there to host your content, they want your viewers. There's no way they're going to do anything to help democratise that content.
We need to stop feeding the beast.
I'm still convinced that Opera Unite, which fused distributed social + web client + web server, should have been the way forward to make the web truly owned by the people: if social sites were simply caches of content available p2p or through any social site of my choosing (that the content owner allowed) ...
Cracking and reverse-engineering DRM is already illegal with the accepted US laws, so it's not far fetched for YouTube to be forced to remove those videos as well.
Kicking someone in the face is illegal too, but there a million - or more - YouTube videos showing you how to do it, and most towns in my country have more than one class you can go to to learn how to do it (TKD, BJJ, Karate, etc.).
The big thing RMS misses in that article is all the bio-identification that has been happening the last couple years.
Dan is going to get caught because the machine takes a picture of him when he logs in with a password instead of the fingerprint reader, cause you know can't have a PC without a camera pointed at the user..
It's more sinister than that. Dan is going to get caught because his typing frequency, style and mouse movements are unique in the whole world. Moreover, he usually works on a computer with unique hardware that can be fingerprinted by some silly W3C standards already. Camera would be a bonus "just to be sure". We will soon need typing/movements randomizers that would add tiny delays/perturbations to our typing/mouse movement to fool some advanced Deep Learning pattern extractor. Using those would place Dan on some "no loan" blacklist though.
For an article written in 1997, it's pretty damn prescient. The article also isn't focused on surveillance. I would argue that modern bio-identification was at least somewhat predicted by 1984 (though Orwell assumed that humans would be doing the identification, not computers).
Not getting caught led Dan to question if the bio-id AI was really that intelligent and helped release thousands of wrongfully convicted people 20 years later!
This reminds me of that Nintendo Switch game that had a ruby repl in it that was then removed from the Nintendo store. Nintendo is particularly bad in this department but it's still upsetting.
The thing that bores me the most is that the sentence not event makes sense. "Showing users how to bypass secure computer systems".
If you can bypass a computer system, in which way can it be considered secure?
A secure system is a not open system. Think of a door to your apartment, house, etc. It isn't relevant how secure it is but whether it is closed to others or not.
Yeah, YouTube's definition is self serving, and breaks apart for many important use cases. Their real definition is "we allow/block whatever makes us look good in the court of public opinion", and to think they have any real definition beyond that is a fallacy.
Sure, but the medium term relevance to company profit isn't a metric you meaningfully have until it's too late to do anything about. You can actually react to the court of public opinion, and reacting to that will pretty much give you a level of CYA as a decision maker, so there's not really a down side on that end.
Overbearing youtube, 10 years from now if it's still a medium it may be a far-cry from an expressive and genuine platform (Even worse-so than it is now).
How long until biohacking, and other things are blocked based on the same sensitivity triggers for the topic?
Overbearing youtube, 10 years from now if it's still a medium it may be a far-cry from an expressive and genuine platform
Yahoo's not the place it was in its heyday. Facebook's not the place it was in its heyday. Even Google's not the place it was 10 years ago. I don't think anyone is immune. The best you can do it to make sure the trajectory is positive. Netflix isn't the place it used to be. I think that's positive, though.
How long until biohacking, and other things are blocked based on the same sensitivity triggers for the topic?
All the really cool stuff should disappear from YouTube. That's just the natural order of things. They no longer want to be edgy. They want to be fat and happy off those big establishment corporate dollars. They've positioned themselves to be the next cable. That just means they want to be the current "vast wasteland."
The faster YouTube becomes the next cable, the better. The less time the public discourse spends squished under the pressing thumb of the corporate oligarchs, the better.
What I am worried is that a lot of the "cool stuff" is disappearing from the web. I remember back in the day (late 90's) we had CrackStore, Phrack, Fravia, DeCSS, the box.sk domains a vibrant reverse-eng. community and a lot of really cool content.
Nowadays with the USA policing a lot of that content has disappeared, and slowly people are pushed not to do new content. There are some very small efforts in some subreddits, but a lot of this is pushed to the underground, where it is difficult to find.
Subreddits are weird. Because of how Reddit works, it's awful easy for the place to be governed by state actors and various coordinated brigades. So you can be there, sure, but if you're in the wrong place with information someone doesn't want seen, it won't do you a lot of good as you'll get the "oh look, 25 downvotes in a matter of seconds, someone's on point today" effect. It's REAL easy to police Reddit and enforce your agenda if you're organized and have teams of bots or sockpuppets.
They have to say it because otherwise people don't subscribe. I know some youtubers who never did it hut had to resort to saying it because their subscriber numbers where stagnating otherwise.
Then there are refreshing youtube channels like "Primitive Technology" where he never says a word and manages to end up with 9.5 million subscribers...
But you know... people CAN just be ok with their subscriber numbers stagnating a bit.
Whoring for likes/subscribes is desperate and it cheapens the hell out of your art. It may give you more likes/subscribes but there are other great things that come from artistic creation than the pitifully minimal effort required by the clicking of a button.
It isn't always about art though? If more subscribers equal more views over time which in turns equals more ad revenue, then I can't blame someone who's trying to make a living for doing something that might come across as cheap to some.
As I understand, it's not about the likes/subscribes, really, but that at subscriber count directly translated to more favorable monetization terms for the content creator. That is, they're basically internet buskers.
I need to experiment with this. I don't say that mantra and my channel is slowly growing (by about 100% a year and starting to do a hockey-stick curve, but starting from very little). I should take a minute at the end of a video (or even the beginning!) to make a case for supporting the actual channel, on the grounds of it'll help the message get out.
I can phrase it as 'like OR DISLIKE and subscribe and click the bell icon', and explain how the dislike button is the same thing (both go to 'engagement') plus a little feedback for me the creator. So you can help the channel AND try steering me away from more channel-whoring by disliking and subscribing. Hell, maybe it helps you more. Please dislike and subscribe :D
I'm not sure if using hidden services is considered a viable solution here on HN, but it seems to to me to be the solution. Don't know any video streaming services but I assume that such sites already exist. The main selling point would be relative difficulty to take down a specific video through a legal action. I assume that youtube takedowns are either results of complaints/legal threats that they have received or a preemptive action to avoid such legal problems happening in future, i.e. their legal department assessed that the risk of such motions in future to be likely. On the other hand, considering bandwidth requirements for video streaming deanonymization of such service appears to be relatively easy, hence possibly some service centered around ipfs would be viable.
Don’t worry the hatespeech will still be there, for something to be banned it needs to do something that like 80% of politicians oppose (“hacking” videos are only useful for crime, so we must stop the kids from criming), or that causes advertisers to pull out, or if the content otherwise hits their bottom line (reporting on hate crimes, privacy, tracker blocking, etc).
Anything else is fine - you have to be either small target or get a large amount of media attention for them to enforce some semblance of their stated policies (which is why defcon and black hat videos haven’t been touched)
My fav part is repeatedly getting recommendations for many years old videos when something like a week’s worth of new comments is uploaded every minute ... why youtube why?
The point isn't to make you a more informed and well-rounded person, it's to keep you on YouTube so you see more ads. I bet "old favorites" that might make you feel nostalgic or have rewatch value (it's not a gamble, you already know it's good) makes a significant number of people stay longer.
YouTube needs to accelerate their banning process so they can become solely focused on mainstream psychological brainwashing clickbait. This way my favorite creators can actually move to other freer platforms and get paid without fascist payment processors and trying to abide by YouTube's insane terms and conditions. YouTube is going the way of cable TV channels dedicated to infomercials. The interesting stuff will be purged soon. The writing is on the wall. Backup and escape while you can. It will not get better.
Corporate, ad-supported platforms are inherently prone to arbitrary censorship... they always have been and always will be. If you want freedom, viewer/donation-supported distribution not tied to corporate interests is the only way to go. But, you have to get someone to pay or it all comes crashing down.
Now might be a good opportunity for Pornhub to offer a reskinned version of their site. They already have the infrastructure and people do host non-porn related content there.
Fantastic idea, and honestly Pornhub's values are a good match. They're used to hosting explicit, controversial content, resisting even copyright takedowns (unfortunately), yet they do a good job of keeping outright atrocities off the platform (e.g. snuff films, child porn etc.)
But how would they make money off it? Infosec expats from YouTube are probably the most likely population to use ad-block of anyone!
I've noticed quite a few free software enthusiast posting their content to LBRY[1]. Doesn't seem like a perfect solution for every type of video getting messed up by YouTube lately, but I think infosec could find a good home there.
Care to explain how to make a censorship resistant system without a blockchain? It's one of the best use cases for it, and everything LBRY promises would not be possible without it.
LBRY actually has one of the most valid uses of a blockchain. Don't you see what's happening on YouTube today with demonization and censorship? No hacking videos? Really.
It's the same with Github, sure you can host on your own domain, but "search for voctoweb on Github" is so much easier than "oh just go to my homepage at sdkljfsdl.sdf".
If you use google instead of github search you can find it even if it's on a self-hosted gitlab, though. And since both use git as API nobody is stopped from forking from gitlab to github either.
In order to receive "Safe harbour" copyright immunity for uploaded user content, you have to have fairly lax rules on content (e.g. only blocking actual criminal content, which is all youtube have done before this, right?).
If you want to significantly curate your content, you can't hide behind the legal protection of "uncurated user content".
>e.g. only blocking actual criminal content, which is all youtube have done before this, right?
Youtube has always blocked porn. Youtube has had a other restrictions as well, for example at first all videos had to be under 10 minutes. In response to criticism of disturbing videos of children, youtube deleted 150k videos of children in disturbing situations[1]. Read the guidelines from 2009[2], there's various things banned there that aren't illegal.
YouTube very aggressively curates copyrighted content. This idea seems like the ideal way to stifle any competition to YouTube because the little guys cannot afford to implement a sophisticated machine learning copyright dragnet.
It ceased to be a public place long ago. - We fucked it up, when we wanted it all for free and shoved all our data up Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Whatever's asses. When financial interest and gains are high enough, how do you want to stop it? Opensource all the infrastructure, let it be owned by some supranational, "communist" organization? How would you guarantee that this be any better than those quasi monopolies?
The "instruction hacking.." bit at the end seems a bit out of place given the rest of the page. What it feels like is that its a poorly written attempt to ban software cracking and the computerized version of the previous "Instructional theft" ban without giving people the mental strings to discover how to get free warez and bypass things like hotel keycards, free token cards for the arcade/etc.
Frankly, I'm frequently surprised by what I stumble upon on youtube..
Obviously the spirit of the law is for youtube to have a way to remove "how 2 script kiddie" videos. But the letter of the law matters, and right now the letters say they can ban just about any video discussing the details of vulnerable systems.
That is true, but youtube is full of things which basically violate these principals. I will pick the second item "Extremely dangerous challenges" because its nice and safe/generic to talk about. I think everyone understands what they are talking about, but youtube has tons of instructional videos for doing things which could severely maim/kill careless or poorly trained individuals. The infamous Shanghi tower climb/etc video (83M views on just one of the versions) is actually on the tamer side of this, likely only violating a couple of the guidelines. Even, less scary are all the "this is how you run a table saw" like videos.
So they have broad guidelines that don't seem to be blanket enforced.
I think you're misinterpreting this part of the ToS. I don't think it's meant to apply to videos of dangerous conduct in general. Instead, it's meant to apply to videos which are explicitly presented as a "challenge" for other users to complete -- along the lines of the ALS "Ice Bucket Challenge", but explicitly harmful (think "Drink a Gallon of Bleach Challenge").
That is, even if your videos are in-the-clear currently, there is no reason Youtube couldn't decide to interpret its rules more strictly in the future. Maybe your video's genre just hasn't gotten any bad press yet.
Yes and no. While it solves users/audience problem for alternative platformm, there is another barier of entry: bandwidth costs. I recommend anyone to do a simple math excercise of simple multiplication:
size of 20 minute 2K video * 50'000 views * price per GB of traffic on your favourite cloud/hosting platform.
To make the excercise more interesting now multiply whatever result you got by the number of videos your platform is supposed to host. Assume this number to grow each month. Also assume that some users will want 4K.
You can monetize from the start, and get the full cut. If the monetization doesn't work out, you can pull the plug before the costs occur. You could probably even code it so that you never serve more than you made in income. You might also say you don't get to 50k views by multiplication, but by addition. I mean, if your videos are so popular that you get 50k hits in the first minute of uploading one, your audience will between them find a way to finance you.
> To make the excercise more interesting now multiply whatever result you got by the number of videos your platform is supposed to host.
Multiply income by the same amount though.
> Also assume that some users will want 4K.
I wouldn't assume that for all types of content anyway, and certainly not for all connections. In this case, that some users don't get what they want doesn't matter to those who don't want it. Whereas YT censoring things can turn off even people who aren't interested in the censored content per se, on principle, I doubt you'll find that with "not supporting 4k, because you only got started self-hosting and making ends meet". People sometimes are supportive of people in ways they aren't of companies.
Seriously though it is a problem that people are increasingly advocating for limiting or eliminating tools which make an individual powerful (or are ambivalent to change that give away that power)
Heck, anyone offering insider advice or education in many professions and trades should be worried: medicine, nursing, legal, engineering, aviation, maintenance (automotive, aviation, industrial and many more), physics and more.
I dont think youtube can run their business without infocsec personal. But the US community as a whole also doesnt seem to have a problem with working for for 3 letter agencies, so its not really surprising that youtube doesnt have to worry about their personal leaving. Please think about what kind of effect your work has on the wider world. Some here are likely in the privileged situation that changing the job because of your conscience is a possibility.
edit: I would add to think about the next generation of us and what example those actions sets, but i dont think i have to. Too many people here already grew up in an environment where taking jobs at 3 letter agencies is nothing out of the ordinary and the head of the NSA gets to speak at DEFCON while kids rot in jail for the same curiosity that made us who we are today.
This ever-increasing censorship is the inevitable result of buying into the idea that speech can be "harmful" and that big tech companies have some kind of "responsibility" to remove it.
> ...buying into the idea that speech can be “harmful”..
Speech can’t be both so powerful we must protect it at all costs and simultaneously harmless.
I understand that it is incredibly important to protect free-speech but to imply it has no impact is disingenuous. We fight for it because it has power not because it is powerless.
One could easily counter you with "tell that to the surviving members of families who died at the hand of terrorists who walked into the europe without a right to do so"
As far as I can tell, defcon hasn’t gone anywhere and the one security researcher who’s videos were taken down by mistake were promptly put back up once the researcher pointed out the mistake to youtube.
I'm just going to shamelessly plug an open source Golang project I've been developing to stream my own videos from my YouTube channel, but in a self hosted privacy-focused way.
Builtin Tor onion service support so you don't need domains or a static IP address, automatic RSS feeds, no database (the video data is read from MP4 metadata), and no JavaScript (the player is just HTML video).
In terms of self-hosting, obviously it's problematic if too many people access it this way, but my experience so far is that modern video compression is really good. I can get one of my 15 minute videos at 480p in around 50mb or so.
That's like loading weather.com five times. And since it's streaming the bandwidth is spread out enough to support plenty of connections (especially with Golang's IO support).
This creates opportunities for niche driven video sites to show up, if they have not already.
For example "YouTube for infosec".
The web is going to go more towards specialisation as the "one place for all kinds of content of this format" model is becoming too big to handle. For various reasons, from searching, to moderation, to curation.
The most upsetting thing for me is, that YT acts in both legislative and executive functions here.
It's one thing to make a rule, to ban "hacking techniques".
But there should be an independent party who get's to decide whether a particular video is about "hacking techniques" or not.
> Is teaching kids how to use wireshark(1) already hacking?
> How about the Chrome dev-console?
The current state of things, where:
a) a proprietary algorithm decides if a rule is violated or not and
b) you have no way to appeal decisions taken by YT,
is appalling.
Update: Well, there appears to be a YT-internal process to appeal censoring decisions. But who knows how well that works. In the past, appealing to copyright take-downs was practically impossible.
The issue is that effective free speech is now facilitated by private entities who are not legally beholden to it. The public forum is now privatised and more and more monopolised.
I could almost see this being an attempt to try to back people off from encouraging them to moderate. Pick something that they can make a very plausible claim to be doing for "public safety" but that they know will cause an uproar from respected voices in tech for being counter productive. Then they can faux throw their hands up in the future and say, "it's in everyone's best interest for us not to moderate".
I'm not really saying strongly this is the case, it's a bit tin foil hat, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was true either.
This is fantastic news. The best possible way to get new platforms is to kick technically competent hackers out of existing ones. We should encourage other platforms to deplatform vulnerability researchers too.
Curious, googlers post here. Do any people who work on youtube read these? While googlers do reply to these sorts of comment sections I've never seen one from youtube do so.
And yet there are hundreds of videos of animals suffering (electrocution, glue, etc) by non-English channels with hundreds of thousands of views and they don't seem to care.
Time to revive the cypherpunks! We are hackers we can crack the hell out of these capitalists that are trying to shape reality or we can build our own platforms, people go where the hackers go, the internet was created by hackers lets take it back! www.gnu.org is a good place to start.
Counterpoint; LiveOverflow (also a channel on YouTube featuring reverse-engineering) had this to say on the manner, in very broad strokes, YouTube monetization, and hosting, is a luxury and they as a private org can choose what or what not to host.
YouTube should just ban EVERYTHING, I mean, absolutely every video -- except for highly edited, highly censored, Barney The Purple Dinosaur(tm) children's videos, where the political party that is in power in the region of the world where the video is shown -- gets to do ALL of the editing... <g>
Most of people of course don't like the pressure, but it's looks too classical: Youtube is a monopoly in video hosting. Monopolist always dictate his own rules, so better be prepared to adventures.
My channel monetization was banned and I'm very grateful, there's a lot of bigger things to do.
They (and all other creators who produce anything that YT might at some point deem even remotely controversial) should just move to BitChute. It kinda looks ugly, but it basically provides the same functionality, without YTs overbearing politics and hostility towards the 1st amendment.
If there is any group capable of finding a new home and thriving it's the infosec crowd.
This is another move from YouTube to limit their content to more advertising friendly genres. I don't like it but it gives me hope there may be some competitors rise up in that space.
Looking forward to Floatplane, youtube's terms and conditions have been awful for years, not to mention the outright ban on anything even remotely controversial and the automated tyranny.
BitChute is really nice. I use it quite a bit now. I've been trying out some Reddit alternatives recently too. They all get hardly any traffic, but they've reminded me how much I miss the "anything goes" culture the web had a decade ago.
Imagine a video site where you had to pay money to have your videos hosted. In this scenario, the platform would be obligated to host your content as long as it was legal.
This time is different, because hackers are more likely to have the ability to solve this problem (even if it weren't for the fact that YT already solved it once more than a decade ago). YT probably made a big mistake here.
If I understand correctly, YT is able to solve it because it has huge data centers which can cache the videos at appropriate locations all around the world. Honest query: do you think an individual/small group can replicate this?
It's already been solved by the groups using the torrent system to create apps which allow "streaming" torrents. But every time one of these pops up it's immediately struck down by legal blows.
Pretty doubtful about that tbh. Yes, the hacking type can likely solve "host video" for people to watch, maybe even "make it streamable without ruining my resources" but they usually aren't as apt w.r.t. user experience, SEO, and a multitude of other aspects that capture an audience. Shameful as I might find it, independent sites also don't offer nearly the reach a platform like YouTube does these days.
Add to that the fact that we're talking about a niche topic here, it's unlikely to affect youtube in any non-philosophical manner.
Google search is, well, controlled by Google. Just like Youtube. Social media is also ridden with content policies and censorship (Reddit is among the better, but they are still centralized, and Reddit search is a joke).
Yes but Google search is a search engine, whereas what I’m thinking about is some sort of recommendation engine, along the same lines of YouTube’s, but not limited to a specific platform. Probably it’s not sustainable from a business perspective so it’s just a dream.
All those things are overrated, putting up some videos on YouTube is no guarantee of an audience. You still have promotional work to do. And it’s not nearly as expensive to host videos now compared to the past.
Fair point. I thought I remembered more incidents than the one. But looking in to it more I don’t see any. I should have done more research before trusting my faulty memory.
Hosting and serving video is a real barrier to uploading content for the vast majority.
Also people don’t want to go to random sites for video, they like YouTube itself. Most video is discovered and watched entirely within, not from external links.
As others mentioned, discoverability is an issue, as well as monetization. I doubt the frozen channel makes a lot of money but even if it's 100 bucks per week or month, it still helps. If he hosted the videos on his own site, he'll most likely make zero.
It's inevitable. In Fahrenheit 451, books start getting banned because every person who ever gets offended starts asking for the thing that offended them to go away and people comply.
This is what happens to big targets. It's why it's important to preserve the independent host.
> > "And in her ears the little Seashells, the timble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming on on the shore of her unsleeping mind."
> So, even as she rests, Mildred is surrounded by noise, by constant entertainment, just like she is during the day with her t.v. walls. Montag's society uses these seashells for two purposes. The first is to control information, and hence, thought and potential rebellion. If they are the ones controlling what information you get, they can tell you whatever they want, giving only one perspective, and painting a rosy picture so that people are never discontented. They also use the shells to relay important information. For example, when Montag escapes at the end, they send a message through all of the seashells for everyone to look out for him, and to turn him in if they see him. They automatically have a huge civilian army at hand, through the use of the seashells. Secondly, if people are constantly "plugged in," they don't have any spare time for their minds to be on their own. If people never have silence, they never think, and so never have the kind of discontented thought that come from meditation.
> Mildred stays "tuned in" so much that she really has no mind of her own. In this sense, she is a perfect citizen of her society. I hope that these thoughts helped; good luck!
"just ask all those American cities that are paying out to ransomware creeps who got hold of a defect that the NSA kept secret so they could use it against "bad guys."
Vimeo recently banned Project Veritas (which is still up on youtube), Alex Jones and plenty of other channels. Not sure it's a less censuring alternative.
I think every platform has the right to censor and also the duty to do so. Like gore or cp etc. This shapes a profile for a platform. In vimeo's case they distanced themselves from some conspiracy theory fanatics which is fine with me. Meaning I endorse that profile as a visitor and who doesn't just needs another platform.
And one reason why those outlets (like Alex Jones & Co.) often aren't accepted around for long is because they attract rather garbled minds with some tendency towards toxic social interaction.
Do platforms have the right to collude with each other to deny service to a particular individual? Even if you think Alex Jones is a crazy person (and he is), you should still condemn Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube for attempting to remove him from public discourse. If anything, it only made his crazy conspiracy theories seem more credible.
They have the right. I don't think censorship is a smart answer to "alternative truths" or debatable content, though. They could just downrank it. The solution must be free and public education enabling a majority of society to make up their own mind in an informed and rational fashion.
Churches aren't businesses, they have different legal rights. Still, if you walk into a Baptist Christian church reciting versues from the Quran you will find yourself quickly banned and the church is within its rights to do so, even if muslims wouldn't like that. Fortunately, a mosque has the same freedom.
Every news about authoritarian overreach prompts some discussion about the need for decentralization.
Yet, decentralization of services is moot if the underlying physical connectivity layer can still be controlled/filtered from a single point. Then there's the matter of discovering decentralized/distributed services.
We have literally billions of devices capable of sending and receiving signals, including millions of independent computing devices that are powered 24/7. Do we really need centralized entities to keep our species connected?
Regarding content and video distribution, we already have a working decentralized platform: BitTorrent. We even have clients allowing searching and previewing videos from torrents (PopcornTime and the like). The infrastructure is already there, the only barriers are psychological at this point.
> the only barriers are psychological at this point.
For me, the barriers are: eating up more than the file's size from my limited ISP quota, and CPU and battery usage when unplugged.
The CPU and battery issues can be resolved by seeding only while charging/idle/under a specific CPU temperature. One hemisphere could serve the other while half the world sleeps every day/night.
As for data caps, we again see the need for decentralizing the physical connectivity layer.
A channel dedicated to creating point-and-click cracking tutorials for complete [expletives] gets banned (go figure.) People cry: waahhh, free speech, think of the [security researchers.] Sorry, but I fail to see how any of this relates to infosec.
If it were really about security research then most of the content would be about theoretical topics like classes of vulnerabilities, how PoCs work, how to write basic shell code, links to assembly programming, and so on. But instead these geniuses give us gems like: how to run [this script] to break this [system version], a guide for tween dummies.
They distill their knowledge and weaponise it for use by anyone, and that's not security through obscurity. That's knowingly building a loaded gun, showing people that its cool to fire it, handing it to children, and then saying: lol, don't use this okay, totally for research only! Yeah, sure. Anything for dat ad revenue, right? Face it, none of the people watching these videos are there for education.
The only people this benefits are the script kiddies. InfoSec researchers sure as hell aren't using YouTube for their vuln disclosures and don't need to be spoon fed cooking recipes for doing pen tests or R & D.
>People cry: waahhh, free speech, think of the [security researchers.]
What do you think free speech means? Speech you like?
And yes, think of not only groups you can think of like "security researches" (sic) but all those groups you can't think of. These policies are a dragnet. Yeah, they'll MAYBE catch some guys you think shouldn't be on there (and by the way, I'm pretty sure YouTube was banning those guys anyway), but they'll catch a hundreds times more. People who maybe doing peripherally related things, like educational content, or historical content, or satirical and comical content, or a mix of all those and infosec stuff, in all kinds of languages, etc., etc. etc.
But you'll say "They can just appeal", and you know what, if Twitterverse makes a stink about something, maybe it'll work, but 99% of those will never appeal and that content will be lost. Or maybe they'll lose their appeal because what constitutes infringement will fall on the interpretation of some offshored minimum-wage worker (much respect to them), or capricious whims of executives who don't want bad publicity.
>The only people this benefits are the script kiddies.
You sure about that? Really? Really really?
How about them reporters in censor-happy countries, I bet you they are script kiddies too because they aren't programmers.
That's one example, but how about all those other groups you and I can't even think of because we're just not that aware of all the things that happen in the world.
And how do you think you learn about infosec? I bet a non-trivial amount of InfoSec professionals started off as 'script kiddies'. In fact, I bet all the good ones were 'script kiddies' (pretty sure Snowden was a script kiddie).
You know what the difference is between a vulnerability testing tool for use in securing your network vs probing another for nefarious penetration? Nothing.
---
I fully get the motivation of these companies. They want safe content for advertisers, so YouTube will never be a free speech zone.
What I don't get are cheerleaders, usually on the left now, who want these behemoths to keep adding more and more restrictions. Who want a corporate behemoth to act like their mommy and daddy and protected from things they are afraid of and do the same for others too.
"Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data."
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
What's incorrect? It was a personal comment? Even here we've got people who boss over others due to lack of understanding. Can't expect that from machines.
Bans on adult content are almost universal on mainstream services. Somehow this is never considered censorship by the tech community. It’s only when they start to ban other content that anyone cares.
Script kiddies have always been the proverbial joke, but if you ask me, this category of hackers collectively is a bigger problem for the average person. They usually can't do much damage individually, but when you have so many of them that know how to cause even a minimal amount of mayhem and distraction for others, that adds up as a burden to society.
I also have no respect for hackers that have no desire to put in the time and effort toward the pursuit of becoming masters at what they do, and virtually everyone who is watching hacking tutorials on YT is just looking for a shortcut so they can hack a little bit on the side between League of Legends games.
So good riddance to the videos (though not sure how much difference it will make at this point).
However, the real issue here is that Google is applying changes to its censorship policies at a gradual, subtler pace, rather than deciding on a coherent principle and applying it consistently. There's too much fear that Google will continue to tighten restrictions, and that next on the chopping block will be either our favorite content or stuff we produce/upload ourselves. Nobody really knows where it ends. This is something I'm definitely not okay with, and this ban is just another example of this trend.
Disagree. I found the channel to be useful and educational. For example, I knew people could crack WiFi passwords but never actually understood how until I watched null byte videos. Now I can be more vigilant about protecting my WiFi. I really hate these generalizations about these wannabe hackers being kids playing League. I’m 33 and I would venture a lot of people watching those vids have legitimate interest in exploring the ethical hacker profession. You may not get the proper education nor exposure but it’s a start. Also I feel like mischief is part of adolescence that’s required to develop interest in a more serious pursuit. As a kid I did plenty of this type of “hacking“ but on a more basic level. This in turn made me more fascinated about how things work, got me into game exploiting, which lead to virtual sales, e-commerce and ultimately a decent paying job.
I’m not happy that today’s society wants to monitor and deter everything. It leaves no room for exploration, growth, mistakes and learning.
