29 ms·
YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”
- jandrese 7y agoSo only for computer systems? LockPickingLawyer is still safe for now? That said, are they just going to push these people out to less annoying formats like a blog or a wiki instead of overly long video presentations?
- gen3 7y agoThe policy also says "Instructional theft: Showing users how to steal money or tangible goods." [0] I could see LockPickingLawyer falling under this category. [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964?hl=en
- Communitivity 7y agoI agree with others here, YT and it's like are de facto monopolies by their size and market share. PeerTube [1] is a Mastodon [2] offshoot project that might allow users to get off YT, no idea where it's at though. "One project, Peertube, does exactly this. A federated, decentralized video sharing platform using the same back end as Mastodon, but around the sharing of video clips."[3] [1] https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ [2] https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [2] https://medium.com/tootsuite/replacing-the-pillars-of-the-internet-235836580a0e https://medium.com/tootsuite/replacing-the-pillars-of-the-in...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- davb 7y agoMy guess is that a tech player with a big ad spend is unhappy about YouTube tutorials teaching users to de-DRM their content or jailbreak their consumer devices.
- OrangeManBad 7y agoI had no clue how the publishing world worked until I read fsj- turns out everything is about ads. You post a bad review And boom- you no longer have apple as an advertiser. FSJ claims that IBM invented this game and apple beat them later at it.
- smittywerben 7y agoI want to A) see the video and B) know why Google skipped age-restricting and simply banned it. Censorship is worse than irresponsible disclosure.
- kohtatsu 7y agoUh oh. You know it's bad when the conditions for a ban are an oxymoron.
- Four8Five 7y agoDidn't they just host a CTF recently?
- rc_hadoken 7y agoThey did, I'm as lost as you are. This actually just broke my mind.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoBigCo has silos. Water is wet. More breaking news at 11. Sarcasm aside, I'm betting there's an organizational unit responsible for content policy and they have nearly zero contact with the organization unit that put on the CTF.
- dRaBoQ 7y agohuh ? What will happen to the Defcon and Blackhat talks ?
- josteink 7y agoSo more random bullshit YouTube censorship, but what are people going to do? Hosting videos in 2019 is easy. Getting your content discovered is the hard bit. We need a decentralised and/or federated alternative for video-content publishing. The sooner, the better. YouTube has been taken over by big business and lawyers, and it seems they are gradually trying to “dumb” it down and take away any risky (read: useful/interesting) content to the point it might as well be cable tv. We could use a viable, alternate and free platform this very instant.
- manjana 7y agoVisit: https://d.tube/ https://d.tube/ and spread the word please, it's current content is crap. It even awards crypto to uploaders.
- swiley 7y agoDoes anyone know what the ligality of uploading MIT's OCW lecture videos here would be? Personally that's what got me into watching youtube in the first place. Also: does that really need javascript? (I'm guessing you're doing something with IPFS?) is there any way to brows it with some command line tool if it does?
- manjana 7y agoI'm only partially familiar with the platform and have no aurhorship so I don't know unfortunately.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 7y ago> Getting your content discovered is the hard bit. > We need a decentralised and/or federated alternative for video-content publishing. I don't see how that second phrase follows from the first. Your comment has a strong point about the need to break Google down, but not on making it easier to host videos.
- sarcasmatwork 7y agoYoutube updating its policy to ban videos they have already monetized from, while the creators get nothing. Youtube is a monopoly. Creators need to get off YT, and onto something else if it exists.
- lghh 7y ago> if it exists. It doesn't.
- skrebbel 7y agoVimeo?
- jasode 7y agoAn example of Vimeo terminating an account of a guy reviewing rat traps after he paid Vimeo's $240 fee: deep link: https://youtu.be/GGMdrBEumLE?t=87 https://youtu.be/GGMdrBEumLE?t=87
- officeplant 7y agoBig fan of his channel. It's so fucking stupid how a simple educational channel on mouse traps (and other types of pest traps) can run into a wall of censorship and demonetization.
- est31 7y agoMost played youtube video: despacito (6.6 B) Most played vimeo video: the mountain (77 M) Most played pornhub video: kim kardashian's sex tape (195 M) There is quite a headstart for YouTube here when it comes to number of viewers.
- plopz 7y agoVimeo banned video game content for not being arty enough. It was a shame too since they were poised to succeed since stage6 had just shut down and youtube wasn't doing HD video.
- 7y ago
- sleepysysadmin 7y agohttps://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964?hl=en Instructional hacking and phishing: Showing users how to bypass secure computer systems or steal user credentials and personal data.
- 0xDEFC0DE 7y agoI didn't catch the video: was it for a specific system they didn't own/have permission for, or was it their own device that launched fireworks? I hope IppSec doesn't lose his uploads. And all of the computer security conference videos.
- gregmac 7y agoRhetorical question: If a YouTube video can show how to bypass it, does it really count as a "secure" system?
- EnFinlay 7y agoI would say yes, since "secure" is a spectrum and there's nothing about a YouTube video that means the information is lower quality or less valuable than any other source.
- philipov 7y agoRhetorical answer: If you can secure a system through legislation, it is no longer necessary to secure it through engineering.
- JoshTriplett 7y agoThat's certainly the (false) belief under which many legislative and governmental bodies operate.
- jegs 7y agoI don't think they believe it either. It's just easier to treat people as criminals by default. Why go through the effort of engineering things properly when you can have 10+ cops break down your door and shoot your dog?
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoYou're overestimating the cognitive ability of the average lawmaker. They probably don't even stop to think about what security measures can be taken to prevent being pwned.
- whatshisface 7y agoIt's a true belief for companies like Equifax, who can offload all of the liability so long as it's the criminal that is guilty instead of them. For Equifax, securing reads is worth very little because as long as they can A. stop competitors from using their data and B. have no liability all of their needs are met.
- unreal37 7y agoI know this might not be a popular opinion. But showing people how to hack systems... that seems like an OK thing to ban. It's a crime. Teaching people how to commit a crime has always been not OK.
- vortico 7y agoMost Constitution-respecting Americans will disagree. Committing a crime is not OK. Conveying information for learning is always OK.
- unreal37 7y agoReally? "It shall be unlawful for any person... to teach or demonstrate the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction..."[1] Teaching bomb making is not legal. Passed the senate 94-0, no objections. There are things you can't teach. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/842 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/842
- vortico 7y agoYou omitted the important part: "...with the intent that the teaching, demonstration, or information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence." The teaching alone is legal. The intent to set up someone to commit a crime is what makes it illegal. I can legally teach you how to make a bomb if I do not intend for you to use it for crime.
- unreal37 7y agoThat is an awfully thin hair to split. I challenge you on that last point. If you tried teaching bomb making in the United States, you would likely have be visited by a couple of ATF folks to have a talk. They would advise you strongly not to teach that. Anyways, best of luck. :)
- 7y ago
- gen3 7y agoDoes this mean that all the reverse engineering videos, con talks, prof of exploit demos, CTF walkthroughs', and fuzzing tutorials will be removed? What about videos showing me how to use tools like Twistlock? Will they be exempt, but videos about burp be banned? What constitutes a "secure" computer system? Side note, I guess its time to fire up youtube-dl. Are there any channels that need to be archived? I normally just watch what comes up in a search, not anyone in particular.
- danShumway 7y agoI'm not going to be able to take a look for a few days, but I'd be grateful if someone made sure that most of the Defcon talks were archived or mirrored somewhere.
- simlevesque 7y agohttps://media.defcon.org/ https://media.defcon.org/ https://media.ccc.de/ https://media.ccc.de/
- danShumway 7y agoThanks, didn't realize these existed.
- sschueller 7y agoYou will also find recent ccc conferences on peertube nodes.
- EnFinlay 7y agoToo many to count.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoPlease use tubeup [1] to backup at risk videos to the Internet Archive. It uses youtube-dl on the backend for retrieving content, subtitles, etc, and will properly set metadata for the item in the archive. The content will be darked if there’s an issue serving it, and the IA staff and storage system will throttle you if necessary (which will bubble up as s3 timeouts). DEFCON, CCC, and other infosec groups need to move to peertube ASAP. [1] https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
- EnFinlay 7y agoThere are thousands of hours of excellent cybersecurity content hosted on YouTube. The possibility of losing this wealth of information and history is shocking to me. Time to start the archive effort. And to finally appreciate what so many other communities have gone through when they've found themselves on the wrong side of one of the internet behemoths. I feel naive.
- gen3 7y agoDo you have any recommendations on channels to archive?
- jeena 7y agoPeerTube lets you import YouTube videos.
- EnFinlay 7y ago- Many convention talks are really good and are too many to list - OWASP - zseano - hackerone - Bugcrowd (Jason Haddix's stuff is a pretty important pillar) - OWASP - DarkOperator - Absolute AppSec - KacperSzureEN - PwnFunction - LiveOverflow There are a ton more, these are just ones I've been watching in the past 6 months or so.
- manjana 7y ago'Adrian Crenshaw' He uploads from more than 20 hacking/infosec cons a year and has around 2k videos. 'IppSec' has around 100 CTF walkthroughs. 'Open SecurityTraining' has ~200 tutorial vids on topics like reverse engineering and malware analysis. Edit: added a few more.
- vernie 7y agoThis might not be particularly relevant but what was the video actually about? Did it show how to remotely launch professional fireworks shows?
- JTbane 7y agoThere's a fine line between pentesting education and "how to break into a computer", and it's sad that instructional videos are now being banned due to this policy.
- marcosdumay 7y agoIs there a line? I fail to see any difference. I also don't understand how a video teaching how to make your software more secure is different from a video teaching how to exploit insecure software. For all I know, they are the exact same video.
- unreal37 7y agoIf I create a video that shows "how to hack into Facebook Corporation", that is teaching an illegal act. You do not have authorization to hack Facebook. If you teach "how to hack your own system, that you own", that's a different thing entirely. Two different videos.
- exabrial 7y agoWhy does SV push half baked algorithms into production constantly?
- r-s 7y agoI dont understand this, if it can be bypassed, by definition, it is not secure?
- umvi 7y agoAs if there is any truly secure system on earth. Name a secure system.
- strictnein 7y agoSending messages using One-time Pads are perfectly secure when used properly, which is pretty simple - don't reuse the keys and the message has to be shorter than the key you are using. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad
- umvi 7y agoAnd is there an app or service in existence currently using OTPs "properly", as you say? OTPs are extremely onerous, if not impossible to implement properly in real life in a way that scales. Hence why nobody uses them (instead people use RSA/ECC/AES/etc).
- jazzyjackson 7y agoThis is as good a time as any to start archiving your favorite channels, you can point youtube-dl at a video URL, a playlist, or a username. brew install youtube-dl youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/user/DEFCONConference/ Showing 2460 videos, I'll have to grab a few harddrives.
- gruez 7y agobut why? there's still https://media.defcon.org/ https://media.defcon.org/
- jazzyjackson 7y agoOof bad example, thanks It's just a channel I'd like an offline backup of anyway. Hoping people post other channels that are worth downloading.
- nudpiedo 7y agoNot anymore a conspiracy theory. This is the actual big brother modeling our futures, a group of people powerful enough, with their own interests and their own agenda with access to most peoples minds/lives, and who already publicly explained how they plan to influence on global geopolitics and society building. I find it disturbing this level of censorship. At first, it was pedophiles, murders and violent criminal acts, then terrorism and copyright... even without the need of a lawsuit or proper request from a court it is hard to argue against this sort of censorship. But now they started banning and censoring everything they find immoral and the definition of morals is subjective and not even philosophers could argue that there is any common moral, not even among the most uniform society. Good luck to everyone, sooner than later they will change their definition of morality and we all gonna pay with our freedom. I think it is a better win for everyone to defend individual rights over the supposed benefit of collectives as history proved because no one is authorized or qualified enough to decide our collective destiny. But many are the ones who feel entitled to do it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 7y agoI don't think anyone is stopping you from putting your hacking video on your own website and letting users download it. That would be censorship. This is merely an aggregator/community that doesn't want to pay to distribute your content. So pay someone else!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nudpiedo 7y agoTry to make viral anything you want without the cooperation of silicon valley big tech club. Unfortunately, I lack the data but I am sure these companies are covering the biggest part of the mass distribution channels and current personal telecommunications, especially since whatsapp surpassed phone calls and texts. In the other hand, they built a social image and I wouldn't wonder that the ones out of the most' platform will become the new parias and they will be less trusted and less accessible, harder to find etc.
- stronglikedan 7y agoFirst they came for the conservative voices...
- belltaco 7y agoFirst they came for the hate, violence and dake news promoting voices that happen be conservative. There is are so many conservative channels that have been untouched.
- jjoonathan 7y agoA bunch of machining-related videos were inside the collateral damage radius of a recent purge. I only noticed because I was building waveguides at the time and poof, there went the two best gundrill videos on youtube >.< There are only a few rural channels in my subscription table but they have all clearly been spooked.
- driverdan 7y agoI downvoted you because this is false.
- jrockway 7y agoBelow the original comment in a reply is YouTube's full list. One of the items bans videos about "hard drugs" which it defines as any drug that causes a physical addiction. Is there an incoming wave of coffee- and tea-related takedowns? Because I'm pretty sure that headache you get when you don't drink caffeine for a day is not your brain longing for the rich aroma of freshly-ground beans. It's a physical addiction to ... a drug! They should just make the rules say "We don't know what our standards are. If someone flags your video and whoever happens to be reviewing things doesn't like you, you're gone. Buh bye." At least people couldn't complain, as every takedown would comply with their written policy.
- knd775 7y agoWhat about the premium series they produced, Mindfield? A good number of the episodes are about Michael Stevens (Vsauce) taking hallucinogens and describing the experience. On second thought, I guess most of those aren't addictive. It still seems like a really odd line to draw.
- bitL 7y agoI guess it depends on what Sergey or Susan are smoking these days... Odd throwing parties at 'plex when Prop 64 was approved, posing with joints, then banning drug videos...
- maerF0x0 7y agoOr thinkspot becomes the youtube killer and we all continue on https://www.ts.today/ https://www.ts.today/ edit: I have no idea how thinkspot is going to play out. But if I know one thing about the internet it's that it's really hard to stop people from using it however they please. Attempts to squash mostly just result a shift of where it occurs, not the fact that it occurs.
- Zak 7y ago> I have no idea how thinkspot is going to play out. I do. The uncensored alternative to a popular platform consistently attracts all the toxic users, making it a place nobody else wants to go. Voat is a relatively recent high-profile example.
- jerf 7y agoThat balance can be shifted if enough normal people get evicted, especially if the normal people tend to end up on some particular service, at least to start with. Probably the best reason Silicon Valley can understand to start thinking twice about whether they want to deplatform all the non-SV-liberals. (I initially said "conservatives" there, but given the discussion elsewhere on this page for someone who was deplatformed on Vimeo for reviewing animal traps because they said it was 'cruelty to animals', it's going well beyond that.)
- ravenstine 7y ago> Probably the best reason Silicon Valley can understand to start thinking twice about whether they want to deplatform all the non-SV-liberals. I suspect that YouTube's long-term strategy is to morph into a hybrid of Netflix and cable, and YouTubers who broadcast opinions outside the range of acceptable opinions to SV and advertisers are just an impedance to that goal. What they will do is boil the frog by making small changes over a period of time that all appear "reasonable" on their own. Demonetization was one step in boiling the frog, but hard to argue against because it's in the best interest of advertisers and videos weren't being deleted. Then came changes to the algorithm that promotes videos, and now YouTube believes I "want" to watch more cable news and significantly less of Tim Pool or Joe Rogan. I'm surprised they haven't done more shadow-banning, and maybe that will be one of the following steps. More incremental changes will be made, probably over several years, until all the interesting voices are gone and no one can point to any one event that made everyone except the left-wing and Rated-G channels leave. And the bulk of users probably won't care since they've been transitioned and conditioned to the resurgence of mainstream blather they'll be selling.
- jlmorton 7y agoThere's a lot of bad content on the Internet, and a lot of people wanted to ban it. And the free speech absolutists said, that's a slippery slope. Once you start restricting speech beyond whatever is illegal, there will be no end to the demands to ban certain content. And a lot of us said, slippery slopes are silly arguments. All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence. We can evaluate these things individually on their own terms. It may turn out the absolutists had a point.
- britch 7y agoI don't think this changes the idea that the slippery slope is a silly argument. Aren't we evaluating these things on their own terms now? It's definitely possible to have a YouTube that is harsh on calls to violence but allows cyber-security instructionals. We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up. edit: I should not have used "we" above, since only Alphabet controls the platform. To clarify, I don't think this is the natural end of a "slippery slope" from removing hateful/violent videos from YouTube. This was not an inevitability of moderation. It is possible to have a "YouTube" that takes down violent content and leaves educational material up. If it makes them money and no one in power objects, it stays up (see harassment of Carlos Maza). If it jeopardizes those in power or YouTube's bottom line, it comes down. Moderation is not to blame. Profit motive is.
- bin0 7y ago> We took a step too low and need to climb back up This is not going to happen; we will keep sliding. We are not the ones doing the stepping, because we do not control the platform. What we can do is persuade people to use distributed and/or federated alternatives.
- britch 7y agoUsing "we" was a bad choice by me. I was trying to say that this is not the natural end of a "slippery slope" of removing hateful/violent videos from YouTube. I don't think this was an inevitability of moderation. It is possible to have a "YouTube" that left educational material up. It was a choice by a powerful corporation acting in the interest of other powerful forces. If they had a real competitor they might be under pressure to leave useful videos like this up. YouTube is definitely in the wrong, distributed alternatives are a good way of providing access to this important information.
- wnevets 7y agoIf true that sounds silly. If the videos aren't breaking the law or found offensive by your advertisers, why would you (as a business) want to stop that kind of content?
- yoodenvranx 7y agoThey day Youtube decides to ban the LockpickingLawyer Channel for "showing users how to bypass secure doors" will be the day I uninstall and block Youtube on all my devices.
- alanh 7y agoIf computers were still ENIAC-sized, then… well, you see where I am going
- naveen99 7y agoi suppose a video tutorial on youtube-dl is out of the question then.
- la_barba 7y agoNot entirely unexpected now that YouTube has grown up and can't be seen hanging out with certain folks by the other grownups in the room. Another example of this trend of getting popular on the backs of the same nerd/geek/hacker/counter-culture/ people who are then deemed unfit to be part of the community, one they become the minority (and hence wont affect your bottom line).
- britch 7y agoRemember this next time Alphabet execs claim YouTube is a neutral platform and that they can't be held responsible for what's posted. Radicalization and harassment is ok because it makes them money. Cyber-security education is a threat to rich and powerful interests, so it is taken down. They've had their finger on the scale for a long time.
- X_Y 7y agoMaybe they just figured they have enough of how to bypass their android factory reset protection and someone who wrote new rule stated too general policy?
- aphextim 7y agoI can't wait for all the videos showing you how to repair your own stuff gets outlawed. Right now it's 'hacking' or possibly circumventing proprietary systems that are trying to get you to purchase a new device or contact them directly rather than fix it yourself if you have the technical know how. Today it's Software/Hardware and computer systems. How long until looking up a you-tube video on how to repair your John Deer tractor or iOS device gets banned. Take it further and how long until all repair/tear down/fix videos get banned from their platform. Everyone is yelling, just repeal their platform status like it is going to change anything. They've used that status to grow to the size they are now and even if they are forced to go publisher it wouldn't change anything other than them being more brazen at the censorship in my opinion.
- AcerbicZero 7y agoI agree, to a point, but I think part of the idea behind the platform -> publisher push is to force YouTube to start making hard choices, where they either become financially untenable trying to stay on top of all the content they're now somewhat legally culpable for, or they ramp up the censorship so quickly and so broadly as to annoy enough of the community to make other platforms viable.
- elliottcarlson 7y agoConsidering John Deer does not want their users to perform self repairs, it might be more realistic than you think. https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/farmers-cant-legally-fix-their-own-john-deere-tractors-due-to-copyright-laws/ https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/farmers-cant-leg...
- vxNsr 7y agoI guessing that is what OP was referencing.
- cr0sh 7y agoAfter videos on repairing stuff gets outlawed - what's next? Videos on how to build stuff. Want to watch a video showing you how to build a quadcopter that doesn't have any kind of geofencing controls? Not allowed.
- idbehold 7y agoHow can anyone violate this rule? Any secure computer system cannot be bypassed.
- stebann 7y agoHaha! They don't even exist.
- mal10c 7y agoJust thinking out loud here: it seems like Youtube has been restricting or pulling videos for a variety of reasons. Alternatives are great, but could still succumb to the same outcome. Personal hosting is an option, but not a solution for everyone. Maybe this could lead to a fun weekend project. Imagine something like MediaGoblin paired with git-annex. I really haven't given it any more thought than what I've just written, but could be a fun project!
- abstractbarista 7y agoUltimately the solution is to remove the allure and income YouTube presides over. Imagine if the top 5% of YT channels deleted all their videos, leaving only one describing why. Nothing short of this will actually stop them from forever widening the scope of what is disallowed. If the channel owner doesn't get income, then YT doesn't deserve it either.
- bredren 7y agoI wonder why YouTube has to be the go-to source for useful video in the first place. Seems steps like this drive important content to other, hopefully more privacy-conscious platforms. This is a bigger loss for YouTube than the security community.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Seems steps like this drive important content to other, hopefully more privacy-conscious platforms. Important and profitable are very different categories; driving away important content is not, in itself, harmful to a business.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago> I wonder why YouTube has to be the go-to source for useful video in the first place For the same reason Google became #1 in search: it's easier to look for something in one place than half a dozen miscellaneous places.
- dredmorbius 7y agoVideo metasearch (as with DDG) is one way to obviate this.
- ifoundthetao 7y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/c6fh4x/after_hoarding_over_50k_youtube_videos_here_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/c6fh4x/after_h...
- WalterBright 7y agoI bought a book on defeating burglar alarms because I wanted to install a burglar alarm that wasn't easily defeated. I read up on what causes cancer so I can avoid those things. I read up on security breaches because I'm interested in designing the D programming language so D programs are less susceptible to hacking attacks.
- Liquix 7y agoEmperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like. Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city is so beautiful and provides for their every need. In the coming years, people who want to paint their house blue badly enough to leave paradise are heavily scrutinized and eventually considered outcasts. Over the years, more and more colors are slowly banned, one by one. People start to notice and complain once their favorite color is outlawed. But decades have passed since Emperor G's generous invitation. Entire generations have lived, died, and raised children inside the city. No one knows how to navigate the wilderness anymore. And even if they could, why would they want to? Thorns and weeds have overgrown the wasteland; it's much safer to stay inside the city walls. Besides, it's cozy and we have everything we need in here. In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?
- Rooster61 7y agoYou forgot the part about how Emperor G would come and burn your house to the ground if you tried to build outside the city because building houses was his idea. But wait, they didn't invent building houses. But Arbiter W lives in the walled city and the Emperor gives him gifts. Arbiter W considers Emperor G to be the person who owns the idea of building houses, and Aribter W is the one that sent the arsons out to your place, so you are now shit out of luck with a burning house.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoI'm sorry, this just flew over my head. What is this analogy about? Is Google DoS'ing third party websites? Deranking them? Suing for patent infringement? Who's W?
- bad_good_guy 7y ago
- afturner 7y agoFuck you Google.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't do this here.
- afturner 7y agoComplain? Swear? Or air a grievance without any other input? Wondering what exactly is crossing the line..
- dang 7y agoSorry for the delay—only saw this now. The problem isn't the profanity, it's that the comment didn't contain any information. Also, we're trying to avoid pure indignation here—it tends to lead to more of the same and that makes for low quality discussion.
- afturner 7y agonvm lol I got it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
- qwerty456127 7y agoWTF? Now this is getting weird.
- CalRobert 7y agoI guess we'll have to go back to BBS' and reading 2600 again. Really though, this is ridiculously bad. A video on how to install Lineageos? Ubuntu on a Chromebook? DD-WRT? All Ostensibly banned. Hell, is showing how to use a VPN to get around geographic restrictions banned now too? Using TOR to escape the great firewall?
- hateful 7y agoThis is like pulling a video on how viruses work (biological viruses, not computer ones)!
- oconnor663 7y agoDevil's advocate: There's a very thin line between e.g. the Lockpicking Lawyer doing reviews of different padlock brands and e.g. an instructional video about how to break into someone's house. YouTube knows that if someone posts home invasion instructions, and then someone else watches those instructions and commits a crime, the news media will absolutely 100% blame YouTube, and politicians will jump on them to score points with the voters. Since it's essentially impossible to define a simple, objective difference between the Lockpicking Lawyer and instructional videos for actual crimes, YouTube needs to write broad policies that potentially cover both, and then rely on their discretion in individual cases. Does this suck for everyone involved? Yes. Does YouTube have a choice about this? No.
- manjana 7y agoSo sad. Some of these channels like e.g. BosnianBill, LockpickingLawyer, HelpfulLockpicker have immense amounts of unique content that are properly even less likely to be backed up somewhere and will most likely be lost for good.
- jonny_eh 7y agoWho said they were getting taken down? Are we over-reacting here?
- mateo1 7y agoThis is not just about lockpicking, Youtube has a trully incomprehensibly vast amount of content locked into their platform. They can hold viewers hostage with it. My opinion on the morality of the matter is that old abandoned and unclaimed content should be made freely available at least to an open data repository. In reality, as automated and semi-automated censorship tools improve, less content will be available to you, more content will vanish without a trace, and some content will be restricted based on factors such as location, nationality, ethnicity, political affiliations and browsing history.
- Invictus0 7y agoDo you blame the bookstore if someone reads about lockpicking and then gets arrested for breaking and entering? Or maybe if they read mein Kampf and become a neonazi? Think about how ridiculous this argument is for a minute.
- rdiddly 7y agoHere comes an argument familiar from other domains (drugs, guns, censorship in general) but still valid: This will serve to drive that content further out of sight and underground, into the realm of people whose hats are statistically more likely to be of a darker shade as it were.
- floatingatoll 7y agoOne effective way to protest this would be to report videos by high-profile companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google itself. Take a few minutes to look for a video about Azure or AWS or GCP, or a video of a presentation at a conference around such things, and report it as Inappropriate content citing the relevant terms of service. Be very careful only to report content that conforms to the above description — the point here is to show YouTube where they're wrong by forcing them into direct confrontation with their own vested interests. Bonus irony points will be conceded to correctly flagging a Google Project Zero video, or a YouTube security team video, as in violation of the terms of service as stated. Again, please do not do this indiscriminately. Use your judgement on how to create the maximum exposure of stupidity through honest and careful judgement of what obviously should be permitted and yet does not comply with the rules as stated today. EDIT: Per commenters below — if you behave improperly and report a ton of videos inappropriately, you very well could get your account banned. If you're worried about this, report one video only. Be selective, use your single vote, and then move on.
- asdf21 7y agoIt's called selective enforcement.
- floatingatoll 7y agoWhat is?
- cosmotron 7y agoasdf21 is implying that your strategy probably won't be effective because YouTube may only enforce this policy selectively (i.e. not on their own parent's content or other powerful entities).
- asdf21 7y agoWhen you "report" videos of large companies, they will likely simply ignore those reports, rendering your outlined tactic futile. Policies like these are almost always selectively enforced.
- jquery 7y agoThis is good news. Censorship should've been something with wide bipartisan opposition, but due to the way Google and others cynically (or accidentally) used partisan tricks to make half the populace clamor for their rights to be violated, like they did with Alex Jones and others, they've gotten away with their censorship to grand applause. Moves like this are a great opportunity to finally develop bipartisan opposition to these corporations. People who've been wearing tribalistic blinders will say, "hey wait a minute, that's my voice you're shutting down, and I'm not a bad person." Even if they don't come to their senses from first principles, at least more of the burden of defending common liberties will now be shared on the shoulders of more people.
- daeken 7y agoI'm super concerned about this. I head up hacker education at HackerOne and the biggest part of that is Hacker101, which hosts all its videos on YouTube. I have the master files and could host them elsewhere, of course, but there's huge value in discoverability, which YouTube completely owns compared to any other platform. Definitely something that I'm going to have to keep an eye on, and be ready to adapt to if they end up enforcing this.
- kelp 7y agoLets keep in mind that YouTube has been around for 14 years... In societal terms that's a relatively short amount of time to have a free platform where anyone can post their ideas, no matter how crazy or toxic. Before that, you could blog. Before that, you could stand on a street corner and yell, or maybe use a megaphone. The platforms for broadcasting your message to a large audience were mostly gated, often by large corporations. TV, Newspaper, Radio, etc. It seems to me that what we are seeing is more like reversion to the mean. It was great in the early days of the internet, because the communities were small, and often self policing. But once they get large enough it's very easy for the noise to overwhelm the signal. This idea of absolute free speech didn't scale once the population got large enough. I don't even use Facebook and Twitter anymore because of this. (I also generally opt out of ad supported anything) I'm really not convinced that providing a cheap / free platform for anyone to amplify their message was actually a net good. Not anymore at least. Like I said, it doesn't scale. Before, the crazy and toxic could yell on the street corner. Now they have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to shout their conspiracy theories etc. IMO, we're overdue for scaling some of that back. There is the right to say and think whatever you want. That does not imply the right to have your message amplified to millions.
- chrisco255 7y agoNeither TV nor radio quite fits the analogy... because these are broadcast 1:many mediums. And the idea that no one has a right to have their message amplified to millions is sort of insidious and evil. Because the consumers choose what to watch on YouTube. And the users produce the content. So this more like a virtual community with billions of micro-interactions. Of course it scales. The internet is a testiment to that. What's different today is only sentimental.
- kelp 7y agoInsidious and evil? that's a pretty strong value judgement. Could you explain more?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bassman9000 7y agoUse. Another. Platform. It's still not illegal to switch vendors.
- CommanderData 7y agoA new YouTube is needed but accomplishing this with any success the same scale as YT would be near impossible.
- bin0 7y agoGoogle is going to regret this in a few years, when it needs security experts and they are in short supply (or rather shorter; they are already in short supply). Maybe we should be commoditizing security knowledge, which is what a platform such as you tube is capable of. Besides, there's a whole internet full of resources, and this isn't going to stop the script kiddies. The real issue is the nation state hackers from Iran, N. Korea, China, Russia. They are the problem. Companies I know of and that people I know work with have been the victim of ransomware many times. It is almost always Iran or N. Korea, and companies I know of have even been victimized twice (they took a look while inside and found another vector; the second time, they knew they had insurance and would pay again). Then there's the espionage - if you're bigger or have something China or Russia wants, they'll go after you. The FBI classifies this as terrorism, and yet does nothing. These are acts of war, and we keep getting stepped on because our government does nothing. Most of us know fully well that our three-letter agencies have exploits capable of disabling just about any thing; it's time they start knocking Iranian, North Korean, Chinese, and Russian infrastructure offline as a retaliatory measure. Each time we trace another attack to one of them, a power plant goes down (or something alike). This is the only solution I can see.
- cronix 7y agoI'd bet that some employees at Google got their interest and possibly initial exposure to infosec by watching, or reading similar (like Phrack 'zine back in the late 80s). Perhaps they're even doing very important things, like working for Project Zero. It would be interesting to know how many people who work in infosec started "on the dark side." I don't think it would be rare, at all. The few actual whitehats I've met sure didn't start out as white hats, and got their start with info publicly available.
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoOk, that's enough. I'm adding Youtube to my hosts file.
- castis 7y agoShould probably change the name to UsTube.
- toss1 7y agoNow, the editing has progressed from (legitimately) weeding out violent and often clearly illegal material (e.g., child porn), to material that some people find objectionable, in this case corporate sponsors. They are now unquestionably editing the content on their site. Soon (as mentioned by others), it is likely to be 'how to repair' videos and the like that end up on the proverbial cutting room floor. It is far past the time for YouTube, FaceBook, etc. to be stripped of their now demonstrably farcical "platform" status and recognized as publishers of content, and reqauired to operate with that set of rights & responsibilities. It won't solve all problems, partly because this has gone on for far too long, but at least they'll need to take on some responsibility for their decisions. It is obvious why they've worked so mightily for so long to avoid exactly this responsibility.
- baal80spam 7y agoNothing to see here, cat videos are safe. /s edit: what I'm trying to say is: people don't care about freedom; they won't care until stupid, useless things like cat videos are threatened
- jolmg 7y agoSaw this the other day: Why Everyone's Leaving YouTube[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQuE0wfjzf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQuE0wfjzf0 EDIT: I've submitted a separate post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347870
- Jabbles 7y agoI bet that this new policy incorrectly flagged this video, it will be restored, and none of the apocalyptic descriptions in the other comments will come to fruition.
- sam0x17 7y agoReally hope they feel the heat for this -- upvote the OP. YouTube is now tumbling down a slippery slope. Tell them you hate this.
- buboard 7y agoHey , it lowers their security costs, that s very reasonable. Next they ll ban videos that teach how to install an ad blocker. It lowers their advertising loss, thats reasonable.
- vincent-toups 7y agoTime to plug MeansTV: http://means.tv/ http://means.tv/ Hardly politically neutral but also not owned by a giant corporation!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dhritzkiv 7y ago> Time to plug MeansTV: http://means.tv/ http://means.tv/ This appears to be a parked domain?
- vincent-toups 7y agoSure is: https://means.media/ https://means.media/
- dmitrygr 7y agoMany of Google's actions can be explained by internal disarray, the way promotions are doled out, and lack of leadership. This cannot. -No longer proud to have been a Googler
- PavlovsCat 7y agoBe, if applicable, proud of the things you did and where your heart was at when you did them. Nothing can take that away from you.
- ben_jones 7y agoIronically some of the people working at Youtube right now probably came up on hacking/modding tutorials on Youtube that would now be banned.
- antpls 7y agoMeanwhile, YouTube is flooded with pseudo-humoristic content from "artists" such as Paul Logan. Hopefully we will be able to transfer knowledge with short Instagram stories and accelerated video posts. Until it get censored and a new unregulated plateform appears
- cr0sh 7y agoSurely someone by now has created a distributed video streaming system coupled with search? Maybe based on bittorrent or something? It seems like an obvious solution to this issue. It wouldn't be fast, and videos might not be as "permanent" (depending on number of "seeders"). The problem seems to be centralization of content and distribution; this seems to be the problem ultimately with many services and "platforms" on the internet. Decentralize it all, make it so that your browser is also a "server" or something of that nature, let the users become "peers". Yes - I am aware of the various projects out there working on this, but all of them seem to be doing their own thing, with no standards or interoperability - maybe that's a good thing? It is fragmentary - but again, maybe that's better for the ecosystem as a whole? The only downside is ultimately the ISP level; they already have TOS terms that they can arbitrarily enforce to prevent using "servers"; they currently don't because of so many things out there that need to operate like this, but they technically could, blocking all kinds of stuff, including a distributed "web" (or whatever you want to call it). So many of these problems can be traced back to when all you had was a form of dialup modem system, and we were conditioned to think that we weren't "peers" on the internet, because the speeds were so slow. We were conditioned to think that our ISP was the endpoint, and we were just paying them to get some of their stuff - and in turn, we turned them into the "gatekeepers". Today, we have always-on connections that would rival or surpass what were actual peerage speeds back then - yet we still have the same broken model that (technically) prevents us from being free to set up our own servers and anything else we want (unless we pay a lot more money for so-called "business class" service - which some providers won't allow you to purchase if the end point is at a "residential address"). This all needs to change - but we might be way, way too late.
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoIt feels weird to think that this kind of content might be safe on PornHub. To teach people how to secure things, they need to appreciate attack vectors.
- wanda 7y agoA move that will achieve little other than to damage Google's image further. There are other prevalent video upload/streaming websites who will not as actively enforce their content restrictions. The impact of YouTube's aggressively purging cybersecurity content will be minimal in a practical sense. In a philosophical sense, the internet has no intrinsic governing body, and as such content restrictions are placed in the hands of content hosts. It is when the content hosts are so massive that they are effectively dictating law (not to say that YouTube is forcing a precedent on other hosts, but rather by placing restrictions on such a massive traffic volume) that the "Big Brother" scenario is unsurprisingly brought up. I think if Google tracked everyone who uploaded and/or watched said content and then transmitted their information to the authorities, this would be Big Brother level. And they may very well do this already, I lack the knowledge on the topic to say. But content restrictions are theirs to impose. I think most of us will judge them by the execution of the prohibition of said content. If they successfully keep their filters narrow enough to remove content that is uploaded for the purposes of causing damage/harm to others, I do not think many of us would judge. There are those who speak of freedom of speech, but if I had a list of user credentials for an internet banking website or GMail, I do not think my transmission of them to the masses would be a responsible thing to do, and neither would I think that freedom of speech obstruction would be a valid defence of my actions were I to transmit everybody's user credentials to the masses for anyone to play with. People are not simply recruited as pentesters or similar straight out of school, they are typically required to have qualifications or at least core competencies and I imagine an attitude appropriate to the sensitive work and material involved. It's not as simple as many contend. Many are content with videos about murder, child abuse etc. being prohibited. They talk of their content options being dictated, but look at prior mediums. Television never included these things, because it was considered improper and/or illegal to disseminate material instructing or capable of instructing people to commit or get away with committing acts of crime. The internet had no such restrictions because people are the content producers, not studios. However, the internet has not changed. If you desire freedom of speech, put your own website up as we all did in the beginning, rather than relying on a mainstream host whose legal obligations are proportionate to its mass and its media presence. If you use YouTube, you sacrifice your freedom for convenience and access to traffic volume, just as you would if you were to broadcast on TV or Netflix.
- qwsxyh 7y agoRegular reminder that Hacker News automatically removes content the community doesn't like. Think about that before complaining on Hacker News about YouTube removing videos.
- alexpotato 7y agoA good reminder that NYC decided that viewing adult content on computers at city libraries was protected by freedom of speech and is therefore allowed: https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/04/25/watching-porn-at-nyc-libraries-is-ok-officials-say/ https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/04/25/watching-porn-at-nyc...
- MiddleEndian 7y agoThis is definitely relevant for multiple reasons. Pornographic content is legally protected free speech (except on broadcast TV for whishy washy reasons). Yet YouTube does not host pornographic content and is not required to do so. To my knowledge, no large groups of people have demanded that YouTube host pornographic content in the decade or so of its existence under free speech grounds. It's only when YouTube stops hosting stuff they like that they suddenly consider it to be a free speech issue. And on the other hand, PornHub has offered to host the channels of people who were banned from YouTube. Few chose to move to PornHub because of the implications of this association, even though it is a more free option. To me it's all nonsense. If you want to host your own stuff unrestricted, start your own site or something like peertube. The more decentralized things are, the freer they are. Alex Jones can still post crazy shit about Sandy Hook families on his own site and deal with his own legal consequences which I will not comment on. But it's pretty obvious why YouTube doesn't want to deal with him. And while it's a bummer for fans of these hacking shows that YouTube won't be hosting their content, perhaps it's an opportunity to work towards decentralization.
- Zenst 7y agoThe stigma IT gets from society with regards to security is abundant. The term hacker for a geek is not the definition the media uses - I often correct people and ask - should Burglars be called Locksmiths? Which is absurd, but then the term hacker has been subverted to mean a computer thief, vandal, burglar or any form of digital crime. As for showing how to break into a compter - the legal and valid reasons outway the criminal ones and yet this is a blanket ban mentality taking the edge cases and projecting them. Forget your password - well thanks youtube for banning all valid digital locksmith usage. So by doing this, it is akin to closing down a road because somebody got caught speeding, or banning anybody learning to drive because somebody got caught speeding. An extreme comparison, but is it? Bigger issue is such digital rules are automated in action, so less due process, more so with some companies whose support due process depends upon you knowing somebody at the company to `actually` look into the automated oversights. So what next, p2p and the darkweb have already been demonised by the media. So any attempt to offer an alternative will get negatively associated, and deemed guilty of a crime they did not commit. Which is nice for the establishments in our digital age, as it protects their effective monopoly.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoShouldn't this apply to lock picking videos too?
- Pxtl 7y agoRacism is still okay, though.
- 1290cc 7y agoYoutube is making the case for IPFS. I didn't think it would happen so soon but here we are. This is great news for the project and should drive more work on the convenience layers that need to be built above the IPFS layer.
- jamesmadison66 7y agoIppsec is still up, wonder what the line is
- greenie_beans 7y agocool so who’s got some links to non-youtube videos? i’m trying to learn
- mamon 7y agoOk, so Google is acting like Inqusition, banning some domains of knowledge... Guess humans haven't evolved much since Middle Ages.
- root_axis 7y agoYou want YouTube to be one way, but it's the other way. Protest. Boycott. Build alternatives. This is how you fight corrupt corporations. It makes no sense to force YouTube to host all content for free. YouTube is a video entertainment business, it's not insulin or a house. Again, it's a video entertainment site. It is wholly unimportant in reality. The only power YouTube has is the power society willingly gives it by visiting the website. Society needs to take responsibility for its own browser history. Upload your video somewhere else on the internet.
- mevile 7y agoIs that a Wire reference <3
- root_axis 7y ago:) I wish it were more relevant (YouTube is like Marlo somehow), but I just like the quote lol.
- 50656E6973 7y ago>it's not insulin or a house. Again, it's a video entertainment site. It is wholly unimportant in reality. It's the greatest library of educational content in human history.
- root_axis 7y agoWhy do you think that? YouTube has lots of content, some of it excellent, but the vast majority of it is of dubious educational quality with tons of trash and misinformation. Much of the educational content that is worthwhile is also superficial compared to other sites on the internet that have quality and accuracy standards for their content. Some examples include khan academy, coursera, and udemy. I'd even include wikipedia before YouTube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTube_channels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub... YouTube is mostly about video entertainment.
- 7y ago
- esoterae 7y agoUmmm technically if the computer systems in question were secure, wouldn't demonstration be impossible? Q.E.D.
- brandonmenc 7y agoOf course they are. It's not "brand safe" content. Few things are, really, as we'll soon find out.
- anvarik 7y agois there a link to the video though?
- Nasrudith 7y agoI suspect the issue isn't YouTube per se but society. While they bear responsibility for their decisions any big entity which becomes the "mainstream" will receive the same pressure. With advertiser backing based on what they /think/ is good for their image regardless of what people other than the many noisy minorities (like every yellow journalist seeking a new moral panic) of all sorts think. And rather than anyone involved learning they will push hard to be "more like TV" which we have been seeing for years on YouTube with every adpocalyose. If we cannot fix the underlying problem we are doomed to reoccurrence.
- vxNsr 7y agoI've increasingly become of the opinion that we need actual regulation for any SV app/co that calls itself a platform. Nearly everyone acknowledges that a platform by definition needs to be either the only co in its industry or part of a duopoly but generally with a 50%+ market share. The gov should acknowledge the benefits of having such platforms but should also recognize the pitfalls and regulate akin to common carrier. Google wants to be the only search engine, fine. everyone benefits when search is consolidated, but it needs to be regulated like a monopoly even if there are 1000 other smaller competitors because it still has a controlling share of the market. I hate regulation as I'm describing it here, but I cannot see another way out.... if trump doesn't pass something like the S-ATA in the next 2 (- 6?) years the next prez almost def will, we're really hitting that tipping point.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoThis was a mistimed move by their leadership. Most in silicon valley have no issue with Youtube banning political speech they disagree with, but if immediately afterwards they start banning education material dear to the hearts of most in the valley (who started as white/black hat hackers in middle/high school), then you highlight the obvious slippery slope. Youtube is transitioning from a platform to a curator. That is a huge risk for them if the govt. realizes this.
- hnsocks 7y agoDon't be evil :) allow only makeup and ultra leftie antifa videos please.
- dyukqu 7y ago"Don't trust the cloud. Don't trust YouTube. Download. Download. Download. UbuWeb is the backup for the internet." [0] [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ubuweb/status/1020549542503231488 https://mobile.twitter.com/ubuweb/status/1020549542503231488
- xwvvvvwx 7y agoThese kind of core communication platforms are way too important to leave in the hands of a single private company :(
- soulofmischief 7y agoWeb dev reporting in, who wants to make a competitor?
- emiliosic 7y agoThe question is why? Is this something G decided to do or is it required by a government? If it's the first, it's just G being idiotic. The second would worry me very much.
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoBoth are worrying, for different reasons.
- slaymaker1907 7y agoWell, if some random dude is posting how to do it on YouTube, you can hardly call it a _secure_ system.
- sequoia 7y agoThe "solution" is choosing your priorities and being willing to make sacrifices, which, in my experience, many people are not willing to do. "I don't want to be on a censorious megacorporate platform." Great! You can do this, you'll just have to be on the #2 platform rather than the #1 platform, and there won't be as many "free" tools & services. "What?? How can you suggest I abandon the #1 platform? I need all those free tools and services + the exposure of the #1 platform!" :shrug: OK, in that case "free tools and services" & "exposure" are higher priorities to you than user respect, privacy, free expression etc., and you're making the right choice to stay on youtube. It feels a lot like people want to have their cake and eat it too. Our (as users) only negotiating leverage with a provider like google is willingness to leave their platforms. If you're are not willing to do that, all this hand-wringing and complaining is just wasted breath as google has ~0 incentive to take your complaints seriously.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoI think the truth here is that saying "Just use another platform" isn't taking into account reality. Let's say for a moment that Google isn't evil (hypothetical, I know) and that you want a Facebook alternative. Google themselves tried to make one - and failed spectacularly. If Google can't make a Facebook alternative, what chance does anyone else have? In what way does a #2 platform ever even approach Facebook while FB can just purchase them or otherwise stop them before a critical mass of users switch? I'm very free market, but this is a clear monopoly and social media sites seemingly requires new rules that didn't exist for telecoms.
- ajna91 7y agoI wonder if all this online complaining is worse than useless, but actually counter-productive by acting as a release valve for real grievances.
- armed-armadillo 7y agoSo who wants to start an open-source effort to make a new video platform?
- ricardbejarano 7y agoTheir city, their rules. You don't like the rules? Then leave the city.
- 50656E6973 7y agoThere's also the option of having the government break up the city
- 19870213 7y agoSo apparently the video was about how to light fireworks using WiFi, could it then be the case that it might fall under a 'dangerous handling of explosives' guideline instead of the 'showing users how to bypass secure computer systems'. The Google support pages says there are other guidelines not listed there.
- miguelmota 7y agoYouTube has network effects which are hard to beat; the uploader can use a YouTube alternative but will take a hit in discoverability. Is d.tube still a viable option?
- dewaine 7y agoThis is a logical fallacy. How can you bypass a truly secure system? By definition if you can bypass it then it's not secure, is it?
- imjustsaying 7y agoThought experiment: would 'sci-fi AI' seek to ban humans from learning about disabling its computer security?
- drngdds 7y agoThis sucks but it's not that surprising. I hope people (Archive Team?) download hacking videos before YouTube deletes them.
- brians 7y agoOh, thank goodness. I consume a relatively large amount of such content, and I can read twenty good articles in the time it takes to watch one video. Do you think I can get them to ban video game walkthroughs?
- mikeash 7y agoYouTube has never been anything like a free for all. Why is this suddenly a problem?
- burtonator 7y agoIsn't this a completely legal activity in many situations? If you're trying to bypass DRM for backup purposes it's completely legal.
- x0rx0r 7y agoThis is disgusting that youtube would ban computer security videos.
- quotemstr 7y agoOnce you buy into the premise that mere words cause "harm", there's no limit to what you'll censor. It's important to take a hard line against speech restrictions in general: once you start, you can't stop.
- dgudkov 7y agoWho thought couple years ago that would be coming.
- OBLIQUE_PILLAR 7y agoI hope they leave my favorite YouTube channel alone The Lockpicking Lawyer https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ
- jupp0r 7y ago"showing how to bypass secure computer systems" reminds me of the DCMA debate, where "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [copyrighted] work." is forbidden. If it was a "secure" computer system, it shouldn't be breakable by anybody after watching a how to youtube video.
- mcgrath_sh 7y agoI am canceling YouTube red as soon as I get home. It probably won’t make much of a difference, but tech learning is the primary reason I bought Red.
- m3kw9 7y agoThey still have videos to by pass physical locks
- aiyodev 7y agoA government is an organization that governs. Any organization that polices it's customers/users beyond what the law requires them to is acting as a government. YouTube crossed that line a long time ago. Like home owners associations, YouTube is a government and should be forced by courts to recognize constitutional protections of civil liberties.
- junar 7y agoAnd here's the resolution: > 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.” https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681586/youtube-ban-instructional-hacking-phishing-videos-cyber-weapons-lab-strike https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681586/youtube-ban-instr...
- da_chicken 7y agoI've been trying to argue for awhile that if the major public venues become privately moderated that it would have a chilling effect on free speech. I continually get the rhetoric that free speech only applies to the government (it doesn't; the First Amendment only applies to the government but the ideal of free speech is a universal human right) and that censorship is something only the government can do (also not true for the same reason). This is not a new concept. In 1859, John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that the tyranny of the majority and the de facto censorship that they can create is just as if not far more dangerous to actual liberty than government control. If we have laws for common carriers, and laws like network neutrality, then there must also be laws protecting the right of the people to participate in public discourse even when the venue is privately held. It is vital to the existence of a free state!
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoWhat you say is true, but the better solution is for huge corporations not to have a monopoly/oligopoly on channels for public discourse.
- da_chicken 7y agoThat's an extremely difficult problem given the speed at which social media changes and the slowness of legal changes. Look at the explosion of Discord. Also, social media isn't a commodity service. What happens if YouTube is broken up? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? It seems safer to also require that any platform that offers free, open access to social media style content not show any bias towards that content unless it is otherwise illegal. If you want to pretend to be a public venue, you've got to have the responsibility of keeping a public venue.
- missingrib 7y agoI'm so torn on this issue. I dislike the idea of the government interfering with private business very much, and I can see how easily it can get scary. That said, it really is insane how influential and widely used a well made application/website can get (youtube/discord/etc). I really cannot think of something that YouTube could do that would make people leave the platform. The amount of users and content on there just totally cements their position. In this specific situation I think tech-savvy people can find where these videos will be located. In other situations, it's pretty strange/scary. I wish people were more open to alternative platforms. Sometimes I talk about DuckDuckGo and get the weirdest stares
- calciphus 7y agoOne entertaining legal point to question: if you can get around them by following a YouTube video, are they really secure?
- emehrkay 7y agoMy absolute favorite youtube genre is children showing me how to pirate software, I'm not joking
- Swaglord333 7y agoActions like this push users towards decentralization. Let them dig their grave
- AdeptusAquinas 7y agoThis comment thread says a lot about hacker news. a) the flagged videos have already been unbanned, with YT saying it was a mistake and b) YT's policy exempts educational videos, which is why it was a mistake, and why e.g LiveOverflow et al should be fine.
- terminalhealth 7y agoWhat are concrete videos that they consider worth banning? Videos explaining 0-day exploits? Where do they draw the line?
- AdeptusAquinas 7y agoProbably something like a how-to guide to hack into a specific site. An analogy might be that a video on how to lockpick a door wouldn't be banned, but a video on how to lockpick your neighbour's door (with his/her address) probably would be. The whole hullabaloo seems to be semantics about the meaning of educational vs instructional.
- cbush06 7y agoWell, this is dumb as hell. Basically, YouTube (i.e. Google) is unwilling to close the holes in their security systems, so they hope to keep everyone in the dark about them??? Any sane person would want people to find and report these vulnerabilities so they could be repaired...
- ThefinalResult 7y agoRest in peace sweet prince
- visualphoenix 7y agoFrom the wayback machine... looks like it changed sometime between Feb 3rd and April 5th... It wasn't there on the Feb 3rd crawl... https://web.archive.org/web/20190203030524/https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964?hl=en https://web.archive.org/web/20190203030524/https://support.g... Pops up on the April 5th crawl. https://web.archive.org/web/20190405094852/https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964?hl=en https://web.archive.org/web/20190405094852/https://support.g...
- captainredbeard 7y agoFirst they came for the right-wingers...
- wortelefant 7y agoSome Hacker communities already have their own video platforms - I only know of CCC so far but I bet there are others: https://media.ccc.de/ https://media.ccc.de/ This knowledge will become even more isolated and harder to find for beginners. But these communities have so much content already, together with banned 'security bypass'-videos it could be combined (or cross-referenced somehow) to an impressive collection. Aggregators and links to similar platforms play an important role whith 'illicit' content. Porn is not allowed on YouTube as well, it is hosted on different platforms and yet people still manage to find it somehow.
- salmonlogs 7y agoGoogle's own bug bounty program (Vulnerability Reward Program) allows you to submit YouTube videos and even has a tutorial on how best to make one: https://sites.google.com/site/bughunteruniversity/improve/how-to-record-an-effective-proof-of-concept-video https://sites.google.com/site/bughunteruniversity/improve/ho...
- NKCSS 7y agoOh wow, that is so lame... I wonder how this will affect LiveOverflow ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClcE-kVhqyiHCcjYwcpfj9w https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClcE-kVhqyiHCcjYwcpfj9w ) and all the DefCon video's, etc.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y agoIt's interesting that Google had an issue with Pixie Dust. This makes no sense: more people should know this type of attack exists as many of not most home routers are vulnerable.
- malka 7y agoJust deleted my youtube account. Google, and all its employees, can go fuck themselves with a pointy stick.
- lucb1e 7y agoA lot of people (especially here) would like to see more competition from non-Google platforms like Vimeo or others (currently they're so obscure, I can't even name any others), so not making too big a fuss about this and not getting it reverted might be a good thing because it forces people to go somewhere else with kids or IT security videos.
- hereonbusiness 7y agoThey should just ban all interesting content already so creators finally move to better platforms some of which are probably yet to be created. Watching YouTube these days without adblocker is just painful, not to mention the broken copyright claim system which has to be the way it is partly because YouTube is just too big.
- irundebian 7y agoOffensive security Youtube videos doesn't help the world to make computer systems more secure. The offensive security subculture deals more about fame, fun and profit. Therefore I'm a little happy on the reaction of some offensive/black hat security people, although I agree that the policy is to ambiguous to be fair. The obvious intention of the policy is obviously the removal script-kiddy like videos which are showing either "how to hack Facebook" bullshit videos or videos which are concretely showing how to harm one concrete business. The boundaries between immature script-kiddy videos and offensive/blackhat security videos are not very clear.
- alasdair_ 7y agoIs there any evidence of things like Defcon and Blackhat talks being pulled?
- chihuazhang 7y agoFf
- quotz 7y agoWe are becoming like China...
- DocTomoe 7y agoIf they are bypassable, they are not secure...
- valdiPL 7y agoOstrava jeszcze raz zajebista sprawa
- Fazel94 7y agoIf the intended systems were "secure", One couldn't bypass it and stream it on youtube :-D.