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So glad this is updated. yt-dl.org/bug still seems to point to the github DMCA takedown notice. There seems to be an issue on YouTube itself where youtube-dl ha

So glad this is updated. yt-dl.org/bug still seems to point to the github DMCA takedown notice. There seems to be an issue on YouTube itself where youtube-dl has been throwing the error: ""token" parameter not in video info for unknown reason; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug https://yt-dl.org/bug" Considering the current political climate, youtube-dl is going to be my (and many's) literal weapon of choice against disinformation operations. Of course, the conspiracy theorist in me asks, what if that's the reason why youtube videos are suddenly breaking yt-dl? Making a video analysis tool unavailable during one of the most unstable times in history is beyond negligent, it's the kind of mendacity that polarizes and radicalizes people. Surely an innocent mistake, that happened at the precise moment, at the worst possible time, affecting the one thing opposition would use, and with complete deniability. "Oops." Indeed.

christocracy 6y ago
> one of the most unstable times in history I can think of far more unstable times in history than the times we’re living in now, recent examples being WW1 & 2, nuclear threat during the Cold War.
- soulofmischief 6y ago
  The US Civil War is a better example than either WW1 or WW2 with respect to the balkanization of America, and the nuclear threat never went away. ;)
  - casperb 6y ago
    It depends on the continent you live on.
    - soulofmischief 6y ago
      I could be wrong but OP's language suggested that the most immediate worst possible time would be the US election in two days and its resulting aftermath, and its connection to disinformation. Perhaps I am a little biased as I've been eyeball-deep in weeding through election-focused disinformation and working with people to expose these tactics the past few months and everything looks like a nail to me right now.
- kaizendc 6y ago
  How do you think those times became unstable? Surely info suppression tactics have often played a role?
  - dylan604 6y ago
    It was much easier to suppress info back then, and it is much easier to spread misinformation today.
- drexlspivey 6y ago
  In fact this is probably one of the most stable times in human history.
  - christocracy 6y ago
    No kidding. I’m a 48 year old programmer. If today were 1939, y2k was the end of ww1, when I was a 28 year old programmer.
- easytiger 6y ago
  Well during the cold war, WW I and WW II you could visit your family, leave your house to have a cup of tea with a friend; you go walk through a restaurant without a mask on your face. In much of Europe you can't do any of those things right now, without incurring the wrath of state force. The next equivalent event in history in western europe to this destruction of civil liberty was the nazi occupation of France.
  - c-cube 6y ago
    Yes, in WW1 or WW2 you were able to… oh wait, rot in trenches with a gas mask, or be fighting somewhere in Europe or northern africa or the pacific, or be interned in a concentration camp. That sounds much better than having to wear a mask when you go buy groceries
    - easytiger 6y ago
      That's what's called an informal fallacy.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        Not at all.
  - arp242 6y ago
    > Well during the cold war, WW I and WW II you could visit your family My grandmother once told me her dad had to console a German soldier crying in the backyard because he wanted nothing more than being back home in Germany with his wife and children instead of occupying the Netherlands. It's not like he had much of a choice though. My grandfather's dad (other side) had to work in Germany during the war. He sure as hell couldn't "just visit his family" and there was no realistic option to say no. And then you have things like Anne Frank hiding in a bloody broomcloset for years. But the above are just two examples of "regular" folk who were not especially persecuted (or indeed, even the occupier). Good heavens, this has got to be the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN. Please, study the daily lives of people in countries occupied by Nazi Germany and you'll find that any comparison to current events is absolutely ridiculous.
- TheKarateKid 6y ago
  OP probably meant one of the most stable times recent history, as in within most generations being alive today. The majority of the population, boomers and younger, didn’t live during WW2 and we probably are globally the least stable since then right now.
  - arp242 6y ago
    In recent American history. I was born in 1985 and the breakup of Yugoslavia and ensuing wars happened in my lifetime, and the Russian invasion of Georgia and Ukraine Ukraine, and things like the Syrian civil war, US invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan getting invaded by the Russians, then had a totalitarian Taliban rule, and then had the American invasion. I mean, it sure is significant and all as the US, for better or worse, isn't "just another country", but it's also pretty narrow towards both the current time and specific location.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Iraq invasion of the US, That...didn't happen.
      - arp242 6y ago
        The MSM doesn't want you to know!
    - TheKarateKid 6y ago
      But we’re not just talking about the US. Tensions in the Asian region are at the highest since WWII as well: North Korea and South Korea. China and Taiwan. China and Hong Kong. Then there’s China and their increasingly imperial motives in Africa and the Asian sea. Plus increasing conflict with the US. Then there’s Russia and Ukraine. Turkey and Armenia. The Middle East conflict with Israel, Europe, and the US. So no, it’s not just American history. Globally, things are the least stable since WWII.
- rhizome 6y ago
  The Cold War was a sham, nobody was ever going to fire missiles except by mistake. It was just a way to maintain military budgets (and contracts) when peace broke out after WWII. Any instability in the main was only ever by design. Look at all the people who went supernova when Clinton downsized the military after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. "Generals and majors always seem so unhappy 'less they got a war." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiLuYZNzNyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiLuYZNzNyc
  - forest_dweller 6y ago
    Stalin would have rolled over Europe if he had half the chance. Nukes like it or not is the reason why we haven't had WW3.
    - vagrantJin 6y ago
      True. Mutually assured destruction is an effective deterrent. But should one nation fire a nuke and the other appeals to neutrals- Behold the lunatics have unleashed world killing weapons on us! - the first nation will become the beligerent state and effectively lose their war.
    - rhizome 6y ago
      Were nukes the only way to deal with his appetite?
  - christocracy 6y ago
    > except by mistake No small threat; plenty of room for those, according to Daniel Ellsberg’s book ”The Doomsday Machine”. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-9781608196708/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-978160819...
istjohn 6y ago
This may be a silly question, but how do you intend to battle disinformation with yt-dl?
- dijit 6y ago
  Makes certain types of media archivable when they otherwise wouldn’t be. It’s rather common for people to take down things that can be used against them later. Very common for youtubers but also somewhat common for politicians who may want to distance themselves from historical points of view.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    Also useful for pulling apart fakes where you need the original files to see how they were edited together.
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  My company does anti-disinformation consulting. We don’t use ytdl, but we do download videos. It helps to: 1. look for artifacts of deepfaking. 2. extract audio for speech to text, translation, and searching. 3. look for patterns that indicate the video is churned out by disinfo content farms.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    Sounds like an interesting line of work, and one that could get very sophisticated.
  - falsaberN1 6y ago
    First notice I have of this line of business. I am thoroughly intrigued. Is the deepfake situation that out of control? What kind of scenarios is it used for, in terms of spreading misinformation?
    - Hnrobert42 6y ago
      I wouldn’t say deepfakes are out of control, but we see their risk potential to our clients. We support social media platforms, politicians, and large corporations. So far, our social media clients are those most concerned and affected by deepfakes. Threat actors use deepfakes, along with other forms of disinformation, to achieve their objective. The most commonly discussed are the Russians interfering with US elections, but many other nations are now getting in the game. We have also seen organized crime using elections or other hot-button issues to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites. We are still in the early days of deepfakes. I am sure we will see many more sophisticated methods as the technology improves. As it becomes commoditized, it will become another tool used moving down market from geopolitical goals, to organized crime, to petty fraud.
seaish 6y ago
Ytdl is always breaking. That's kinda the reason why it needs to exist. It isn't any more sudden than any other time.
stunlocked 6y ago
if you live in the US that is.
half-kh-hacker 6y ago
> "token" parameter not in video info for unknown reason This is seemingly fixed in commit 6d4733ce - " [youtube] Fix JS player URL extraction" at 2020-10-31 23:52 GMT.
SllX 6y ago
The barbarians aren’t at the gate, Genghis Khan ain’t riding across Central Asia, Japan is unified, America isn’t in the midst of a civil war, and Europe is trying this union thing on to see how that goes, and the relative fallout if it doesn’t work out looks fairly minor compared to the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian Wars, two World Wars and the Iron Curtain. I know I know, recency bias and all that, but the world is pretty great these days, even if 2020 seems a low point in our lives.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  It doesn't have to be the worst time in human history to be a bad time in human history, though I think our scale is a bit off if we're saying now is on-par with what was going on in the Middle Ages in Europe, for example.
  - Trill-I-Am 6y ago
    What was the best time in human history?
    - 8bitsrule 6y ago
      Probably around 450BC, when the Eleusinian Mysteries began initiations in Athens.
      - toyg 6y ago
        Athens still had widespread slavery though, so I guess you had to be born in the "right" family, which would have been a minority.
      - harry8 6y ago
        Don't overlook that it's pretty recent that our beds are comfortable and our teeth don't hurt. Men not having extra children and wives to compensate for watching them die is pretty neat as well. Pick your time post ww2 otherwise forget it. Even the roaring 20s were total and utter garbage compared to when penicillan existed. In the west, Boomers did pretty well. When they were at their horny age there was this great new pill and STDs were all treatable. We really should rename the baby-boomers the boomer-bunnies. ;-) Probably had it the easiest economically, no world wars. We sleep on the beds of emperors, kings and queens and banquets from the 4 corners of the earth is our norm.

christocracy 6y ago

> one of the most unstable times in history I can think of far more unstable times in history than the times we’re living in now, recent examples being WW1 & 2, nuclear threat during the Cold War.

soulofmischief 6y ago
The US Civil War is a better example than either WW1 or WW2 with respect to the balkanization of America, and the nuclear threat never went away. ;)
- casperb 6y ago
  It depends on the continent you live on.
  - soulofmischief 6y ago
    I could be wrong but OP's language suggested that the most immediate worst possible time would be the US election in two days and its resulting aftermath, and its connection to disinformation. Perhaps I am a little biased as I've been eyeball-deep in weeding through election-focused disinformation and working with people to expose these tactics the past few months and everything looks like a nail to me right now.
kaizendc 6y ago
How do you think those times became unstable? Surely info suppression tactics have often played a role?
- dylan604 6y ago
  It was much easier to suppress info back then, and it is much easier to spread misinformation today.
drexlspivey 6y ago
In fact this is probably one of the most stable times in human history.
- christocracy 6y ago
  No kidding. I’m a 48 year old programmer. If today were 1939, y2k was the end of ww1, when I was a 28 year old programmer.
easytiger 6y ago
Well during the cold war, WW I and WW II you could visit your family, leave your house to have a cup of tea with a friend; you go walk through a restaurant without a mask on your face. In much of Europe you can't do any of those things right now, without incurring the wrath of state force. The next equivalent event in history in western europe to this destruction of civil liberty was the nazi occupation of France.
- c-cube 6y ago
  Yes, in WW1 or WW2 you were able to… oh wait, rot in trenches with a gas mask, or be fighting somewhere in Europe or northern africa or the pacific, or be interned in a concentration camp. That sounds much better than having to wear a mask when you go buy groceries
  - easytiger 6y ago
    That's what's called an informal fallacy.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Not at all.
- arp242 6y ago
  > Well during the cold war, WW I and WW II you could visit your family My grandmother once told me her dad had to console a German soldier crying in the backyard because he wanted nothing more than being back home in Germany with his wife and children instead of occupying the Netherlands. It's not like he had much of a choice though. My grandfather's dad (other side) had to work in Germany during the war. He sure as hell couldn't "just visit his family" and there was no realistic option to say no. And then you have things like Anne Frank hiding in a bloody broomcloset for years. But the above are just two examples of "regular" folk who were not especially persecuted (or indeed, even the occupier). Good heavens, this has got to be the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN. Please, study the daily lives of people in countries occupied by Nazi Germany and you'll find that any comparison to current events is absolutely ridiculous.
TheKarateKid 6y ago
OP probably meant one of the most stable times recent history, as in within most generations being alive today. The majority of the population, boomers and younger, didn’t live during WW2 and we probably are globally the least stable since then right now.
- arp242 6y ago
  In recent American history. I was born in 1985 and the breakup of Yugoslavia and ensuing wars happened in my lifetime, and the Russian invasion of Georgia and Ukraine Ukraine, and things like the Syrian civil war, US invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan getting invaded by the Russians, then had a totalitarian Taliban rule, and then had the American invasion. I mean, it sure is significant and all as the US, for better or worse, isn't "just another country", but it's also pretty narrow towards both the current time and specific location.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Iraq invasion of the US, That...didn't happen.
    - arp242 6y ago
      The MSM doesn't want you to know!
  - TheKarateKid 6y ago
    But we’re not just talking about the US. Tensions in the Asian region are at the highest since WWII as well: North Korea and South Korea. China and Taiwan. China and Hong Kong. Then there’s China and their increasingly imperial motives in Africa and the Asian sea. Plus increasing conflict with the US. Then there’s Russia and Ukraine. Turkey and Armenia. The Middle East conflict with Israel, Europe, and the US. So no, it’s not just American history. Globally, things are the least stable since WWII.
rhizome 6y ago
The Cold War was a sham, nobody was ever going to fire missiles except by mistake. It was just a way to maintain military budgets (and contracts) when peace broke out after WWII. Any instability in the main was only ever by design. Look at all the people who went supernova when Clinton downsized the military after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. "Generals and majors always seem so unhappy 'less they got a war." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiLuYZNzNyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiLuYZNzNyc
- forest_dweller 6y ago
  Stalin would have rolled over Europe if he had half the chance. Nukes like it or not is the reason why we haven't had WW3.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    True. Mutually assured destruction is an effective deterrent. But should one nation fire a nuke and the other appeals to neutrals- Behold the lunatics have unleashed world killing weapons on us! - the first nation will become the beligerent state and effectively lose their war.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    Were nukes the only way to deal with his appetite?
- christocracy 6y ago
  > except by mistake No small threat; plenty of room for those, according to Daniel Ellsberg’s book ”The Doomsday Machine”. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-9781608196708/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-978160819...

istjohn 6y ago

This may be a silly question, but how do you intend to battle disinformation with yt-dl?

dijit 6y ago
Makes certain types of media archivable when they otherwise wouldn’t be. It’s rather common for people to take down things that can be used against them later. Very common for youtubers but also somewhat common for politicians who may want to distance themselves from historical points of view.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Also useful for pulling apart fakes where you need the original files to see how they were edited together.
Hnrobert42 6y ago
My company does anti-disinformation consulting. We don’t use ytdl, but we do download videos. It helps to: 1. look for artifacts of deepfaking. 2. extract audio for speech to text, translation, and searching. 3. look for patterns that indicate the video is churned out by disinfo content farms.
- jlokier 6y ago
  Sounds like an interesting line of work, and one that could get very sophisticated.
- falsaberN1 6y ago
  First notice I have of this line of business. I am thoroughly intrigued. Is the deepfake situation that out of control? What kind of scenarios is it used for, in terms of spreading misinformation?
  - Hnrobert42 6y ago
    I wouldn’t say deepfakes are out of control, but we see their risk potential to our clients. We support social media platforms, politicians, and large corporations. So far, our social media clients are those most concerned and affected by deepfakes. Threat actors use deepfakes, along with other forms of disinformation, to achieve their objective. The most commonly discussed are the Russians interfering with US elections, but many other nations are now getting in the game. We have also seen organized crime using elections or other hot-button issues to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites. We are still in the early days of deepfakes. I am sure we will see many more sophisticated methods as the technology improves. As it becomes commoditized, it will become another tool used moving down market from geopolitical goals, to organized crime, to petty fraud.

seaish 6y ago

Ytdl is always breaking. That's kinda the reason why it needs to exist. It isn't any more sudden than any other time.

stunlocked 6y ago

if you live in the US that is.

half-kh-hacker 6y ago

> "token" parameter not in video info for unknown reason This is seemingly fixed in commit 6d4733ce - " [youtube] Fix JS player URL extraction" at 2020-10-31 23:52 GMT.

SllX 6y ago

The barbarians aren’t at the gate, Genghis Khan ain’t riding across Central Asia, Japan is unified, America isn’t in the midst of a civil war, and Europe is trying this union thing on to see how that goes, and the relative fallout if it doesn’t work out looks fairly minor compared to the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian Wars, two World Wars and the Iron Curtain. I know I know, recency bias and all that, but the world is pretty great these days, even if 2020 seems a low point in our lives.

TameAntelope 6y ago
It doesn't have to be the worst time in human history to be a bad time in human history, though I think our scale is a bit off if we're saying now is on-par with what was going on in the Middle Ages in Europe, for example.
- Trill-I-Am 6y ago
  What was the best time in human history?
  - 8bitsrule 6y ago
    Probably around 450BC, when the Eleusinian Mysteries began initiations in Athens.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Athens still had widespread slavery though, so I guess you had to be born in the "right" family, which would have been a minority.
    - harry8 6y ago
      Don't overlook that it's pretty recent that our beds are comfortable and our teeth don't hurt. Men not having extra children and wives to compensate for watching them die is pretty neat as well. Pick your time post ww2 otherwise forget it. Even the roaring 20s were total and utter garbage compared to when penicillan existed. In the west, Boomers did pretty well. When they were at their horny age there was this great new pill and STDs were all treatable. We really should rename the baby-boomers the boomer-bunnies. ;-) Probably had it the easiest economically, no world wars. We sleep on the beds of emperors, kings and queens and banquets from the 4 corners of the earth is our norm.