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YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

801 points by decrypt 5y ago

sagolikasoppor 5y ago
Google being google. Its funny that once I used to lookup to this company and now I view it as a threat to society.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight It's funny that I really appreciated Google when I first signed up for Gmail. Now that I've had it for 16 years, I resent the fact that I can get deplatformed for any reason, and there's really nothing I can do to prevent that.
  - Jukg7e3AFyskdj 5y ago
    export all of your email to Protonmail and stop sucking on that Google breast
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      I'm seriously considering it, but I'm a heavy IMAP user. When you enable IMAP in ProtonMail, it's no different than any other mail provider, security wise. This is the dilemma for me.
      - social_quotient 5y ago
        Technically no different but you have cast a small vote to behavior you no loner tolerate or support (socially). Even if it’s a fraction of a dollar. In aggregate they add up.
        bayindirh 5y ago
        That's another point to look at it, you're right.
      - decrypt 5y ago
        It is for this reason I am moving away from ProtonMail to Migadu. Literally any IMAP-offering email service would do. All that we need is a custom domain.
      - dunnevens 5y ago
        Other people have made good points. Just wanted to add: you'll feel better knowing you're no longer vulnerable to Google. It's a nice feeling of relief knowing Google could cancel my account tomorrow and I wouldn't be hurt in any substantial way. Definitely worth the effort to move your email to an independent provider.
      - Jukg7e3AFyskdj 5y ago
        I used to be also but now use the protonmail app on my phone. And this on my desktop https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail
      - infamia 5y ago
        I don't think you can connect to your email via IMAP without ProtonMail Bridge (which encrypts traffic between your email client and ProtonMail).
        bayindirh 5y ago
        AFAIK you bypass 2FA when you use IMAP. I don't see many advantages of using Proton (over any other independent e-mail provider) without 2FA. The thing is, I connect all my accounts to a single mail application and handle everything from there, including their automated backups for ~15 years or so. The jury is still out for me, we'll see.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      buy your own domain and only use the email addresses you fully control.
m_a_g 5y ago
>Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong. Can't agree more.
- b3kart 5y ago
  The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's attention span? Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result? I don't know, but I have my doubts. Yes, moderation/suspensions can be a pain, and pointing out embarrassing mistakes is important to add pressure on Google to put more resources into it. At the same time, YouTube is full of great content and content creators. Anyone can upload a video and make it viewable by billions, instantly. I think we shouldn't forget how amazing this actually is.
  - izacus 5y ago
    What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset based sites which could actually handle their moderation and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth?
    - b3kart 5y ago
      Isn't that basically how reddit operates? And last I heard they have their native video hosting as well. Sounds like this could work, but doesn't quite at the moment. Is YouTube handling content discovery better? Network effects maybe?
      - judge2020 5y ago
        Reddit is interest-based but gets free labor from most subreddit moderators that remove bad content for them. Reddit is also much less lucrative of a content platform given you have limited ways to make money (usually limited to linking to your patreon), so the content is constrained to whatever people do with no expectation of money.
Jan454 5y ago
Time to install GPT-3 on your own server and unleash it onto Google-Support, YouTube-Support, Alpha-Support, etc. to complain about your situation ;-) You just need to answer the captchas to keep it goin.
- joshxyz 5y ago
  Combine that with 2captcha.com, what do we have? Lol
- abhishekbasu 5y ago
  With AI-based support automation, it might end up like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY
PedroBatista 5y ago
YouTube, like most of the "Internet" these days it's just a shopping center. It appears to be the Universe because these sites/companies are so massive but at the end of the day it's their turf and they do what they want. Now, once they reach a certain scale, why are they allowed to operate like a "normal small company"?
- macspoofing 5y ago
  >Now, once they reach a certain scale, why are they allowed to operate like a "normal small company"? There was and is a push to make them behave more like a utility (i.e. a platform). Mainstream media, along with a major political party, are on a crusade to make these tech platform be more and more of an editor because they like that currently their competition (in case of media) and political rivals (in case of Democrats) are bearing the brunt of the censorship. And you can see this push even here on HN with constant references to how evil Facebook and Twitter is because memes on those platforms caused Hillary to lose in 2016, and therefore how misinformation is such a big problem that more censorship is needed. I don't know how you fix that. These platforms didn't want to do this. They got bullied into it.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Leonard French recently reviewed a Supreme Court ruling on Knight Institute v. Trump that includes a concurrence statement by Justice Thomas that touches exactly on these issues (and maybe even net neutrality by proxy). https://youtu.be/IpkGzJYYQj4 https://youtu.be/IpkGzJYYQj4 https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_3204.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_32...
- dmingod666 5y ago
  If I can uninstall YouTube from my Android I think that would be a good start towards a journey to a normal, if not small company..
Jan454 5y ago
Maybe it's time for a public company-independent complains-platform where all companies are obliged by law to respond. Each complaint of course is hidden behind some anti-bot captcha/protection so that the companies themselve can't use AI to answer your complaints.
- roenxi 5y ago
  What do you think this will achieve? We know what Google thinks; they don't want this content on their platform. Forcing them to state that in a specific forum as some sort of power play isn't going to help.
- Werewolf255 5y ago
  That sounds like something that the government should oversee, maybe they could also make some regulations so that , I dunno, corporations might need to be responsible for their actions.
- qayxc 5y ago
  That's basically what the author suggests when they say: > Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. It's impossible to operate a complaints-platform on a global scale if it's run by humans. According to GMI [0], 500 hours of content are uploaded every minute. Given an average video duration of about 12 minutes [1], that would be 2500 videos per hour. That's just too much to manually review and handle complaints. [0] https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statistics/ https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-category-average-length/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-ca...
  - danhor 5y ago
    *2500 videos per minute
    - qayxc 5y ago
      Yes, thanks.
broknbottle 5y ago
We should start letting "AI" decide the outcome in any of Google's pending court cases. We could setup a twitter account and direct them to complain, I mean appeal by @ the twitter account and hope the bot gods decide their tweet is worthy enough for human review
asimpletune 5y ago
The first part of the post, where they said the got a strike for teaching people how to use pgp... Wow, that’s um, wild
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  I believe it's still against US law to export pgp to certain countries, as it's considered munitions. Wild is a great description.
  - arsome 5y ago
    Didn't DJB v US pretty much end that? That would also impact things like Firefox for the record.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      Pretty much, but export to "rogue states and terrorist organizations" is still technically illegal. I suspect it wouldn't withstand challenge though.
HenryBemis 5y ago
> Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. BYOReligion.. and Google believes that they need to increase 'engagement', increase profit, and decrease headcount.. so.. there you have it dear Sun Knudsen. Edit: I don't care for the 'virtual currency' of 'karma'. I wonder though; the sky is blue, I point at the sky, I say "the sky is blue", and people frown (?) upon me for stating the obvious fact of life.. Or is it just Google-trolls/fanboys/fangirls that don't like the true being called out? My above comment is also applicable to any entity that automates "as much as possible" and maintains a small team to manage operations. Something tells me that their internal Finance team has "enough" staff to monitor the General Ledger. Because General Ledger is critical to their $$$$$. A 'content creator' though, is not as critical, thus gets far less attention, and <insert FAANG> will only be bothered to fix this, if said person yells loud enough. How is this fact of life being downvoted? (not me.. I don't grow taller/shorter based on the karma points) :)
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "I say "the sky is blue", and people frown (?) upon me for stating the obvious fact of life.." Yes; exactly this. If you were out in a crowd and called everyone's attention to you - thousands of people quietened to pay attention to what you were going to say for a moment, and you announced the thing you yourself say is an "obvious fact", that the sky is blue, the crowd would be annoyed at you for wasting their time with obvious low-quality trivia. "company seeks profit" is the same low-value annoying thing to say. You're not being downvoted because it's untrue, you're being downvoted because it's like a toddler going "hey, hey, hey, hey, look, look at this, watch this" "okay?" "throws ball at ground". Great, thanks for that, good contribution.
Black101 5y ago
I think that Google should hide all sites that display ads from the search results... because after all, it goes against AMP's principles of responsive websites. They definitely should also block Gmail... because it has become incredibly slow to load. I bet the CEO is laughing a lot when he sees all of this interacting together.
williesleg 5y ago
Boycott google while you still can. Almost have world domination.
throwaway120831 5y ago
tube has been censoring folks left and right since the start of covid
FpUser 5y ago
I am sure it is ok to use AI to cheapen initial screening. This FAANG and the like set of companies are becoming vital for people to the point that sometime they can loose their income. I see nothing wrong with those that serve as a source of income being declared as utility type service with the mandatory staged conflict resolution process. Said process at the last stage (well before the actual lawsuit) would include being able to present proof to the actual human being/s who has the power to reverse the decision and is paid for but not employed by said utility. In case of utility failing to comply that watchdog should be able to levy fines. This should also help to prevent cases when the utility "moderation" is based on the political (other similar in nature) opinions of the owners. All this "I am a private company and do as I please" when it comes to a very big companies is baloney. They have way too much power and should be held responsible for how this power being used. Preventing them from being able to lobby governments should be of first priority as well. Since the companies of that type are international it is of course up to the individual governments to implement whatever if any measures they would see fit.
privatesgtrj 5y ago
Google is a private company. It's fully within their rights to remove any video they don't like, for whatever reason. It comes with the territory if we want Google to be able to censor hate speech and misinformation. You can always use a competing site, or build your own.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- danuker 5y ago
  Except the sheer scale of Google is hair-raising. (Sleep tight dear FTC). If Google loses a YouTube creator, it has almost no impact on their bottom line. If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is threatened. I would argue this is the perfect scenario for a creator's union (of course, it should use some other platform to communicate).
  - freebuju 5y ago
    > If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is threatened No. There are numerous providers that can host your videos. For a small fee. This mentality is what gives Google such pseudo-power.
    - derivagral 5y ago
      At the end of the day, I'd guess this is less about alternatives and more about youtube being the best platform for your investment. Hosting isn't the problem, its the audience and traffic (and ad monetization from your vids.) Do the alternatives hold up in terms of things like market reach, $ performance, and not banning the same users?
      - freebuju 5y ago
        If Youtube was to go away today, do the guys who upload videos on this platform stop being content creators? This is myth I want to dispell. Now to answer your question. Yes, it will be tough and disruptive should you start distributing your content through other alternatives if you were using youtube as your only vehicle. But similar issues were faced by other content creators such as musicians, journalists when the streaming era started disrupting their vehicles. They adapted. Don't see why video content creators shouldn't be able to find the same flexibility and continue to thrive. Youtube by itself with no content does not have anything to sell. Infact, relying only on a single platform can be dangerous for creators since we've seen some of them being booted off by AI. No human explanations. Audience, traffic, monetization, reach are all market problems. They will exist whether Youtube is there or not.
Ian678 5y ago
I remember a survey by google about security research and one of the questions was something like "What hinders learning/education in this topic?", and I remember answering exactly this behavior.
Aissen 5y ago
FYI, this is the video: https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4d32-88b8-3de0dae58855 https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4... ; the links in the description: KRACK Attacks: Breaking WPA2 https://www.krackattacks.com/ https://www.krackattacks.com/ KRACK - Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOgJswt7nAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOgJswt7nAc
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Are these new attacks? The video in OP only seems to indicate the ability to attack content on a Wifi connection of other connected clients if you're already connected. It doesn't give you the ability to "crack" a WPA2 network without the password.
black_puppydog 5y ago
FWIW the video in question seems to be this one from ~1y ago: https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4d32-88b8-3de0dae58855 https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4...
enriquto 5y ago
> I am a privacy and security researcher and content creator on YouTube and PeerTube. > I am no longer able to post content for a week. Honestly, they had it coming. While "regular people" can be understood to use overtly shitty platforms like youtube, somebody who is a security and privacy researcher has no excuse. They should just avoid platforms with such callously hostile policies. Moreso when there are plenty of sane alternatives like peertube and others.
- giansegato 5y ago
  If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way around YouTube and the like It's obviously and evidently not about uploading videos, but rather to build and reach a community Also, it's wrong to accept that these platforms have this kind of influence and we should just avoid them. They're part of the social fabric of our time, and it's our duty to make things better.
  - grumple 5y ago
    > If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way around YouTube and the like Is this true? There's almost no discoverability on YouTube imo. You could just push people towards your privately hosted platforms.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    > If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way around YouTube and the like This kind of attitude only serves to entrench the problem and make everything worse. Even if you are not personally affected by youtube's damaging policies, just using the platform is an insulting lack of respect towards other people who are. What ever happened to "be the change you want to see in the world"? Any such change must be led by knowledgeable people like this security researcher. I hope that this ban serves Sun Knudsen (who already publishes their videos on peertube) to lead more and more people out of this and other user-hostile platforms, until these platforms finally turn into a cesspool of content-free "influencers".
at_a_remove 5y ago
I think the "oh no human moderation would cost us too much" defense is a distraction. It's a good one, because it is working, but it is still a distraction. Let us suppose we have a program which checks for orthodoxy according to the YouTube Terms of Service against each video submitted. Nothing but a lack of having done the work prevents YouTube from adding to its "rejected" flag the following: 1) A list of timestarts and durations of the portions of the video violating the ToS. 2) For each item in that list, make it a tuple and add a reason -- which clause was violated? Then outputting that to the owner of the rejected video. Nothing stops them from doing this. Some set of words or images happened somewhere in the timestream -- the orthodoxy program has that timestamp as it churns through the video. And a specific clause was violated -- a particular word in a wordlist as an example, because there's no simple, non-composite function that just says "good or not good." This is really not a particularly high bar as an ask.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  That will never work. If you tell the user exactly what they did wrong, they will keep trying by changing very little in the original video until it gets past bots, but still keeps the illegal or "forbidden" message. I think youtube should not be allowed to remove videos for their content unless for legal reasons. Meaning it's a violation of the law, in which case they have to send the information to the police as well. And that, of course, should require a human stamp of approval. Of course, Youtube should be allowed to remove videos if they are too long, wrong format etc., but NOT for their content.
  - tumetab1 5y ago
    > If you tell the user exactly what they did wrong, they will keep trying by changing very little in the original video until it gets past bots, but still keeps the illegal or "forbidden" message. I think there's a possibility to implement that handles the issue you describe. It's trivial to detect an user trying to circumvent content controls if he's trying that from the same account. When that is detected the user account can be put into manual mode review or automatically block new uploads for a while. If circumvent is tried with different accounts the current system already doesn't prevent that so nothing is lost.
Zenst 5y ago
Odd, more so given a whole video is upon YT about this from 2017. https://youtu.be/Oh4WURZoR98 https://youtu.be/Oh4WURZoR98
- Sephr 5y ago
  Note that this video was originally taken down for the same supposed ToS violation: https://twitter.com/vanhoefm/status/927612810984677376 https://twitter.com/vanhoefm/status/927612810984677376
arminiusreturns 5y ago
Stop buying into the "the AI did it" whitewashing. Youtube is selectively targeting more and more channels and videos for daring to be any sort of contrarian. Its psyops under any other name.
- finnthehuman 5y ago
  "The AI did it" is the same cop-out as "A low level employee did it of their own volition" and should be rejected as an excuse for all the same reasons.
- root_axis 5y ago
  It's not a "psyops", YouTube, like every gigantic corporation is motivated entirely by money, and they would be happy to monetize every video on the site if they could, but advertisers pay the bills, and since advertisers are sensitive to their public image, YouTube goes out of their way to appease them. The problem here is the ad model, not AI or YouTube's values.
  - seriousquestion 5y ago
    That's an outdated view. Youtube now bends to activists and political winds.
    - root_axis 5y ago
      So what is the activist political position on WPA2 vulnerabilities? You see what you want to see, but YouTube hosts an overwhelming abundance of evidence that contradicts your claim.
      - im3w1l 5y ago
        Internal employee pressure is the cause of some things getting removed, but they are not behind everything. In this particular case it might bdriven by legal concerns or something. But it should also be seen in light of the status quo. When censorship being the new default, then it doesn't take a strong reason to add another thing, such as hacking-adjacent content to the no-go pile. The code is already written, and the routines are well-known. There is no freedom-of-speech reputation left to protect. So the cost of removing this content is very low, lower than the legal risk.
cl3misch 5y ago
Are we certain this was not because the vulnerability is called "KRACK" which is similar to the drug "crack"? Youtube has been very strict about such phrasing mishaps.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  If your argument is it would be reasonable for you tube to automatically ban anything that could be a mention of crack cocaine we’re not going to find a lot of common ground on what is accidental moderation vs intentional censorship.
kingsuper20 5y ago
It would be fun to do a quick survey of books breathlessly laying out the future of the internet from 20 years ago. Looking back, the evolution of social media/youtube was pretty obvious. Back then, not so much. 1) Begin with anything goes including illegal. Run at a loss, Grow baby! 2) Ads 3) Bitching from some important people causes some removal of the more flagrantly illegal stuff. 4) Employees and PR departments apply a POV to what is now close to a monopoly. Large scale censorship. What makes the modern era interesting is the POV angle. I can't imagine Rockefeller's Standard Oil restricting sales to people with conflicting politics. Of course, there are people spending a lot of time each day on r/politics and what used to be r/thedonald shouting joyous insanity at each other...that's the modern pool of workers.
Aunche 5y ago
This is what people choose when they decide to angrily tweet at advertisers into pulling away ads whenever YouTube doesn't take down bad videos quickly enough. It tells Youtube that they should tune their moderation to be overly aggressive. This is true regardless of how much human moderation they use.
kypro 5y ago
YouTube's content policy is bizare. Children in my family seem to watch videos of Spiderman dry humping Elsa or grannies kicking people in the nuts, but then they remove stuff like this. I guess this is what happens when advertisers are the main priority and the moderators have all been replaced with robots. Content that may actually harm the development of children is considered fine, while someone posting a slightly edgey political take or a research paper about something which triggers a bot is removed.
- shakezula 5y ago
  YouTube will robot-moderate themselves into the ground. Too many people are leaving the platform. It’s just a trickle now but soon it will be a flow. It’s the inevitable result of moderation based only on who’s paying you.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - iso8859-1 5y ago
    Where are people escaping to? Are people publishing their own content on Gopher or BitTorrent nowadays? These platforms have a perfect balance of usability and freedom. They can take over the world.
    - Balgair 5y ago
      It seems like they are making their own sites. Nebula is one such place where a few of the higher quality content creators are going. I've no idea if it'll work, but they are trying. https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/
      - CameronNemo 5y ago
        The problem with these techniques is discover ability. How do you build an online audience without paying google for advertisements?
codeecan 5y ago
Google has long been manipulating content, look up "blue anon". You can compare searches between Bing and you'll find lots of content thats been "moderated"
pyronik19 5y ago
It's disheartening that in the 2000s, people used to regularly talk about creating decentralized systems to prevent megacorporations and governments from being able to censor the internet, now the tech community that used to deplore such tactics actively supports mass AI censorship on entire host of topics where the only version of the truth that is allowed to stand is #thenarrative.
1cvmask 5y ago
AI is a great excuse for censorship. But many economic actors want censorship including the advertisers. So it seems more competition to Youtube is the only answer to censorship. But I don’t see any credible competition on the horizon to Youtube for a while. The ultimate ironic censorship on the part of Youtube: https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-censored-youtube/274918/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce... And the discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217
nromiun 5y ago
Recently I also discovered that YouTube shadow bans comments for using banned words (e.g. kill, coronavirus etc) or external links (two of my comments got banned). I have seen some people asking for sources on YouTube comments and it turns out you literally can't do that. Maybe that's why only spam comments rise to the top, any long or thoughtful comment simply gets shadow banned. 0. https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/6273409?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/6273409?hl=en 1. https://support.google.com/youtube/forum/AAAAiuErobU70d28s1NNC0/?hl=en&gpf=%23!topic%2Fyoutube%2F70d28s1NNC0 https://support.google.com/youtube/forum/AAAAiuErobU70d28s1N...
haolez 5y ago
Off topic: is there an YouTube equivalent in China? I'm just curious.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nikisweeting 5y ago
  When I lived there it was https://www.youku.com/ https://www.youku.com/, not sure if they're still the dominant site now, stuff changes quick.
fencepost 5y ago
I don't see any mention of the other thing that would be a concern to me - don't ever be in a situation where any Google product is critical to you, because the behemoth may casually destroy you as a side effect. What if instead of locking him for a week they'd canceled his account (and related accounts e.g. Gmail, plus linked accounts because 'bypassing ban')? And you don't have to be doing something like discussing security - maybe you're talking about Pokémon Go and they ban you for "CP videos" or you posted a bunch of red or green emoji in livestream comments for a gamer. Goodbye email, sites logged into with a Google account, Android phones (because they KNOW that phone number is linked to your identity), etc. And what are you going to do about it? Call customer service? snrk
- barbazoo 5y ago
  > And what are you going to do about it? Call customer service? I know it's not perfect but I feel much better knowing I pay for my email service, online storage and password management, knowing I'll be a paying customer in someone's system deserving of at least some degree of customer service.
PhilosAccnting 5y ago
Whenever I hear "algorithm" anymore, I see it as the "statistics" of the past. This entire thing is a product of math washing[1]. [1]https://www.mathwashing.com/ https://www.mathwashing.com/
ddtaylor 5y ago
One of the largest and most profitable companies in the world can't hire enough low-paid humans to do content review. They already have some of the highest margins in history and they still can't figure out that sacrificing less than 1% of profits could solve this problem?
- zentiggr 5y ago
  Paying less attention to YouTube also solves this problem. People still can't figure out that not watching YouTube solves all moderation problems? Google doesn't care about those posting on YouTube. They care about advertisers pulling their money if whatever content infringes on THEIR priorities.
  - ddtaylor 5y ago
    I think the reason most people are watching YouTube instead of traditional media is _because_ of this type of thing. Take this exact situation here as an example: this kind of content would never make it to traditional TV because it can't find an audience for such niche content, eg. people smart enough to warrant linking a PhD research paper in the description. I think Odysee is a good alternative. PeerTube doesn't really seem to be a great option here as it seems to have been down during this time. > Google doesn't care about [...] Mostly true, but also kind of not relevant. Google isn't doing anything here besides making poorly trained AI models that try to solve this problem for them. It's more negligence than it is malice, IMO.
mikaeluman 5y ago
YouTube (and others) appear to have lost the plot. I tend to avoid it and support other platforms to encourage content creators to migrate.
tacosaretasty 5y ago
The hypocrisy from Google here is palpable. First this content creator got a strike for showing users how GPG works and now for linking to academic research. On the other hand you have Google project zero who openly publish vulnerability research to the detriment of some software vendors. You can’t have it both ways and as someone who works in this space I’m pretty upset by this ham fisted approach to censoring content. I look forward to google becoming the next AOL.
- crocsarecool 5y ago
  I used to love Google - I can’t believe I’m feeling the same way. Everything is so downhill for them. Searching isn’t as great as it used to be. Popular services get killed to be replaced by replicas (thinking of messaging apps). What the heck is going on with Google? I used to think they were innovators, and now I feel like they’re just Big Brother.
jb775 5y ago
Not a popular opinion here but selectively covering up research is a play straight out of the Communist Manifesto. This sounds more like concerns over the spread of hacking intel, but it's worth noting yet another example given big tech's selective censorship over the past year.
kevwil 5y ago
"violates our harmful and dangerous policy" is hysterical coming from a harmful and dangerous automated censorship engine.
airhead969 5y ago
YT suspended my account without telling me why. Oh and no recourse for this evidence-free execution with only an ostensible appeal.

801 points by decrypt 5y ago

sagolikasoppor 5y ago

Google being google. Its funny that once I used to lookup to this company and now I view it as a threat to society.

devoutsalsa 5y ago
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight It's funny that I really appreciated Google when I first signed up for Gmail. Now that I've had it for 16 years, I resent the fact that I can get deplatformed for any reason, and there's really nothing I can do to prevent that.
- Jukg7e3AFyskdj 5y ago
  export all of your email to Protonmail and stop sucking on that Google breast
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    I'm seriously considering it, but I'm a heavy IMAP user. When you enable IMAP in ProtonMail, it's no different than any other mail provider, security wise. This is the dilemma for me.
    - social_quotient 5y ago
      Technically no different but you have cast a small vote to behavior you no loner tolerate or support (socially). Even if it’s a fraction of a dollar. In aggregate they add up.
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        That's another point to look at it, you're right.
    - decrypt 5y ago
      It is for this reason I am moving away from ProtonMail to Migadu. Literally any IMAP-offering email service would do. All that we need is a custom domain.
    - dunnevens 5y ago
      Other people have made good points. Just wanted to add: you'll feel better knowing you're no longer vulnerable to Google. It's a nice feeling of relief knowing Google could cancel my account tomorrow and I wouldn't be hurt in any substantial way. Definitely worth the effort to move your email to an independent provider.
    - Jukg7e3AFyskdj 5y ago
      I used to be also but now use the protonmail app on my phone. And this on my desktop https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail
    - infamia 5y ago
      I don't think you can connect to your email via IMAP without ProtonMail Bridge (which encrypts traffic between your email client and ProtonMail).
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        AFAIK you bypass 2FA when you use IMAP. I don't see many advantages of using Proton (over any other independent e-mail provider) without 2FA. The thing is, I connect all my accounts to a single mail application and handle everything from there, including their automated backups for ~15 years or so. The jury is still out for me, we'll see.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    buy your own domain and only use the email addresses you fully control.

m_a_g 5y ago

>Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong. Can't agree more.

b3kart 5y ago
The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's attention span? Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result? I don't know, but I have my doubts. Yes, moderation/suspensions can be a pain, and pointing out embarrassing mistakes is important to add pressure on Google to put more resources into it. At the same time, YouTube is full of great content and content creators. Anyone can upload a video and make it viewable by billions, instantly. I think we shouldn't forget how amazing this actually is.
- izacus 5y ago
  What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset based sites which could actually handle their moderation and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth?
  - b3kart 5y ago
    Isn't that basically how reddit operates? And last I heard they have their native video hosting as well. Sounds like this could work, but doesn't quite at the moment. Is YouTube handling content discovery better? Network effects maybe?
    - judge2020 5y ago
      Reddit is interest-based but gets free labor from most subreddit moderators that remove bad content for them. Reddit is also much less lucrative of a content platform given you have limited ways to make money (usually limited to linking to your patreon), so the content is constrained to whatever people do with no expectation of money.

Jan454 5y ago

Time to install GPT-3 on your own server and unleash it onto Google-Support, YouTube-Support, Alpha-Support, etc. to complain about your situation ;-) You just need to answer the captchas to keep it goin.

joshxyz 5y ago
Combine that with 2captcha.com, what do we have? Lol
abhishekbasu 5y ago
With AI-based support automation, it might end up like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY

PedroBatista 5y ago

YouTube, like most of the "Internet" these days it's just a shopping center. It appears to be the Universe because these sites/companies are so massive but at the end of the day it's their turf and they do what they want. Now, once they reach a certain scale, why are they allowed to operate like a "normal small company"?

macspoofing 5y ago
>Now, once they reach a certain scale, why are they allowed to operate like a "normal small company"? There was and is a push to make them behave more like a utility (i.e. a platform). Mainstream media, along with a major political party, are on a crusade to make these tech platform be more and more of an editor because they like that currently their competition (in case of media) and political rivals (in case of Democrats) are bearing the brunt of the censorship. And you can see this push even here on HN with constant references to how evil Facebook and Twitter is because memes on those platforms caused Hillary to lose in 2016, and therefore how misinformation is such a big problem that more censorship is needed. I don't know how you fix that. These platforms didn't want to do this. They got bullied into it.
infogulch 5y ago
Leonard French recently reviewed a Supreme Court ruling on Knight Institute v. Trump that includes a concurrence statement by Justice Thomas that touches exactly on these issues (and maybe even net neutrality by proxy). https://youtu.be/IpkGzJYYQj4 https://youtu.be/IpkGzJYYQj4 https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_3204.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_32...
dmingod666 5y ago
If I can uninstall YouTube from my Android I think that would be a good start towards a journey to a normal, if not small company..

Jan454 5y ago

Maybe it's time for a public company-independent complains-platform where all companies are obliged by law to respond. Each complaint of course is hidden behind some anti-bot captcha/protection so that the companies themselve can't use AI to answer your complaints.

roenxi 5y ago
What do you think this will achieve? We know what Google thinks; they don't want this content on their platform. Forcing them to state that in a specific forum as some sort of power play isn't going to help.
Werewolf255 5y ago
That sounds like something that the government should oversee, maybe they could also make some regulations so that , I dunno, corporations might need to be responsible for their actions.
qayxc 5y ago
That's basically what the author suggests when they say: > Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. It's impossible to operate a complaints-platform on a global scale if it's run by humans. According to GMI [0], 500 hours of content are uploaded every minute. Given an average video duration of about 12 minutes [1], that would be 2500 videos per hour. That's just too much to manually review and handle complaints. [0] https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statistics/ https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-category-average-length/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-ca...
- danhor 5y ago
  *2500 videos per minute
  - qayxc 5y ago
    Yes, thanks.

broknbottle 5y ago

We should start letting "AI" decide the outcome in any of Google's pending court cases. We could setup a twitter account and direct them to complain, I mean appeal by @ the twitter account and hope the bot gods decide their tweet is worthy enough for human review

asimpletune 5y ago

The first part of the post, where they said the got a strike for teaching people how to use pgp... Wow, that’s um, wild

boomboomsubban 5y ago
I believe it's still against US law to export pgp to certain countries, as it's considered munitions. Wild is a great description.
- arsome 5y ago
  Didn't DJB v US pretty much end that? That would also impact things like Firefox for the record.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Pretty much, but export to "rogue states and terrorist organizations" is still technically illegal. I suspect it wouldn't withstand challenge though.

HenryBemis 5y ago

> Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. BYOReligion.. and Google believes that they need to increase 'engagement', increase profit, and decrease headcount.. so.. there you have it dear Sun Knudsen. Edit: I don't care for the 'virtual currency' of 'karma'. I wonder though; the sky is blue, I point at the sky, I say "the sky is blue", and people frown (?) upon me for stating the obvious fact of life.. Or is it just Google-trolls/fanboys/fangirls that don't like the true being called out? My above comment is also applicable to any entity that automates "as much as possible" and maintains a small team to manage operations. Something tells me that their internal Finance team has "enough" staff to monitor the General Ledger. Because General Ledger is critical to their $$$$$. A 'content creator' though, is not as critical, thus gets far less attention, and <insert FAANG> will only be bothered to fix this, if said person yells loud enough. How is this fact of life being downvoted? (not me.. I don't grow taller/shorter based on the karma points) :)

jodrellblank 5y ago
> "I say "the sky is blue", and people frown (?) upon me for stating the obvious fact of life.." Yes; exactly this. If you were out in a crowd and called everyone's attention to you - thousands of people quietened to pay attention to what you were going to say for a moment, and you announced the thing you yourself say is an "obvious fact", that the sky is blue, the crowd would be annoyed at you for wasting their time with obvious low-quality trivia. "company seeks profit" is the same low-value annoying thing to say. You're not being downvoted because it's untrue, you're being downvoted because it's like a toddler going "hey, hey, hey, hey, look, look at this, watch this" "okay?" "throws ball at ground". Great, thanks for that, good contribution.

Black101 5y ago

I think that Google should hide all sites that display ads from the search results... because after all, it goes against AMP's principles of responsive websites. They definitely should also block Gmail... because it has become incredibly slow to load. I bet the CEO is laughing a lot when he sees all of this interacting together.

williesleg 5y ago

Boycott google while you still can. Almost have world domination.

throwaway120831 5y ago

tube has been censoring folks left and right since the start of covid

FpUser 5y ago

I am sure it is ok to use AI to cheapen initial screening. This FAANG and the like set of companies are becoming vital for people to the point that sometime they can loose their income. I see nothing wrong with those that serve as a source of income being declared as utility type service with the mandatory staged conflict resolution process. Said process at the last stage (well before the actual lawsuit) would include being able to present proof to the actual human being/s who has the power to reverse the decision and is paid for but not employed by said utility. In case of utility failing to comply that watchdog should be able to levy fines. This should also help to prevent cases when the utility "moderation" is based on the political (other similar in nature) opinions of the owners. All this "I am a private company and do as I please" when it comes to a very big companies is baloney. They have way too much power and should be held responsible for how this power being used. Preventing them from being able to lobby governments should be of first priority as well. Since the companies of that type are international it is of course up to the individual governments to implement whatever if any measures they would see fit.

privatesgtrj 5y ago

Google is a private company. It's fully within their rights to remove any video they don't like, for whatever reason. It comes with the territory if we want Google to be able to censor hate speech and misinformation. You can always use a competing site, or build your own.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
danuker 5y ago
Except the sheer scale of Google is hair-raising. (Sleep tight dear FTC). If Google loses a YouTube creator, it has almost no impact on their bottom line. If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is threatened. I would argue this is the perfect scenario for a creator's union (of course, it should use some other platform to communicate).
- freebuju 5y ago
  > If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is threatened No. There are numerous providers that can host your videos. For a small fee. This mentality is what gives Google such pseudo-power.
  - derivagral 5y ago
    At the end of the day, I'd guess this is less about alternatives and more about youtube being the best platform for your investment. Hosting isn't the problem, its the audience and traffic (and ad monetization from your vids.) Do the alternatives hold up in terms of things like market reach, $ performance, and not banning the same users?
    - freebuju 5y ago
      If Youtube was to go away today, do the guys who upload videos on this platform stop being content creators? This is myth I want to dispell. Now to answer your question. Yes, it will be tough and disruptive should you start distributing your content through other alternatives if you were using youtube as your only vehicle. But similar issues were faced by other content creators such as musicians, journalists when the streaming era started disrupting their vehicles. They adapted. Don't see why video content creators shouldn't be able to find the same flexibility and continue to thrive. Youtube by itself with no content does not have anything to sell. Infact, relying only on a single platform can be dangerous for creators since we've seen some of them being booted off by AI. No human explanations. Audience, traffic, monetization, reach are all market problems. They will exist whether Youtube is there or not.

Ian678 5y ago

I remember a survey by google about security research and one of the questions was something like "What hinders learning/education in this topic?", and I remember answering exactly this behavior.

Aissen 5y ago

FYI, this is the video: https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4d32-88b8-3de0dae58855 https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4... ; the links in the description: KRACK Attacks: Breaking WPA2 https://www.krackattacks.com/ https://www.krackattacks.com/ KRACK - Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOgJswt7nAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOgJswt7nAc

koheripbal 5y ago
Are these new attacks? The video in OP only seems to indicate the ability to attack content on a Wifi connection of other connected clients if you're already connected. It doesn't give you the ability to "crack" a WPA2 network without the password.

black_puppydog 5y ago

FWIW the video in question seems to be this one from ~1y ago: https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4d32-88b8-3de0dae58855 https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4...

enriquto 5y ago

> I am a privacy and security researcher and content creator on YouTube and PeerTube. > I am no longer able to post content for a week. Honestly, they had it coming. While "regular people" can be understood to use overtly shitty platforms like youtube, somebody who is a security and privacy researcher has no excuse. They should just avoid platforms with such callously hostile policies. Moreso when there are plenty of sane alternatives like peertube and others.

giansegato 5y ago
If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way around YouTube and the like It's obviously and evidently not about uploading videos, but rather to build and reach a community Also, it's wrong to accept that these platforms have this kind of influence and we should just avoid them. They're part of the social fabric of our time, and it's our duty to make things better.
- grumple 5y ago
  > If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way around YouTube and the like Is this true? There's almost no discoverability on YouTube imo. You could just push people towards your privately hosted platforms.
- enriquto 5y ago
  > If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way around YouTube and the like This kind of attitude only serves to entrench the problem and make everything worse. Even if you are not personally affected by youtube's damaging policies, just using the platform is an insulting lack of respect towards other people who are. What ever happened to "be the change you want to see in the world"? Any such change must be led by knowledgeable people like this security researcher. I hope that this ban serves Sun Knudsen (who already publishes their videos on peertube) to lead more and more people out of this and other user-hostile platforms, until these platforms finally turn into a cesspool of content-free "influencers".

at_a_remove 5y ago

I think the "oh no human moderation would cost us too much" defense is a distraction. It's a good one, because it is working, but it is still a distraction. Let us suppose we have a program which checks for orthodoxy according to the YouTube Terms of Service against each video submitted. Nothing but a lack of having done the work prevents YouTube from adding to its "rejected" flag the following: 1) A list of timestarts and durations of the portions of the video violating the ToS. 2) For each item in that list, make it a tuple and add a reason -- which clause was violated? Then outputting that to the owner of the rejected video. Nothing stops them from doing this. Some set of words or images happened somewhere in the timestream -- the orthodoxy program has that timestamp as it churns through the video. And a specific clause was violated -- a particular word in a wordlist as an example, because there's no simple, non-composite function that just says "good or not good." This is really not a particularly high bar as an ask.

flavius29663 5y ago
That will never work. If you tell the user exactly what they did wrong, they will keep trying by changing very little in the original video until it gets past bots, but still keeps the illegal or "forbidden" message. I think youtube should not be allowed to remove videos for their content unless for legal reasons. Meaning it's a violation of the law, in which case they have to send the information to the police as well. And that, of course, should require a human stamp of approval. Of course, Youtube should be allowed to remove videos if they are too long, wrong format etc., but NOT for their content.
- tumetab1 5y ago
  > If you tell the user exactly what they did wrong, they will keep trying by changing very little in the original video until it gets past bots, but still keeps the illegal or "forbidden" message. I think there's a possibility to implement that handles the issue you describe. It's trivial to detect an user trying to circumvent content controls if he's trying that from the same account. When that is detected the user account can be put into manual mode review or automatically block new uploads for a while. If circumvent is tried with different accounts the current system already doesn't prevent that so nothing is lost.

Zenst 5y ago

Odd, more so given a whole video is upon YT about this from 2017. https://youtu.be/Oh4WURZoR98 https://youtu.be/Oh4WURZoR98

Sephr 5y ago
Note that this video was originally taken down for the same supposed ToS violation: https://twitter.com/vanhoefm/status/927612810984677376 https://twitter.com/vanhoefm/status/927612810984677376

arminiusreturns 5y ago

Stop buying into the "the AI did it" whitewashing. Youtube is selectively targeting more and more channels and videos for daring to be any sort of contrarian. Its psyops under any other name.

finnthehuman 5y ago
"The AI did it" is the same cop-out as "A low level employee did it of their own volition" and should be rejected as an excuse for all the same reasons.
root_axis 5y ago
It's not a "psyops", YouTube, like every gigantic corporation is motivated entirely by money, and they would be happy to monetize every video on the site if they could, but advertisers pay the bills, and since advertisers are sensitive to their public image, YouTube goes out of their way to appease them. The problem here is the ad model, not AI or YouTube's values.
- seriousquestion 5y ago
  That's an outdated view. Youtube now bends to activists and political winds.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    So what is the activist political position on WPA2 vulnerabilities? You see what you want to see, but YouTube hosts an overwhelming abundance of evidence that contradicts your claim.
    - im3w1l 5y ago
      Internal employee pressure is the cause of some things getting removed, but they are not behind everything. In this particular case it might bdriven by legal concerns or something. But it should also be seen in light of the status quo. When censorship being the new default, then it doesn't take a strong reason to add another thing, such as hacking-adjacent content to the no-go pile. The code is already written, and the routines are well-known. There is no freedom-of-speech reputation left to protect. So the cost of removing this content is very low, lower than the legal risk.

cl3misch 5y ago

Are we certain this was not because the vulnerability is called "KRACK" which is similar to the drug "crack"? Youtube has been very strict about such phrasing mishaps.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
If your argument is it would be reasonable for you tube to automatically ban anything that could be a mention of crack cocaine we’re not going to find a lot of common ground on what is accidental moderation vs intentional censorship.

kingsuper20 5y ago

It would be fun to do a quick survey of books breathlessly laying out the future of the internet from 20 years ago. Looking back, the evolution of social media/youtube was pretty obvious. Back then, not so much. 1) Begin with anything goes including illegal. Run at a loss, Grow baby! 2) Ads 3) Bitching from some important people causes some removal of the more flagrantly illegal stuff. 4) Employees and PR departments apply a POV to what is now close to a monopoly. Large scale censorship. What makes the modern era interesting is the POV angle. I can't imagine Rockefeller's Standard Oil restricting sales to people with conflicting politics. Of course, there are people spending a lot of time each day on r/politics and what used to be r/thedonald shouting joyous insanity at each other...that's the modern pool of workers.

Aunche 5y ago

This is what people choose when they decide to angrily tweet at advertisers into pulling away ads whenever YouTube doesn't take down bad videos quickly enough. It tells Youtube that they should tune their moderation to be overly aggressive. This is true regardless of how much human moderation they use.

kypro 5y ago

YouTube's content policy is bizare. Children in my family seem to watch videos of Spiderman dry humping Elsa or grannies kicking people in the nuts, but then they remove stuff like this. I guess this is what happens when advertisers are the main priority and the moderators have all been replaced with robots. Content that may actually harm the development of children is considered fine, while someone posting a slightly edgey political take or a research paper about something which triggers a bot is removed.

shakezula 5y ago
YouTube will robot-moderate themselves into the ground. Too many people are leaving the platform. It’s just a trickle now but soon it will be a flow. It’s the inevitable result of moderation based only on who’s paying you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- iso8859-1 5y ago
  Where are people escaping to? Are people publishing their own content on Gopher or BitTorrent nowadays? These platforms have a perfect balance of usability and freedom. They can take over the world.
  - Balgair 5y ago
    It seems like they are making their own sites. Nebula is one such place where a few of the higher quality content creators are going. I've no idea if it'll work, but they are trying. https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/
    - CameronNemo 5y ago
      The problem with these techniques is discover ability. How do you build an online audience without paying google for advertisements?

codeecan 5y ago

Google has long been manipulating content, look up "blue anon". You can compare searches between Bing and you'll find lots of content thats been "moderated"

pyronik19 5y ago

It's disheartening that in the 2000s, people used to regularly talk about creating decentralized systems to prevent megacorporations and governments from being able to censor the internet, now the tech community that used to deplore such tactics actively supports mass AI censorship on entire host of topics where the only version of the truth that is allowed to stand is #thenarrative.

1cvmask 5y ago

AI is a great excuse for censorship. But many economic actors want censorship including the advertisers. So it seems more competition to Youtube is the only answer to censorship. But I don’t see any credible competition on the horizon to Youtube for a while. The ultimate ironic censorship on the part of Youtube: https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-censored-youtube/274918/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce... And the discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217

nromiun 5y ago

Recently I also discovered that YouTube shadow bans comments for using banned words (e.g. kill, coronavirus etc) or external links (two of my comments got banned). I have seen some people asking for sources on YouTube comments and it turns out you literally can't do that. Maybe that's why only spam comments rise to the top, any long or thoughtful comment simply gets shadow banned. 0. https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/6273409?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/6273409?hl=en 1. https://support.google.com/youtube/forum/AAAAiuErobU70d28s1NNC0/?hl=en&gpf=%23!topic%2Fyoutube%2F70d28s1NNC0 https://support.google.com/youtube/forum/AAAAiuErobU70d28s1N...

haolez 5y ago

Off topic: is there an YouTube equivalent in China? I'm just curious.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nikisweeting 5y ago
When I lived there it was https://www.youku.com/ https://www.youku.com/, not sure if they're still the dominant site now, stuff changes quick.

fencepost 5y ago

I don't see any mention of the other thing that would be a concern to me - don't ever be in a situation where any Google product is critical to you, because the behemoth may casually destroy you as a side effect. What if instead of locking him for a week they'd canceled his account (and related accounts e.g. Gmail, plus linked accounts because 'bypassing ban')? And you don't have to be doing something like discussing security - maybe you're talking about Pokémon Go and they ban you for "CP videos" or you posted a bunch of red or green emoji in livestream comments for a gamer. Goodbye email, sites logged into with a Google account, Android phones (because they KNOW that phone number is linked to your identity), etc. And what are you going to do about it? Call customer service? snrk

barbazoo 5y ago
> And what are you going to do about it? Call customer service? I know it's not perfect but I feel much better knowing I pay for my email service, online storage and password management, knowing I'll be a paying customer in someone's system deserving of at least some degree of customer service.

PhilosAccnting 5y ago

Whenever I hear "algorithm" anymore, I see it as the "statistics" of the past. This entire thing is a product of math washing[1]. [1]https://www.mathwashing.com/ https://www.mathwashing.com/

ddtaylor 5y ago

One of the largest and most profitable companies in the world can't hire enough low-paid humans to do content review. They already have some of the highest margins in history and they still can't figure out that sacrificing less than 1% of profits could solve this problem?

zentiggr 5y ago
Paying less attention to YouTube also solves this problem. People still can't figure out that not watching YouTube solves all moderation problems? Google doesn't care about those posting on YouTube. They care about advertisers pulling their money if whatever content infringes on THEIR priorities.
- ddtaylor 5y ago
  I think the reason most people are watching YouTube instead of traditional media is _because_ of this type of thing. Take this exact situation here as an example: this kind of content would never make it to traditional TV because it can't find an audience for such niche content, eg. people smart enough to warrant linking a PhD research paper in the description. I think Odysee is a good alternative. PeerTube doesn't really seem to be a great option here as it seems to have been down during this time. > Google doesn't care about [...] Mostly true, but also kind of not relevant. Google isn't doing anything here besides making poorly trained AI models that try to solve this problem for them. It's more negligence than it is malice, IMO.

mikaeluman 5y ago

YouTube (and others) appear to have lost the plot. I tend to avoid it and support other platforms to encourage content creators to migrate.

tacosaretasty 5y ago

The hypocrisy from Google here is palpable. First this content creator got a strike for showing users how GPG works and now for linking to academic research. On the other hand you have Google project zero who openly publish vulnerability research to the detriment of some software vendors. You can’t have it both ways and as someone who works in this space I’m pretty upset by this ham fisted approach to censoring content. I look forward to google becoming the next AOL.

crocsarecool 5y ago
I used to love Google - I can’t believe I’m feeling the same way. Everything is so downhill for them. Searching isn’t as great as it used to be. Popular services get killed to be replaced by replicas (thinking of messaging apps). What the heck is going on with Google? I used to think they were innovators, and now I feel like they’re just Big Brother.

jb775 5y ago

Not a popular opinion here but selectively covering up research is a play straight out of the Communist Manifesto. This sounds more like concerns over the spread of hacking intel, but it's worth noting yet another example given big tech's selective censorship over the past year.

kevwil 5y ago

"violates our harmful and dangerous policy" is hysterical coming from a harmful and dangerous automated censorship engine.

airhead969 5y ago

YT suspended my account without telling me why. Oh and no recourse for this evidence-free execution with only an ostensible appeal.