12 ms·
“Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”
- judge2020 5y agoThe thing that makes this fishy is that I also received an email for my Google Workspace organization about link sharing changing for Google Drive for a security update, and the date it initially takes effect is the same day at this YouTube thing, July 23. https://support.google.com/a/answer/10685032?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/10685032?hl=en Could something have happened across their entire Zanzibar/ ACL infrastructure?
- llacb47 5y agoCould you explain what that is?
- chx 5y agohttps://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/
- jzelinskie 5y agoThe permissions service at Google. For more details see: https://authzed.com/blog/what-is-zanzibar/ https://authzed.com/blog/what-is-zanzibar/
- tenerifevisitor 5y agoWhat is Zanzibar?
- phuff 5y agoI found this link: https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/
- chairmanwow1 5y agoI really do love this paper.
- tech234a 5y agoYouTube mentions the Drive change on their blog post[1], and Drive mentions the YouTube change on theirs[2]. [1]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-youtube-unlisted-links/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-youtube-unlisted... [2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/06/drive-file-link-updates.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/06/drive-file-l...
- xxpor 5y agoI completely thought the email I got for this (for my personal Google app domain) was a phishing attempt. Why couldn't they have included the text in the email rather than some generic sketchy "You have a notification" nonsense?
- jerryoftheyear 5y agoYeah this one was pretty bad, I had the same reaction.
- dylan604 5y agoIf there was a link that said "Click here to view your messages", then yeah, I'd agree it would sound like a phishing attempt. If it was an email saying, "You have a notification" and you have to manually log in to see it, then there's less chance of you clicking on a phishing attempt. Also, if there's any personal/private/sensitive information, this method makes it unavailable over email. Just shooting from the hip. It could also just be laziness.
- bombcar 5y agoYou’re training users to click a “you have a notification” email that’s not easy to verify is legit.
- hackmiester 5y agoYeah, that's why it looked so phishy. Exact text: "Dear Google Workspace Administrator, You have an important notification from Google Operations that requires your attention. Sincerely, The Google Operations Team" And then there is a clickable link: "Go to Alert Center" This is the first time I have EVER heard of the Alert Center. So, I also assumed it was made up.
- QuercusMax 5y agoSeems highly unlikely to me (a Google engineer who works on systems that use Zanzibar / Cloud IAM) that this is a result of anything other than a change in policy.
- resoluteteeth 5y agoThis person seems to believe it's a security issue with video ids, but maybe that's not related to Zanzibar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27611436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27611436
- londons_explore 5y agoThis is true. There are rumours the key has leaked swirling.
- judge2020 5y agoI still find it odd why the Google Drive change would be related to this, but maybe they're not related besides that date being 'migration day'.
- oh_sigh 5y agoOut of curiosity, could you blindly speculate about something that could happen to this service that would require these changes to be made in drive/youtube?
- pininja 5y agoThis seems to be a planned change related to a new link generator they released in 2017 [1]. You can opt out here [2] if an old video is effected. It seems like the unlisted feature is otherwise unchanged. I suppose you can also flip an effected video back to unlisted and get a new link after this goes into effect. [1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/114633828/changes-to-unlisted-videos-uploaded-before-2017?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/114633828/changes-... [2] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970
- barosl 5y agoThat's unfortunate. I have a few videos which seems to have been forgotten even by their uploaders. Those videos would probably not be updated. I guess I need to back them up manually.
- Causality1 5y agoYes. I always tell people that if they really love a YouTube video they need to archive it themselves. Tons and tons of content gets erased all the time for many different reasons. Just recently I found two of my favorite channels, popular around a decade ago, had deleted almost all their content because their jokes were too offensive for today's audience and they wanted to project a more mature aesthetic. That would've been a huge chunk of my early adulthood gone forever if I hadn't already had copies of all their videos.
- tartoran 5y agoAbsolutely! Think of a channel getting wiped out for a fake copyright infringement and you could have dozens of videos (if not more) wiped out
- Ruthalas 5y agoIf you feel like chatting with others who also archive youtube content, consider stopping by my discord server: https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and occasionally direct efforts to preserve specific content- like unlisted videos right now. [1] https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w
- bmurphy1976 5y agoI have one video in my favorites that is marked as unavailable. This drives me crazy I'll never know what that video was. I only have a couple videos in my favorites and every single one of them is important to me. If you can back them up.
- dathinab 5y agoSeems reasonable tbh. even through it might "hit" some hidden and mostly forgotten gems.
- varispeed 5y agoNow I regret not saving at least a list of links of some of the videos :( How people who died are supposed to tick the box :/
- anfilt 5y agoI was thinking the same not everyone is sadly still around to make sure their content does not go basically poof.
- falcolas 5y agoDoesn't to me. Patreon tier-restricted videos, not to mention family shared videos, fall into this category, and not all creators are savy enough to know they need to do this.
- jackson1442 5y agoDid they send an email to affected accounts? There seems to be a logical reason for this (newer unlisted videos have a more secure url generator), so I’d say this is neutral at worst.
- MauranKilom 5y agoSome of my videos would be affected and I got an email from them. Seems reasonable to me. Of course, there is probably a large number of currently unlisted videos from accounts that are no longer active, which would effectively be lost after this change. Unfortunate.
- jackson1442 5y agoIt'd be interesting if Google had made this only apply to accounts that have had activity in, say, the last six months. If an account logs in and was skipped due to inactivity, it would then be appropriate to prompt them for their decision. That, of course, requires significantly more engineering so I can see why it didn't happen.
- prometheus76 5y agoThe opt-out process only takes 30 seconds.
- varispeed 5y agoWhat if the uploader of videos died? How are they supposed to do that...
- dragonwriter 5y ago> What if the uploader of videos died? Google has process for handling accounts of the deceased (mostly for closing them and exporting some data, which can then be moved to a new account). Or individuals could assure that next of kin get credentials to their account for control. But, yeah, a zombie account (without any active owner) won't be able to opt out.
- mankyd 5y agoLink to the form: https://support.google.com/youtube/contact/older_unlisted_update https://support.google.com/youtube/contact/older_unlisted_up...
- falcolas 5y agoThe problem isn't the opt-out time, it's the lag time to identify that you need to opt out. That could be years, or (effectively) forever. The creators might no longer be with us, to boot.
- beebeepka 5y agoI think it's mostly a good thing but it's Google so there must be an angle. Am I too jaded?
- mjfl 5y agocaching efficiency probably.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoOr making private videos a paid feature?
- CamperBob2 5y agoWeird thing to downvote. I'd like to be able to pay to ensure that no ads are placed on my own B2B videos, myself.
- mankyd 5y ago> Am I too jaded? Yes. Edit: they give the reason explicitly https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/114633828/changes-to-unlisted-videos-uploaded-before-2017?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/114633828/changes-... > Why? In 2017, we rolled out a security update to the system that generates new Unlisted video links. This update included security enhancements that make the links for your Unlisted videos even harder for someone to discover if you haven’t shared the link with them. We’re now making changes to older Unlisted videos that were uploaded before this update took place.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fortenforge 5y agoyes
- DevKoala 5y agoCan they monetize the content that is being hidden? If not, perhaps that’s the answer.
- judge2020 5y agoSo the reasoning makes it sound like there was potentially an exploit that made it easy to find unlisted videos? Were the video IDs deterministic perhaps?
- carl_dr 5y agoMaybe their old scheme, when divided by the number of videos, was getting to the point where it was feasible you could brute force finding unlisted videos. The old scheme had 7.3 x 10^19 ids (11 chars, base 64, thanks Tom Scott!). Suspiciously close to the max value of a 64-bit int, hmmm … Assume a billion videos and you’re down to 10^10 - a one in a 10 billion chance isn’t much chance, but it’s far from secure. (I’m ignoring the fact that only a small %age of videos are unlisted I guess, but I think the point still stands.)
- quantumofalpha 5y agoYes, exactly. Video ID is just a base64'ed DES-encrypted primary int64 video key from MySQL. It used to be sequentially incremented until at some point they switched to randomly generated primary keys. Any (ex-) engineer who snapped a copy of the encryption key (it used to sit right in the code for anyone to see) can enumerate all videos from YT until that moment, including unlisted - which are only protected by secrecy of that one key. If the key leaks, then also anyone in the world can. That's what they are afraid of here. Source: worked for YT.
- Animats 5y agoI need to move some of my early technical videos to Vimeo now. I never connected my pre-Google YouTube account to Google, and so I can't do anything with them. It's been over a year since I logged into Google, anyway.
- contingencies 5y agoPlease share the URL! I always appreciate your hardware comments and would love to see what you've shared in video format.
- Animats 5y agoFirst legged running on rough terrain (around 1994) https://youtu.be/kc5n0iTw-NU https://youtu.be/kc5n0iTw-NU Made on a 20MHz Mac IIci, not enough computer for the job. First working ragdoll (around 1997) https://youtu.be/5lHqEwk7YHs https://youtu.be/5lHqEwk7YHs Ragdoll physics, correct but slow. Big falling object test (around 1997) https://youtu.be/-DaWIHc1VLY https://youtu.be/-DaWIHc1VLY Notice that it looks heavy, unlike most video game physics.
- contingencies 5y agoAs an Aussie I appreciate the kangaroo. We still work often with 20MHz: good enough for most control applications. Not sure I'd want distributed control applications with multiple control algorithms and timing quandries, though.
- pyromaker 5y agoWe've been working on a tool called Pyro to move our videos to a different platform https://www.pyro.app https://www.pyro.app Also our goal was to create our own video community. Might be an option for others who are thinking about something similar.
- somethoughts 5y agoYes this totally seems like an opportunity for Vimeo which recently IPO'd* to clean up. * not a shareholder
- throwawaysea 5y agoA related frustration for me is when I have random videos in my "watch later" list replaced with a gray square and a note saying the video is no longer unavailable or has been made private. Since I don't even get any details of what the video was (title/channel/description), I can't go find it elsewhere. It's like having a song deleted from a playlist silently. It makes me wonder if I should even rely on Google's features for this sort of thing, or maintain a list elsewhere.
- contingencies 5y agoAlmost like submitting to centralized gatekeeping is a crime against public culture, intellectual history and social integrity... wait... what are we all building again?
- brokenmachine 5y agoWe have already built a corporate dystopia where plebs spend their precious time making content which enables a giant multinational company to generate billions in advertising dollars. In exchange we get free email.
- varispeed 5y agoThese days I use ytdl instead of watch later... A friend sent me a link to an amazing tech tutorial someone made and they wasn't sure whether that is their thing. Of course they received a lot of abuse from internet trolls and later deleted the video and disappeared. I was never able to find that video again and since then I always download.
- echelon 5y agoGoogle the URL. You'll often find it in the Google cache or linked from somewhere else with the full description. This can sometimes be enough information to find an alternate source.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI don't think there is a URL to Google in this case.
- btown 5y agoA welcome move for individuals who may have embarrassing content as Unlisted links. Future politicians will thank you. But... this will hit B2B product training and product marketing libraries hard. Many companies I've seen have help pages with embedded or linked videos for features not updated in years, and many of those embeds are Unlisted videos so that they're only seen in the context of their help article, not promoted randomly by the YouTube algorithm. Some may have legacy content on legacy "X Corp Training" YouTube channels where nobody knows how to opt out of this policy shift. And especially post-COVID, they may no longer have the same technology and training teams, if they have any at all. They may not even have the YouTube login. I could see a policy where YouTube made Unlisted videos Private that only had referrers from social media; this would be a welcome compromise to ensure non-guessability of URLs. But I can also see how this could become complicated and political. And companies using YouTube in this way aren't really contributing to YouTube's revenue materially, so there's not much incentive relative to the reputational risk of people guessing Unlisted links. I shudder to think that healthcare professionals or heavy-machinery operators might be relying on these links to be trained in systems they use, will start to see broken links, will never report them back to the right people at their system providers, will just not get the full training, will make mistakes, and might cause harm as a result. Security is not the only component of safety, and impacts need to be evaluated holistically.
- app4soft 5y ago> A welcome move for individuals who may have embarrassing content as Unlisted links. All those "early access" on Patreon.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- newsclues 5y agoMaybe critical training materials should not be published to YouTube?
- the_benno 5y ago"should not be published" is very different from "are not published"
- dukeofdoom 5y agoI guess that means you can't put your Dead Man's Switch video on youtube anymore. How far into the future can you schedule a video anyway.
- kmfrk 5y agoVery, very drastic, but this is basically the public S3 bucket situation for videos. Maybe another video category would have made for better distinction than just Public, Unlisted, and Private.
- Smithalicious 5y agoThis makes me sad, I remember quite a few unlisted videos going around for one reason or the other over the years. Videos meant to be watched, mind. There's lots of old stuff on YouTube from long dead small channels. This stuff rots and disappears over time with nobody around to maintain it. I guess it's a good reminder that everything needs maintenance. Something similar, but much more dramatic, happened once they got rid of annotations - lots of old stuff that no longer works the way it was intended. It seems like nobody particularly cares about preserving this kind of stuff. It's a big downside to having content that only lives on the web - video files on my local storage don't just change retroactively. Things might still need maintenance, like getting old flash files to work again, but information doesn't get lost as easily.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fapjacks 5y agoIt's been clear to me we're at the tail end of the golden age of online videos and I and many others have been furiously downloading in preparation for the inevitable.
- asdff 5y agoNot just videos, any online content is subject to loss. If you see something and like it, save it locally and back it up, whether its a video, image, text post, or an entire website.
- fapjacks 5y agoYeah bitrot is way worse than people imagine. About ten years ago (wow time flies) I ran an experiment to validate hyperlinks and measure bitrot and even then, links older than a few years did not work. This is why we will be leaning ever harder on stuff like the Internet Archive (thank you Jason!) as big ass media companies keep turning the screws to confine our attentions to their content while spending considerable effort to attack outside content.
- 5y ago
- fudged71 5y agoIntentional link rot. Am I supposed to go through all my old bookmarks and saves to see what to download?
- andrewzah 5y agoWhat's stopping you from downloading videos you care about in the first place? It's not that hard to have youtube-dl batch download playlists, which is what I do.
- freeflight 5y agoI wonder where the web went wrong that we ended up in this regressive place where we have to create local backups because the Internet has gotten really good at "forgetting" all the fun and interesting stuff, while never forgetting all our personal info :/
- asdff 5y agoThis is the end result of the internet being a firehose left on for multiple decades. Signal is washed out.
- Springtime 5y agoThe internet has always been fragile like that though, it's not a new thing. Even more than a decade back there were those encouraging saving local copies of web pages for any content one found worthwhile, rather than bookmarking it, since there's a likelihood of the link/content disappearing, which time has shown to be a smart idea given online archives aren't always reliable[1]. The same is true (perhaps moreso) for audio/visual media online. [1] It takes someone else to first know about archive sites, consider archiving a link pre-emptively either manually or in an automated way, which doesn't always occur. Then one problem is if a link changes a version may have been archived at the old link but the new link doesn't show as being archived (sometimes redirects are in place, other times not). Another issue is archive.org respects robots.txt and webmaster requests so crawls can be retroactively made non-public (archive.is is a bit different but there's so little known about who operates it that it's unclear how reliable it is for long-term reference).
- PikachuEXE 5y agoI always prefer opt-in over opt-out. I can't think of an exception yet.
- scruffyherder 5y agoPut your sensitive data on other people’s servers and this happens. If people cared they’d host it inside, on the other hand, that would mean being responsible for your own data which is not a popular idea these days
- rozab 5y agoAre there any projects which scan public playlists for unlisted videos and archive them?
- jobigoud 5y agoYou can put unlisted videos in public playlists? That sounds off.
- londons_explore 5y agoThis is all a result of a poor security choice by YouTube, back when they were run by a few people. Video URL's look random, but are in fact an encrypted sequential integer. If the encryption key is leaked, then someone can browse through all unlisted videos. There are rumours the key has been leaked. All these changes are to mitigate the impact of that.