3 ms·
Base64 doesn’t require JS, it requires a Base64 decoder, which either every language has, or any CS student who’s taken an algorithms class could write in a few
by jonhohle 3y ago
Base64 doesn’t require JS, it requires a Base64 decoder, which either every language has, or any CS student who’s taken an algorithms class could write in a few hours for the language of their choice. Base64 encoding/decoding is the type of thing you could ask most applicants to write during an interview. It’s like saying they encrypted it in UTF-8.
- userbinator 3y agoBase64 is just one of the components of the JS that YouTube uses to generate the actual video URLs. It's been at least a few months since I took a look at it, but I remember it having a substitution cipher and some other transformations, but no "real" crypto like AES and such. That said, if they're effectively giving you both the lock and the key, is it really circumvention of access control to unlock it with anything other than a user-agent they "support" (i.e. approve of)? As I mentioned in my other comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37114697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37114697), a lot of people "download" from YouTube not to infringe copyright but to simply use alternative software to view the content.
- mcpackieh 3y ago> they're effectively giving you both the lock and the key, DRM in a nutshell. I think we have to assume the anti-circumvention laws are intended to apply in precisely this kind of circumstance, since that describes virtually all DRM. When these laws were written, it was even common for DRM to be implemented as XORing with some single byte "key", which was trivial to either extract from the program or just brute force.