9 ms·

Technically, all interesting. Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google”, I feel like it's reasonable to stop after the first optimization (“pass the rea

Technically, all interesting. Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google”, I feel like it's reasonable to stop after the first optimization (“pass the real browser test to get regular browser speeds”). There you're not “wasting” any more of YouTube's resources than a browser user with ad-block. Getting full Gb/s without paying anything feels to me like you're pushing all the ad-blocked users' luck. But then again, fuck Google I guess?

planede 3y ago
I wonder how abusive this is though. In the end you are downloading the same amount of data, but in a shorter time. You are utilizing more bandwidth but you go away earlier. I think the original browser use case is tuned for the common occurrence of not watching the whole video. But if you intend to watch (and archive) the whole video to begin with then I don't think this eats away Google's bandwidth more. OTOH it probably has more overhead due to the amount of connections.
- abwizz 3y ago
  yea, i also don't think that the increased rate is a problem per se, but i also doubt that a majority of youtube views cover the entire length of the video, hence downloaders do probably use more data.
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    Any youtuber, myself included, can attest that a majority of youtube views demonstrably don't. A key factor in finding success as a youtuber is getting better at retention, hence all the ridiculousness and MrBeastness: some people specialize in retention, and they do better. It's weird from the standpoint of someone who sets out to watch an entire thing, but almost nobody sticks around while watching videos. It seems like the mass of youtube viewerdom are bouncing around like mad, all the time.
    - abwizz 3y ago
      not unlike "zapping" tv channels
    - nradov 3y ago
      It's FOMO on a second-by-second basis. No matter what you're watching now you could be watching something better. The UI even somewhat encourages this with the way it displays a list of additional videos below what's playing now.
      - majewsky 3y ago
        By default, it's even right next to what's playing now. It's only below when you're in theater mode.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  Well, you go away unless you're another organization that proposes to mirror all of YouTube and eat its lunch. Google can't only think about humans, it's got to also think about competing organizations. That complicates things.
  - thousand_nights 3y ago
    that's their problem to deal with. why is everyone here going all 'think of the poor corporations'
    - stavros 3y ago
      I think you're reading it as "as a user, you must not do this because...", when the GP meant it as "as Google, the reason I'm doing this is because..."
    - apetresc 3y ago
      Well, when they "deal with it", we'll all be complaining even harder. The fact that they've gone relatively light on obfuscation and security against things like yt-dlp for such a long time is basically tacit approval at this point. I wouldn't want to bite that hand.
    - kodra 3y ago
      By the same logic, fare evasion is "metro company's problem to deal with". It technically is, but if someone makes a programmer's salary and still jumps over turnstiles, I consider it a big red flag over their personality.
  - planede 3y ago
    That organization would probably parallelize the download on multiple video level, not necessarily on subrange level on a single video.
  - secondcoming 3y ago
    Is it technically or financially feasible to mirror YouTube?
  - 3y ago
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  > I wonder how abusive this is though. In the end you are downloading the same amount of data, but in a shorter time. In the end you're downloading a lot more data in total, as what ends up happening is you're downloading all sorts of stuff that you never end up getting around to actually watching (data hoarder syndrome). Whereas if you could only watch that stuff during life playback, you'd be downloading much less data in total as there's no bytes wasted amassing a library that never gets viewed.
  - planede 3y ago
    > In the end you're downloading a lot more data in total, as what ends up happening is you're downloading all sorts of stuff that you never end up getting around to actually watching (data hoarder syndrome). Well that's an assumption on the intent of downloading. I don't download videos that I don't eventually watch. But typically it's for archival, I just hate my favorite videos going away.
    - CydeWeys 3y ago
      > I don't download videos that I don't eventually watch. I doubt it.
no_time 3y ago
>Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google" Companies do not have ethics, only interests. It's only natural I behave similarly.
- benterix 3y ago
  > Companies do not have ethics, only interests. While that's certainly true (although an simplification - they are just managed by people with low ethics), we can do better. If I behaved like managers of Google, Meta or Microsoft, I'd be ashamed of myself.
  - sph 3y ago
    I despise this philosophy. Megacorps are shit, so we should be better than them? It's a popular theme because it makes one feel like they have control over the world around them: they just have to be better than it. No. I shouldn't have to work harder myself to somehow cancel out the evil in the world. Because if we were less cowards and calling them for what they are - evil - they wouldn't hold so much power over us. Reminds me of that scene from Mr. Inbetween about bullies. Bullies exist because we're told to ignore them and get punished if we retaliate, so they get away with it. -- But without getting sidetracked. Companies have no emotion, no particular sense of ethics, and least of all, they don't need people to defend them, unless they're called a lawyer.
    - js8 3y ago
      > No. I shouldn't have to work harder myself to somehow cancel out the evil in the world. Not only you should, but you should also support countermeasures that make it harder for evil, so you eventually wouldn't have to work harder. If there is one reason, do it for your kids, to show them that a better world is possible.
    - hilbert42 3y ago
      "Because if we were less cowards and calling them for what they are - evil - they wouldn't hold so much power over us." Exactly, if we held public demonstrations outside the offices of book publishers, Sony, RIAA, and similar greedy bastards, and it became the norm to snub our noses at their employees then things would soon change. For instance, we ought to be demonstrating in the streets over how these bastards are hounding the Internet Archive, but we're not. If we were, then these companies would quickly change their tune and think twice before launching such lawsuits. Trouble is we're not out there demonstrating. And it's only a tiny minority of the population who actually care about such things—those of us posting here on HN etc.—who do. We're such a small force we couldn't escape from a wet paper bag on the deck of a sinking ship let alone take on the might of these greedy corporations. Cory Doctorow has said this many times although he's not been as blunt about it as I am. I've followed this for decades and I reckon it's essentially a lost cause. Even if we could get politicians to agree to change laws they could only do so around the edges as they've signed international treaties, Berne, WIPO, etc. which prohibit signatories from exiting. Any country that left the treaties would have sanctions placed against it. These corporations have not only won but they've implemented a system that's irreversible, like a ratchet, every one of their cog-like actions squeezes us consumers further and there's fuck-all we can do about it.
mrtksn 3y ago
Technically, everyone pays for connecting to the network. I wouldn't say it's unethical to slam YouTube with full speed downloads but at the same time I wouldn't judge YouTube if they take measures against it. I'm using a browser extension to show full size of images on social media when hover and Instagram went crazy about it, warning about unusual activities and threatening to lock my account. I looked into it to see if the extension does any scrapping behind but no, it all seems fine. My assumption is that Meta detects requests happening in wrong order which might indicate data scrapping due to the non-standart client behaviour. So, measures and countermeasures. I guess it's up to YouTube to implement their counter measures and push the scrappers to implement theirs but overall at some point they should be able to limit downloading to the playback*2 speed because a legitimate consumption wouldn't happen any faster on a legitimate client. But honestly, downloading shouldn't be restricted. The contents are protected by laws anyways and most people have legitimate reasons for downloading videos. It could be for archiving purposes because the video has some value for you, it could be for analysis or it could be about creating content based on the vide content(like downloading a movie trailer to extract parts for you movie review video). The content in YouTube is not created in vacuum and once published they create the new environment where new videos will be made and this creative freedom is important unless we want the current videos be the last videos ever made.
- bmicraft 3y ago
  > I'm using a browser extension to show full size of images on social media when hover and Instagram went crazy about it, warning about unusual activities and threatening to lock my account. I looked into it to see if the extension does any scrapping behind but no, it all seems fine. I've used such an extension and found dragging the curser over your screen might fire like 25 requests. You might simply be rate-limited.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    Maybe, I just speculate over the reason of course but I haven't noticed anything strange like that. That said, the pattern of requests from the client should be obvious to the backend, the preventive measures can be designed around it and the rate Is one of the obvious signals. Removed the extension anyway
miyuru 3y ago
> YouTube's resources > Getting full Gb/s Technically most of the time video is served on the same network(ISP) as youtube has caches with almost all ISPs, IXes in the world. It might be the largest CDN built to date. Case in point, the authors YT URLs point to Canadian ISP Videotron. https://bgp.he.net/dns/rr1---sn-8qu-t0aee.googlevideo.com https://bgp.he.net/dns/rr1---sn-8qu-t0aee.googlevideo.com
p0w3n3d 3y ago
technically you should be able to download video and you should not be prevented from this, at least to have a proof somebody was spreading hate speech or insulting you or your relatives. Of course you can camcord the screen but this sounds like a stone age solution. Do you know for example that you cannot take screenshots of netflix in your browser on Mac, and therefore cannot make a meme, which is a fair use that has been taken from you?
- nradov 3y ago
  What does hate speech have to do with anything? The content has no bearing on the legality or ethics of downloading or bypassing throttling controls.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thrashh 3y ago
It's the cost of doing business?

planede 3y ago

I wonder how abusive this is though. In the end you are downloading the same amount of data, but in a shorter time. You are utilizing more bandwidth but you go away earlier. I think the original browser use case is tuned for the common occurrence of not watching the whole video. But if you intend to watch (and archive) the whole video to begin with then I don't think this eats away Google's bandwidth more. OTOH it probably has more overhead due to the amount of connections.

abwizz 3y ago
yea, i also don't think that the increased rate is a problem per se, but i also doubt that a majority of youtube views cover the entire length of the video, hence downloaders do probably use more data.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  Any youtuber, myself included, can attest that a majority of youtube views demonstrably don't. A key factor in finding success as a youtuber is getting better at retention, hence all the ridiculousness and MrBeastness: some people specialize in retention, and they do better. It's weird from the standpoint of someone who sets out to watch an entire thing, but almost nobody sticks around while watching videos. It seems like the mass of youtube viewerdom are bouncing around like mad, all the time.
  - abwizz 3y ago
    not unlike "zapping" tv channels
  - nradov 3y ago
    It's FOMO on a second-by-second basis. No matter what you're watching now you could be watching something better. The UI even somewhat encourages this with the way it displays a list of additional videos below what's playing now.
    - majewsky 3y ago
      By default, it's even right next to what's playing now. It's only below when you're in theater mode.
Applejinx 3y ago
Well, you go away unless you're another organization that proposes to mirror all of YouTube and eat its lunch. Google can't only think about humans, it's got to also think about competing organizations. That complicates things.
- thousand_nights 3y ago
  that's their problem to deal with. why is everyone here going all 'think of the poor corporations'
  - stavros 3y ago
    I think you're reading it as "as a user, you must not do this because...", when the GP meant it as "as Google, the reason I'm doing this is because..."
  - apetresc 3y ago
    Well, when they "deal with it", we'll all be complaining even harder. The fact that they've gone relatively light on obfuscation and security against things like yt-dlp for such a long time is basically tacit approval at this point. I wouldn't want to bite that hand.
  - kodra 3y ago
    By the same logic, fare evasion is "metro company's problem to deal with". It technically is, but if someone makes a programmer's salary and still jumps over turnstiles, I consider it a big red flag over their personality.
- planede 3y ago
  That organization would probably parallelize the download on multiple video level, not necessarily on subrange level on a single video.
- secondcoming 3y ago
  Is it technically or financially feasible to mirror YouTube?
- 3y ago
CydeWeys 3y ago
> I wonder how abusive this is though. In the end you are downloading the same amount of data, but in a shorter time. In the end you're downloading a lot more data in total, as what ends up happening is you're downloading all sorts of stuff that you never end up getting around to actually watching (data hoarder syndrome). Whereas if you could only watch that stuff during life playback, you'd be downloading much less data in total as there's no bytes wasted amassing a library that never gets viewed.
- planede 3y ago
  > In the end you're downloading a lot more data in total, as what ends up happening is you're downloading all sorts of stuff that you never end up getting around to actually watching (data hoarder syndrome). Well that's an assumption on the intent of downloading. I don't download videos that I don't eventually watch. But typically it's for archival, I just hate my favorite videos going away.
  - CydeWeys 3y ago
    > I don't download videos that I don't eventually watch. I doubt it.

no_time 3y ago

>Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google" Companies do not have ethics, only interests. It's only natural I behave similarly.

benterix 3y ago
> Companies do not have ethics, only interests. While that's certainly true (although an simplification - they are just managed by people with low ethics), we can do better. If I behaved like managers of Google, Meta or Microsoft, I'd be ashamed of myself.
- sph 3y ago
  I despise this philosophy. Megacorps are shit, so we should be better than them? It's a popular theme because it makes one feel like they have control over the world around them: they just have to be better than it. No. I shouldn't have to work harder myself to somehow cancel out the evil in the world. Because if we were less cowards and calling them for what they are - evil - they wouldn't hold so much power over us. Reminds me of that scene from Mr. Inbetween about bullies. Bullies exist because we're told to ignore them and get punished if we retaliate, so they get away with it. -- But without getting sidetracked. Companies have no emotion, no particular sense of ethics, and least of all, they don't need people to defend them, unless they're called a lawyer.
  - js8 3y ago
    > No. I shouldn't have to work harder myself to somehow cancel out the evil in the world. Not only you should, but you should also support countermeasures that make it harder for evil, so you eventually wouldn't have to work harder. If there is one reason, do it for your kids, to show them that a better world is possible.
  - hilbert42 3y ago
    "Because if we were less cowards and calling them for what they are - evil - they wouldn't hold so much power over us." Exactly, if we held public demonstrations outside the offices of book publishers, Sony, RIAA, and similar greedy bastards, and it became the norm to snub our noses at their employees then things would soon change. For instance, we ought to be demonstrating in the streets over how these bastards are hounding the Internet Archive, but we're not. If we were, then these companies would quickly change their tune and think twice before launching such lawsuits. Trouble is we're not out there demonstrating. And it's only a tiny minority of the population who actually care about such things—those of us posting here on HN etc.—who do. We're such a small force we couldn't escape from a wet paper bag on the deck of a sinking ship let alone take on the might of these greedy corporations. Cory Doctorow has said this many times although he's not been as blunt about it as I am. I've followed this for decades and I reckon it's essentially a lost cause. Even if we could get politicians to agree to change laws they could only do so around the edges as they've signed international treaties, Berne, WIPO, etc. which prohibit signatories from exiting. Any country that left the treaties would have sanctions placed against it. These corporations have not only won but they've implemented a system that's irreversible, like a ratchet, every one of their cog-like actions squeezes us consumers further and there's fuck-all we can do about it.

mrtksn 3y ago

Technically, everyone pays for connecting to the network. I wouldn't say it's unethical to slam YouTube with full speed downloads but at the same time I wouldn't judge YouTube if they take measures against it. I'm using a browser extension to show full size of images on social media when hover and Instagram went crazy about it, warning about unusual activities and threatening to lock my account. I looked into it to see if the extension does any scrapping behind but no, it all seems fine. My assumption is that Meta detects requests happening in wrong order which might indicate data scrapping due to the non-standart client behaviour. So, measures and countermeasures. I guess it's up to YouTube to implement their counter measures and push the scrappers to implement theirs but overall at some point they should be able to limit downloading to the playback*2 speed because a legitimate consumption wouldn't happen any faster on a legitimate client. But honestly, downloading shouldn't be restricted. The contents are protected by laws anyways and most people have legitimate reasons for downloading videos. It could be for archiving purposes because the video has some value for you, it could be for analysis or it could be about creating content based on the vide content(like downloading a movie trailer to extract parts for you movie review video). The content in YouTube is not created in vacuum and once published they create the new environment where new videos will be made and this creative freedom is important unless we want the current videos be the last videos ever made.

bmicraft 3y ago
> I'm using a browser extension to show full size of images on social media when hover and Instagram went crazy about it, warning about unusual activities and threatening to lock my account. I looked into it to see if the extension does any scrapping behind but no, it all seems fine. I've used such an extension and found dragging the curser over your screen might fire like 25 requests. You might simply be rate-limited.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  Maybe, I just speculate over the reason of course but I haven't noticed anything strange like that. That said, the pattern of requests from the client should be obvious to the backend, the preventive measures can be designed around it and the rate Is one of the obvious signals. Removed the extension anyway

miyuru 3y ago

> YouTube's resources > Getting full Gb/s Technically most of the time video is served on the same network(ISP) as youtube has caches with almost all ISPs, IXes in the world. It might be the largest CDN built to date. Case in point, the authors YT URLs point to Canadian ISP Videotron. https://bgp.he.net/dns/rr1---sn-8qu-t0aee.googlevideo.com https://bgp.he.net/dns/rr1---sn-8qu-t0aee.googlevideo.com

p0w3n3d 3y ago

technically you should be able to download video and you should not be prevented from this, at least to have a proof somebody was spreading hate speech or insulting you or your relatives. Of course you can camcord the screen but this sounds like a stone age solution. Do you know for example that you cannot take screenshots of netflix in your browser on Mac, and therefore cannot make a meme, which is a fair use that has been taken from you?

nradov 3y ago
What does hate speech have to do with anything? The content has no bearing on the legality or ethics of downloading or bypassing throttling controls.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thrashh 3y ago

It's the cost of doing business?