So maybe I should thank the RIAA for clueing me in!
Like for example, if something came out that some persons might use to try an embarrass me, I let it stay out for a while and don't really address it. Two to three people tweet it and it doesn't go further, hundreds of people weren't compelled to save it "for the lulz". Then a few weeks or months later I get the service to take it down, the person that posted barely notices or understands that their voice is not strong enough and the bar to change that is much higher and they've moved on to some other issue de jour.
Yes, there is a possibility that it circulates pretty far initially, or that the thing being shared gets ingrained into the consciousness as truth, but in those circumstances providing a reaction involving the law or lawyers would still amplify it.
That was 1998. Streisand was 2003.
You won't miss anything then...
youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 <mediaurl>Since lossy to lossy transcodes always cause some degradation due to the way perceptual codecs discard data, it's always best to use them as-is without converting.
AAC is widely compatible these days and is the broadcast industry (ITU / EBU) standard for distribution of end-user audio, the default recording format for most consumer and pro-sumer equipment, and also what Youtube's upload giudelines suggest. Therefore it's better just to get the `-f140 -x` for maximum compatibility, unless you know you can play the Opus audio and have reason to believe the upload was higher quality.
youtube-dl() {
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
if [ "${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}" != "" ]; then
env youtube-dl -f best "$(wl-paste --type text/plain)"
else
env youtube-dl -f best "$(xsel -b)"
fi
else
env youtube-dl "$@"
fi
}
The Streisand Effect applies when your attempts to block something simply increases the harm you were trying to prevent. Importantly, their is no remedy for the kind of harm at issue in the Streisand Effect.
But the RIAA does have a remedy: they can sue for a lot of money. And ultimately, as the harm they are trying to prevent is financial, the Stroganoff Effect does not apply
Thank you RIAA!!
""token" parameter not in video info for unknown reason; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug"
Considering the current political climate, youtube-dl is going to be my (and many's) literal weapon of choice against disinformation operations. Of course, the conspiracy theorist in me asks, what if that's the reason why youtube videos are suddenly breaking yt-dl? Making a video analysis tool unavailable during one of the most unstable times in history is beyond negligent, it's the kind of mendacity that polarizes and radicalizes people.
Surely an innocent mistake, that happened at the precise moment, at the worst possible time, affecting the one thing opposition would use, and with complete deniability.
"Oops." Indeed.
I know I know, recency bias and all that, but the world is pretty great these days, even if 2020 seems a low point in our lives.
I can think of far more unstable times in history than the times we’re living in now, recent examples being WW1 & 2, nuclear threat during the Cold War.
Look at all the people who went supernova when Clinton downsized the military after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR.
"Generals and majors always seem so unhappy 'less they got a war."
Surely info suppression tactics have often played a role?
The majority of the population, boomers and younger, didn’t live during WW2 and we probably are globally the least stable since then right now.
In much of Europe you can't do any of those things right now, without incurring the wrath of state force.
The next equivalent event in history in western europe to this destruction of civil liberty was the nazi occupation of France.
1. look for artifacts of deepfaking.
2. extract audio for speech to text, translation, and searching.
3. look for patterns that indicate the video is churned out by disinfo content farms.
It’s rather common for people to take down things that can be used against them later. Very common for youtubers but also somewhat common for politicians who may want to distance themselves from historical points of view.
This is seemingly fixed in commit 6d4733ce - " [youtube] Fix JS player URL extraction" at 2020-10-31 23:52 GMT.
That way the command would "just work", "always work", and it can be switched from one host to another anytime without breaking that.
A blockchain is overkill for this:
Its central goal of providing a clear ordering of events by the time at which they happened (t1 < t2 < t3) is not necessary to distribute software updates.
You merely want to be able to sort things by a number, the version of the software, which their author has provided on their own.
Remember, the blockchain was invented so Bitcoin could prevent double-spending of the same coins. I.e. if someone attempts to send the same money to multiple different addresses and thus fool multiple people into believing they were paid it can use the blockchain to determine which attempt was the first and ignore all others.
Such attacks would happen within milliseconds typically, hence the need for a strong mechanism against them.
This is not needed for merely distributing downloads:
You already trust the author enough that you would run their code, so you can as well trust them that the number which they say is the latest version in fact is the latest one. That's also because they have no incentive to fool you into using an older one, there's no money involved.
What you'd want instead is Freenet, the goal of which is preventing censorship and providing anonymity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
It's "updatable subspace key" (USK) address type is suitable here.
I guess that's not strictly necessary just to provide a binary update, but this feature could also be used to make the blockchain itself host the repo and its commits. Branches, pull requests, reverts, and everything could be stored as events on the blockchain. Differential commits do need that clear ordering of time to work.
Basically, imagine a decentralized version of Github.
I think a better strategy would be to separate the youtube-dl core "engine" from the set of rules/exceptions/offsets that it uses to iterate and download the media.
So the core youtube-dl could not download anything (or, perhaps, only a simple file at a static URL) and you would add a set of rules, or specs, that give it the ability to download from youtube or vimeo or whatever.
Then you would not worry about blocking youtube-dl or having it barred from github, etc. and all of the "rules" could be simply shared, or published, as simple text via pastebin or email or whatever.
I think hosting the development repository in a country that doesn't respect the DMCA is a simpler solution. Git is a blockchain too, after all.
Interestingly, the DMCA notice RIAA sent GitHub isn't a typical DMCA notice either. It seems to be more of a cease and desist along the lines of "we noticed this repo is a tool used to infringe on our rights -- sure would be a shame if you were to get caught up in the legal shitstorm that's about to happen, thanks!"
Let's take this objective:
>it can be switched from one host to another anytime without breaking that.
... that flexibility of any unknown host in the future then breaks the following code:
>if we could make a youtube-dl that dynamically fetched the latest working version
... and youtube-dl would download the latest version from where? What kind of "intelligence" does one put in the code to download from a future unknown http source?
One could try to be clever and embed a "intelligent algorithm" inside youtube-dl to scan the Google SERs[0] for the latest host source but that's not foolproof. Google may also later block results with the all-too-common censorship message "In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 6 results from this page."
Would youtubel-dl scan a well-known Twitter account or SMTP mailing list server to find the latest version? (My previous comment exploring that[0])
Storing binary blobs in popular blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum would be near impossible because of technical and architectural limits. (E.g. youtube-dl binary is about 1.7MB and thus miners will reject your non-standard transaction.)
I'm unaware of a foolproof way to share future versions aka future sources that can be programmed into deterministic code. Discovery will have to involve humans coordinating in some way. E.g. PirateBay moves from host to host but humans (not code) spread the new location.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube-dl+latest+download
This is entirely possible :)
You would use an "USK" ("updatable subspace key") address of Freenet to achieve that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
Also see my other comment to the parent for an explanation of why Freenet would be preferable to blockchains here.
This is small enough that embedding it in a major blockchain is entirely feasible. There is also the much more boring option of hardcoding many different locations to find the URL.
Sounds like what you actually want is IPFS.
I recommend going with the APK version of NewPipe as the FDroid install often takes a while to catch up to breaking changes on youtube.
If, for some reason, I really wanted to download a video to have a copy of it forever, I'd use youtube-dl
For example NewPipe (Android) and FreeTube (Windows MacOS, Linux)
As someone pointed out recently, [1] this presumably breaks the YouTube terms of service, as presumably does any use of youtube-dl.
Not sure what RIAA's endgame is though. I'm somewhat fearing that they are coordinating with Youtube in an attempt to prevent any organised effort against youtube's next obfuscation or something.
And, yeah, by the way: let's not forget that it's youtube and the likes of it who are actually the enemy of youtube-dl. All these RIAA notices and stuff are just tools.
Even if you are against these downloads, there are laws that let you prohibit such downloads by using DRM. Ignoring those laws or trying to claim that publicly available links count as DRM means these programs should be allowed.
I personally wouldn't touch contributing to youtube-dl right now with a 10 foot pole, but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side :).
It sounds like your perspective is of someone paranoid and from the US. But it seems the author is not, he's like from Russia or something, and most contributions don't seem to come from the US either, and international community outside of the US doesn't care about DMCA, RIAA and US laws. There doesn't seem to be a way for RIAA to get their way and kill the project.
Git itself works just fine without one.
There are many other project hosting alternatives as well. E.g. Canonical's Launchpad, GNU Savannah, etc.
1. Use RSS to subscribe to your Channels [1]
2. On iOS, use Shortcuts to forward to either HookTube, Invidious, or use YouTube PIP [2]. When you want to open a YT-Link, hold it, select share and then select your shortcut.(It seems cumbersome but it's actually faster than going to the website and dismissing the stupid sign-in prompt every time)
3. Use DDG !v and inline playback as an alternative player.
[1]: I love Reeder, but I'd also recommend Lire, NetNewsWire and FieryFeeds [2]: https://routinehub.co/shortcut/6622/
The front-page seems to be filled with fake-news and videos containing unnecessary jump cuts to keep the the attention of hyperactive 8-20 years olds, that can't concentrate for longer than 5 seconds.
You approach however is the same that I use to ween myself off things that I notice take up too much of my time. It is quite effective indeed.
eg if you clone that repo, and run
git log --show-signature 34299510b
That said, I have been able to find clones of the youtube-dl repo elsewhere with HEAD 416da574e, and the 3 commits the gitlab repo adds on top of that seem innocuous.
git log -p 416da574e..HEAD
The original author moved to gitlab and started GPG signing commits with his real GPG key. This gives packagers certainty they can replace old github links with new gitlab links, it tells us this project hasn't been compromised and is safe to be redistributed, unlike blackjack4494/yt-dlc
Updating to version 2020.11.01.1 ...
Updated youtube-dl. Restart youtube-dl to use the new version.Thanks for confirming
Updating to version 2020.11.01.1 ...
ERROR: unable to download latest versionLike many products, youtube-dl can be used for legal and illegal purposes (just like a baseball bat can be). However, it was foolish to include links in their documentation to works where infringing uses are more likely. They should have pointed to the MANY works released under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. Here's one I posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC1g8FmFcUU
If this is a real DMCA takedown, then GitHub doesn't really have a choice, GitHub must take it down. youtube-dl should immediately file a DMCA counter-claim. A lawyer can help with this.
I think it's clear that youtube-dl has many non-infringing uses. I've posted many videos on Youtube where I own the copyright, & I really hope that people use youtube-dl to download and see those videos. But youtube-dl needs to do a better job making it obvious that it has many clearly legal uses.
AFAICT all the documentation examples are test videos uploaded by the youtube-dl authors themselves and ones by the Linux Foundation.
The complaint submitted to github was not a DMCA takedown (17 U.S. Code § 512), though it was superficially formatted like one. It was a complaint regarding 17 U.S. Code § 1201 anti-circumvention. There is no counter-claim (or takedown, for that matter) provision in that law because there is no safe harbor.
Moreover, your description of a §512 takedown is simply incorrect. Github is not obligated to take down a work when they receive a well formed DMCA notice: rather, they obtain an immunity from lawsuit for that particular infringement if they follow the procedure. In cases where there is transparently no infringement that immunity isn't worth much. In all cases it's simply a business decision to accept the liability or not vs the interruption in customer relationships, distrust, and loss of goodwill that can result from cutting off a user... no different than the decision to take on liability in any other business activity.
Maybe try avoiding such strong language when you haven't personally researched the subject in great detail?
My main point still stands, though: They need a lawyer.
You are legally correct that GitHub in isn't obligated to take down a work if they receive a DMCA notice. But that would be very bad advice to take. GitHub handles millions of repos. GitHub could take a huge gamble by keeping the material posted after a DMCA request, or just take it down, wait for the DMCA counterclaim, and put it up after the counterclaim was filed. A CEO could easily get fired for risking the entire company when there was a no-risk alternative with the same result. The legal penalties are so stiff, and so easily avoided, that it would be improbable for a company to do anything else. This apparently isn't a DMCA takedown anyway, but I thought I should comment on your response.
Anyway, I'll repeat myself yet again: They need a lawyer.
How do you host a thing so Uncle Sam’s (US)powerful hands can’t touch it?
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/jktx5b/how_to_an...
One of the many reasons I got out of the world for providing random tools for Windows users was this sort of pain.
Compiling saves 1000ms of load time.
$ time python youtube-dl-original --version
2020.11.01.1
real 0m1.474s
user 0m1.356s
sys 0m0.111s
$ time python youtube-dl-compiled --version
2020.11.01.1
real 0m0.380s
user 0m0.328s
sys 0m0.049s
"As a technical aside (to the main topic of this HN thread), I had written a blog post some years ago, describing some uses of youtube-dl, and some commentary giving an overview of what its source does:"