YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
In other words, they're aspects of the same thing...
The idea that you're going to ban something because one aspect of it has a negative social purpose is philosophically unsound... We don't ban videos on electricity or electrical engineering because people can be electrocuted... We don't ban videos on chainsaws because they could be used to cut a person in half... We don't ban videos on cars because they could be used to run people over... Everything in the universe can be used for a positive or negative purpose, when you start banning things because some people use these things for negative purposes, you misunderstand that those effects are caused by the actor, not the information and/or the tool that's being used...
This won't stop this information from being disseminated, but it may save some idiots from themselves.
Uh, guns?
- Their primary purpose is to inflict harm.
- The harm caused is potentially / easily lethal.
- Their existence escalates nearly all situations.
- They're dangerous items that can very easily cause accidental harm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372404
The first man mentioned in that article was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in prison on the sole charge of possession of this knife.
https://www.amazon.com/Sheffield-12113-One-Hand-Opening-Lock...
Yes, that's right, in UK carrying in public any object that can be or is used as a weapon (including defensively) is considered a crime. This is normally applied to knives, but if the letter of the law was to be adhered to someone who did defend themselves against an attack with a small pumpkin could be arrested for the possession of the said pumpkin... This is the madness of UK law.
I remember few years ago a situation where a dog attacked a small child and wouldn't let go, someone ran home, grabbed a kitchen knife, killed the dog and saved the child. When the police arrived they had to arrest the person who saved the child life because of the knife... Thankfully the person didn't end up being charged as no witness would testify that that person has indeed used a knife as a weapon.
You're not allowed to carry a hard fruit in a bag with the intention of using it as a self defence weapon. But if you go shopping and happen to have it on you when you're attacked you're allowed to use it to defend yourself. (And you don't need to wait for the attacker to land the first blow, you're allowed the first strike if you're genuinely trying to defend yourself).
EDIT: also, you seem to misunderstand the purpose of English arrests. Of course if you stab an animal to death you're going to get arrested. The arrest allows the police to question you, and it _protects your rights_ -- you get a free lawyer for that interview; they have 24 hours to charge or release you etc.
If the blade is under 3 inches (and isn't lockable) you're allowed to carry it.
If the blade is longer than 3 inches you need a valid reason to carry it.
(2)Subject to subsection (3) below, this section applies to any article which has a blade or is sharply pointed except a folding pocketknife.
(3)This section applies to a folding pocketknife if the cutting edge of its blade exceeds 3 inches.
The three inches is clarification around folded pocketknives, it's not blanket authorisation to carry knives less than that length.
Seems to have worked GREAT there!
(Note that YouTube has plenty of other problems; I'm just summarizing LiveOverflow's take on this particular controversy)
Videos aren’t working at all because the speakers on my phone are busted. On an iPhone, they won’t load even if the volume is set to 0. It has to have an output :(
Don’t give to YouTube too many ideas.
Everyone who wants to run some sort of "channel" can trivially use cheap hosting and open syndication tools.
Did his channel get unbanned? Kody's website links to this active channel with its first video uploaded in Oct 2017: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgTNupxATBfWmfehv21ym-g
edit: Yep looks like the ban was a mistake ️
> In a subsequent comment, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that Cyber Weapons Lab’s channel was flagged by mistake and the videos have since been reinstated. “With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call,” the spokesperson said. “We have an appeals process in place for users, and when it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681586/youtube-ban-instr...
If it were some random "amateurish" hacker channel, it would be banned and nobody would give a crap. The problem is that many valuable things started as some "amateurish" stuff put together by some clever guys in a garage.
How times have changed there, haven't they?
We appealed it and were reinstated pretty quickly (hours), which was a genuinely surprise to me given all I've heard about the Youtube system and the assumption that channels only got unbanned by being able to attract attention.
Shortly after we uploaded our 4th episode we were banned on Youtube. We appealed the ban and were allowed back on pretty quickly (hours) and we are by no means a large channel even now (~50 subs).
We are not putting out any new episodes right now though, I'm currently off on a long-distance hike.
/s (I guess)
Because of this, they have a responsibility to uphold people's natural right to expression. In many ways Google now has more control over speech than governments historically have.
If there was a viable competitor this would be different, but there is no such competitor.
Not true. Almost all modern speech doesn't take place on Youtube or any Google platform. It's possible to broadcast without Google, publish without Google, disseminate without Google, gather without Google, dissent without Google, make phone calls without Google, chat, email, text, audio, video, everything - literally all forms of speech and expression are possible without Google, both on and off the internet.
>If Google doesn't like you they can damn near erase you from public view.
Also not true. Plenty of people Google "doesn't like" are still in public view. Name one person Google has effectively "disappeared" in this way, and I'll bet they still have a presence elsewhere on the web, still participate in society, still can communicate publicly, be contacted, etc.
>If you have an internet business they can ruin it.
Maybe. But then so could Amazon. So could your ISP. If losing SEO would ruin your business, the problem isn't Google's power, it's your crappy business model.
>There is no way to escape their influence.
Really? Do they control you here? In your home? Do they moderate other sites? Do they control Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News?
It's arbitrarily easy to escape their influence. They control one platform, not the internet, not society, not governments.
>In many ways Google now has more control over speech than governments historically have.
Governments can imprison you, torture you, kill you, run over your friends with tanks, nuke entire cities, fill shallow graves with dissidents, burn down libraries and make it legal. Google has no more control over speech than the governments whose laws they must obey by definition. They don't claim a monopoly on violence or sovereign immunity.
>If there was a viable competitor this would be different, but there is no such competitor.
There are plenty. Google is not the only search engine, and Youtube is not the only video streaming service.
Almost every part of your comment is falsehood, hyperbole and nonsense.
Alex Jones was attacked by Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple in a short span of time and this certainly does bring noticeable harm. Your argument that Google isn't a monopoly so much as a participant in an oligopoly is pointless.
>Maybe. But then so could Amazon. So could your ISP. If losing SEO would ruin your business, the problem isn't Google's power, it's your crappy business model.
It's amusing how people raise this same argument about advertising and how newspapers or other publications can die for all they care, but then newspapers are ''important to Democracy'' and shouldn't need to exist like others do and the other publications are just trying to make end's meet and can't do anything else. Maybe letting large businesses buy or crush everything else is a bad idea?
>Really? Do they control you here?
No.
>In your home?
No.
>Do they moderate other sites?
Yes. Large chunks of the WWW contain Google malware or are at the behest of Cloudflare and that makes avoiding these two difficult, as it's likely at least one place one visits is involved with one or the other. I can't even contact some businesses because of Gmail and its strangulation of the email protocols and with ReCaptcha it becomes increasingly harder to do certain things without giving Google free work.
>Almost every part of your comment is falsehood, hyperbole and nonsense.
You're either misguided or purposefully arguing in bad faith.
Alex Jones is not a victim of anyone but his own avarice. He defamed victims of horrible violence and refused to stop. He kept ending up in court trying to use defenses like, "I am actually a comedy show and everyone knows it is a joke." It became so absurd that his liability was spilling over onto other broadcast networks who couldn't deny he was deliberately slandering people.
I'm saying: his speech is about as valuable as shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theater. So maybe he is not your go-to example. May I recommend instead Dan of "Three Arrows," who has been banned for explaining Nazi history in a factual way with the highest standards of evidence, but ends up being banned or demonetized because of brigading organized by pro-fascist elements lead by reactionary channels failing the same standard like Tim Pool.
But I agree that you could probably make a case YouTube is a monopoly.
> Large chunks of the WWW contain Google malware or are at the behest of Cloudflare and that makes avoiding these two difficult,
Your problem is with site runners who do not consider it malware. You're demanding a product with a price of $0, but such things don't have $0 cost. And of course, you can instantly 0 it out by using tools like noscript. But you can't try to blame Google or CloudFlare for the presence of these tools. That's a conscious decision by website engineers who could offer their content free of charge, but cannot afford to. Ain't capitalism great?
May I recommend doing what I do, which is using NoScript on Firefox? I won't lie, FireFox is worse than Chromium and the plugins are worse, but sometimes we gotta take a hit for our principles.
> ReCaptcha it becomes increasingly harder to do certain things without giving Google free work.
Exactly how many street sign identification tasks do you think Google needs for Waymo or Maps? I'll give you a hint: a kid with tensorflow can solve those captchas using off the shelf parts. The primary value of those captchas is forcing a human to interact with the captcha in a very short span of time, which raises the costs of using cheap contract labor solutions to evade the captcha several orders of magnitude.
> You're either misguided or purposefully arguing in bad faith.
"People who disagree with me are all wrong or liars" isn't a very "good faith" argument either.
Alex Jones has not been anywhere near "erased from public view."
Also by "moderating other sites" I clearly meant moderating content - as in comments, videos, what Google moderates on its own platform. Obviously, they don't do that, and can't. Putting up a captcha or ads isn't the same thing.
>You're either misguided or purposefully arguing in bad faith.
OK, there's the personal attack, so I'm done with this thread. Good day.
I actually challenge you to find a credible alternative to Youtube that is a genuine contender and doesn't rely on webtorrent (which would very much DOS the entire internet into tiny fragment networks if it tried to service Youtube level volume).
Who's the alternative? The closest thing is broadcast television, which is under extremely tight government regulation.
Yeah, see, you're using subjective weasel words like "credible" and "genuine" and assuming that no site operating at anything less than Youtube's scale would be effective - yet plenty of other streaming sites demonstrably do exist and have communities and users.
Even most videos on Youtube don't even have nearly the traffic that would necessitate that scale - "youtube level volume" isn't necessary. Convenient, cheap, reliable, but not necessary.
So... Vimeo? Twitch? Dailymotion? Metacafe? Veoh? Pornhub? The Internet Archive? Whatever they use in Asia? Most social media sites that let you upload videos directly? There seem to be a few here[0].
Until Youtube can stop other streaming sites from existing, it's absurd to say they have any real control outside their own platform. They're popular, but that's it - popularity can wane. They don't control video distribution or streaming the way JP Morgan controlled the railroads, they don't control the infrastructure nor can they enforce monopoly control over the internet, and they certainly do not control "the pathways of modern speech."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services
Okay, but they don't do archival at even a fractional scale. It's true other streaming contenders exist. They are all much smaller than youtube.
> So... Vimeo?
Doesn't really compete in the same space anymore. It's a lot more focused on corporate offerings.
> Twitch?
Big site. Run by a massive company that actually has the networking capacity to make a competitor. But doesn't do archival of all content. That makes it a lot, lot harder.
Edit: Don't get me wrong! Twitch is an incredibly impressive piece of work despite its technical flaws. They do things Youtube has failed to do. But the long tail of content distribution they need to deal with is smaller, and that redefines the problem the resolve.
> Dailymotion? Metacafe? Veoh?
All of these aren't really competitors to Youtube, now are they? Dailymotion is more of a hosting service for corporate offerings as I see it. I also think you pay them for hosting, but I'm happy to be corrected about this.
> The Internet Archive?
What?
> Pornhub?
I know a bunch of SWE and SRE there and they're good folks. But uh... well if they want to explain to you how this is misguided I will let them.
> Until Youtube can stop other streaming sites from existing, it's absurd to say they have any real control outside their own platform.
YouTube is bigger than any 3 of your other alternatives combined, and that's ignoring the fact that they're doing broadcast TV now. The only site on your list that has any credibility in the space of user-generated content is Twitch, and they don't do archival unless you're a Partner still, right? It's been awhile since I've run my twitch channel.
> They're popular, but that's it - popularity can wane.
The following is my opinion:
I have become much harder on youtube since joining Google because I learned how absurdly difficult it would be to do what Youtube does. You've gotta be an international mega-corp to compete with what they're doing. While I am enjoying understanding how the internet actually works, I also confess to a certain degree of despair over its reality.
YouTube could grow to meet its demand because of its affiliation with Google. Other sites would need to build a global scale supercomputer with network to match to do what Youtube and Youtube TV does.
Further, the internet itself cannot handle the amount of media streaming users want to do. That's why otherwise noble ideas like PeerTube can't be used to route around this damage. And as we've seen with search and human interaction, the network effects of concentrating media all in one place are just too overwhelming.
Perhaps you feel more optimism about it. If so, I encourage you to try. As it stands, only Amazon's Twitch could possibly pivot into this position and they seem disinclined to do so for now.
The public demand itself is enough. Search for Google is already subject to regulation in the EU.
This isn't strictly true even in America, and it's worth noting that every sanctioned monopoly in American history has tried to use this line of reasoning.
> every sanctioned monopoly in American history has tried to use this line of reasoning.
So what? That's like saying "every criminal has claimed they were innocent". It doesn't mean that innocent people don't exist.
I think maybe the problem here is that you're assuming that "active" interference needs to take place. All you need to do to hurt competition is set your monopoly-backed prices too low for other competitors to match and if you lack any competition, you're not stifling it.
> So what? That's like saying "every criminal has claimed they were innocent". It doesn't mean that innocent people don't exist.
Right, but that means "I am innocent" doesn't constitute an ironclad defense. Which is the only point I'm trying to make.
And I think the ugly part about this is that YouTube actually does an amazing and in fact peerless job on the technical side. I know how a lot of it works and it's breathtaking.
But that's part of why they can set their price for hosting at $0/byte. And that's hard for anyone at a less superlative scale to compete with.
YouTube has stayed the same price since it was created, long before it became a monopoly.
> Right, but that means "I am innocent" doesn't constitute an ironclad defense. Which is the only point I'm trying to make.
Obviously. My point is that you haven't shown any examples of YouTube abusing its monopoly to stifle competition, thus the argument that they are in danger of violating anti-trust laws does not seem to be correct.
We both agree that YouTube has the largest market share, but can you explain to me why you believe YouTube's market share is the result of anti-competitive practices and not a result of a superior product?
The fact that you think they are entitled tells me you view the services as a gift and they should be grateful for whatever they get. The services provided are not gifts.
So in essence, you have a bunch of kind-of employees complaining about their kind-of employer's insistence that the customer is always right, even if it undermines their livelihoods. That sounds like what you'd expect out of any other customer-facing job, so what's the problem here?
The important think to recognize about Youtube (as opposed to search, or ads) is that YouTube has no real competition and it's absurdly difficult to compete with Youtube. They're like Facebook but moreso. As such, they may end up being subject to different rules from other businesses if they're not careful.
Mainstream mentality has always been to freak out when something goes outside what they consider acceptable even if it is harmless. It goes back to the Oscar Wilde and he certainly wasn't the first.
Including the observers commenting on the stupidity with "So long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses." While callous and somewhat homophobic by today's standard it pointed out how society really should be reacting - not giving a shit unless it leads to an actual danger.
I don't recall needing to provide any documentation? I'm also not American so I couldn't provide "US Based documentation" whatever that means.
There also wasn't any back and forth interaction with support to get unbanned.
I can't help but feel the ruining is accelerating.
I hope the infosec community can come up with some kind of decentralized way to actually share free speech. If anyone is capable, they are.
The discovery problem is an illusion. If you build it, they will come.
Youtube is like that big commercial avenue in the city, where you can only see mainstream stuff. If you look for the bookstore that has hacking/engineering/pyscology books, you'll have to go elsewhere. But it has always been this way.
Pornhub has good enough porn, can find something for most any niche.
Soon you’ll find though, if you’re really into this or that, individual studios that cater to your niche create videos with high production value that are all around better than what you dig up on pornhub.
There are marketplaces for small studios like clips4sale.com (nsfw).
Also aggregators for specific niches / topics, etc.
Maybe anti-YouTube people can look to porn for the way out?
YouTube did not become popular with "mainstream stuff" if I wanted "mainstream stuff" I would still be a cable TV Subscriber
YouTube promoting only "mainstream stuff" like CBS, and CNN will kill YouTube
I have never once watched a mainstream TV show or Movie on the platform.
Given CNN'S dwindling ratings I sincerely doubt that. If anything youtube needs to rescue them.
There are decentralized/open/ethic friendly services alternative to big corporations services. In the case of Youtube there's PeerTube[1] for exemple (even if in that case there's a IP leak due to the p2p protocol if I remember correctly).
The sad thing here is that people decide to stay on the "big" services due to the network effect, and few people decide to boycott them just to follow principles.
That would probably work here until YouTube move on to "can't signpost content that's not allowed here".
I guess if YouTube blocks content by keywords we'll need to get creative with the thesaurus or ROT13.
No, it is ruined by normal citizens who largely don't understand democracy and its value. As long as the dictator doesn't bear the label "dictator", people generally prefer dictators, and then at times they are surprised that dictators abuse their power.
Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, so can't help you with estimating the cost. But a few years back the research community had some reasonable-sounding models. Plug in current hardware and you can get an idea.
Edit: note that peer to peer doesn't exactly solve the economies. Instead of advertisers, you're asking your viewers to provide the resources. Depending on the audience, this will or will not work.
Well, it is convenient I guess. Your content is being found, the interface is great, someone else is paying for servers, storage and bandwidth. All of that for a little control and advertisements...
And honestly, I want platforms to regulate content. They have millions of users, some of them are underage or even democratically unstable.
It's okay to put a little effort into finding knowledge now and then.
Exactly. Using Twitter or Facebook in place of Email/IRC/Usenet/WWW is wrong so many ways, but good luck telling that around without getting laughed at.
Infosec people tend to be crafty (it's a job requirement imo) and quite a lot of the greybeards were part of building the infrastructure from the beginning, so no need to despair yet.
True. Even the audience for this will be devs which is right fit to make a decentralized community.
But people are too lazy, and find the "just use the largest corporate platform" very convenient, especially if it's "free".
edit: ...which is a problems, since also your viewers only use that "one big" platform, and don't check elsewhere.
The only way to fight it is to make sites like we used to, and make sure they have onions
Google/YouTube/FB/etc made the web more accessible, fun and useful to normal people. The profit motive was great for cutting through the more idealistic 'open web's" occasionally stubborn^ roadblocks.
YouTube, for example, got online video bigger/better/faster by doing centralisation, flash & such.
After they win though, they effectively become squatters. YouTube or FB could go offline today and tomorrow we'd probably see new services, possibly free and decentralised, popping up to replace them. But, while they monopolize their areas... they probably create negative value.
Could you give some examples of this, please?
..FB also, photos of their grand hildren was the reason a lot of people got online.
Presumably you're not accusing "open web" activists of having ideals that favour inhibiting bandwidth, or hosting content on slow servers, so noting that proprietary ["closed"] services had those facets is irrelevant to your original comment.
If you felt that people wanting to use PNG, because GIF was closed and contrary to [the nebulous concept of] "open web ideals" has retarded progress on the web, then that might be an example? I'm struggling for an example, because I don't know of any examples, which is why I asked you because you spoke implying you know [many] examples!
Flash made online video work. Facebook & YouTube made contributing & sharing content accessible. IRC, host-your-own webpages, later attempts like RSS and such, which were more idealistically "www" were also not right for Aunt May. They were right for 1990 users, who were a self-selected bunch.. not alway representative of the majority.
Even jewels like Wikipedia (a brilliant achievement of the www idealism, imo) are relatively inaccessible (the editting part) to the average person. That works very well for Wikipedia specifically.
I think Facebook is already creating negative value.
What would you suggest as an alternative?
Social media sites which depend on user supplied content use that content to advertise the platform. Maybe no one told Youtube content creators that they were really doing sales work for Google, but that's always been the nature of the modern social media model. They don't work for you, you work for them.
TANSTAAFL.
It’s no surprise YouTube opted not to censor this genre based on their workplace shooting incident. Companies are getting more and more paranoid these days.
EDIT: Spoke too soon. It’s already gone.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/01/04/coat-hanger-m...
What’s next? Lockpicking?
with "actually improves personal security/safety" I do not agree. If you are not training daily watching video about martial arts does nothing to improve your personal safety. Though there is guy having gym in China who is explaining it better than me and he has martial arts channel. But that is one guy vs tons of "self defence bullshit".
As usual, Stallman tends to be quite prescient: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html (perhaps more like "right to watch" in this context.)
As a software author working at startups, am I part of the problem? I don’t understand how to make a good living without locking down the code to some extent, with few exceptions (it’s hard to found red hat)
I ignore him.
You may think it's too idealistic or uncompromising, but his predictions have been proven repeatedly.
You should learn from him, not outright ignore him.
That system requires the power of a small European country to do 7 transactions a second generating a max of 1 mb of data volume every 10 minutes. That's like 1970s transaction speeds. Who the heck is ever going to use that?
In fact, PC magazines of the 80s and early 90s used to contain articles specifically about patching software to do interesting things, complete with instructions of the form "change byte at X to Y"; AFAIK they didn't violate any copyrights because they didn't distribute copyrighted material. Then there's the whole series of "undocumented DOS/Windows" books written by people like Matt Pietrek, Andrew Schulman, and Mark Russinovich; all of which required substantial amounts of reverse-engineering and analysis, but instead of them being persecuted, two of them now work at Microsoft.
"If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."
Copyright law can still apply. Just because I have your sources doesn't mean I can go and use them in my own software, or re-implement your patented algorithm.
"But how can I be sure that my customer isn't stealing my work?"
Well, ask someone to look at the source code they provide to their customers. Remember, we're in an imaginary world where source-included is the normal way to sell software, and anyone peddling binary blobs is seen as shady.
1. Obfuscated code. This is a classic, employed back in the day when raw machine code wasn’t quite as much of a barrier like it is nowadays. Less common now since its importance has lessened, but still ever-present, and could be re-employed instantly.
2. The very design of the software. For instance, the software might require a phone number for every user, and this is baked in at the very fundamental design level, making it impractical to change. Other design choices might encourage you to share your contact lists, for say, backups, and your data is now leaked.
3. The software is merely a collection stubs calling a cloud service. Very common now with so-called "apps" for phones. This design has come to its pinnacle with “web page apps”, where only the front-facing UI portion sits on the user‘s control, and the rest runs remotely.
This is why “shared source” and the like is not enough. The end user must have the practical ability to, reasonably easily change the software, either by themselves or by hiring anyone they like and/or trust to do it for them.
One interesting implication is that since people can view and modify the source code, patches and modifications to the software are shared.
This has always lead me to wonder if a diff file violates copyright as it includes some of the original source as context.
My understanding is that use a patch file as long as your patch doesn't include any copyrighted material it is fair to share.
A patch file does not necessarily have any of the original code, just the location info and the new value.
It's one of those problems that are solved only at the individual level but because of that are not going to be solved at all.
The alternative to working on favorably licensed OSS that you posit, is roundly illegal, unless you had no designs on modification and/or redistribution of a derivative work.
You're right that it's not essential -- and he does mention this in most of his talks. But reverse engineering is very time-consuming and difficult, especially if you need to do it for every program you use.
So his view that software freedom requires the source code to be available to users is much more of a practical requirement than a philosophical one. This is why the GPL requires the preferred form of modifying the program be provided -- to ensure it's just as easy for users to modify the program as it is for the developers.
Most EULA's prohibit Reverse Engineering and companies like Oracle have entire legal teams dedicated to prohibiting reverse engineering going as far as prohibiting people from reporting security vulnerabilities discovered using "reverse engineering techniques"
Further the wide interpretation the courts have allowed under CFAA can easily be applied to reverse engineering as well, i.e "Exceeding authorized use" making reverse engineering of software a felony under US Law
It technically isn't, much like having an excavator isn't essential to digging up ground for a new mall, when you can technically do this with a shovel too.
I get your point, but right now, I'm sitting in front of a 22-years-old game I spent a great deal of time even trying to get to run. I want to restore it. There's no source leak of it that I know of, it has no clear relation to prior titles and there wasn't any reversing effort I could find either. Half of the formats used by it are obscure, and from causal inspection seem to be dumps of in-memory structures.
Having source code, my main problem would be to build it - but it's essentially a straightforward task of finding and patching or mocking various 1990s-era peculiarities, until the whole thing builds correctly with an reasonably current compiler. The source code would assist me with reversing the data formats too. However, I don't have the source code, just a barely-32bit application with a 16bit installer. The game plays really weird tricks with your screen, so attaching a debugger will be a PITA (unless I figure out how I can run a debugger on a different machine and remotely debug the game on the one computer that it manages to run in half-broken fullscreen mode). Best I can do now is poke it and see what changes.
> It could even be argued that the rise of open-source lead to a decrease in interest and skills of RE.
I think so too - simply because being able to ask decreases interest in and skills of figuring stuff out yourself. Has its good and bad sides.
Two suggestions for you: 1, VMs are your friend. 2, decompilation technology has gotten very good. I'd "statically analyse" the binary in a disassembler/decompiler for a while first and figure out what it's doing before actually trying to run it.
I don't think source is necessarily always making things easier either --- I've had a few times where, even with open-source software, it's easier to find the right bytes in the binary to patch than to figure out where in the (huge) source that would be, and then how to build the rest of it (along with all its hairy web of dependencies) completely unmodified from the original binary.
Especially if it's a fundamentally trivial change (like a string constant somewhere, whose desired value is the same or smaller in size), and I don't expect to make any more complex changes, I'll definitely choose opening the hex editor for a few minutes (at most) over spending perhaps hours downloading a few hundred MB of source and dependencies and figuring out how the original was built and how to reproduce that.
And slowly, I noticed that he was still a pompous ass, but he was right. And longer I observe, I notice that he wasn't wrong, but ahead of the curve. And instead of being an ass, he was calling these issues out before they reared their ugly heads... but lo and behold they did eventually.
That's why I'm a proud member of the FSF.
The question you should be asking yourself is “why do I have to take freedom away from others to earn a living?”
I do make a living, it's just a very poor and insecure living. I sleep a lot easier, though, and it's very unmistakably a 'First World' living even if it's sort of constrained. How small a living can you stand? How rich do you have to be to have 'enough', and do your 'quality of life' calculations include personal guilt over screwing people over, or not doing that? Software freedom matters to my day-to-day life, but so does the fact that my income's low enough that I qualify for Section 8 housing. Without that, I'd lose some things making it possible to be writing the free software.
Can you afford to be on the side of good, or do you have to play for team evil in order to keep the doors open? If it's the latter, can you plan for a heel/face turn and execute a dramatic betrayal of Team Evil? I did (sort of). I was selling the audio software for years and merely keeping all my code proprietary (and getting sucked into the hype mechanic, more and more) and when I made my exit and went full Patreon I executed a clear, very public transition from commercial to open source, even reserving that as a threshold for the Patreon to hit. Took a major loss in revenue right away, but made that threshold pretty soon, and now I don't have to go back. But I wouldn't have been able to do it without years of exposure as a commercial developer.
Just like doing an IPO or executing an acquisition strategy, you can execute a heel/face turn into Free Software if you handle it properly. You need to care about the values of it, that's part of the return for you, but I'm still seeing annual returns in excess of, say, index funds. I'm growing at about 34% a year (started out more, but that's over the last year and ignores launch) and I feel I can continue to expand at that rate through taking on more interesting (and costly) projects. Note that this is not passive, this is working capital and is continually funding new stuff I'm able to take on. Hey, if it works for Amazon… ;)
Frankly you're an inspiration, thanks for this post. Know that I hope your growth rate continues or even increases.
And if you think Stallman was the tinfoil-hat prophet, you gotta hear about this guy Karl Marx. He predicted the economic turmoil of automation back when the US had a war over "States' Rights" to choose whether Slavery was Legal.
I predict that the US will slide further and Further into being a 3rd world nation, until suddenly, another collapse happens. US citizens wont break right away... No, they'll suffer it for a while. They'll even go hungry for a while - and I'm not talking about Detroit or Chi-raq. Im talking Seattle, Houston, NYC looking like the Rust belt, complete with bridge collapses and deaths-via-crumbling infrastructure.
China's upcoming divorce from the US markets will insulate them from the crash, but their involvement in our real estate market will only worsen the crisis for Americans. Russia, China, and the Eurozone will finally band together with their currency-basket idea upstaging the dollar. And Americans will still think we're special.
Then, when the Hoovervilles have swollen enough to be dangerous, someone will have the bright idea to mobilize and radicalize us. Still, we'll do nothing, even in the absence of Netflix and Cable TV. But that wont stop the government from trying to herd us into camps, just like the immigrants... And in those, with the forced absence of soap, sleep, food..., something will snap, and the guillotine will be reborn in fire and fury.
The Climate Change problem? Will get so bad it starts on Xenocide before anyone does anything effective - the sole exception being economic collapse. And we're going to have to shoot a few CEOs for the rest of them to take any of it seriously.
Everything from human trafficking to drug use is going to boom.
You know slavery - just barely behind propaganda, it was the second biggest influence on modern management practices. Psychology just taught us how to sugar coat it better.
Speaking of Propaganda, 1984 aint got shit on 2019. And 2030 is gonna make today look adorable.
Really? the feeling of being secure may come first. Think of how much modems/routers/phones or any other embedded device comes with obsolete software pieces with lots of security bugs. The non-free methodology of software development, I feel, is actually killing security, and making everybody more vulnerable.
Most firms don't like giving the source code of the devices away. I understand that they have their own reasons for that (whether it is right is another thing). But at least, there should be an official way to unlock those devices and run custom software pieces (which of course, voids warranty).
These days more people are moving to "Open Source," but not "Free Software." See how Linux & busybox essentially making any hardware non-free. Hope people understand the difference and help make the world better.
And of course this ends up being true almost every time.
As I cast my eye over the FSF's basic definition of free software [0] I can't spot much of a mystery.
If a user don't have those freedoms, then someone else is in control of their software. It is inevitable that sooner or later the situation will change and the person who does have control the software is going to do disagree with what the user wants to use the software for - and at that point the user is the one with the problem.
Stallman isn't using a genius level of insight, but he is avoiding some very common shortcuts people take where they assume that because people are on 'their side' today that they will remain on 'their side' even if the incentives change. They are then shocked to discover that when the incentives change that nobody was ever actually on 'their side', it was just that the shark swimming placidly alongside wasn't hungry before.
I'm usually with Stallman's theories, it amazes me people keep being surprised that liking someone doesn't mean that the person is immune to the incentive structures that surround them. People have a remarkable and underappreciated capacity to make decisions that are good for them rather than good in the abstract.
People commonly seem to express this idea. That's not actually true.
Plenty of people haven't believed the PR from day one. What you're seeing now, is the reason why.
You can not compromise on freedom, for once you allow a single exception that allows authoritarians to take your freedom in "limited" situations, they will quickly invent more and more situations to take more and more of your freedom until none remains
If you value liberty, uncompromising protection of that liberty is the only way to secure it
I’m afraid we are all part of the problem, but we can also be part of a solution, particularly if we work collectively.
What if I want to reverse engineer my toaster, and make a video about it?
"Well you can use it for defence ..."
White-hat hackers are a thing too.
I almost think the reaction to this is too pessimistic! "Oh YouTube is banning content the Internet is DOOMED". As long as we can freely connect to any service then there will always be an alternative.
Dan is going to get caught because the machine takes a picture of him when he logs in with a password instead of the fingerprint reader, cause you know can't have a PC without a camera pointed at the user..
I came to that conclusion trying to “fight” a (non-existant) virus that could infect any non-volatile memory onboard.
Since I didn’t actually control (really I mostly didn’t understand) my hardware it’s always seemed natural to me that, for example, the firmware of a hard drive of a networked computer could be compromised.
Since I didn’t control anything, I was at the mercy of those who did. Therefore I was always very hygienic on the internet, for example.
Stallman’s an arrogant self-righteous bastard. But he’s our bastard, damit! And I love him for it.
I wonder if we'll end up seeing state actors (or supranational entities like the EU) promoting state funded networks as a public alternative, as is sometimes the case in industries that tend to be monopolistic due to the cost of starting - transportation, telecommunications, etc.
You make a good point but I'd like to think of it this way: If the said service is made mandatory, then it has a chance of succeeding. Else, building that critical mass entails a lot of customer acquisition costs that a Govt may just not be in a state to justify. And therein lies the beauty and danger of network effects. Once a company has them, it is very very difficult to dislodge it. Look at Visa and Mastercard: V has been around since 1958 and MC from 1966. Both are valuable as they have network effects.
We need to stop feeding the beast.
I'm still convinced that Opera Unite, which fused distributed social + web client + web server, should have been the way forward to make the web truly owned by the people: if social sites were simply caches of content available p2p or through any social site of my choosing (that the content owner allowed) ...
There is such a thing as an insecure security system.
US wanted to have this as a law and got quickly informed how insane it is.
Anything else is fine - you have to be either small target or get a large amount of media attention for them to enforce some semblance of their stated policies (which is why defcon and black hat videos haven’t been touched)
Yahoo's not the place it was in its heyday. Facebook's not the place it was in its heyday. Even Google's not the place it was 10 years ago. I don't think anyone is immune. The best you can do it to make sure the trajectory is positive. Netflix isn't the place it used to be. I think that's positive, though.
How long until biohacking, and other things are blocked based on the same sensitivity triggers for the topic?
All the really cool stuff should disappear from YouTube. That's just the natural order of things. They no longer want to be edgy. They want to be fat and happy off those big establishment corporate dollars. They've positioned themselves to be the next cable. That just means they want to be the current "vast wasteland."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_and_the_Public_Inte...
The faster YouTube becomes the next cable, the better. The less time the public discourse spends squished under the pressing thumb of the corporate oligarchs, the better.
When I hear this standard YouTuber meme, I always trip hard over the dislike button and never quite make it to subscribe. :^)
Whoring for likes/subscribes is desperate and it cheapens the hell out of your art. It may give you more likes/subscribes but there are other great things that come from artistic creation than the pitifully minimal effort required by the clicking of a button.
I can phrase it as 'like OR DISLIKE and subscribe and click the bell icon', and explain how the dislike button is the same thing (both go to 'engagement') plus a little feedback for me the creator. So you can help the channel AND try steering me away from more channel-whoring by disliking and subscribing. Hell, maybe it helps you more. Please dislike and subscribe :D
Nowadays with the USA policing a lot of that content has disappeared, and slowly people are pushed not to do new content. There are some very small efforts in some subreddits, but a lot of this is pushed to the underground, where it is difficult to find.
Yeah it already is hard enough to dig through the sea of YouTube personalities who mimic each other and start up with the YouTube-isms.
Nothing is worse when someone you follow stars doing reaction videos, rants... YouTube drama :(
I already rarely leave the handful of channels I follow. Too much garbage to dig through.
But how would they make money off it? Infosec expats from YouTube are probably the most likely population to use ad-block of anyone!
Potentially dangerous science experiments
I bet they have a better monetization model for creators anyways.
Its more "decentralized crypto blockchain" nonsense. Nope, nope, and just nope.
This is the best test: https://spee.ch/a/doyouneedablockchain
Does a high tech community need Youtube as a video platform though?
The famous German hacker community "chaos computer club" simply uses their own platform to begin with: https://media.ccc.de/
We really need to redefine the public space on the Internet.
If you intend on redefining it in a way that takes away property rights, then I won't support it and neither should you.
In order to receive "Safe harbour" copyright immunity for uploaded user content, you have to have fairly lax rules on content (e.g. only blocking actual criminal content, which is all youtube have done before this, right?).
If you want to significantly curate your content, you can't hide behind the legal protection of "uncurated user content".
Is YouTube gaining some benefit from pretending to be an open platform? I'm not sure what you're saying here.
Likewise, isn't copyright infringement is a criminal offense?
Youtube currently benefits massively from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_... as they are not directly liable for people uploading content they don't own.
I'm suggesting that we only let people have that immunity if they aren't significantly curating their content.
If they significantly curate their content, they should be able to curate copyright too.
Youtube has always blocked porn. Youtube has had a other restrictions as well, for example at first all videos had to be under 10 minutes. In response to criticism of disturbing videos of children, youtube deleted 150k videos of children in disturbing situations[1]. Read the guidelines from 2009[2], there's various things banned there that aren't illegal.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/youtube...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20091114041327/http://www.youtub...
Frankly, I'm frequently surprised by what I stumble upon on youtube..
(better article with the TOS bits in question) https://www.malwaretech.com/2019/07/youtubes-new-policy-on-h...
So they have broad guidelines that don't seem to be blanket enforced.
http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=346
That is, even if your videos are in-the-clear currently, there is no reason Youtube couldn't decide to interpret its rules more strictly in the future. Maybe your video's genre just hasn't gotten any bad press yet.
I think you're misinterpreting this part of the ToS. I don't think it's meant to apply to videos of dangerous conduct in general. Instead, it's meant to apply to videos which are explicitly presented as a "challenge" for other users to complete -- along the lines of the ALS "Ice Bucket Challenge", but explicitly harmful (think "Drink a Gallon of Bleach Challenge").
> To make the excercise more interesting now multiply whatever result you got by the number of videos your platform is supposed to host.
Multiply income by the same amount though.
> Also assume that some users will want 4K.
I wouldn't assume that for all types of content anyway, and certainly not for all connections. In this case, that some users don't get what they want doesn't matter to those who don't want it. Whereas YT censoring things can turn off even people who aren't interested in the censored content per se, on principle, I doubt you'll find that with "not supporting 4k, because you only got started self-hosting and making ends meet". People sometimes are supportive of people in ways they aren't of companies.
If the data is not end to end encrypted, then it is public.
Everyone should understand this.
Seriously though it is a problem that people are increasingly advocating for limiting or eliminating tools which make an individual powerful (or are ambivalent to change that give away that power)
edit: I would add to think about the next generation of us and what example those actions sets, but i dont think i have to. Too many people here already grew up in an environment where taking jobs at 3 letter agencies is nothing out of the ordinary and the head of the NSA gets to speak at DEFCON while kids rot in jail for the same curiosity that made us who we are today.
Peertube uses web torrenting to distribute videos, so it should be possible to host it without needing the massive delivery infrastructure of Youtube.
I've volunteered my instance (https://video.freeradical.zone) to host infosec videos, in accordance with the theme of my Mastodon instance at https://freeradical.zone/ . This is explicitly within my terms of service.
Speech can’t be both so powerful we must protect it at all costs and simultaneously harmless.
I understand that it is incredibly important to protect free-speech but to imply it has no impact is disingenuous. We fight for it because it has power not because it is powerless.
One could easily counter you with "tell that to the surviving members of families who died at the hand of terrorists who walked into the europe without a right to do so"
Builtin Tor onion service support so you don't need domains or a static IP address, automatic RSS feeds, no database (the video data is read from MP4 metadata), and no JavaScript (the player is just HTML video).
In terms of self-hosting, obviously it's problematic if too many people access it this way, but my experience so far is that modern video compression is really good. I can get one of my 15 minute videos at 480p in around 50mb or so.
That's like loading weather.com five times. And since it's streaming the bandwidth is spread out enough to support plenty of connections (especially with Golang's IO support).
Check it out: https://github.com/wybiral/tube
For example "YouTube for infosec".
The web is going to go more towards specialisation as the "one place for all kinds of content of this format" model is becoming too big to handle. For various reasons, from searching, to moderation, to curation.
It's one thing to make a rule, to ban "hacking techniques".
But there should be an independent party who get's to decide whether a particular video is about "hacking techniques" or not.
> Is teaching kids how to use wireshark(1) already hacking?
> How about the Chrome dev-console?
The current state of things, where:
a) a proprietary algorithm decides if a rule is violated or not and
b) you have no way to appeal decisions taken by YT,
is appalling.
Update: Well, there appears to be a YT-internal process to appeal censoring decisions. But who knows how well that works. In the past, appealing to copyright take-downs was practically impossible.
I'm not really saying strongly this is the case, it's a bit tin foil hat, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was true either.
“Cruelty to animals”
May they be infested with plague rats.
Counterpoint; LiveOverflow (also a channel on YouTube featuring reverse-engineering) had this to say on the manner, in very broad strokes, YouTube monetization, and hosting, is a luxury and they as a private org can choose what or what not to host.
My channel monetization was banned and I'm very grateful, there's a lot of bigger things to do.
This is another move from YouTube to limit their content to more advertising friendly genres. I don't like it but it gives me hope there may be some competitors rise up in that space.
I can’t imagine creating a ton of educational content and then having it all depend on the whims of a single platform.
This is not the end of infosec or hacking videos.
Perhaps GNU can take this up as an initiative.
It's also the only way to stay independent from advertiser interests.
Add to that the fact that we're talking about a niche topic here, it's unlikely to affect youtube in any non-philosophical manner.
One incident isn't enough to become a 'history', and their actions were perfectly justified.
Also people don’t want to go to random sites for video, they like YouTube itself. Most video is discovered and watched entirely within, not from external links.
Very hard to imagine anyone dedicated enough to host their own stuff that long.
This is what happens to big targets. It's why it's important to preserve the independent host.
> > "And in her ears the little Seashells, the timble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming on on the shore of her unsleeping mind."
> So, even as she rests, Mildred is surrounded by noise, by constant entertainment, just like she is during the day with her t.v. walls. Montag's society uses these seashells for two purposes. The first is to control information, and hence, thought and potential rebellion. If they are the ones controlling what information you get, they can tell you whatever they want, giving only one perspective, and painting a rosy picture so that people are never discontented. They also use the shells to relay important information. For example, when Montag escapes at the end, they send a message through all of the seashells for everyone to look out for him, and to turn him in if they see him. They automatically have a huge civilian army at hand, through the use of the seashells. Secondly, if people are constantly "plugged in," they don't have any spare time for their minds to be on their own. If people never have silence, they never think, and so never have the kind of discontented thought that come from meditation.
> Mildred stays "tuned in" so much that she really has no mind of her own. In this sense, she is a perfect citizen of her society. I hope that these thoughts helped; good luck!
from https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/fahrenheit-451-what-tec...
"just ask all those American cities that are paying out to ransomware creeps who got hold of a defect that the NSA kept secret so they could use it against "bad guys."
And one reason why those outlets (like Alex Jones & Co.) often aren't accepted around for long is because they attract rather garbled minds with some tendency towards toxic social interaction.
regardless of answer, please elaborate.
do you see the slipperness of that slope?
Yet, decentralization of services is moot if the underlying physical connectivity layer can still be controlled/filtered from a single point. Then there's the matter of discovering decentralized/distributed services.
We have literally billions of devices capable of sending and receiving signals, including millions of independent computing devices that are powered 24/7. Do we really need centralized entities to keep our species connected?
For me, the barriers are: eating up more than the file's size from my limited ISP quota, and CPU and battery usage when unplugged.
The CPU and battery issues can be resolved by seeding only while charging/idle/under a specific CPU temperature. One hemisphere could serve the other while half the world sleeps every day/night.
As for data caps, we again see the need for decentralizing the physical connectivity layer.
Yes, because while the connected future is here, it's not evenly distributed.
If it were really about security research then most of the content would be about theoretical topics like classes of vulnerabilities, how PoCs work, how to write basic shell code, links to assembly programming, and so on. But instead these geniuses give us gems like: how to run [this script] to break this [system version], a guide for tween dummies.
They distill their knowledge and weaponise it for use by anyone, and that's not security through obscurity. That's knowingly building a loaded gun, showing people that its cool to fire it, handing it to children, and then saying: lol, don't use this okay, totally for research only! Yeah, sure. Anything for dat ad revenue, right? Face it, none of the people watching these videos are there for education.
The only people this benefits are the script kiddies. InfoSec researchers sure as hell aren't using YouTube for their vuln disclosures and don't need to be spoon fed cooking recipes for doing pen tests or R & D.
What do you think free speech means? Speech you like?
And yes, think of not only groups you can think of like "security researches" (sic) but all those groups you can't think of. These policies are a dragnet. Yeah, they'll MAYBE catch some guys you think shouldn't be on there (and by the way, I'm pretty sure YouTube was banning those guys anyway), but they'll catch a hundreds times more. People who maybe doing peripherally related things, like educational content, or historical content, or satirical and comical content, or a mix of all those and infosec stuff, in all kinds of languages, etc., etc. etc.
But you'll say "They can just appeal", and you know what, if Twitterverse makes a stink about something, maybe it'll work, but 99% of those will never appeal and that content will be lost. Or maybe they'll lose their appeal because what constitutes infringement will fall on the interpretation of some offshored minimum-wage worker (much respect to them), or capricious whims of executives who don't want bad publicity.
>The only people this benefits are the script kiddies.
You sure about that? Really? Really really?
How about them reporters in censor-happy countries, I bet you they are script kiddies too because they aren't programmers.
That's one example, but how about all those other groups you and I can't even think of because we're just not that aware of all the things that happen in the world.
And how do you think you learn about infosec? I bet a non-trivial amount of InfoSec professionals started off as 'script kiddies'. In fact, I bet all the good ones were 'script kiddies' (pretty sure Snowden was a script kiddie).
You know what the difference is between a vulnerability testing tool for use in securing your network vs probing another for nefarious penetration? Nothing.
---
I fully get the motivation of these companies. They want safe content for advertisers, so YouTube will never be a free speech zone.
What I don't get are cheerleaders, usually on the left now, who want these behemoths to keep adding more and more restrictions. Who want a corporate behemoth to act like their mommy and daddy and protected from things they are afraid of and do the same for others too.
Any video that gives an opportunity to malevolent people to do harm must be banned from youtube.
But it must be banned from general purpose video viewing sites only, not from the internet.
Specialized sites should be allowed to host these videos.
Altenatively, youtube must create a new category of videos that are viewable only when the real identity of the viewer is confirmed.
What if those same videos help oppressed people do do good?
Script kiddies have always been the proverbial joke, but if you ask me, this category of hackers collectively is a bigger problem for the average person. They usually can't do much damage individually, but when you have so many of them that know how to cause even a minimal amount of mayhem and distraction for others, that adds up as a burden to society.
I also have no respect for hackers that have no desire to put in the time and effort toward the pursuit of becoming masters at what they do, and virtually everyone who is watching hacking tutorials on YT is just looking for a shortcut so they can hack a little bit on the side between League of Legends games.
So good riddance to the videos (though not sure how much difference it will make at this point).
However, the real issue here is that Google is applying changes to its censorship policies at a gradual, subtler pace, rather than deciding on a coherent principle and applying it consistently. There's too much fear that Google will continue to tighten restrictions, and that next on the chopping block will be either our favorite content or stuff we produce/upload ourselves. Nobody really knows where it ends. This is something I'm definitely not okay with, and this ban is just another example of this trend.
I’m not happy that today’s society wants to monitor and deter everything. It leaves no room for exploration, growth, mistakes and learning.
YouTube isn't even the worst example of this. The digital surveillance in schools really creeps me out the most.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342264 "Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312642 "Schools are using unproven surveillance technology to monitor students"