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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

So glad this is updated. yt-dl.org/bug still seems to point to the github DMCA takedown notice. There seems to be an issue on YouTube itself where youtube-dl has been throwing the error:

""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.

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The barbarians aren’t at the gate, Genghis Khan ain’t riding across Central Asia, Japan is unified, America isn’t in the midst of a civil war, and Europe is trying this union thing on to see how that goes, and the relative fallout if it doesn’t work out looks fairly minor compared to the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian Wars, two World Wars and the Iron Curtain.

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.

It doesn't have to be the worst time in human history to be a bad time in human history, though I think our scale is a bit off if we're saying now is on-par with what was going on in the Middle Ages in Europe, for example.

What was the best time in human history?

Probably around 450BC, when the Eleusinian Mysteries began initiations in Athens.

Athens still had widespread slavery though, so I guess you had to be born in the "right" family, which would have been a minority.

Don't overlook that it's pretty recent that our beds are comfortable and our teeth don't hurt. Men not having extra children and wives to compensate for watching them die is pretty neat as well.

Pick your time post ww2 otherwise forget it. Even the roaring 20s were total and utter garbage compared to when penicillan existed.

In the west, Boomers did pretty well. When they were at their horny age there was this great new pill and STDs were all treatable. We really should rename the baby-boomers the boomer-bunnies. ;-) Probably had it the easiest economically, no world wars.

We sleep on the beds of emperors, kings and queens and banquets from the 4 corners of the earth is our norm.

I would say the early and mid 90s. The iron curtain is gone, economy is going up (without the gaping inequality we have now), and the world was having great hopes on pulling Russian and China into the international community.

The claim was: “one of the most unstable times in history” in reference to the present day.

You can make an argument that maybe this is a bad time in human history, and I would still disagree, but far less so than I would disagree with the claim I was replying to. If you can make the case that compared to just a decent sampling, doesn’t even have to be the entirety of human history, just a good sample, that today actually sucks, I’ll be impressed.

> one of the most unstable times in history

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.

The US Civil War is a better example than either WW1 or WW2 with respect to the balkanization of America, and the nuclear threat never went away. ;)

It depends on the continent you live on.

I could be wrong but OP's language suggested that the most immediate worst possible time would be the US election in two days and its resulting aftermath, and its connection to disinformation.

Perhaps I am a little biased as I've been eyeball-deep in weeding through election-focused disinformation and working with people to expose these tactics the past few months and everything looks like a nail to me right now.

How do you think those times became unstable?

Surely info suppression tactics have often played a role?

It was much easier to suppress info back then, and it is much easier to spread misinformation today.

In fact this is probably one of the most stable times in human history.

No kidding. I’m a 48 year old programmer. If today were 1939, y2k was the end of ww1, when I was a 28 year old programmer.

Well during the cold war, WW I and WW II you could visit your family, leave your house to have a cup of tea with a friend; you go walk through a restaurant without a mask on your face.

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.

Yes, in WW1 or WW2 you were able to… oh wait, rot in trenches with a gas mask, or be fighting somewhere in Europe or northern africa or the pacific, or be interned in a concentration camp. That sounds much better than having to wear a mask when you go buy groceries

That's what's called an informal fallacy.

Not at all.

> Well during the cold war, WW I and WW II you could visit your family

My grandmother once told me her dad had to console a German soldier crying in the backyard because he wanted nothing more than being back home in Germany with his wife and children instead of occupying the Netherlands. It's not like he had much of a choice though.

My grandfather's dad (other side) had to work in Germany during the war. He sure as hell couldn't "just visit his family" and there was no realistic option to say no.

And then you have things like Anne Frank hiding in a bloody broomcloset for years. But the above are just two examples of "regular" folk who were not especially persecuted (or indeed, even the occupier).

Good heavens, this has got to be the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN. Please, study the daily lives of people in countries occupied by Nazi Germany and you'll find that any comparison to current events is absolutely ridiculous.

I was referring to non deployed persons, obviously.

My great-grandfather wasn't deployed. Anne Frank wasn't deployed. They were just regular citizens.

I think you are confused, I stated the last time any restrictions even remotely similar to this applied was then. But that despite those imposition on freedoms most people in say paris could go visit their parents etc. Which they cannot right now.

You seem to be acting like i'm saying this is worse when i clearly did not

OP probably meant one of the most stable times recent history, as in within most generations being alive today.

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 recent American history. I was born in 1985 and the breakup of Yugoslavia and ensuing wars happened in my lifetime, and the Russian invasion of Georgia and Ukraine Ukraine, and things like the Syrian civil war, US invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan getting invaded by the Russians, then had a totalitarian Taliban rule, and then had the American invasion.

I mean, it sure is significant and all as the US, for better or worse, isn't "just another country", but it's also pretty narrow towards both the current time and specific location.

> Iraq invasion of the US,

That...didn't happen.

The MSM doesn't want you to know!

But we’re not just talking about the US. Tensions in the Asian region are at the highest since WWII as well: North Korea and South Korea. China and Taiwan. China and Hong Kong. Then there’s China and their increasingly imperial motives in Africa and the Asian sea. Plus increasing conflict with the US.

Then there’s Russia and Ukraine. Turkey and Armenia. The Middle East conflict with Israel, Europe, and the US.

So no, it’s not just American history. Globally, things are the least stable since WWII.

The Cold War was a sham, nobody was ever going to fire missiles except by mistake. It was just a way to maintain military budgets (and contracts) when peace broke out after WWII. Any instability in the main was only ever by design.

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."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiLuYZNzNyc

Stalin would have rolled over Europe if he had half the chance. Nukes like it or not is the reason why we haven't had WW3.

True. Mutually assured destruction is an effective deterrent. But should one nation fire a nuke and the other appeals to neutrals- Behold the lunatics have unleashed world killing weapons on us! - the first nation will become the beligerent state and effectively lose their war.

Were nukes the only way to deal with his appetite?

> except by mistake

No small threat; plenty of room for those, according to Daniel Ellsberg’s book ”The Doomsday Machine”.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-978160819...

Ytdl is always breaking. That's kinda the reason why it needs to exist. It isn't any more sudden than any other time.

This may be a silly question, but how do you intend to battle disinformation with yt-dl?

Makes certain types of media archivable when they otherwise wouldn’t be.

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.

Also useful for pulling apart fakes where you need the original files to see how they were edited together.

My company does anti-disinformation consulting. We don’t use ytdl, but we do download videos. It helps to:

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.

Sounds like an interesting line of work, and one that could get very sophisticated.

First notice I have of this line of business. I am thoroughly intrigued. Is the deepfake situation that out of control? What kind of scenarios is it used for, in terms of spreading misinformation?

I wouldn’t say deepfakes are out of control, but we see their risk potential to our clients. We support social media platforms, politicians, and large corporations. So far, our social media clients are those most concerned and affected by deepfakes.

Threat actors use deepfakes, along with other forms of disinformation, to achieve their objective. The most commonly discussed are the Russians interfering with US elections, but many other nations are now getting in the game. We have also seen organized crime using elections or other hot-button issues to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites.

We are still in the early days of deepfakes. I am sure we will see many more sophisticated methods as the technology improves. As it becomes commoditized, it will become another tool used moving down market from geopolitical goals, to organized crime, to petty fraud.

I echo the sibling comments and would like to learn more about your work and perhaps have a link to your company or another one in the same industry.

In case you don’t return to this comment otherwise, I wanted to post that responded to the sibling post.

> "token" parameter not in video info for unknown reason

This is seemingly fixed in commit 6d4733ce - " [youtube] Fix JS player URL extraction" at 2020-10-31 23:52 GMT.

if you live in the US that is.

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