GitHub reinstated youtube-dl but restoring forks is apparently a problem
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
(Also, the person who wrote this article said that they contacted me, but I never received anything from them.)
That's literally all I had to do: rebase it against upstream.
If I was a US resident I would, but I'm not a US resident. If the DMCA claimer decides to challenge my counter notice it ends-up in a US court. Even if their claim is super far fetched they will probably realize there is no way I can realistically defend myself in a foreign court.
Worst case I get convicted in absentia and the next time I set foot on US soil I get in trouble at customs.
FWIW, you cannot simply be convicted in absentia in the USA. It would violate the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments and the due process rights they secure for a defendant. SCOTUS covered this in Hopt v. Utah in the late 1800s and there has been no revision since. If someone engages in voluntary behavior after a trial begins the trial may still proceed, like if they're there for the start of the trial and then voluntarily flee, or they're disruptive, given warning they could be ejected, and continues to be disruptive. But the trial can't start without them.
Granted here we're not talking criminal law at all. And most DMCA takedown claims are just mass sent on the cheap with zero intent to followup.
Just give me the ability to delete my fork. Currently trying to delete it via API fails with HTTP 451.
Circumvention is only copyright infringement due to the DMCA, which Microsoft, as part of the BSA, lobbied for [1]. This entire incident is Microsoft's doing, from passing the initial consumer-hostile law, to interpreting it in the most copyright-maximal way they can get away with [2].
[1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/01/4511/
[2] Lest anyone think MS is not an enthusiastic abuser of that law: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says - https://torrentfreak.com/removing-annoying-windows-10-featur...
Internet is amazing, Bowie was right.
I suspect Github doesn't want it to be that way?
Then all the DMCA problems would be immediately gone. It's sad that the gittorrent idea never really took off.
E-mail is the golden example on how not to solve this. It's unsecure, unvalidateable, unverifiable, exploitable and everything in between can block it or listen to it. And it uses another, unencrypted, transport protocol, which means it is not related to git at all.
The reason why GitHub exploded is the UX experience and the convenience that comes with it. But on the technical side there is no reason not to integrate those features into git itself (or git-web for that matter).
The instance also runs inside a LAN so... whatever.
Here's another one posted about a week ago: https://github.com/gogs/gogs/issues/6536
Thus having a copy only saves you for a few weeks. Then it will start to fail on all sites, one by one.
Relevant. Youtube changed something that broke youtube-dl the day after it was removed from github. It couldn't update as the update source was from github.
Ah, yeah, now they do frequent updates. But here's a fork that I switched to for a while because the maintainers of the original youtube-dl were slacking off. :) https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc
I can't believe the level of entitlement my comment exhibits. :)
My attitude (a bit tongue in cheek) is probably why many open source authors abandon their products. Too much work, no thanks, lots of bitching.
Not only does it keep reasonable pace with original youtube-dl, it also incorporates several improvements from forks (detailed on the page).
This reminds me of this post about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I keep this in my local crontab:
ssh john@rsync.net "git clone mirror https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl.git"Do you really have an passphrase-less SSH key on your primary machine?
Unless your computer is compromissed, than no key or password will help.
It's also arguably a US HQed company while GitHub is simply a US company.
https://newpipe.net/blog/announcement/f-droid/pinned/f-droid...
but technically just by looking at my comment history here (not much to see) you can see the likelyness of this b being true
[^1]: Considering they have a local clone of their repo.
I imagine this is a coordinated effort to preserve the "hip, young, fresh" GitHub brand as distinct from the Microsoft corporate stink.
I am unsurprised that the response is only skin deep.
But yes, leaving organizations like the RIAA, BSA, and similar groups of evil would provide for nicer optics of the new, non-evil Microsoft being, well, non-evil.
It's a good business model too. MSFT stagnated based on evil when it no longer had the same type of monopoly power. Non-evil Microsoft is doing much better. I'll take Azure of GCE now, despite GCE having better tech, since Microsoft is more honest than Google.
(although, to be clear, I did pick AWS over both)
Not just evil, "More Evil Than Satan Himself".
That phrase was probably the very first Google Bomb, back in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing#History
I don't get this marketing campaign that I read over and over again in any thread mentioning Microsoft.
It's a real fantasy; Microsoft begins realizing that there is some real cold cash in the open source biz, hops onto supporting linux in any way that might cause Microsoft to see some revenue (WSL comes to mind), and this somehow causes everyone to start parroting "Microsoft isn't evil anymore!"
Two ironies : 1) "Microsoft isn't evil anymore" was motivated by Microsoft losing ground on the OS side of things and acquiescing into the support of another system as long as it made a buck doing so.
2) "not evil anymore " is a pretty fantastically horrible show of support, and honestly I am made queasy by supporting any formally evil entity.
Does anyone buy this stuff?
'Big corporation' isn't good or evil, they are capitalistic with morals and ethics that try to align best with whatever cohort will attract the most profit by doing so.
Don't be fooled into actually thinking about this problem with good/evil in mind, it's a distraction.
It's just a more attractive way to frame 'We changed directions -- since that thing we formally hated as competition is profitable now we won't make it our mission statement to disparage and destroy it as a target, now we're going to use it to make a buck ourselves instead while evangelizing about the product with about as much effort as we tried to disparage it earlier in time.'
This is a false abstraction: "they are capitalistic with morals and ethics that try to align best with whatever cohort will attract the most profit by doing so."
One step more accurate is would be "THEY THINK will attract the most profit." This reflects personalities.
One more step more accurate is that a corporation is a network of people, most of whom don't care about corporate profits. If I were an engineer at Microsoft, I don't see why I'd care how much I helped or hurt Microsoft's bottom line. I'd care about:
1) Having fun
2) Getting paid myself
3) Getting promoted / setting myself up for future job opportunities
Those sorts of motivations apply to everyone, right up through the CEO. I work at a not-for-profit where people DO care (myself included), and I've worked at start-ups, where there was a mix. Big corporations are an abstraction.
Microsoft, for about two decades, led to a lot of harm to the world and very little good. If Microsoft didn't make Windows 95, we'd have OS/2, NeXT, QNX, Amiga, or something else. It didn't do much innovating. It was just sort of a big parasite, sucking money out of the economy, and lobbying for corrupt laws.
Today, it's just like any other megacorp.
- Quotation: Captain G. M. Gilbert.
Not to Godwin's law the convo, I just think this definition is accurate, relatable, and salient. Big, capitalist corporations are almost by design, incapable of aligning with values other than profit. Their only approximation of empathy is when PR affects the bottom line.
Frankly, the MSFT's "this company and everything they do is awesome" to "this company and everything they do is evil" followed a similar timeline to Google's, just shifted by a few decades.
Yeah, now they just sell and support the software that their national government uses to run concentration camps down in Texas. Microsoft in the 1990s was simply anticompetitive. Today it's a horse of a different color.