“Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”
support.google.com
support.google.com
I could see a policy where YouTube made Unlisted videos Private that only had referrers from social media; this would be a welcome compromise to ensure non-guessability of URLs. But I can also see how this could become complicated and political. And companies using YouTube in this way aren't really contributing to YouTube's revenue materially, so there's not much incentive relative to the reputational risk of people guessing Unlisted links.
I shudder to think that healthcare professionals or heavy-machinery operators might be relying on these links to be trained in systems they use, will start to see broken links, will never report them back to the right people at their system providers, will just not get the full training, will make mistakes, and might cause harm as a result.
Security is not the only component of safety, and impacts need to be evaluated holistically.
All those "early access" on Patreon.
That's also one reason spreadsheets are still so popular:
As an average corporate drone, you can either hack together something quickly over the weekend in Excel that will mostly work. Or you can wait 3+ months for your IT department to fail to deliver.
(And that's the best case scenario.)
The Google drive could be deprecated at any moment
At this point the advice is moving towards "Don't even have a video if you can't be bothered designing a CPU from scratch to host it on".
Keep a local backup by all means but it's far more likely the local copy will get lost than the google drive copy.
Obviously, if your website is running a complex stack this is fairly infeasible (good luck keeping a complex web-framework secure without vigilance!) But if it's just a static site... and static sites are the fair comparison to google drive.
The issue with google drive and similar products is that they're actively - very actively - maintained. Stuff doesn't just break because it's taken offline, but because there are changes in terms of service, there are automatic deactivations for inactivity, there are plain old incompatible upgrades, etc, etc, etc.
I mean - I totally support people starting with the minimal effort (which is surely some freemium service like google drive), and leaning to live with the limitations - but the risks of a server (whether physical or otherwise) if you're similarly conservative and willing to live within constraints not unlike hosting on drive seem overblown - people talk as if servers burn down all the time, and hackers crack everything, but nothing could be further from the truth - those are exceedingly rare circumstances. And for many things, those risk are just OK. Don't keep your only copy of the data on the box, and don't keep private stuff there, and if lighting really strikes - it's not so bad. And both strategies will need a little TLC once and a while, that's just the way it is.
You know that this requires some uncommon computer proficiency?
None of this is stuff the average company needs to deal with when youtube works just fine. I'm sure you can list out all the ways to avoid those listed problems but that just shows how much work and knowledge is needed to pull this off while anyone can use youtube.
That may be the best "free" way, but my company puts their training videos up on some training website. The site tracks which videos were watched and sends nag emails when required trainings are late.
So if you're putting up content that your employees are obligated to watch, there are better alternatives than Youtube.
Just because it’s worked for years doesn’t make it so forever.
The trust and reliance on Google for free video hosting seems both foolish and dangerous.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm for a classic take on the subject.
I believe management consultants call that "efficiency."
At what point is a hypothetical harmful scenario too absurd to care about?
The reductive logic here is something else
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_–_The_...
They managed to convince people that Beethoven was Austrian, and Hitler German.
Yeah, the Austrians are saying that, but here in Germany we say the same about them.
I was born in the wrong country.
Thank you.
They’re YouTube. At their scale, there’s no such thing as an “edge case.”
But at YouTube scale, the cases need to get weirder and weirder to fall into 'not-yet-handled' territory.
Sometimes all the holes in the cheese still align.
They're both pretty unlikely but at YouTube scale both are real.
15 years later it's much easier to trawl through millions of videos by incrementing and check them automatically for nudity than anyone thought it would be back in the day.
There’s too many IDs to iterate through. Searching for $defatltvideoname for some camera is far more effective for that. Scarily so.
Even at high-functioning companies, people don't report or fix glaring problems in documentation and training material. There are quite a lot of not-so-high-functioning companies in the world.
This can be hard to imagine for a problem solver personality. How can people be so helpless?
But it’s basically because people have learned that complaining usually achieves nothing so they don’t even bother.
There's lots of old stuff on YouTube from long dead small channels. This stuff rots and disappears over time with nobody around to maintain it. I guess it's a good reminder that everything needs maintenance.
Something similar, but much more dramatic, happened once they got rid of annotations - lots of old stuff that no longer works the way it was intended.
It seems like nobody particularly cares about preserving this kind of stuff. It's a big downside to having content that only lives on the web - video files on my local storage don't just change retroactively. Things might still need maintenance, like getting old flash files to work again, but information doesn't get lost as easily.
It makes me sad, too.
Probably should do the same when I get around it. You're absolutely right about the way the internet has developed. In addition to the privacy concerns now it looks like data availability will be an increasing issue with sites removing or limiting access left and right.
We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived.
We are currently organizing some efforts to find and download unlisted videos.
Feel free to check us out here: https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/114633828/changes-...
https://support.google.com/a/answer/10685032?hl=en
Could something have happened across their entire Zanzibar/ ACL infrastructure?
[1]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-youtube-unlisted...
[2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/06/drive-file-l...
If it was an email saying, "You have a notification" and you have to manually log in to see it, then there's less chance of you clicking on a phishing attempt. Also, if there's any personal/private/sensitive information, this method makes it unavailable over email.
Just shooting from the hip. It could also just be laziness.
Yea better is to tell them to go login and provide no links.
Exact text:
"Dear Google Workspace Administrator,
You have an important notification from Google Operations that requires your attention.
Sincerely, The Google Operations Team"
And then there is a clickable link: "Go to Alert Center"
This is the first time I have EVER heard of the Alert Center. So, I also assumed it was made up.
We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content.
It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and occasionally direct efforts to preserve specific content- like unlisted videos right now.
If you can back them up.
I wish youtube would at least keep the title there so you know what it is that has been lost.
Welcome to the alzheimic future.
Where?
Other sites keep the metadata (and even allow new comments on) deleted posts.
When a user asks to delete a video it’s deleted, with it goes the title and description.
Also I seriously doubt that all those missing videos were requested to be deleted by the user. I'd be willing to bet that 90% of them were taken down by youtube's ridiculous and mostly broken takedown bots. There should be consequences for frivolous takedowns.
We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived.
We are currently organizing some efforts to find and download unlisted videos.
Feel free to check us out here: https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf
Searching for a video's URL might let you find some metadata about it. Unfortunately YouTube encourages social media insulation so a video might have only ever been referenced inside of YouTube with no inbound links from the web.
It's the uploader's video, and they retain ownership of it. If they want it gone, it'll be gone. Since they own the IP, their interests matter more than some random viewer who happened to add it to a playlist some time in the past.
I don't recall the creator, but I do recall a video series that used links in the videos that pointed to other videos for a basic quiz or choose your own adventure.
This applies to logical places on the internet too.
Of course, you don't need to keep a copy of everything you see on the internet. But if you have a dependency you might want a copy.
wget was the thing back then, maybe something similar with youtube-dl now?
Too many times I have gone back to reference something only for the site to be dead, or the user been banned from the platform.
The old scheme had 7.3 x 10^19 ids (11 chars, base 64, thanks Tom Scott!). Suspiciously close to the max value of a 64-bit int, hmmm …
Assume a billion videos and you’re down to 10^10 - a one in a 10 billion chance isn’t much chance, but it’s far from secure.
(I’m ignoring the fact that only a small %age of videos are unlisted I guess, but I think the point still stands.)
Edit: Before the scheme change I mean
Block ciphers (such as DES) don't collide. If they did there would be no way to decrypt them because a block could be decrypted into multiple valid plaintexts.
Made on a 20MHz Mac IIci, not enough computer for the job.
First working ragdoll (around 1997) https://youtu.be/5lHqEwk7YHs
Ragdoll physics, correct but slow.
Big falling object test (around 1997) https://youtu.be/-DaWIHc1VLY
Notice that it looks heavy, unlike most video game physics.
Also our goal was to create our own video community. Might be an option for others who are thinking about something similar.
* not a shareholder
Of course, there is probably a large number of currently unlisted videos from accounts that are no longer active, which would effectively be lost after this change. Unfortunate.
That, of course, requires significantly more engineering so I can see why it didn't happen.
How people who died are supposed to tick the box :/
The same is true (perhaps moreso) for audio/visual media online.
[1] It takes someone else to first know about archive sites, consider archiving a link pre-emptively either manually or in an automated way, which doesn't always occur. Then one problem is if a link changes a version may have been archived at the old link but the new link doesn't show as being archived (sometimes redirects are in place, other times not). Another issue is archive.org respects robots.txt and webmaster requests so crawls can be retroactively made non-public (archive.is is a bit different but there's so little known about who operates it that it's unclear how reliable it is for long-term reference).
Why content preservation is not very popular among webmasters (why NH and 1000000s other sites do not do it?) is an interesting question for Internet philosophers.
Maybe, because people mostly want the shit to sink and not come up again?
Also, why web-archiving is biased right-wing?
Video URL's look random, but are in fact an encrypted sequential integer.
If the encryption key is leaked, then someone can browse through all unlisted videos.
There are rumours the key has been leaked.
All these changes are to mitigate the impact of that.
In exchange we get free email.
The creators might no longer be with us, to boot.
Google has process for handling accounts of the deceased (mostly for closing them and exporting some data, which can then be moved to a new account). Or individuals could assure that next of kin get credentials to their account for control.
But, yeah, a zombie account (without any active owner) won't be able to opt out.
Maybe another video category would have made for better distinction than just Public, Unlisted, and Private.
I can't think of an exception yet.
Yes.
Edit: they give the reason explicitly https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/114633828/changes-...
> Why? In 2017, we rolled out a security update to the system that generates new Unlisted video links. This update included security enhancements that make the links for your Unlisted videos even harder for someone to discover if you haven’t shared the link with them. We’re now making changes to older Unlisted videos that were uploaded before this update took place.
With respect to storage, there's a provision to delete old videos in the EULA at any time Google chooses. Eventually Google will pull the trigger.
Caching, I'm not so sure, but I'd be surprised if hiding old unlisted videos freed up enough of it to matter. New videos probably dominate cache storage.
When Google bought Youtube Videos, I followed their directions on the new password, etc.
Something went wrong, and I couldn't delete, or edit my own videos.
They weren't that embarassening, but I used youtube originally as kind of a diary, or todo list.
I tried for awhile to get them off, but failed, and just gave up.
I did reach a human in advertising one day, and she told me, "Those issues are not what they hired he fooor. Try the help boards?". (She brought back memories of certian new college grads, and I realized how difficult it is to talk to a human at Google.)
Anyway--the vids are still up their years later, with people telling me how lousy they are. I just commented on my own videos. Telling people at one time, some uploaders just posted without thinking about clicks.