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Comment by db48x | Hacker News Reader

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db48x·

It’s not a bug. Youtube deliberately throttles downloads unless the client can answer a math question.

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That's excessive for the oddly specific group of users who are ironically going to YouTube for math help.

seems like it would be exactly what they need

I think questions like « Prove that the union of finitely many compact sets in a topological space (X,τ) is also compact » would certainly achieve rate limiting and boost global math skills.

I seem passing by this really funny captcha on the Quantum Random Bit Generator Service's [1] signup page.

[1] http://random.irb.hr/signup.php

That's good, but unfortunately security through obscurity (in the true sense of the word).

Is this a quasi-captcha because of some legal reasons? I would assume math problems are easy to solve for a computer (easier than for most of the humans, actually).

It's just a flippant way of saying "hiding the URL or parameters behind running JavaScript that serves no other purpose than obfuscation". See also this commit:

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/commit/404f611f1c4aa516fbc4...

Of course this is easy to solve, but every layer of obfuscation they add generally requires someone to go and work around it in yt-dlp. It's mutually assured time waste on both sides.

> mutually assured time waste

I just learned an awesome new term. Thank you

I didn't know about this. How does it work? youtubedown gets around the throttling by opening a bunch of connections at once.

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