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Comment by onemoresoop | Hacker News Reader

What I don’t understand is how can they ransack through unlisted and private videos?

RIAA types are terrified of the idea of secret networks of people sharing private links

And rightfully so, back in the day I watched more than a few episodes through secret delisted playlists. They still exist, presumably hidden so that one of those AI copyright bots ("companies") can't take down every video in one fell swoop.

How do you find them?

Back in the day I found them on forums that required accounts. I've long since switched to other mechanisms for pirating content not available in my region, so I wouldn't know where to find them these days.

Presumably, there are Discord servers for that kind of thing, seeing as Discord has mostly replaced the forums of yore.

Google does the "ransacking" for them - ContentID.

Funny how the companies doing the scanning to enforce copyright are also the same ones building generative AI capabilities off the copyrighted data.

Laws for thee but not for me

Not really, considering the origins of ContentID. It's just the same story over again. Google/YouTube didn't really want to build ContentID. It was a concession as a result of lawsuits from Viacom (and others) from the early days of YouTube, where they were about to be sued out of existence for having a platform, which at the time, was filled with blatantly pirated content.

I can confirm from my experience that Google also automatically scans private videos.

My YouTube account was recently mistakenly suspended; luckily, after a few minutes of panic, Google reinstated it.

I discovered the suspension because my kid wanted to see a video on my TV's YouTube app (LG webOS), which showed an error without further explanation. Trying to find out what happened, I saw an email from YT about my account breaking the ToS with a video. "WTF!? I got pwned!" was my first reaction (followed by panic as YT uses my Google account). But, no, the culprit was a screen recording in 2015 that I did at work to showcase a UI prototype about a key-based VPC setup workflow I was working on. The video was private and unlisted, and I didn't remember it as I did it as a quick capture to share an idea with the team. I hypothesize that the video got flagged because the algorithm confused it with a "crack/hack tutorial."

I was happy to see my account reinstated the same day. However, the whole experience didn't leave good taste: a small algorithm mistake can make your life miserable, and you don't have any human or support to correct it. Also, the "private" moniker in YT videos is an illusion.

I have refused to create any content on YouTube for this reason. My Google account is too valuable to my digital identity.

When Google banned a user because their Google Drive was used to share a picture of their child’s skin with the doctor for diagnosis reasons and Google flagged the account as CSAM, I felt vindicated that I don’t create content for YouTube. Not because I believe my content would get banned, but because their automated systems catch irrelevant content and the user experience of those instances is like a DoS on your digital identity.

Just use a separated google account for your channel?

Probably YouTube scanned it, found something potentially actionable, automatically informed the representatives. The video was unlisted, which is not private, technically totally accessible to anyone with the link.

What I don’t understand is how can they ransack through unlisted and private videos?

Can they just iterate through the URL keys?

   youtu.be/v=a0000aa
   youtu.be/v=a0000ab
   youtu.be/v=a0000ac
   youtu.be/v=a0000ad

Sure, you just need to go through the 74 quintillion possibilities. Every day.

Only if the 74 quntillion possibilities exist. There's a pretty good percentage of 404s.

Plus, they don't have to do it every day, and clearly don't, since some people get dinged for videos they uploaded months or years earlier.

It's not like these organizations don't have the cash for the system to do it. It's not going to be one guy in the basement of the building overclocking a 386.

You are making zero sense. The point is the ids are random, so yes there are 74 quintillion possibilities. And roughly 74 quintillion 404’s. You need to check all of them. If you want to keep up with them you need to check them often. No one has the cash to check 74 quintillion anything even with a million 386s. Even the 386sx.

You won’t know if you’ll get a 404 until you make a network request. How many of those can you make per second? Hundreds? Thousands? Let’s be very generous and say millions.

That means you just need millions of years to go through the entire range.

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