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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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