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Comment by lutorm | Hacker News Reader

No, whether it's a crime depends.

Is it a crime to teach people how to pick a lock?

>Is it a crime to teach people how to pick a lock?

I imagine that depends entirely on where the viewer lives, it wouldn't surprise me if some countries had laws that made it so.

Mere possession of lock picks themselves, according to this site https://tihk.co/blogs/news/116232133-lock-pick-legality , appear to be enough to get you arrested for intent to commit a crime in 5 states.

Given that laws vary wildly from county to county, city to city, state to state, country to country, sometimes stuff like this is simply CYA for YouTube.

You also have to keep in mind that YouTube is not a webhosting service or content delivery network, they exist to sell adspace for 99% of their income, if advertisers don't want to appear around guns/pornographic material/material of questionable legality/etc then it's well within YouTube's right to prohibit such content whether or not is legal to distribute.

People always rush to scream YouTube/Google is censoring them when they aren't. YouTube is not a government, YouTube is a business that sells ad space.

That site is wrong, lock picking tools in all those States are still legal to possess for non-criminal purposes same as all the other states. They just consider possession of such tools to be prima facie evidence that you have criminal intent. Prima facie evidence is basically evidence that if not disproved by the defense is by law sufficient to convict.

So that means it's still legal to possess such tools in those states. But if prosecuted for criminal possession you basically lose the presumption of innocence and must prove you had no criminal intent rather than the state being required to prove that you did.

There is a difference however between demonetizing clips (ie not showing ads associated with certain content) and outright banning them. I feel the latter should be reserved for very few types of contents (mostly contents that is illegal to host).

Hacking is not only not necessarily a crime, you can actually get a job doing it responsibly (red team security professional). I'm looking forward to seeing Amazon refuse to sell the Red Team Field Manual because it's about "hacking".

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