YouTube removed a Cybersecurity channel without much reason
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
And this is the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/technux0/
On both of those pages, you can see the titles of the videos that were posted. On the Facebook page, you can still see the video thumbnails.
I wonder if YouTube removed his channel for the cybersecurity videos, or if they removed his channel for posting walkthrough videos on how to pirate Burp Suite Pro ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't know, but I'm going to automatically berate YouToob's motives/competence, compare some other topics that I feel are less censored than cybersecurity (which is confusing since I haven't bothered to read YouTube's content policy), and preach about the importance of local backups!
This looks like piracy & script-kiddie guides channel, not a "cybersecurity channel" or anything educational-related. But the pitch forks are already out, so whatever.
This type of content is widely available on mainstream online blog sites, in published books, and through established, expensive training outfits like the SANS Institute. YouTube has really missed the mark thinking there are real risks they are mitigating by culling it out from their platform.
This is an editorial decision by YouTube on what they want to groom YouTube's community to be, not a content decision based on sound public policy or realistic threat models.
Some channels post videos which stay up for years without any strikes or problems and then out of the blue the whole channel gets taken down under a vague "you violated our T&Cs" notice without Youtube bothering to highlight which of the T&Cs. They sometimes take down huge channels without first contacting the channel owners to warn them in advance and give them the opportunity to do something about it.
Rather than take down the channel why can't Youtube just remove the videos?
It's not a civilised way to conduct business.
It's true, and the way they try to hide this fact is by pretending that the censorship and policy switch-up is done in the name of "anti-racism."
YouTube & co could not have been more lucky that an entire segment of the culture came up with the perfect catch-all term to enable them to walk back their horrible business blunders.
I don't think they were lucky at all. There's always a "ism" assholes can hide behind to justify their actions, whether it's Racism, Terrorism, Communism, Nazism... etc. As well as the timeless "Think of the Children" shtick.
It's becoming painstakingly difficult to be actively against all of the overwhelming misinformation leveled one's way, because anti-racism's tenants are so easily generalized.
For example (given enough capital), is there genuinely an opportunity to build a YouTube-like platform that simply doesn't have the policies YouTube has (e.g. shares revenue more fairly, has a more-sane copyright law enforcement, explains their moderation actions)?
The idea here is that while it's true, in theory, that YouTube could make those policy changes and your YouTube alternative would then be pointless, the reality is they never will, even if it begins to cost them.
I really wish I could talk to someone more about this, or if there was targeted reading, but I haven't really found much, because I think most folks dismiss this as a viable strategy.
TIDAL tried this as a Spotify competitor and have basically failed.
Or can you throw money at it until you have those? TIDAL seems to be trying the "throw money at it until it's winning" strategy...
To me this seems like a good middle ground between having your own website and relying on a monopolistic service. Downside still is that your identity is fixed to an instance, but there are discussions on how to change that.
And since you cannot without great effort educate people who are incapable or intentionally unwilling to learn, the easiest solution is to sacrifice some of your users to placate the idiots.
Maybe this is not Google's excuse, but it certainly applies to many other internet companies (craigslist for example).
Edit: typing on phone is miserable :(
Advertisers pay the bills, not governments. And the golden rule[0] applies.
[0] "He who has the gold makes the rules."
How so? I wouldn't have gotten into phreaking in the 80's without Phrack.
However, I think you would be correct if you amended your statement to read, "It's a mistaken position to believe sharing "how to" information solely mints cybercriminals."
https://codeofhacking.blogspot.com/2018/01/burp-suite-pro-v1...
It goes even further: you can sell a kit with instructions on how to make something illegal and this is perfectly fine.
"Burp Suite v1.7.30 Pro Cracked Version Download Details:- Version:- 1.7.30 Pro License Expires:- Dec 2 , 2018 Size:- 26 MB Download links:- https://drive.google.com..."
YouTube did the predictable thing, but not the right thing.
If I open a restaurant and sell food, but don’t publish my recipes, that isn’t unethical?
If I make software, and I choose to offer it for money but not offer the source, what is unethical about my behavior?
The start.
>If I open a restaurant and sell food, but don’t publish my recipes, that isn’t unethical?
No - this is also unethical.
>If I make software, and I choose to offer it for money but not offer the source, what is unethical about my behavior?
If software runs on the user's hardware or uses the user's data, I have a right to know how it works, to modify it to do something different, and to share those modifications with others. I hold the copyright to those modifications, and I should even be able to sell it to others. The software is just information at that point, and information is inherently valueless - it's the creation and distribution of information that costs money. And money itself, remember, is an abstraction for value, not valuable in and of itself. Just because something is a viable business model does not make it ethically agreeable.
Note for recipes that restaurants are required to share some information, like ingredient lists and nutritional content. This doesn't go far enough, but even at this level of transparency, the food industry is held more accountable than software.
If I make something, it’s perfectly ethical for me to decide my criteria for giving it to somebody else. If the cost I impose or the restrictions I require are too onerous, nobody is going to agree to enter into a transaction with me. But if they do, they’ve agreed to pay my cost and abide by my terms.
The same is true of meals at a restaurant or sale of land or any other societal transaction. As a consumer of food, I can take as a personal stance the ideal that I’ll only eat food if I can know the recipe, but restaurants aren’t obligated to change their offering to account for me, any more than I’m obligated to eat at their establishments.
Land is a finite resource with intrinsic value, not the same thing. So is the meal itself. Recipes are different.
We have social obligations. That's what being a society is.
The fact is, it may protect against piracy but practically all consumer software nowadays is doing something on your device that you wouldn’t approve of. The only realistic way for a user to know how their resources are being used would be to look at the source code.
I can see two main reasons for business not distributing source code:
The first is to prevent users from using it without paying. If someone acquires a copy of the source code, they can redistribute at will at no cost.
For some business models this might be fine, internet services being an example. "Normal" users would prefer paying for just using such services, instead of maintaining the necessary infrastructure themselves.
But what about desktop applications or other software that just runs in the user's device? If all the user needs to use the software is a download link, there would be no tangible incentives to pay for it. There are other incentives, such as helping maintain a software that is useful to you, but most users don't grasp the concept of software maintenance and wouldn't see that as a good investment.
The second reason is to prevent low barrier competition. As you said yourself, creation and distribution of software costs money, so consider this:
Software company "A" spends months developing a desktop application which it plans to sell for $30, which will be enough to get initial investment back after selling 1000 copies. Since the product is a desktop application, and the company is using a free software licence, they distribute the source code with the compiled version. In this scenario, what's to prevent software company "B" from taking the source, rebranding/recompiling and launching a competing version with the same features for $10? In a purely ethical world, everyone would do the "right thing" and this scenario wouldn't exist. In our world, incentive-based systems are used to keep chaos from taking over.
Currently I'm an intermediate Linux user and can get by with only free software, but that was not always the case. My first contact with computers happened before I was 10 when my father had brought a 386 and installed MS-DOS and later windows 3.1.
In the early 2000's I began my software development career using Microsoft technologies such as .NET and VBA. Sure Linux existed at the time, but it was much less accessible than it is today (especially to someone who mostly used MS products so far). Eventually I released myself from "Microsoft prison", but I had to use MS products in order to access the internet and acquire the necessary knowledge.
Today I wonder if the free internet would have developed so quickly if it was not proprietary software developed by "unethical" software companies and sold to end users. Free software is more ethical, but initially it was only for the technical elite at universities.
PS: I'm a big fan of your software (been using sr.ht since the start). Keep up the good work!
TBH I'm not very informed in this regard, do you know where can I read more about open source business models?
I have no reason to suspect it would not scale up. In fact, the larger the force behind the software, the more difficult it is for a competitor to step in and try to maintain a fork.
>TBH I'm not very informed in this regard, do you know where can I read more about open source business models?
I wrote about this here:
https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/20/A-few-ways-to-make-money-...
I don't address your specific domain - end-user software - but I would just say "try selling it, with the source code".
As a summary:
- Output from a proprietary program (in this case it would be food) is not unethical.
- The _user_ must be free, not the developer. The users of the recipes are the cooks, not the customers. Cooks are free to change and distribute recipes. There is no recipe that a cook can't make, because in this case, the cook is the executant, not some computer. There are no compiled recipes.
- If there were cooking robots that would cook compiled recipes that would not be free, he would be against it, as he is with proprietary software.
If you consider proprietary software to be inherently unethical, how does it follow that pirating it is to be encouraged? Shouldn’t you be against the usage of such software, regardless of how it was obtained?
Personally, I don't use nonfree software, pirated or not, but I have no qualms with anyone who does.
I am not suggesting those videos/channels be banned either just pointing the uneven absurdity of YT's policies.
"A Jew asks why do people deny The Holocaust?...and admits the 6 Million figure is fake" from the account "Holocaust Lies Explained".
Soo... yeah. Par for the course for "uncensored alternative" sites I guess?
That is a GOOD thing, and a FEATURE not a deterrent.
You do not defeat bad ideas, and repugnant ideologies with suppression of speech. Sorry it does not work that way no matter how much the Authoritarian Left and the Authoritarian Right would love it to
Now, you might be the sort of person that would choose to live with a group of sadistic trolls for the edification that might result. I suspect most humans would react badly to that type of environment; our psychology is not well adapted to a constant barrage of persuasive deception and emotional manipulation.
Personally, I hope this latest crop of trashtube sites is driven offline and into bankruptcy; the sooner, the better.
You can defeat ideas only with better, well argumented ideas.
This is the problem with letting idiots and hucksters push out garbage "facts" - they build communities that are uninterested in counter-arguments. It doesn't even matter if the "facts" are somehow eventually refuted, because the attitudes informed by them have already hardened. And, the only way I can think of to prevent those idiots and hucksters from being so effective is to introduce some kind of social restraint - thus, shame.
Free alternative sites always seem to end up being just, or at least mainly, a place for hosting extremists. call it the voat effect if you will.
And to be clear, I do think that having that kind of content being offered a platform is not, at all, good. But I don't think you need to agree with that to agree with the specific point I was making.
We just call him Gun Jesus
It means YouTube believes that advertisers don't want to advertise, or that journalists are running hit pieces on the vertical.
It may be correlated to advertiser demands, but the direct causation isn't there most of the time.
Yes, it is not a good thing for creators, and they must be creative in finding ways to get paid.
https://www.engadget.com/youtube-ads-on-small-creator-videos...
I make the same clarifications in each comment I make so as not to receive a wave of downvotes, it is incredible how HN decreases in quality more and more.
As noted above, that's a good chunk of videos on the channel that got removed
As for me it was expected.
The only question here: why Cybersecurity channel was on YouTube? As YouTube itself is a "vulnerability platform".
I guess, PeerTube is the right place for cybersecurity channels.
I don't care about the distinction you are about to make nor do I care to post an opinion on the matter. Just information for anyone passing by.
YouTube doesn't charge rent or other fees, and I'm not sure how they'd auction your digital copyrighted IP anyhow.
Youtube could do something similar, by providing you 30 days to download your content.
instituting a 30-day retention period to exporting content would be really good for users. shame we can't pass tech laws in the US.
1. That's arson, a crime.
2. I have a contract with them (including consideration) to store my stuff.
But for a video site the provided content is going to dwarf the other data/metadata stored about a person/account/channel so it does make sense to separate them, and I don't see why they should be required to give over resources so you can download data that in theory you should already have. They are a content hosting service, not a content backup service.
> so long as they're not clearly illegal
That makes things even more complicated. How do they decide, given some things are grey areas almost everywhere and some things are very much illegal in some places but not others?
Unless you think https://codeofhacking.blogspot.com/2018/01/burp-suite-pro-v1... is somehow fine.
ALWAYS HAVE A LOCAL BACKUP of all the content you upload to other services. Facebook is not your photo backup. All your stuff could disappear off Google tomorrow. The cloud is literally someone else's computer.
The biggest takeaway for all YouToobers is to organize all their videos in a manor that they can upload them to a new place when (not if) the time comes.
YouTube is going to become a dinosaur in a few years. I don't see people finding meaningful content on it with the shit they keep pulling.
(Is this feasible? Perhaps not, but given how cheap storage is, if this could be even semi-automated, it would easily save a lot of heartache for some at many points in their life, especially in the worst cases of things like their Google accounts being banned)
I maintain a list of content that various members have archived, such that if anything is removed, people can direct inquiries to people who have archived that content.
It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and direct efforts toward at-risk channels.
(You can see the current list of user-archived content here: https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w)
For the moment I make my archive available via Soulseek, and am open to requests!
Discord is used for the simple reason that the current goal is to gain as much traction and participation as possible. The Rocketchat server I host, and the IRC channels I could have used would both acted as barriers of entry to a lot of possible participants.
Perhaps with time I can push for a migration to a solution I host. For the moment I'll stick with these tools, and plan for their failure as best I can.
I wonder how to trigger archive.org spiders...
Also would be a nice service to others to create a backup on archive.today and archive.org, and similar sites.
I think the problem is that "meaningful content" doesn't really matter. Ever heard of mukbang? Or reaction videos? Lots of people understand that if you make a 10 minute video that can be used as background noise while working or playing video games, you can make a lot of money. Youtube has to be aware of this, which would explain why they so quickly take down any video that advertisers might not like.
It may become a dinosaur to people who value quality content, but go search the topics I mentioned and compare the view counts to the types of videos you normally watch.
Have they never ever written an essay on Microsoft Word and then lost the progress cause they never saved it on a floppy?
I make computer security videos so there is a non negligible chance my YouTube will get deleted.
i guess we should get ready for next decade hearing a lot of "Have you lost pictures and memories of loved ones on Google Drive or a service affiliated with AWS? We at lawyer & lawyer ..."
If you're a trans or LGBTQ creator your content is not safe. If you produce "hacking" or firearms videos your content is not safe.
Maybe some day the millennial generation will end the boomer era mantra of passing legislation federally or adopting policies that censoring content for the children TM.
For instance, don't like what your opponents have to say? Just make it so their supporters have to go to their own platform. The insidious angle of this is how this kind of thinking starts to bleed into payments processing / CC companies.
You mean the "millennial generation" that invented "cancel culture" to destroy the lives of people it doesn't agree with?
so they invented things like segregation? lynchings? witch-hunts?
"cancel cultute" is as old as time and oppression.
it is woefully naive to believe a generation, whom you seem to begrudge, invented it.