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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Where is the part where YouTube gets hacked?

YouTube sells YouTube music subscription, the SONOS has not been intended to play on a YouTube video. Now it does, that's the SONOS hack. YouTube has not been designed to play YouTube videos on a SONOS outside of their YouTube Music subscription. Now it does, that's the YouTube hack.

But I assume the title is a bit catchy.

Playing a video from a website isn't hacking them. If you did the same with a video on fbi.gov, you didn't hack the FBI.

Or are you considering the process of downloading the videos from YouTube hacking since it's against their terms of service?

The hacking community understands the definition of hacking to be 'modifying something to be used differently than it's intended purpose'.

The idea of 'hacking' you are referring to is a colloquialism that is shared by young teens and entertainment media. It is not a reflection of reality.

You're certainly right about the original definition of hacking, and even with that in mind, YouTube is not being modified: it was designed to deliver the MP4 stream to any client that asks. And even the Sonos device is arguably doing a thing it was designed (albeit undocumented) to do: consume an ADTS stream (i.e., if a burglar stole the Sonos, they would not possess a hacked Sonos). The middleware is what's getting hacked here.

Hacking doesn't just refer to security vulnerabilities and unauthorized access.

"A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker

Even by your definition, you would consider writing an MP4 parser as "hacking YouTube"?

Seems reasonable by the above definition. I would say the standard way to consume audio from youtube is to play the video on youtube.com or in the app, not by writing an MP4 parser.

On the Hacker News website, "hack" retains its original meaning.

I also can't find how that's hacking YT.

There was a time, not so long ago, security bugs hunters would claim they found some oddities within a sub module of some software, then disclose how it leads to escalation of privileges, 7 other severe flaws leading to remote code execution, ending with a mention that it makes half of the internet vulnerable since it's Apache or some other broadly used utility.

Spoiler alert: it doesn't. But that won't stop them from making this nonsense clickbait headline I guess.

I guess parsing an MP4 file from YouTube is now classified as "hacking YouTube".

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