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Comment by tepitoperrito | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find it weird that most (all?) of the youtube videos referenced in the "Cultural Impact" section of that Wikipedia article are now private? I'm not saying that united paid anyone to make their videos private, but it's definitely not a good look now. Even a 404 or video not found would be better IMHO.

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Well do note that youtube did a mass privating of unlisted videos a while back. That might be a factor.

Any info about that mass private thing ?

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970?hl=en

What's the difference between the old and newer, more secure URL's for unlisted videos? eg. More entropy?

Any entropy at all. Supposedly the old ones were an encrypted counter, so if that key had gotten loose it would have been bad.

The key did get loose. Thousands of engineers had access to it and it showed up on dark corners of the internet for sale. A bunch of my unlisted videos got more view counts than they ought to have had, so I think abuse of it was pretty widespread.

Probably a bunch of people got promoted for making the new URL and nobody was going to get promoted for maintaining the old one

That is so typical behavior from Google, change the rules as you go along.

There is no way an unlisted video should be treated as a private video.

And it won't be the last time Google changes opt-out, that's for sure.

They only changed it for the videos with vulnerable URLs. Do you really think it's better for all those videos to become effectively listed?

Maybe they could have done something more clever, like only private videos that aren't linked on the public web already, but there would still need to be a mass privating of most unlisted videos.

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