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Comment by Drainik | Hacker News Reader

Would it be possible to use it if the source code is forked?

There isn't really a "source code" per-se for Vanced, they took the official YouTube app, decompiled it, applied hacks and recompiled it - pretty much very much the same way we hacked key checks and CD copy protections back in the day.

So if there's anything resembling source, it's more of a diff of a certain YouTube app version you can't just cleanly upload somewhere or even apply to new versions.

But the source for the hacks could be made open, so that other people could work on it.

Good way to get a bunch of lawyers at your door

And distributing a premade APK is somehow not a Good way to get a bunch of lawyers at your door?

How would that (legally and technically) work exactly? And how would you defend even the hacks themselves against DMCA?

Just upload the thing to a Russian server.

The lines of code that were generated are copyrighted by the person who wrote them, so they probably can't be DMCA'd easily. The offsets (and possibly the algorithm for finding those offsets) are harder to protect, of course.

The problem, of course, is that bogus DMCA claims are enough to take down a repository, and protesting those DMCA claims will dox you to the big tech companies.

Every time a project like this goes down, I feel more like there should be some kind of Gitea server hosted on a hidden service where "illegal" projects like these can be developed.

> Every time a project like this goes down, I feel more like there should be some kind of Gitea server hosted on a hidden service where "illegal" projects like these can be developed.

While not a Gitea server per se (GitLab instead), git.rip used to be a well-known host for pirated content, leaked source code, and various other things. If I remember correctly, the amount of content on there was in the hundreds of terabytes, which would have made it very hard to externally archive (not even taking into account bandwidth restrictions).

The ROM hack community has been releasing patches to proprietary software for years without legal issues.

Other projects like this on Android extract the official APK, then patch it and resign it on the device. Distributing the actual APK was a technical decision that now bit them.

Seeing as we are probably due for reduced rights (e.g. pay a subscription to listen in the background) and inflated fees for those rights, it would be interesting to develop some kind of distributed way for people to (basically anonymously) develop these binary hacks i.e. you effectively have a git-in-2005 model where all nodes (patches) are equals but some more equal than others.

Vanced was not open source, supposedly to avoid angering Google by openly sharing the mod. Not sure how that makes sense though now that I think about it

You should be allowed to distribute your own code. The Youtube app itself is Google's intellectual property so I understand why they did that. I hope they can release the mods so we the users can apply them to the app ourselves

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