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nyx commented on I thought I bought a camera, but no DJI sold me a license to use it [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=aUOnQ... · Posted by u/qingcharles
moritonal · 4 months ago
Wow, this was not a "smug corpo" opinion? I renovated a house recently, and had a plethora of choices for cheap smart options, instead after research I found some expensive options with MQTT support for HomeAssistant, they got my money.

I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.

You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.

Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.

nyx · 4 months ago
The way I see it, the suggestion that one can simply "vote with their wallet" is absolutely a pro-corporation stance because it pretends that consumers and megacorps have equal footing in the market. This premise is a bit of a spherical cow because it--conveniently for corporations--ignores monopoly, price fixing, anti-consumer corporate fraud at scale and flouting of regulations. Perhaps, in the frictionless vacuum of an Ayn Rand wet dream where every interaction is a transaction between two equals operating perfectly rationally, where there's no governments thus no regulatory capture, no barriers to entry, and so on, this might make sense--but in our world it does not.

You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."

I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.

nyx commented on I thought I bought a camera, but no DJI sold me a license to use it [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=aUOnQ... · Posted by u/qingcharles
moritonal · 4 months ago
Vote with your wallet.
nyx · 4 months ago
I wonder what the "free-market" types will say to minimize criticisms like those in this thread once everything that can possibly be purchased requires bending over for this sort of abuse.

Is the fantasy that some entrepreneurial savior will come along and voluntarily forgo all the massive spying profits in order to cater to the minute proportion of consumers perceptive enough to realize they're getting molested on the daily?

How about smartphones, for example? "Vote with your wallet," says the smirking corporatocrat, "and just buy a mobile operating system that respects your personal privacy." Alright professor, looks like my choices are iOS or Android, so I'm kind of hosed either way? Unless I want to return to a 2004 feature set, or perhaps a GNU/Linux paperweight with a 20-minute battery life that can't use banking apps or place phone calls?

I exaggerate (but in my opinion only slightly), and sincere apologies for tone--but it's quite frustrating to be met again and again with such a smug dismissal of what to many of us feels like an inescapable horror. This depraved race to the bottom, with every MBA-steered ship vying to see who can violate us the hardest, seems to be standard practice these days, and "purchase different products" puts the onus on consumers to fix what isn't their fault in a way that leaves an awful taste in my mouth.

nyx commented on Show HN: Quickly connect to WiFi by scanning text, no typing needed   github.com/yilinjuang/wif... · Posted by u/ylj
IanCal · 6 months ago
I do like people building things, but isn't this what the share network button is in android? It creates a qr code with ssid and password, and when scanned with lens it gives you a "join" button.

Edit - ah is the point taking a photo of credentials and joining from that?

nyx · 6 months ago
Yeah, from the demo video, it looks like this OCRs a photo of text and turns it into one of those QR codes. Then you can use Google Lens against the QR code onscreen to get the "join" button.
nyx commented on YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients   github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/... · Posted by u/azalemeth
brigade · 6 months ago
Not a login token, but rather an attestation token. Presumably TV clients don't really have a good mechanism for attestation that isn't tied to DRM (web technically doesn't either, but the web code can be updated daily...)
nyx · 6 months ago
Good spot, thanks... I'm reading up, more info here: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/PO-Token-Guide
nyx commented on YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients   github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/... · Posted by u/azalemeth
bitwize · 6 months ago
They may be anti-consumer garbage, but they're black-letter law, and repealing them would require violating international treaties. So they're not going anywhere.
nyx · 6 months ago
whether this is a positive thing is left as an exercise to the reader :)
nyx commented on YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients   github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/... · Posted by u/azalemeth
mdaniel · 6 months ago
I mean, in some sense your two cases are indistinguishable since there's no way I'm going to inject ads into my local .mp4

However, I'd guess quite a few folks use yt-dlp for archiving (or watching on an airplane) because YT Premium is not a "we promise this video will still be available next month"

nyx · 6 months ago
Yep, downloading copies of videos so I can watch them on long flights is one of my main use cases for yt-dlp.

I suppose someone more sycophantic to the wishes of trillion-dollar corporations could argue that I'm not entitled to do this for free, and that YouTube offers an offline download option as part of its $13.99/mo Premium offering. To them, I'd say "you're right, also go pound sand lol."

nyx commented on YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients   github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/... · Posted by u/azalemeth
bitwize · 6 months ago
You have just confessed to a federal felony under 17 U.S.C. section 1201, punishable by up to five years in prison. Breaking DRM, no matter how weak, is in and of itself a crime, separate from copyright infringement, unless it falls within one of the specific enumerated exceptions set forth by the Librarian of Congress, listed here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24...

> But now, how exactly do I get DRM-free movies while also paying for them?

"That's the neat thing -- you don't."

Part of the point of copyright is that the copyright owner solely determines whether and how their work gets distributed or exhibited. If they want to make it available exclusively through streaming, so be it. If they want never to release a movie again (see: Song of the South), so be it. You don't have the right to have your own copy of a movie, nor even to see it more than once. You can do these things only inasmuch as the copyright owners allow you to.

nyx · 6 months ago
Felony contempt of business model! The DMCA and its anti-circumvention provisions bring us a rich history of abuse, including such gems as "Lexmark suing a company that figured out how to interoperate with its ink cartridge business and thus give consumers more ink cartridge options" and "Chamberlain suing a company that figured out how to interoperate with its garage door openers and thus give consumers more garage door remote options".

I admit I don't shed many tears for the poor movie publishers, but even setting piracy completely aside, these laws are anti-consumer garbage. One wonders aloud if there are limits to the insanity copyright owners are entitled to inflict on their customers. How about surreptitiously installing malware on people's machines to make sure they play nice?[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

nyx commented on YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients   github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/... · Posted by u/azalemeth
perching_aix · 6 months ago
Can anyone explain what this actually means? The issue ticket's core points revolve around concepts that are not understandable even for a technologically well-versed general reader, so people will just pivot to the keywords, which won't make for productive discussions.

To be more specific:

- what is an innertube client?

- what is a `tv` innertube client?

- what is TVHTML5?

- what are "DRM formats"?

- what does it mean for them to be "available"?

- and finally, why is it of interest if they're only available to tv innertube clients?

nyx · 6 months ago
In summary, YouTube is A/B testing a change where specific clients receive only DRM-locked video streams. This is notable because yt-dlp impersonates those clients during normal operation. Since yt-dlp won't support decrypting DRM-locked videos, this change breaks yt-dlp's ability to download any videos.

To respond to your specific questions:

- innertube is the name for private YouTube APIs. (Here's a library that talks to innertube https://github.com/tombulled/innertube/, although yt-dlp has its own separate client code.) These APIs are intended for consumption by the various types of YouTube client software.

- The "tv" client is one of the types of client (see other examples here: https://github.com/tombulled/innertube/blob/main/innertube/c...)

- TVHTML5 is the specific client (as opposed to e.g. TVLITE or TVANDROID)... presumably different TVs run different specific TV clients, with consumption of different specific TV APIs.

- When yt-dlp downloads a video, it roughly performs this sequence of steps: pretend to be one of the types of clients supported by innertube; download the top-level video object; parse out the list of possible formats. These formats are like "MP4, 1080p, with AAC audio" or "Ogg, audio only". (The original issue report shows a better example in the verbose output dump.) By default, yt-dlp just grabs the best quality audio and best quality video stream, downloads them, and muxes them together into a single file, but you can configure this behavior. DRM formats are formats that are protected by (presumably) Widevine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine, the decryption of which yt-dlp has stated will not be supported.

- Available means they're an option for our yt-dlp client to download. Videos don't necessarily have all formats for all clients; for instance, a video might not have a 4K option, because it was never uploaded in 4K. Or it might have a 4K upload, but YouTube won't show 4K options to a client that doesn't support 4K decoding.

- In this case, it means this specific internal client type can't download the video, because when yt-dlp reaches out, it gets ONLY formats that are DRM-locked. This is of note, I think, because the TV client is a way to get high-quality video from the YouTube API without having to pass it a valid YouTube login token (further down the issue, the reporter says providing a token allows the "web" innertube client to work).

nyx commented on Legal fights over kei trucks in the U.S.   wsj.com/business/autos/pi... · Posted by u/impish9208
nyx · 9 months ago
I've rambled about this on here before, but I'm pretty bothered that the media coverage of these always mentions the 25-year import law, but also always frames it simply as a matter of exemption from safety and emissions standards, never deigning to mention that the law originated in the first place as a protectionist measure.

In the late 80s, Mercedes in North America was getting its lunch eaten by grey-market importers who were bringing European models over and undercutting the American dealers on price. So they blew millions lobbying the government to crack down on these imports, and found a not-wholly-unsubstantiated justification in safety concerns around modifications not complying with American safety standards. So the US just enacted a sweeping ban of any new imports; you can bring in dodgy old cars from the 1990s unmodified, but you can't bring in a 2024 European Mercedes or Japanese kei truck, because they're "unsafe". The new cars can't be titled, and if the feds find out you got one in anyway, they'll literally confiscate it and throw it in the crusher.

Seeing Whistlindiesel in the article makes me realize that there could be a bipartisan coalition here of "government should let me do what I want" conservatives and libertarians, and urban-design lefties who resent having to drive everywhere and would love to buy the minimum amount of car possible to meet their needs if such a thing were possible. My conspiracy theory is that burying the lede on this is intentional because people buying $12,000 Japanese imports wouldn't be buying $60,000 F-150s.

Dead Comment

u/nyx

KarmaCake day1733January 14, 2019View Original