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Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by madez on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @03:08AM (#15859433)
This is why I don't like the web in it's current form. It's not anymore about freely sharing information. It is about creating uncopyable 'experiences' and programs in the web. I don't want services I may or may not use. That is not the web I want. Maybe if browsers didn't include JavaScript, the situation would improve. But even the supposedly user-friendly Mozilla is backing JavaScript.
Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by finchisko on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @05:11AM (#15859936)
Actually that is why you should like web in current form. Google blocked native youtube app, but kept youtube web accessible from amazon devices. IMO there should not be be proprietary app to access youtube or any other service, if the same experience could be delivered for everybody via web.

If I owned the Youtube, I'll block Amazon too. They're practically taking advantage and not want to give anything back. Don't want to sell google appliances, don't want to participate in youtube ad program. Only word that came to mind is to describe such a attitude is leech.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by syshum on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @06:11AM (#15860207)
>Google blocked native youtube app, but kept youtube web accessible from amazon devices.

This is false, the app on the fire tv is simply a webview of https://www.youtube.com/tv that is publicly accessible

They are not doing any, no my knowledge, more than wrapping that page up in a webview

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by finchisko on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @07:13AM (#15860509)
Ok. So finally it's start making sense. Google blocked Amazon access to https://www.youtube.com/tv. So they set webview url to https://www.youtube.com/ instead.

Correct?

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by syshum on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @07:48AM (#15860665)
Today it is still youtube.com/tv but Google has injected Popup that says the service will be disabled on 1/1/2018 (https://i.redd.it/g8t5z4owv5201.jpg)

I do not know what will happen on 1/1/2018. Redirecting to YouTube main page is likely not a very good option because the UI would be almost unusable on TV. I have seen some people suggesting the Silk Browser as a work around, I have tried it is it not very user friendly and does not work at all with the youtube/tv interface.

I am likely ordering a Roku Today to see if I like them, Amazon is risking alot here, this YouTube situation may be the final straw for me (and many others I suspect). They started putting ads on the FireTV Device, they are spending a crap ton of money to get Sports I have no interest in, now YouTube is pulling out. It seems every day the FireTV ecosystem get worse and worse, time to move on i think

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by pbhjpbhj on Sunday December 10, 2017 @07:18AM (#15891098)
Prior to FireTV we used Roku device branded as nowtv. Someone unlawfully accessed it, either from Roku or with their permission, and disabled side-loading preventing us from using it to view family photos, local media, etc. (with Plex app, as it happens). Shame, the movie package we were buying from nowtv was excellent.

In short Roku and nowtv is dead to me.

Google making FireTV worse means I'm not going to buy Google - I can't endorse that behaviour - so what else is there? Just no-name android devices??

Probably I'll use a hack; presumably using a proxy to mask FireTV, or stripping UA info is going to work.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by anon1385 on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @05:34AM (#15860033)
>Actually that is why you should like web in current form. Google blocked native youtube app, but kept youtube web accessible from amazon devices

From the article:

> Amazon has responded, and its response points to the unfair nature of Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it. "Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website," Amazon's statement reads. "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible."

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by finchisko on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @05:38AM (#15860052)
If you think about it, those statements doesn't make sense.

1. Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it.

2. Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website

I understood it, that Google blocked Amazon to access youtube via native app. And Amazon reaction was to switch their youtube app to webview, which basically renders web version of youtube.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by Blaiz0r on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @04:30AM (#15859772)
I'm glad you and the above poster have said this, I also feel very strongly that the web has been completely trapped by coorporate interests.

I feel like the web as we know it should be abandoned to coorporations and people that want an open platform for knowledge sharing should start something new that has to stay open.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by krapp on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @07:19AM (#15860533)
>I also feel very strongly that the web has been completely trapped by coorporate interests.

"corporate interests" haven't trapped the web.

People are choosing to pretend that the web has somehow ceased to exist outside of a few silos, or that javascript has no purpose other than to further corporate or media interests, or that Facebook owns HTML now, but none of that is true. The web is just as open as it's ever been.

Just because mainstream viewing habits tend to converge towards a few corporate owned social media sites does not mean the web has become owned by corporations, it just means people have gotten lazy and don't want to work to discover new content.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by CaptSpify on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @02:26PM (#15864088)
This is a joke, right?

We are building drm into the browsers themselves now. We are letting companies tell people that "there is no way to access media, unless you go through our walled garden" and defending the company! The open web is farther gone than it's ever been.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by krapp on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @07:29PM (#15866491)
I shouldn't have to point this out to someone on Hacker News but browsers are not the web. Facebook is not the web. Twitter is not the web. Not even Google is the web.

No one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use EME when they distribute media, and it certainly will no more be the case that all media will be forced through DRM and a walled garden than it ever was. The companies that will use this are the companies that would have used DRM anyway, just in another form. The web, as a whole, is unaffected.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by CaptSpify on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @10:54PM (#15867508)
Wow, I've heard some bad arguments on here, but this one is great. Good work.
Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by eloisant on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @05:27AM (#15860005)
The web is fine, the "closed garden" experiences are in native apps ecosystems.
Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by rusk on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @05:04AM (#15859908)
This is the nub of the net neutrality argument for me.

We don't need to "start something different" we just need to ensure that what's there can still be used for both corporations, and the public at large.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by narrator on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @09:22AM (#15861189)
The only people who are actually serious about creating alternatives to major social media networks are alt-right (for lack of a better word) who have been banned from these services.

Of all these alternatives, I think bitchute.com is really innovative in that it has a Bittorrent video viewer that solves the bandwidth usage problem by going p2p. Not a lot of stuff on there yet. For now, that site is mostly full of political content that would get banned, or at least demonitized, on YouTube.

I have a hard time getting over the irony that the alt-right are going to be the ones to save the open Internet while the rest of Silicon Valley sits around and does nothing because they need to be protected by the machines of loving grace [1] that are the vast content moderation and filtering apparatus of the major social networks.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines...

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by icebraining on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @05:05PM (#15865449)
Bitchute.com is just another centralized system, that happens to offload some of their costs onto their users. Using webtorrent is cute, but no conceptually no different than what early Spotify did. They still control what you're allowed to see.
Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by Flow on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @08:47AM (#15860988)
We need something like BittorrentYouTube. Something that is somewhat indexed, content can be directly linked to, and there's no-one to control what can be there and what can not.

Of course it will be a bit slower at startup times, but it's still faster than a video that has been removed in your country or removed due other arbitrary reasons.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by Mindwipe on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @08:48AM (#15860996)
There's nothing to stop you doing all the open platform knowledge sharing on the current web apart from lack of market share of the audience.

How moving to a new, less popular distribution mechanism would make that any better is not clear to me.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by icebraining on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @04:18AM (#15859728)
Mozilla was co-founded by the creator of JavaScript. Chances are they don't share your opinion regarding it.
Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by Angostura on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @04:40AM (#15859808)
I feel differently. For the most part, I still the Web is about freely sharing information - most of the stuff from the good old days of 1998 is still there. However, in addition various companies who otherwise wouldn't put their content on the Web, have to decided to do so, but on the proviso that technology exists that gives them adequate control over how it is distributed.

I don't think that's a particularly bad thing.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by astura on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @07:09AM (#15860487)
This doesn't make sense, I really don't understand this at all.

JavaScript makes the web powerful so more content can be distributed via the Web. Without JavaScript we'd be having much more native apps, not less.

The web runs on any platform with a web browser (for the most part), native apps only run from one platform. Crippling the Web leads to more silos.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by CaptSpify on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @02:33PM (#15864155)
Javascript takes control from the client and gives it to the server. This is a terrible idea, that has ruined the web. Are there good sides to JS? sure, but they, by far, don't outweigh the bad.
Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by astura on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @03:29PM (#15864669)
Nonsense, javascript runs on the client.

No javascript = 100% code runs on the server.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by CaptSpify on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @05:13PM (#15865515)
Uh yeah, that's my point. Running code from some random server on your machine without verifying it first is a terrible idea.

We really need to start seeing the internet as a dark and scary place again. There's too much blind trust nowadays.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by krapp on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @07:27PM (#15866479)
How much of the code running on your operating system have you verified before compiling it?
Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by CaptSpify on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @11:00PM (#15867528)
A bit. But that's not the point. The point is I can verify it. There's a mountain of difference between the two.
Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by krapp on Thursday December 07, 2017 @05:25AM (#15868948)
You can verify javascript as well. Most libraries provide their source code and copies of the minified versions that run in your browser, and a lot of javascript isn't even minified.

And unlike everything else running on your machine, Javascript is sandboxed and limited in its capabilities, and you can turn it off if you want to. Try pre-emptively turning off your C++ runtime before booting up. Hell, for that matter, try rewriting your binaries on the fly the way you can override and rewrite javascript in the browser.

Yes, there are potential threats from running javascript, but javascript still relatively less threatening than everything else, including every other kind of executable code that can run from the web, such as java applets, flash and silverlight. I understand you don't like javascript, but you're overstating the malice of forethought behind its application in all but the edge cases.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by CaptSpify on Thursday December 07, 2017 @10:42AM (#15870979)
You can, and I do. But most sites use it in a way that breaks most of the functionality if you don't enable it. This is bad, and encourages bad habits to those that don't know what they are doing.

> Yes, there are potential threats from running javascript, but javascript still relatively less threatening than everything else...

yeah, all of those plain html attacks have been pretty damaging.... oh, wait, there are hardly any, because html makes sense, and is designed with the user in mind. JS is the opposite.

> including every other kind of executable code that can run from the web, such as java applets, flash and silverlight.

Those are shitty too. But just because they are worse, doesn't make JS acceptable.

> I understand you don't like javascript, but you're overstating the malice of forethought behind its application in all but the edge cases.

I'm not overstating the malice of forethought. I get that 99% of JS is by people who want their site to work well, and use it with good intentions. But even good intentions, done wrong, lead to bad results.

Re:Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV by tzahola on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @03:51AM (#15859618)