Mr. Stallman, is that you?

---

One more reason Google sucks:

Google recently deleted hundreds of videos of the war in Syria. Potential evidence of war crimes erased. Original uploaders may be dead.

I don't think some tech people realize the consequences of their decisions.

> Google recently deleted hundreds of videos of the war in Syria

Wow, that is truly evil. Do you have a source on this?

Edit: found article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/middleeast/syria-yo...

> Wow, that is truly evil.

Arguably. Youtube is a video hosting site, it's not a political platform and has no obligation to host content it doesn't deem suitable for their platform.

Those videos should be sent to news agencies, (inter)national archives, the UN, war crime tribunals, etc instead (or in addition to) "entertainment" video hosting sites.

They are under no obligation to host the videos, but they can't just delete them. It's irresponsible, immoral and unethical.

By parallel, misprision of felony is a crime in the US:

> Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

There is a moral imperative created when someone else is giving you these records. It's like someone asking you to call 911. You don't have to go out looking for emergencies to call 911 about, but you do have to deal with it when one is dropped in your lap. In this case "dealing with it" just means retaining a copy and making it available on some terms.

> They are under no obligation to host the videos, but they can't just delete them.

One implies the other. If your media backup and recovery plan is Youtube, then you need another plan.

> Youtube is a video hosting site, it's not a political platform and has no obligation to host content it doesn't deem suitable for their platform.

For "not a political platform," Youtube has quite a lot of political content, and it's not at all clear to me why someone would think that the idea of a general interest video hosting site and a political platform are somehow exclusive at all.

And as far as obligations go... I'd imagine that there's no legal obligation, and maybe there shouldn't be, but that isn't the end of the question. As far as I know, I'd have no formal obligation to stop and render aid or even contact emergency services if I came across someone unconscious and bleeding on the sidewalk near my house, but that doesn't mean I might not be under some obligation.

And one problem is that organizations like Youtube often don't put themselves together in such a way that there's anyone interested in and capable of responding to these questions.

It's almost like they come across a turtle in the desert, and it's flipped over on its back, belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not with out their help. But they're not helping. Why is that?

> why someone would think that the idea of a general interest video hosting site and a political platform are somehow exclusive at all.

A general interest here seems commercial in nature and is thus susceptible to whims of the owner(s) and their ToS.

One possible solution seems to be something like a Wikipedia for videos, a non-profit org, but the cost of video hosting seems to still be prohibitively high for a non-commercial entity in 2018.

The likely reason why they ended up on Youtube was because every last Android phone (and a fair few other phones) have Youtube bundled, complete with a one button upload.

In the spur of the moment, in particular in a warzone, the proper place to store something is the last thing on one's mind.

Regarding "Youtube is a video hosting site, it's not a political platform": politics enters any situation where 2 or more people are involved. Another poster has clearly explained how YouTube is quite fine hosting shows with what are clearly political views as well as choosing whose views are currently in favor. Calling any editing effort non-political is either woefully uninformed or an attempt to manipulate others (snowed or trying to snow others).

Regarding "has no obligation to host content it doesn't deem suitable": Yes, sadly, this is a problem not unique to YouTube. All hosters get to decide what to host and to change that decision at any time.

Some people choose to respond to hosting on sufferance by becoming sycophants (placate the hoster with speech one believes won't offend the censors) but that is ultimately detrimental to one's own message and free speech overall. We have no solution for this that is really easy for nontechnical computer users because we all depend on other parties for Internet access. If homes had Internet access that could not be taken away, we might be able to recommend self-hosting. For now, in the age of the ISPs, the best we can do is massively decentralized hosting which uses no DRM, running additional nonfree code (such as YouTube's DRM in JS), and somehow getting a lot of peers with lots of storage and bandwidth to keep available copies of everything uploaded (we ought not decide that one message is worth sharing and not another message because that is the very problem we're trying to solve).

This is a tough problem to solve. I don't know what a viable solution will look like quite yet. But I know what to avoid: we won't solve this problem by placating big business desires for more control over what we say and how we get copies of other people's works.

A correction: running no additional nonfree code.

YouTube is not just a video hosting site. They are a primary conduit through which global human culture is conducted. Their actions to actively control and manipulate human culture (as Eric Schmidt said in his book The New Digital Age it is Googles responsibility to do because they are rich and therefore know better than humanity how human culture should go) is something they bear total responsibility for. And, at least for me personally, "but we thought it would make more money this way" is not a legitimate reason to facilitate mass murder.

Sure, in theory... In the end you either educate the users if you can, or try to make the big platforms more accepting of this, or both. There is no perfect solution. Being an "entertainment site" isn't a good excuse.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429

For those that don't get the joke: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/106-is-that-you-kd/

I can't imagine listening to the audio, but reading the transcript is nauseating due to the frequent occurrence of the work like.

197 occurrences of the word like.

This particular section of the transcript annoyed me the most.

---

He’s fired. And becomes like basically a celebrity for certain parts of like the right. And they were kind of like… Like this is not what he was necessarily saying about himself, but for them, it’s like… He’s like this perfect symbol of like the qualified, brilliant, genius coder who’s the best person for the job, whatever his race or gender happen to be, who said one reasonable thing and like got fired because of political correctness.

That's the paragraph that led me to hitting the back button.

That couldn't possibly be the source of this joke, so why this particular link?

(Also, frankly, this interview doesn't exactly present its participants as the sharpest tools in the shed.)

The comments that followed my comment are the reason I wish it was possible to simply delete a ycombinator/hacker news profile.

It's an entertaining episode from a show I enjoy. Apparently, there are no other fans of the show here.

Very sorry.

You're entitled to your tastes; just because no other fans of the show chimed in, doesn't mean you need to feel sorry for posting it (though some explanation of relevance to the topic would be appreciated).

So don't worry; in a day nobody will remember this subthread anyway :).

It builds up over time with a slow drip drip drip. Just the constant soul destroying pointlessness of socializing on the internet though comment boards.

Anyways, I googled it and no it is not possible to delete a hacker news account. I successfully disabled reddit, facebook, twitter and linkedin though. So, this is the last outpost of an abysmal time on the web.

Thanks everyone. I am out.

Wtf is this?

> I encourage you to consider hosting your media with the Internet Archive and your own website instead of YouTube.

unfortunately this makes your content pretty hidden. You are not within youtube's search anymore, you're not in any sidebar as related video either

This is why I am increasingly of the hub and spoke method. You create content and host it on your own, but then reupload it to various sites that fill a need (youtube/vimeo/dailymotion for video, etc). Then not only is the content when removed from one (say youtube) still there in another place/form, but it can just be reuploaded.

Own your own content, but if you seek to spread a message you might want to use closed proprietary ecosystems as long as you aren't dependent on them.

For example, I was recently updating linkedin, and went to add Bruce Schneier, but he had a post that said he never checks or uses it and only links to his website from there. He still has a presence there though, and that really hit me how much these little walled gardens we let take over so much of our compute ecosystem are starting to look like prison, even for your standard copyleft hating SV hipster.

Of course Stallman would say don't even use them, and he makes some good points, but the problem we have now is even if you have a good message you can't reach the masses without going through some priestly gatekeeper of the government-corporate media power. So you have to use the system to beat the system.

> So you have to use the system to beat the system.

Which by the way is what RMS did back when the GNU system didn't exist: use proprietary UNIX to develop GNU, replace the system piecemeal.

The two cases (YouTube and using nonfree OSes) are not comparable as the grandparent poster and this suggest.

In Stallman's case there were no free software OSes. One could not use a computer in freedom. Therefore he used a nonfree OS to write free software until he could run a free software OS and thus had no more need for nonfree OSes. For years now he (and the FSF) don't run nonfree systems. They even endorse computers (and other computer hardware) that can be run completely in freedom (see https://www.fsf.org/ryf for details).

We already have file hosting options that don't use DRM, nonfree JS (or indeed any JS), and avoid the other problems of YouTube. There's no need for coming up with something new as we already have viable other means of sharing files.

We don't need YouTube, they need us. By buying into their limitations and restrictions uploaders endorse YouTube (which is undesirable and certainly not very thoughtful) and help foist YouTube's choices on others (which is unethical).

Still, the issue remains: if you have a message to spread, how would you go about spreading it? The brute facts are, not putting copies of the message in those evil centralised social networks means the message will be invisible to many people, in some cases the majority of the target audience.

I'm all for getting rid of YouTube, but I'm not sure how we should do it.

Well yeah, think of it like backups. You wouldn't keep just a single copy of an important document, would you? And certainly not on a cloud service with randomly-enforced ToS, right?

Upload to as many sites as possible, link between them. Keep offline copies if you can.

>IA hosting is gratis

Not a scaleable solution though. If everyone were to do the same they'd quickly be consumed by bandwidth costs.

That's quite a claim made without any pointer to evidence. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim?

IA has been around for many years and not bumped into this problem. Nor are they making choices that even hint at this problem. In fact, they have long made choices (such as default derivatives generation) which suggest they have plenty of storage space and bandwidth.

Also, this isn't an evidenceless complaint specific to IA.

RasPi + Cloudflare should be a good solution. Even live streaming is possible with CDN as live streams are just conventions with playlists and metadata. I can't comment on costs at scale, but Twitter claims equal ingress and egress bandwidth for Persicope (ie. first egress hit caches), standard HLS will just have more latency and not more cache misses if I understand correctly. My stream is 1500-2500kbps 720p.

How about distributing one's videos through BitTorrent instead? Should scale pretty well. Granted, viewing the video becomes a hassle. But it works.

Or with PeerTube, which makes videos available in the browser AND uses a bittorrent-like protocol: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

IPFS is better for that. Example: https://eternum.io/ipfs/QmSV87hzPYKxo8Go7A2JCsfCVXPqV8poovGk...

IA (https://archive.org) offers a BitTorrent feed for each of its uploads. You should check out what IA offers.

Do you contribute to the Internet Archive? Video service is ridiculously expensive, and using them to hotlink HTML5 video onto your Web site seems...kinda antithetical to the spirit of what you're saying.

This is true but I think OP meant Internet Archive in addition to self hosting.

> use the Internet Archive (at https://archive.org/) and your own hosting instead of YouTube

Use IA to set up a canonical, permanent URL for the media, which resolves to a host under your control as long as it's available, then resolves to the IA-hosted archived copy if your site ever disappears? As long as the URL doesn't change, a CDN could do most of the heavy lifting anyway, right?

No, OP meant embedding Archive hosted assets onto your site, or any site.

> You can use [the Internet Archive URL] in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage

There's nothing special about "video service" nor is that even a relevant concept to discuss and in no way contradicts anything I said. If you're going to claim otherwise, please be specific about this alleged contradiction so we can have a meaningful conversation. Serving data is serving data. Hosters have to put effort into disguising/obfuscating a URL to make it not be a static link (and thus completely useful for HTML5 video/audio use, or pointing others to download and keep, or something else).

If a hoster doesn't want one to distribute the files, that is the issue. Not whether one distributes them for use in an HTML5 video/audio element, or downloading for local storage, or use in some other way.

https://blog.archive.org/2009/07/01/archive-org-supports-the... would seem to address your claim.

Video service is special because it is expensive on account of video files being large. You’re pulling a lot of bandwidth off Archive when you embed HTML5 onto your site. On its face, that’s a pretty shitty thing to leech from a charitable organization; YouTube pays for that with advertising. Archive takes donations. Are you donating?

I’m confused that you think this isn’t relevant. You’re directly advocating hotlinking against Archive and you don’t even mention supporting their operation in the slightest. I have no idea what you think I said, because your reply makes little sense.