This comment section is wild.
The videos are up. Microsoft and Google weren't meeting in secret backrooms to censor this one channel. The most likely explanation is that a competing channel was trying to move their own videos up in the rankings by mass-reporting other videos on the topic.
It's a growing problem on social media platforms: Cutthroat channels or influencers will use alt accounts or even paid services to report their competition. They know that with enough reports in a short period of time they can get the content removed for a while, which creates a window for their own content to get more views.
The clue is the "risk of physical harm". People who abuse the report function know that the report options involving physical harm, violence, or suicide are the quickest way to get content taken down.
Why? Because they were all paying people to DDoS each other. Kinda silly, but good for business.
It’s also a monopoly, luxottica owns practically all brands and dictates the prices.
That estimate is way to high. More like 90 eurocents (~$1) for the whole thing, assembled. That's retail price:
(swiss is not its own language btw. but italian, german and french)
At the time(and really, even now) people would get their eyeglasses from their local provider. Who cares, insurance probably covers some or all of it. Even getting contacts or glasses as a prescription was like pulling teeth, since they wanted to keep it in house.
So the new market of get your prescription, then buy online was born. And it was like the wild west, not full of eye care professionals but...mostly less than above board places all fighting for your click.
Think about it...if you finally decide to Google eyeglass frames or such, you were entering a whole new realm. And why fight over SEO, when you can just take your competition offline, as most people will click a link, watch it load for 5s, then click back and try the next.
I have no idea if the industry is still shady or not, but 20 years ago, it was full of nothing but bad actors.
I don't know if it matters at all to the conversation or not, but none of the actors(gambling or eyeglasses) were based in the US, despite their domain names and courting US customers. The DDoS company was based in the US.
Exactly, this is why vision "insurance" is basically a scam, supported only by US tax laws that enable employers to offer vision "insurance" tax-free, while people buying their own eyeglasses have to pay with after-tax dollars.
Except where insanely inflated, glasses cost at most tens of dollars. Certainly not the kind of thing one needs insurance to cover.
The only frequent obvious problem I see is Youtube not telling people why their videos get hidden or taken down or down ranked. Long time creators get left in the dark from random big changes to the platform that could be solved with an email.
We have companies with billions of customers but smaller customer service than a mid-sized retailer from the 90s. Something is not right.
IME it's especially bad with Admob. They've purposefully kept their email contact option broken for years and the only "help" you can access is from their forum, which is the absolute worst and never provides any meaningful resolutions. It's awful.
People posting on these sites as content creators aren’t customers.
The root problem is twofold: the inability to reliably automate distinguishing "good actor" and "bad actor", and a lack of will to throw serious resources at solving the problem via manual, high precision moderation.
This can be accomplished with bogus dmca notices too. Since google gets such a high volume of notices the default action is just to shoot first and ask questions later. Alarmingly, there are 0 consequences (financial or legal) for sending bogus dmca notices
I think it's high time google stopped acting as judge jury and executioner in the court of copyright enforcement.
[https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai...]
Not saying Google is good or anything, but this is well trod ground at this point.
https://techhq.com/news/dmca-takedown-notices-case-in-califo...
That's not the argument IMO. They don't have to be intentionally malicious in each action. A drunk driver doesn't want to kill a little girl in the road. Their prior choices shape the outcome of their later options. A drunk driver decides to get behind the wheel after drinking. A large company makes a decision to make more profit knowing there are repercussions and calculating the risk.
Complain to Congress, they’re the ones who set this up to work this way.
So they might be right, they might be wrong - it might as well be a Twitter post.
You'd see them, if you read the article. Look for the big image with the caption saying "Source:".
I should warn you that you'll have to make it through seven (7) sentences of text before you get there.
As a side note, not a single word of your comment just now is true. Did you think no one would notice?
Edit: it’s a tiny text chip embedded in a reaction video type image in what looks like yet another ad, that actually showed up hidden by 2 other actual ads when it loaded.
I was just reading the text, because wtf.
Have you considered you’re just being a jerk?
>Two weeks ago, Rich had posted a video on installing Windows 11 25H2 with a local account. YouTube removed it, saying that it was "encouraging dangerous or illegal activities that risk serious physical harm or death."
Stop embarrassing yourself.
Please don't don't sneer at fellow community members on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's also not clear how an informational YouTube video would be either a circumvention tool or an act of circumvention if nothing in the video itself is infringing.
Who lobbied for it to work that way? I'm assuming google aren't entirely innocent here.
People are so quick to assume conspiracy because it is mentally convenient
Also, it doesn't even need to be collusion between Microsoft and Google, but to pretend like that's never a thing is to be ignorant of history.
Stop defending these big companies for these things. Even if your version of the story is true, the fact they allow their platform to be abused this way is incredibly damaging to content creators trying to spread awareness of issues.
But also, do you seriously think there is a massive amount of competition at the scale of a 330k subscriber channel for people to bother pulling off this kind of attack for two videos on bypassing Windows 11 account and hardware requirements?
Regardless of what happened here, Google is to blame at least for the tools they have made.
As for Microsoft, I don't think there's anything disagreeable with saying that they've tried hard to get people to switch to hardware with their TPM implementation and lying about the reasons. Likewise for forcing Microsoft accounts on people. I am not certain they were involved in this case, but they created the need for this kind of video to exist, so they are also implicated here.
Enough to cause this behavior. I don’t know if theres a mathematical or organization law or something, but it seems like theres always a way to abuse review mechanisms for large communities / sites.
Never enough manpower to do review for each case. Or reviews take a long time.
Manpower at a given salary cost.
All content platforms could throw more money at this problem, hire more / more skilled reviewers, and create better outcomes. Or spend less and get worse.
It's a choice under their control, not an inevitability.
If they don't react quickly and decisively to reports of "possible physical harm", even if the reports seem unfounded, they'll eventually get the NY Times to say that somebody who committed suicide "previously watched a video which has been reported to Youtube multiple times, but no action was taken by Google."
If that's too expensive, your platform is broken. You need to be able to process user reports. If you can't, rethink what you're doing.
The central ill of centralized web platforms is that the US never mandated customer/content SLAs in regulation, even as their size necessitated that as a social good. (I.e. when they became 'too big for alternatives to be alternatives')
It wouldn't be complicated:
- If you're a platform (host user content) over X revenue...
- You are required to achieve a minimum SLA for responsiveness
- You are also required to hit minimum correctness / false positive targets
- You are also required to implement and facilitate a third-party arbitration mechanism, by which a certified arbitrator (customer's choice) can process a dispute (also with SLAs for responsiveness)
As-is, they invest what current law requires, and we get the current situation.
I really wish someone could tell me that either
1) Yes we can make a system that enables functional and effective customer support (because this is what this case is about) no matter the language
2) No we can’t because it’s fundamentally about manpower which can match the context with actual harm.
Whatever I suspect, having any definitive answer to this decides how these problems need to eventually be solved. Which in turn tells us what we should ask and hope for.
I'm not saying that it's humans, but it's humans.
Augmented by technology, but the only currently viable arbitrator of human-generated edge cases is another human.
If a platform can't afford to hire moderation resources to do the job effectively (read: skilled resources in enough quantity to make effective decisions), then it's not a viable business.
But, it is viable. Many profitable businesses exist that don't pay for this.
One may instead mean that they want such businesses to be made non viable, in which case we should critically consider which business models that we might currently like other consequences of may be made non viable. For example, will users suddenly need to pay per post? If so, is that worth the trade-off?
Imho, we should do what we can to make sure they're required to pay for those externalities.
Then, they either figure out a way to do that profitably (great! innovation!) or they go under.
But we shouldn't allow them to continue to profit by causing external ills.
They do figure out how. That's the problem. This stuff is all trade offs.
If you say they have to remove the videos or they're in trouble then they remove the videos even if they shouldn't.
You can come up with some other rule but you can't eliminate the trade off so the choice you're making is how you want to pay. Do you want more illegitimate takedowns or less censorship of whatever you were trying to censor?
If you tried to mandate total perfection then they wouldn't be able to do it and neither would anybody else, and then you don't have video hosting. Which nobody is going to accept.
And that requirement can be created by more robust, outcome-defined regulation.
People keep looking at the absolute amount of profit across a massive service and assuming that it means they could afford to do something expensive. But the cost of the expensive thing is proportional to the size of the service, and then they can't, because dividing the profits by the number of hours of video turns into an amount of money that doesn't buy you that.
> And that requirement can be created by more robust, outcome-defined regulation.
What are you proposing exactly?
Outcome-based metrics are the things that often fail the hardest. It's reasonable to have a given level of human review when you have functioning CAPTCHAs on the reporting function to rate limit spam reports, but if you then require that by law and LLMs come around that can both solve CAPTCHAs and auto-generate spam reports to target competitors etc., now your cost of doing human review has gone up by many fold but you're still expected to meet the same outcomes. Then they either have to tune whatever metric you're not forcing them to meet up to draconian hellscape levels to meet the one you're demanding or you're now demanding they do something that nobody knows how to do whatsoever, both of which are unreasonable.
And all of this is because the government doesn't know how to solve the problem either. If you want to prohibit things with a "risk of physical harm" then you have to hire law enforcement to go drink from the fire hose and try to find those things so the perpetrators can be prosecuted. But that's really expensive to do properly so the government wants to fob it off on someone else and then feign indignation when they can't solve it either.
> The platform claimed its "initial actions" (could be either the first takedown or appeal denial, or both) were not the result of automation.
They'll silently fix the edge case in the OP and never admit it was any kind of algorithmic (OR human) failure.
Does Microsoft unfairly benefit from Google's takedown tirefire? I do not know.
But if I were designing a voting system for takedowns it would be: 1. 1 non-DMCA takedown vote per user per year 2. No takedown votes for accounts less than 1 year old 3. Takedown all equivalent content when a video is voted down. 4. Verification of DMCA ownership before taking down DMCA-protected content.
They need to do what? Browser, zoom, email client. They are never going to install anything.
All of these have great options on linux, and they work just as well.
Just put them on Debian stable and be done with it.
That being said, it's also pretty easy to get a full linux shell and even install gui apps via flatpak or whatever.
Even the one major 'windows' app that my mom needs to use is going Web only... so I figure if I install Debian Stable + Widevine that'll cover 99.9% of the use case and I gain an OS that just works correctly.
Any particular reasons?
All 3 give it a solid thumbs up. "It never crashes", "It's so easy", "It's fast", "None of that Windows bs".
Besides, all major distributions (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) ship with a shim signed by Microsoft, and systemd..
*BSD is the only escape, but for how long?
> Linux is under control of the same companies
Linux is indeed open source, so are you trying to say that "Linux is EFFECTIVELY under control of the same companies VIA UEFI WITH SECURE BOOT ENABLED"? Or is there a big-Tech cabal controlling Linux in another manner? I get that most big-Tech companies are major contributors to open source projects.
> all major distributions (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) ship with a shim signed by Microsoft
Having a shim signed by Microsoft makes no difference if these distributions are being installed on hardware without UEFI firmware implemented on the motherboard’s SPI flash e.g. motherboards from Purism (Librem Laptops), System76 (Thelio, Galago Pro, etc.), Framework Laptop (2021 →), Star Labs, Raspberry Pi / Single-Board Computers and uncountable DIY PC builds with motherboards (ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte, etc.) that expose Secure Boot options. It is usually only when consumer hardware is being used from major OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) that ship with only Microsoft’s key in the firmware trust database.
> and systemd
You are suggesting that “systemd” is also part of the lock-in or control (in your mind) of those distributions. But strictly in the context of shim and Secure Boot, systemd is not the same issue: systemd is an init-system/process manager in userland, not part of the firmware/boot loader signature infrastructure. Major distros use systemd, so from a “vendor/lock-in” narrative they may lump bootloader trust and systemd governance together. But strictly speaking your assertion is more of a opinion/ideological piece than a formal technical dependency.
> *BSD is the only escape
Not true. Not all Linux distributions use it — Tails, Qubes OS, PureOS, Alpine, Void, Gentoo, etc., deliberately avoid it. Most minimalistic, privacy, or DIY distributions refuse the Microsoft-signed shim route because their users are expected to control their firmware settings or use owner-controlled keys.
The YouTube drama you glossed over is the point: we've reached a stage where explaining how to bypass Microsoft's arbitrary hardware requirements gets censored for "physical harm"
On systemd: calling it a Red Hat/Microsoft, driven monoculture that mediates everything from device mounts to DNS is accurate, the same consolidation that gave us Microsoft signed boot chains also delivered one init system to rule them all, dismissing this as "merely ideological" is exactly how normalization works, by the time it's a technical dependency, it's alreadt too late, look at the "cloud" ecosystem..
You listed exceptions, but let's be honest, they are only just distros.. Tails and Qubes are security, hardened research tools, not daily drivers for "elderly relatives". Alpine, Gentoo and Void require deep knowledge, technical skills and an ongoing maintenance that defeats the "set it and forget it" goal
And yes, you can buy a Purism or System76 laptop, but that's the exception that proves the rule: you must pay a premium and choose their hardware to escape the shim problem, that's not freedom; it's choosing your corporate master from a smaller menu, all subject to the same master/ideology
*BSD remains the only ecosystem offering a complete, usable desktop without either a Microsoft signature or a sprawling, vendor, controlled init system, if that sounds hyperbolic, it's because the Overton window has already shifted so far toward corporate control that stating the obvious appears radical
Today Linux supports most HW but Tomorrow, if the Chip Security Act passes, chips will be legally required to contain tracking and kill-switch mechanisms, while the Act doesn't directly mandate Linux to restrict hardware support, it creates the legal infrastructure for exactly that: either mainstream distributions cooperate with the surveillance architecture or risk being barred from running on modern hardware
The 'choice' becomes BigTech-approved Linux that supports backdoored silicon, or niche distros that can't run on any new machine
I could continue with many more examples, but I feel like none of the people over hear understand the point
https://www.centerforcybersecuritypolicy.org/insights-and-re...
Strongly disagree on this one. All operating systems require maintenance of some sort, but you singled out Void and I find I'm doing far less maintenance with this one. Even with the venerable Debian, it always required some sort of regular maintenance to work around the bugs of it's legacy packages; Void does not have this glaring issue.
Source:
If they claim that a non automated review occurred but then still took down/denied appeal, what caused them to change course?
What is your source that the restoration of the video was not because of the noise?
Microsoft on the other hand seems to be reheating the old Palladium/Trusted Computing concept enhanced now by Copilot. This idea was already criticized over 20 years ago as a dangerous attempt of turning desktop machines to uncontrollable appliances which would run only approved software and serve, access approved safe content rigged with DRM. And frankly, with all this play with chat control, age verification it's hard to not see some similarities. Maybe that's where this is all going.
Nowadays they censor by putting pressure (by denying payment capabilities) on sites that offer content that they dont agree with.
I'm not quite that cool, but I have been using it full time since about 2009, so I'm not too far behind :)
The only time that I have to use Windows is because I have to play tech support for my parents, because despite considerable effort on my end, I have been completely unsuccessful at convincing them to move to Linux or Mac. It's a little annoying, because when I bring up the subject they act like I should just "live and let live", but that's a really stupid argument when they're saying this while I am fixing their computer. Somehow this is lost on them.
I have complained about this a bunch of times on here, but I'll say it again: If you work on Windows Update, then you should consider any career other than software engineer. Windows Update has made the world a worse place because it disincentivizes updating your computer, leading to an increase in open. Update software isn't allowed to suck.
It didn’t bother me that much until a few months ago when an auto update to Windows 11 bricked my mom’s computer, and since Windows won’t support filesystem that didn’t coexist with dinosaurs and because System Restore doesn’t work, and because the automatic repair tools never work, I ended up having to walk them through flashing a drive with a fresh copy of Windows 11 to get it working.
Oh, also, the diagnostic tools don’t appear to work, and they don’t really have “live USB” support for anything anymore, so I actually had to first walk my dad through flashing Ubuntu to a drive so I could tmate in, mount the NTFS drive and rsync all the files to my server. The only way to save Windows and NTFS is to use Linux, apparently:
If they were running Linux, I would have them set up with automatic system snapshots with ZFS and since ZFS is actually a competently built filesystem the snapshots would actually work.
I am ragging on filesystems but it’s not even inherent to filesystems. I run NixOS on my laptop and every time I do a rebuild it takes a snapshot, so if I break something I can just reboot and choose an older generation, and this works even on ext4. I think this is how Windows System Restore is supposed to work but it has the slight disadvantage of not actually working, or it is so limited so as to be useless (e.g. you apparently cannot restore a Windows 10 restore point from a Windows 11 install, a big problem if the auto update to Windows 11 was the actual problem).
I have debated giving the ultimatum, and I haven’t ruled it out, but in order for it to work I need to be willing to stick to my guns if they call my bluff, and I don’t know that I am there yet. I have been trying to plant the seed though it has not been successful.
I'll just have to remember to never visit Spain, lest I get arrested for drug trafficking because of my phone.
And if they do care they will find workarounds as you said.
Nothing will change, the frog has been sitting in boiling water for more than a generation now and the newbloods never experienced the computational freedom you hold dear; they will happily use whatever corporate surveillance technology is being forced upon them. They will even defend it to the bone if you try to take it away
(a big) But YouTube has grown to be such a monopoly, that they now dictate what we are going to be able to watch on the web.
This is sadly so hard to change, so many creators are now literally working "for" YouTube, and there are so many quality videos there.
They might even put the ads in different places for different users to throw off things like Sponsorblock.
I consider my time to be valuable, and really hate ads though so removing even a few minutes of ads are worth the $8 to me.
Also you can block the ads so you have the third option.
Until that point I’ll continue to pay. Content creators tell me they get more income from premium subscribers too so win-win.
No.
It's wild to me that people like you think you're in a position to make demands when you have zero leverage. How did you become so delusionally detached from the way the world works? You literally have no power over me, when you make demands of me, you're just pissing into the wind. Have fun getting wet, weirdo.
It is literally better in every way and helps support the content creators whose work you enjoy. As a bonus it includes YouTube music.
I guess taking those creators work without paying using adblock is one way to live, but that doesnt give you the moral high ground you think it does and your entitled attitude is kind of nasty. Do you really feel like YouTube and all of those creators owe you free shit? Just don't use it if you hate commercials that much and can't afford 8 lousy bucks.
No I don't work there. I'm just a fan who thinks the excuses people make to steal are gross.
I would have to jump through all kinds of hoops to do that, like creating an account, staying logged in, and on top of that I would still need to have my adblocker to fix their website trying to shove "trending" videos down my throat. The real recommendations based off viewing history work great with a disposable anonymous cookie.
Simply put, paying doesn't provide enough value over doing it the free way. This is YouTube's problem, not mine. I don't pirate games, simply because buying them from steam or gog is a much nicer user experience than pirating the games. But dealing with google and getting so little in return, still needing to use extensions to fix their crap website anyway? Nah, I don't care about their business model.
I’m having much more trouble imagining life without Google Maps that without YouTube.
The report system has been gimped massively,can't even type in reasons any more just have to select from some limited options and hope for the best. Took me over half a year of reporting a permanent street closure near me for them to actually change it and all the whole they were happy to direct people and cars down it . Other times they just outright reject reports without any reason.
Directions have got more sucky over the years.
More and more advertising has creeped into the maps as well, seeing the logos for stores and restaurants over other places and when zoomed out because they paid to be boosted.
I only use Google for street view and, on google earth, for historical aerial imagery these days, not for navigation. For that I use apps that use OSM like Organic Maps or now CoMaps.
I find it hard to extract the same practical value from YouTube. There have been cases where I would see how people repair stuff and to some degree it has been useful but it is hard to find that "useful" type of video you look for among all the noise. Product review videos are always kind of fishy, because reviewers are mostly sponsored. So I can't quite get to extract anything of great value from YouTube.
Btw, thank you for the Organic Maps tip. Looks really really cool!
That said, YouTube has been auto-dubbing videos using an algorithm that overdubs English spoken by people with an accent, which I consider discriminatory (if not outright racist), so I'm trying the various alternatives now. In a few months I think I'll have more of an opinion about them.
so is xfce but i'm too old for tweaking so much
It’s literally their mission: to organize the worlds information.
We just didn’t understand it at the time.
I'm happy to work in Linux and see the great improvements they did thru decades
Well - it is time that the rest of the world censors these two corporation. I don't want them to restrict information.
People will find workarounds by the way. This is now a Streisand effect - as people see that Google and Microsoft try to hide information from them, they will now look at this much more closely than before, with more attention.
(Having said that, my bypass strategy is to not use Windows 11 altogether. I don't depend on it, having used Linux since 21 years now, but my machine to the left is actually using Win10, for various reasons, such as that I can fix problems of elderly relatives still using Windows. But I won't use Win11 ever with its recall-spy software. I also don't care that it can be disabled - any corporation that tries to sniff-invade on me, is evil and must be banned.)
Edit: Ok so the video was restored. That was good, but still, we need an alternative here. Google holds WAY too much power via youtube.