cross-posted from: https://lemmy.org/post/1872634
So, starting now, Google started mandating full JS for YT, effectively breaking all third-party clients and locking the site to their official client.
This reeks of DRM.
UPDATE: Installing Deno and installing yt-dlp through PyPi fixes yt-dlp but the very idea that Google is mandating JS to lock down YT in an attempt at pseudo-DRM is still crappy.
UPDATE #2: inv.nadeko.net is working again for now.
I am so glad I had the foresight to use yt-dlp to back up most of my favorite videos. Not all of them, but I just thought we’d get more time.
But yeah, I knew this would happen. The age verification thing was really controversial, so Google would have had to expect that people would try to find other ways to access YouTube. They won’t stop here and will go after Deno and NewPipe.
I’m pretty much done with YouTube. It’s just not what it used to be. All my favorite YouTubers are either gone, have changed for the worse, or are on Nebula. It’s mostly just slop, and I won’t miss it.
I wish there was a place that had agdq and speedrunning clips. Then I could leave.
Twitch is atrocious for archived content.
Nebula is just a better experience most cases too. It just shows you what you’re subscribed to in chronological order, which is how YouTube used to work when it was less annoying.
It also shares more revenue with creators and doesn’t force feed you ads. I really hope it continues to grow and never betrays its roots.
Sadly there’s so much good music from the 2000s on there that I can’t find elsewhere. Small bands that never really broke through.
Inaccesible because of autocratic morons.
As someone who is listening to a video on NewPipe as I type this very comment, no they did not
Came here to say this after giving it 24 hours in case it was just lucky timing
However, now if I try to watch a YT vid in Firefox, I get the “Oops something went wrong” right when the Ad should have popped up
I’ve gotten that occasionally, it usually fixes with a refresh. Was it persistent for you?
yeap… happened again after the refresh
I had almost given up on youtube since they blank out your home if you do not allow them to track history so this may have started a bit back. I only went on it because someone sent me a link and I just opened it directly… all in all, just another reason to not use YouTube
Haha I actually love having a blank Home (and especially blank Shorts) since as it has significantly moderated excessive YT use for me. I’m honestly surprised that was their course of action as it ultimately had reduced my use of the app.
Well, that’s super lame! I wish there was a good alternative. I’ll probably stick with it as long as ReVanced works.
my yt-dlp is on a daily auto-update loop, so I missed this. It’s working still. My thanks go to the amazing yt-dlp devs.
They’re going to keep enshitifying it until they kill it completely. Them blackholes, I mean shareholders, will never have enough money.
Overheard at the last shareholders conference. “Until everyone empties all their ecoin & change jars and the only things left to eat are those mysterious Budding’s sandwich meats with some shit ass processed excuse for a loaf of bread.” This is where we want the average American citizen to be living/existing/panicking.” I dunno his name, but it was for sure a rich, old, white dude. A real Montgomery Burns type looking MF’er. I dunno? They all look the same to me. EDIT: Apparently I fit that demographic according to the young ‘uns visiting us. Although they think I look like “The Dude” from “The Big Lebowski”.
The Dude abides.
They won’t kill it, just like it hasn’t died so far. The content, viewer demographics, and algorithm continue to shift. There’s too much money with all the ads and subscription fees. Most people view some content on it by default.
Its gonna be the new cable TV in a way. Kinda sucks, some good stuff on it, but mostly slop filled with ads. And everyone will still use it. Even if they block all 3rd party access, people like me are still going to use it to some limited degree. There will be a video about how to fix a random plumbing fitting that is leaking in my house, or how to fix some random thing on my 15 year old car.
The market that accesses YouTube from a PC or Mac is shrinking rapidly.
They would prefer you use one of the apps and at some point that will be the majority, if it isn’t already
That is by design.
With an actual computer, you have a lot more options in terms of how you can handle the content. They don’t own your PC (yet) but they do own the mobile market and the operating system entirely.
You don’t have any form of root/admin access on a mobile device of any type nor any other device (tv box, game console, tablet, etc). For the handful that have jailbroken or rooted their phones, many apps don’t work (by design of course). You can do it, but you’ll break a ton of stuff in the process. That’s enough to keep causals from doing it and leaves the tiny group of hardcore dorks that are willing to live with the complexities that are required.
I’m going to put on my tinfoil hat and say this is what keeps any real attempt at a Linux phone in the gutter. If people had a choice for their mobile operating system and the freedom to do what they want with it, the big tech companies would shit a brick. They’ve already removed the ability to block ads on mobile devices for the vast majority, they’re finally getting what they wanted (save the handful of Firefox users left).
Linux phones won’t be a thing until there is hardware for them. With apple/google phones, the manufacturers will not release the necessary software so that is needed for a 3rd party OS. Google and Apple will make sure that anyone who makes hardware for them are legally tied to keeping that software tightly closed. Even if someone did manage to reverse engineer it, it would be a herculean effort and would break as soon as a new release is out (or if one of the manufacturers “accidentally” released some exploit code for the reverse engineered drivers).
It’s an ugly world these greedy fucks have made for us.
They don’t own your PC (yet)
MS pretty much owns the desktop PC space with Windows though, and even though there’s nothing stopping you from installing an alt OS on PC generally, Win11 not supporting anything older than Zen+ or Coffee Lake and flat-out refusing to run on anything older than Bulldozer or Nehalem even without support because everything before those arches lacks the POPCNT instruction, isn’t a good sign to say the least.
Hopefully MS don’t start acting like Google and start breaking WINE/Proton and DXVK/VKD3D and crippling Linux gaming and even general desktop use on Linux, or even forcing Pluton to be enabled platform-wide blocking the ability to install alt OSes.
I will set my fucking phone on fire before i install a google app on it
It’s an ugly world these greedy fucks have made for us.
We EAGERLY helped them. We walked into the cage and clasped the manacles all by ourselves.
Who’s “we” though?
I see the largest two camps here as (1) casuals that don’t have the know how to protest via alternatives and (2) the tech literate that are willing but ultimately limited by the larger forces at work.
I think it’s fair to blame the people with the power that exploited the first group and left the second without choice.
Yeah last I’ve seen even smartphones and tablets are decreasing quickly relative to smart TVs.
What??? Where did you see this? I would assume the mobile market is still skyrocketing.
The day smart tube next stops working is the day i stop using youtube. I will NEVER watch a shitty youtube ad and I’m sure as shit not paying google any money whatsoever.
What I don’t understand. Like, they know people hate shitty ads.
If they had like, literally any level of vetting on the ads, people might actually watch them. But its all fucking scams or podcasts of lies pretending to be ads etc.
I know it costs money to have people but sales people serve a purpose.
They have a bank of companies that are paying to have their ads shown.
The companies dictate who they want to market to.
Google originally pitched scanning your things for relvant ads and delivered on it, but that’s not where the money is at.
It’s so weird hearing about YouTube ads. I can’t recall ever seeing one. I know one day they’re going to finally ruin it and I won’t be able to consume it any more, an event I try to prepare for, but I haven’t really done anything special to avoid ads except all the stuff you have to do just to be secure on the web in the first place. Like just using librewolf out of the box works fine?
I’m gonna start listening to podcasts, they’re more informative and less bandwidth heavy anyway.
Holy shit I did not realize how complex of a project yt-dlp has to be to do something as simple as download a video… Kudos to the devs
This post’s title is just completely incorrect and it looks like 700+ people didn’t even read the comments or the actual issue for one minute.
Good job guys!
I mean sure, OP’s title is somewhat clickbaity but it’s kind of true though. YouTube have broken compatibility with all existing unofficial clients. It’s good that yt-dlp are managing to work around it. I expect many other clients will follow suit but some of them may be unable to install additional dependencies and remain broken.
Ultimately, what is the last straw that will break the camel’s back? Every client/consumer will have their breaking point.
I mean sure, OP’s title is somewhat clickbaity but it’s kind of true though.
Somewhat? Did you read the issue? Here’s a recap: yt-dlp will introduce a proper JS runtime in the future to better cope with YT’s JS. That’s it… that’s the issue.
YouTube have broken compatibility with all existing unofficial clients.
Yup, Grayjay still worked for me as of this morning, and that’s on a build that’s a month old. So either I’m not impacted by the A/B test, or it’s actually not a big deal.
Plugins update independently from the app.
Just to give a second point of confirmation: newpipe is working.
New pipe and smart tube both working for me.
My self hosted downloader similarly didn’t skip a beat.
Which one?
YoutubeDL-Material. It works great and I’ve found it downloads videos from other sources too.
You should remember to send all YT videos that you watch to archive.org
There are browser extensions to do this conveniently
Which extension are you referring to? Is it the standard Wayback Machine extension or a youtube specific one?
Didnt want to name specifics because they might not exist for certain browsers, but you can search “archive” and there will be many
!remember 8 hour
Honestly surprised YouTube hasn’t just required DRM yet
Well… the only available option to them for DRM that will work on all devices is Widevine L3 which is entirely bypassable. Spend a few hours on the net and you can figure out how to do it too.
Well, if they want to make everyone either buy Rokus or watch YT either in Edge on Windows (the official way to watch Netflix on PC currently) or on another Android device than a Roku with the official YT app, they could just implement a full Widevine L1 lockdown, and sadly, just buying a Roku to watch YT on or watching it on a pre-existing Roku along with the paid streaming services, is probably what most people would actually do if they locked it down like that.
Basically, Google would win the ad blocker and third-party front-end war by locking YT into pre-approved apps or devices, and as an added bonus (for them), they’d snuff out any competing platforms as Widevine L1 would also kill the ability to mirror one’s YT channel to one of the alternative platforms, and I guarantee most people who just post any random thing on YT don’t store their source video files locally to be able to to re-upload on PeerTube, Odysee, or Rumble, if anything, they’re likely just filming and posting straight from their phones.
Now, the people with nice studio setups probably do have a local copy of their source files stored somewhere that they could re-up on their alternative platform of choice, but average Joes filming from a phone outnumber them.
I don’t think L1/PlayReady SL3K will happen. Imagine Google telling people that in order to view content on their website they need to use a competitor’s browser. Sure, technical people like you and I understand what’s happening behind the scenes, but average joe will just think Google fumbled it and can’t make it work with their own browser, it’s bad press for them. I also think that at least for now there’s too many desktop users to be able to pull it off. They’ll have to tell all the desktop users to go fuck themselves in order to do that, and that will get a good amount of people pissed off.
You know YouTube Revanced?
The only pre-baked option to them…
If they require a full JS implementation, they could crap out different algorithms and rotate you through them. I’m afraid they’ll eventually use a coding LLM to generate daily algorithms.
Imagine YT-DLP needing to adjust to code changes daily.
Could you briefly summarize what’s needed to make it happen? Not asking for a step-by-step just very rough overview
There are a lot of thorough guides on vidhelp along with dumped L3 keys.
You’re basically just saying go get a guide like you could have just not said anything LOL
Not sure what’s up with the self-entitlement but I got shocking news: I don’t own you anything. You asked for a brief explanation and I told you where to go find it. Instead of writing that snarky comment you could’ve instead used the web for its original purpose and conduct your own research and not bug strangers on the internet to do your bidding.
Instead of writing that snarky comment you could’ve instead used the web for its original purpose and conduct your own research and not bug strangers on the internet to do your bidding
You’re not the only one they’re doing it to (I went to their profile to see if this is a pattern, and it sure is).
sleep-pc: a .NET Native AOT tool to make Windows sleep after a timeout
Seems like one of them bad apples. Hopefully the admins of their home instance deal with them soon.
Just ran am update for ytdlp and it’s working again.
Beginning very soon, you’ll need to have the JavaScript runtime Deno installed to keep YouTube downloads working as normal.
if only you could read 😔
Well the title claims that Youtube just broke third party clients, so you sorta expect the clients to be broken. Shit title
Damn reading is hard
*writing
Read past headlines
I do, I just explained why so many are confused, friendo.
How much into the past are we talking about?
At least 10,000 years to get the full picture of how human civilization got to this point.
With a focus on how some us think there’s only 4000 years of history.
Installed where?
Can’t recall installing such a runtime manually.
Is it bundled with yt-dlp?
So many questions…If only one could be precise
youtube has a monopoly on video content, they can (and will) do what they want
Otoh, you also have Odysee and PeerTube to move your own content to.
Those are fantastic solutions if you don’t want anybody to watch your content.
You can post it on those first, and on YouTube a week later, the way some creators promote Nebula or their Patreon
At least you own your content on those platforms, PeerTube especially if self-hosted, and not Google. If you self-host a PeerTube instance using local hardware, for example, no one can take it down on a whim but you.
With YT, Google can and will nuke your channel for any reason they see fit.
You got a source to google owning your content if you upload to YouTube?
I’m assuming they mean de facto, not de jure.
In reality YT can do whatever the hell they want. You aren’t going to win from their entire team of ivy leage lawyers unless you’re independently wealthy yourself.
Lessee, recent censorship issues, the fact that you can get demonetized or straight-up struck down if you say something Google don’t like, the fact that your channel can and will get taken down if Google don’t like you…
That isn’t Google owning your content though, just Google deciding what you can do with your content on their service.
It is for all functional purposes the same thing.
If you don’t own and control it and someone else does and you have no power or ability to stop them
You don’t own it
To try to draw a line here is pointless in anything but a debate of technicalities and reality doesn’t care about those.
Then start watching content on peertube, bozo
The fediverse is kind of like a dandelion growing out of the cracks in a concrete slab.
Hopefully the seeds take.
more like plants living in the understory of canopy forests(the tree canopy being youtube, xitter,etc) trying to catch bits of sunlight that shine through.
Yup, the fediverse has a lot of things still to solve and figure out before it goes anywhere. I have little faith that present moderation would scale well if there was a massive growth in the userbase. And then there’s the other issue. There’s a discussion on the peertube github for two years now on how to keep instances from dying.
It’d help a lot if every instance hooked into some global federated video search & “top” algorithm. Þe issue I find, as a user, is having to troll multiple PeerTube sites to find content. I don’t really see þe “federated” part of it. Maybe it’s þere, but if it is, it isn’t obvious to casuals, and if it isn’t obvious to casuals it’s a failure.
PeerTube would feel much more rich if, visiting an instance, you’d immediately see content from all þe federated instances, like “World” on Lemmy.
The way you write the is so annoying to humans and does nothing against ai.
Last I spoke to @Sxan@piefed.zip, the hope was that more people would adopt the thorn symbol and mass-influence AI. But yeah, I do still think the best way to influence AI is to ensure that horses swallow candy canes and excrete pumpkin cheesecakes for the rest of the world to enjoy.
you missed a thorn in algorithm.
where is my prize?? :D
I don’t really see þe “federated” part of it. Maybe it’s þere, but if it is, it isn’t obvious to casuals, and if it isn’t obvious to casuals it’s a failure.
I think it’s because that contrary to the lemmyverse, peertube does not auto-accept federating servers. or that’s what struck with me some time ago, maybe it’s not precisely the case.
Makes sense, and I guess it’s understandable as video’s riskier content. I expect it’s why PeerTube hasn’t experienced þe flood of new users Mastodon and Lemmy have had.
And Nebula if you want to see how it works when viewers pay for the videos.
Couldn’t posting your normal content to PeerTube or whatever, and then selling premium content on Nebula to fund the would-be free PeerTube portion, be a potentially viable model vs. gaming the AdSense system on YT and hoping for the best?
Like, if you cover the same niche as Not Just Bikes, for example, but replace YT with PeerTube, that could maybe work provided you have a big enough following.
Why not both? As far as I can tell, only Nebula originals are restricted to just one platform. Everything else is in two places. I think you could totally play the same game with a PT+Nebula combo.
Mainly because PT’s a better fit to Nebula being creator-centric, vs. YT where it’s what Google says goes and you have basically no say over your content.
Yeah that’s a better pair as far as censorship is concerned. On YT, you need to dance around sensitive topics as if you’re talking to a child.
However, as there are more viewers on the bigger platform, abandoning that place doesn’t happen so easily. It’s basically like Facebook all over again. Isn’t there a term for this type of inertia…
Honestly, you shouldn’t talk to children using words like sewer slide, ledollarbean, or unalive. I fucking hate this algospeech. It drives me to violence.
Nebula never works well for me. The seeking and tracking causes endless buffering, and sometimes not even a hard refresh fixes this. Their site is just so buggy but when it works, at least it works decently well.
Weird, it works fine for me. Both the site and and app.
I’ve used it for a year now on Linux, Android and Windows with no problems at all. Maybe something else is causing your issues.
I have never used the website, but the app has always worked really well for me.
We have an excellent set of videos and creators on the respective communities: !peertube@lemmy.world
So do we
Google doing everything they can to anger everyone.
I cancelled YT Premium after paying pretty much since Google Music was a thing. The price keeps going up ($14/month now here in the US), and Lite is meh even for the discounted price (e.g. no background play I think?).
They just keep building the wall higher and higher, while they survive only because creators keep filling it with content. Nobody is watching “YouTube Originals” or their first party content. YouTube exists solely because of third party creators.
Not only that but I can survive with Brave or Firefox with UBO or whatever. It’s not that hard to avoid the ads, even if it’s a little inconvenient vs being able to use the app.
If you’re using your phone, definitely check out YouTube revanced. Or if on a tv check out Smart tube next. No ads, sponsor block baked in. It’s all the perks of premium (plus more) without the cons of supporting an evil company
You can either revance your yt music app, or use Firefox with an extension that keeps videos playing while your phone is locked.
It’s annoying but I guess they’re just evolving their anti spam mechanisms, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
JS is one of the most popular scripting languages anyway so having it as a requirement shouldn’t hinder anyone.
And not to throw shade at the people who designed yt-dlp, but designing a tool to “scrap” the content of an evolving platform in a different language (with different tooling etc) than the one said platform is expecting to be consumed by might have been a mistake
anti spam? on the video player? you cannot think is seriously.
JS is one of the most popular scripting languages anyway so having it as a requirement shouldn’t hinder anyone.
except any of the clients that care about not running whatever untrusted google code in an unrestricted environment.
about +12 hours ago spotdl (which uses yt-dlp) was broken. But I keep go on watching videos on newpipe
Someone give it to me straight, what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game? I know yt-dlp and invidious have been quite crafty at adapting to these changes, but the scales seem to be tipping.
It feels like Google will dominate the game into submission the same way it did with AOSP and Chrome. I know I’m being dramatic but it’s really starting to feel like we’re being cornered into a hopeless situation
Well the problem for google is that Youtube MUST be accessible to almost any internet user in the world - that’s a key reason why it’s so ubiquitous.
The reason this cat and mouse game has lasted as long as it has in the first place is because any method that is currently being quashed has a solution lying in another user agent that youtube can’t kill.
If one day YT sets a “minimum requirements” page on their website to access their content, they’ve immediately ceded market share to the next upstart. Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
As long as YT caters to the lowest common denominator (Their business model essentially binds them to do so), there will always be a software/hardware environment that these tools can spoof. The moment that stops being the case, people look for other options.
A similar analogy would be how Microsoft handled the windows 11 requirements - the strict requirements locking out years upon years of hardware has resulted in a substantial amount of users finding workarounds for their machines (like windows 10 IOT LTSC), or to even jump to linux entirely. They abandoned the entry level users, so entry level users are abandoning them.
If one day YT sets a “minimum requirements” page on their website to access their content, they’ve immediately ceded market share to the next upstart. Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
This all incorrectly assumes that there exists any viable competition to switch to. YouTube ran at a net loss for over a decade to get the reach they currently have, only because Google was one of the very few companies who could feasibly afford to do so. Nobody else with the resources to compete with YouTube is willing to compete with YouTube, because of the massive cost required to get even a fraction of that user base, let alone a critical mass.
And most of the content people access YouTube for is only found on YouTube, so those hypothetical users aren’t going to switch to a new platform, they’re going to either just flat-out stop watching or will replace their devices.
Users replacing their devices isn’t feasible in many parts of the world, especially outside of the west.
You are correct that a service similar in scale and scope would not appear out of the aether due to the cost, but to say nothing would make a grab for those underserved users would be foolish.
Again - the entry level cost conscious users do constitute a large part of Youtube’s userbase, so even if they are burdensome to support (due to ad blocking rates, required legacy features to upkeep, and so on), they are a core part of the audience that youtube serves. In an economic environment where people cannot afford to abandon their hardware, there is no chance they will opt out of receiving information and entertainment entirely because of their devices being unsupported by google’s sites. They will move to the next service in the chain, either existing or new. To google’s investors, that shrinkage in userbase may be untenable.
PeerTube or LBRY (The protocol, not Odysee) might help in that. As in decentralized instances focussing on specific content. All connected via hubs/open-protocols.
Basically Decentralized or distributed networks are key. The next hurdle is populating those platforms with content.
Not just populating with content, but also create revenue in some way. Otherwise creators won’t post their content there, they have to make a living from whatever platforms they’re on after all
Would be cool if someone started a thread/post, where we could discuss & debate this.
As in how obe can build a good content platform that can truly challenge big tech.
Unfortunately video platforms are also much harder on small hosts. More storage, more bandwidth, harder to moderate.
I feel like the solution might be a media management company, like buffer, offering to host videos directly and over a open protocols for a small upgrade in addition to posting to YT et all.
Tiktok and intagam are standing by to at least take over short form video.
Tiktok has also experimented with longer videos.
Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
Not-so-fun fact, this is exactly what ATSC 3 is trying to do for OTA broadcast TV.
ATSC 3 ? Never heard of that, but I’m curious.
New broadcast standard which if implemented as intended, will use Widevine DRM to encrypt/decrypt streams, and require a web connection to view previously free OTA broadcasts, also that DRM will limit what you can do with it, as Rossmann puts it early on in his ‘this is why I show these things in my vids’ vid. https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/videos/watch/61332f1b-9a15-46b6-8a97-c4e378fbce72
I would be alarmed, if there was still anything worth watching on TV.
Never has been
Damn. Hopefully some capture mechanism will exist so piracy sites can still reupload a backup.
HDMI capture will always work.
A similar analogy would be how Microsoft handled the windows 11 requirements - the strict requirements locking out years upon years of hardware has resulted in a substantial amount of users finding workarounds for their machines (like windows 10 IOT LTSC), or to even jump to linux entirely.
Staying in windows 10 sure, but I’ve yet to see much evidence people have been switching much to Linux.
Good point, but the result is still the same - people defect away from the “modern” product instead of complying and buying a new machine.
Anecdotally, I’ve recently helped friends and family (a sample size of about 4 people now) to set up either windows LTSC or Linux mint on their machines as they are uninterested in replacing their computers, so maybe linux is a minority solution (although still occurring)
what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game?
Same as usual: the mouse loses unless it assembles and unionizes with other mouses and they bring in a guillotine.
They turn it into an app-only platform just like with many PRC-based apps. Literally, some of those platforms doesn’t even have a web or desktop mode.
I tried using Baidu Maps web to look at my old neighborhood (I was born in mainland China) for nostalgia, and the site repeatedly automatically attempts to download the .apk like every tap I make on the site. Wtf lol. The site probably detected the useragent and keeps nagging me about their app.
I tried browsing a random popular online store to see what it’s like for curiosity (天猫), but it asked for a sign in. Like wut? Even Amazon, Ebay, Bestbuy doesn’t do that. PRC is actually just late stage cyberpunk capitalism.
This is gonna be the future for every big-corp stuff. App only, real ID and phone number verification required. Probably even scan your face.
We need a Meshtastic-based “internet” to actually decouple from big corps have control our infrastructure to have real freedom.
Good luck blocking alt OSes on PC if Windows goes the route you’re describing though, unless MS pulls some strings to force Pluton platform-wide on PC and stamp out alt OSes altogether.
Also, good luck blocking decentralized and self-hostable platforms, at least easily.
lol. microsoft manages the preinstalled signing keys for secure boot. all it needs to do is require motherboard makers to not allow disabling secure boot or installing a machine owner key.
Good luck trying that with loose mainboards for custom builds unless they can just preinstall Windows in ROM at that point or push to get the current desktop form factors axed in favor of mini PCs from the big OEMs.
I don’t think it would be that hard. Microsoft could just change the UEFI certification process. Alternative UEFI firmware could solve it (unless that too is tied to verification like qualcomm does on android), but nearly no modern motherboards have any alternative firmware. I think there was 2 ASUS motherboards with built in wifi capability, but that’s it.
Can they really get away with banning Linux from hardware though? It’s not like there are only 12 of us anymore.
Plus unless they discontinue all the modular desktop form factors in favor of mini PCs where everything is soldered, and turn the PC platform into yet another Mac clone controlled by a single entity, you can still just build your own PC and install whatever OS you want at that point since custom builds don’t generally ship with an OS and expect the builder to provide it themselves.
I don’t think we are in meaningful numbers. not yet.
We have OEMs building systems that run Linux. Loads of servers run Linux, quite a few jobs require Linux experience - just annoyingly none near me at a level I can get.
Android is different because there are no alternatives to cellphones except Apple. On the web, there are other ways to share video. So Google can maybe lock YouTube down, but it can’t lock you down.
Many of us use 3rd party browsers a stop-gap measure. We’d like to leave the platform entirely, but we are still interested in some of the content there, so we’re OK with the cat-and-mouse game for now, knowing that if Google goes hardcore blocking mode that we will walk away and be better human beings for it.
You got Linux phones but those are rough to be nice about it.
They are glorified toys to be blunt. Cellphones just require too much proprietary tech and licensing. Shits never goanna be viable as anything more than a hobbyist toy.
If you already use your phone as nothing more then a toy then it’s a easy switch. But most people don’t.
Not to mention, carriers can dictate who can get connected. Australia already banned any IMEIs not “approved” by them, not even for emergency calls.
In contrast, all that a computer would need is working wifi, and for now at least, we still control wifi hardware and the ISP can’t dictate what devices you connect. (unless they start forcing their “gateways” Modem/Router devices)
Flip phones
I use mine as a toy and as a device for making phone calls
Jolla with sailfish is the best. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone
What makes it the “best” over Ubuntu Touch, etc.?
i heard there is something called murena
https://murena.com/products/smartphones/
no idea how these are, but i have previous generation fairphone and it has been decent, even if that one has android. I’ll propably get one at some point since i dont want to use android. the price of fairphones is a bit high, but that is how it is when you dont use slavery to produce them.
Technically you don’t need a smartphone. A tethered mobile device would do. For just cellular calls, there are dumbphones. That Youtube does or doesn’t work doesn’t concern me. They always ask to login on VPN which is always on for me. Thanks, just no.
Someone give it to me straight, what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game?
The internet gets turned into packetized cable tv with bonus panopticon features.
Someone give it to me straight, what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game?
A mandatory account with paid subscription.
The fucking horror!
It would be. Its been nice moving away from using a Google account.
What exactly has been “nice” 🤣. For real, please explain to me how your superior IdP works and what features have made it “nice” 🤣.
Why are you overusing emojis? Anyways, its been nice feeling less tied to Google services since I switched away from Gmail and moving to another email provider, and moving to foss options for services I used to use Google for.
So having less dependency on Google, and not even having to sign into Google anymore to get benefit of subscription feed, playlists, and history has been cool through freetube on desktop and other third party apps like newpipe.
You are on lemmy which is a very niche tech leaning social media that is more likely to degoogle or limit google usage. What is so bizzare about the concept of someone wanting to reduce their account dependency from a large corporate platform?
The end game is to take full control. If Google implements Widevine on YT, and especially Widevine L1, that’ll be their Hiroshima bomb for both third-party front-ends and downloaders, and even non-Android, ChromeOS, Apple, or Windows platforms as far as OS goes and non-Chrome or Edge browsers.
Like, say Google implemented Widevine L1 on YT streams at some point in the future, it would be entirely feasible that you’d be looking at Netflix-style lockdowns to Edge on Win11, or even Chrome on Win11 for that matter, with both SecureBoot and TPM2 in place, if you wanted to watch YT on PC in the future, else you’d be limited to Rokus to watch it.
That would be their poison pill. Youtube’s advantage is in it’s ubiquity. Lose that, you lose countless users.
They’d sooner replace those users with home-grown AI slop the way they’re moving right now.
The perfect business case: AI users watching AI ads before AI videos. No pesky users to deal with👍
But also, they’re not real users watching those ads and getting impressions. Unless people are using an agent system that could be convinced to buy the product, it doesn’t seem like it would be that useful.
You may as well serve ads to standard viewbot at that point.
I’m pretty sure they were sarcastic.
Your new monitor likely has DRM features built in that are already being utilized by Netflix and others. Youtube is next on the line
Yeah, I think Netflix has like a few thousand movies and a couple thousand TV shows, and some of us here have similarly sized Jellyfin libraries. On the other hand, YouTube has billions of videos. It seems DRM would be a significantly more difficult and costly problem for YouTube.
DRM is expensive. Very expensive in fact because it is basically non-trivial encryption.
A website with as much traffic as YouTube cannot afford to DRM every single video stream. There just isn’t enough processing power and electricity available.
Netflix et al. have a tiny fraction of YouTube’s traffic with more income per user due to subscriptions.
Plus YouTube’s storage demands are many orders of magnitude larger. A maximum upper bound for Netflix is 1 PB I’d imagine. Archiveteam alone has selectively downloaded more than 3 PB. YouTube has, I’d imagine, a double digit exabyte amount of data stored + backups.
And yet, youtube uses resource intensive compression methods for said exabytes
Do we know this?
I suspect they usually compress videos at most a couple times (for each resolution) and then keep the results cached somewhere. At least for popular videos that combined take up 99% of bandwidth. For 0 views videos I’d imagine they only store the highest resolution and compress it further down on demand.
I’d argue DRMing all those popular videos would take up so much computing power it cannot be offset by ads.
Whatever the latest version of HDCP is, sure. HDCP is a core feature of the HDMI spec.
I was actually thinking of DisplayPort since I haven’t used HDMI for quite some time now, but pretty much the same thing, except for name - DPCP, but supposedly DP also supports HDCP.
Probably like every other victim of enshittification:
You pay or you don’t consume.
Maybe total DRM enforcement, and clients without widevine only get garbage quality. That’d end yt-dlp for youtube
