WE HAVE been writing a lot about YouTube lately because the mainstream media does not talk about the quiet 'revolution' which mostly involves attacking creators, viewers, and Free software. Google is a Gulag and all it cares about is money. It's tired of losing money and now it's crushing all the volunteers/serfs who helped YouTube become so dominant. Can they still justify this? Can they still tolerate the Gulag? Should they? For many of them, as the classic saying goes, "enough is enough!"
"YouTube should only be optional and Google's lawyers try to ensure no other options exist."We've already made some constructive suggestions last month (see links at the very bottom) and we recently pushed to Git some code that helps bypass YouTube links by suggesting alternatives to them in IRC. We need to discourage adoption/usage of YouTube and part of that involves asking people to not upload to YouTube or also uploading somewhere else. YouTube should only be optional and Google's lawyers try to ensure no other options exist.
Well, some people reported to us (in IRC) that YouTube now blocks Falkon, the Web browser. I could not reproduce this at my end (that's the main browser I use and maybe these changes are experimental, hence they only impact a subset of visitors), but I noticed other problems with YouTube ads in Falkon, notably a lack of picture, just sound playing. It'll get worse over time as they optimise for Chrome, with no ad blocking (not even in Chrome!), and add more DRM on top. GSoC is, to them, just some 'hush money' (also grossly underpaid, temporary workers to be exploited as PR drones); they don't want developers to speak about this travesty.
Last week, by mere serendipity, I noticed that playing something in YouTube treats it like a native application on my laptop. That's just... strange. It was bad enough that site notifications were doing something to that effect. We used to expect browsers to render Web pages, not take over the machine. Well, "Big Browsers" have a mind of their own. How long before they start demanding root password to run or not only send all passwords to "the cloud"but also prevent the users from disabling this behaviour.
"We're living on borrowed time, perpetually at the mercy of the Gulag."Why did YouTube start attacking Invidious more than ever before? Whose idea in the legal team was it? Was this strategically wise. Many instance thought, we're too 'niche' for YouTube to care. But things changed as soon as the management changed and they want to kill all alternative GUIs/web interfaces, to remove even the mere option of bypassing the ads.
Well, based on the past week's news, YouTube's strategy seems to have changed [1-3] to something akin to Netflix (DRM) and blocking of anything other than the proprietary front end will progress [4]. Just because something still works (today, barely) doesn't mean it'll work tomorrow or next week or next month. We're living on borrowed time, perpetually at the mercy of the Gulag. ⬆
Related/contextual items from the news: