ban hooktube and give anyone defending it a warning

Submitted by zombie_berkman in meta

currently i see at least 2 people defending a site made by a reactionary, for reactionaries, created to give reactionaries a platform, that link to gab and use to link to a literal nazi site under their "friends" section because its "useful".

anyone that defends a reactionary platform as "useful" can seriously fuck off into traffic

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leftous wrote

Support.

In this case, hooktube is also proprietary. It poses a danger to our users to link to any alt-right/fascist content without archive links.

hooktube is essentially just youtube-dl according to them. Also there are other platforms that can be used to post and share videos if you insist.

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anarcho_pirate wrote

What do you suspect is the way they stream videos from the site? If I use youtube-dl myself I might have to wait ~10 minutes for a longer video to download before starting it (although to be fair I always use the highest quality available). Are they just on a fast connection and downloading lower quality videos on demand when someone visits the hooktube page for that video, and then streaming them from their site? Or is there some way I can use youtube-dl to stream from youtube while keeping the privacy benefits?

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leftous wrote (edited )

I believe what they are doing is using youtube-dl to convert the URL into its raw form (hosted on googlevideo). If you copy the link they are embedding on their site, you'll see that it's posted on googlevideo.com

So probably just the youtube-dl --get-url command

If you do that and copy the url into your browser, it's the same as using hooktube.

Edit: Just tested this and it works

youtube-dl [URL] -g -f 43

This produces the link that you can copy into your browser for direct streaming

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imminent wrote

In this case, hooktube is also proprietary.

And so is Youtube, are we going to ban simply because it's proprietary? Ultimately creating a hooktube fork would be the best solution, but until we get there we should put some of our bandwidth into screwing up hooktube's API.

It poses a danger to our users to link to any alt-right/fascist content without archive links.

As I said somewhere else,

It's not just nazis that are trying to violate your privacy, so use the Tor Browser with everything as much as possible.

.................

hooktube is essentially just youtube-dl according to them.

Yes but does youtube-dl have geo-location as well? Also in the convenience viewpoint it's not as good as a website, for example I always use Tor so I don't want to fear having some leaks when proxying it when Tor Browser already makes sure there are no leaks. There's also no search feature and preview with it unfortunately.

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leftous wrote (edited )

And so is Youtube, are we going to ban simply because it's proprietary?

You missed the second half of my statement where I said proprietary AND run by the alt-right. Linking from this site could mean they are tracking the referrer and potentially deploying mallicious code. Looking at past versions of their site on webarchive, they clearly have an obsession with attacking the "alt-left" and evil SJWs. YouTube is going to track you, but theyre not doxing and harassing you.

Sure people should be using privacy software, but not everyone is a privacy expert with an airtight setup. We have casual left liberals visiting raddle all the time. It is more important that we limit the security risks to our users, than try to ddos some alt-right losers.

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ziq wrote (edited )

Support. It's always the same shitty voat troll that shills for that site and imgoat.

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imminent wrote (edited )

ziq, please don't hide the fact that you yourself actually posted links to it (hooktube):

https://archive.fo/JoVl3 (Please don't remove it or edit that post if you don't want to harm your (up until now) reasonable integrity)

For some strange reason, wasting that site's bandwidth and costing him more became a taboo here only recently, perhaps following this OP's comments. It's literally weird that we're fighting over something so trivial as wasting an alt-righters money by profiting off his useful web service.

I'm not shilling for that site I WANT IT TO BE GONE TO BE DESTROYED AND TO INFLICT MONETARY DAMAGE ON ITS OPERATOR: https://raddle.me/f/mediation/25975/comment/33615

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deleted3 wrote (edited )

Edit: deleted a misplaced comment.

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imminent wrote

If flooding the site for nefarious purposes is your goal and your looking for support, then it’s abundantly clear you’ve come to the wrong place. Move on.

It's absolutely not my goal nor my intention, if you paid close attention then you'll realize that it's the other person in this exchange (not me) that started this whole hooktube-oh-no-please-no-drama : https://raddle.me/f/funny/25890/racist-dog-groomer-caught-blatantly-lying

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shanoxilt wrote

Is PeerTube any good?

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imminent wrote

I think you're misunderstanding what hooktube does, there are no videos that are hosted on hooktube, it's a just a "proxy" for Youtube that gives you their video URLs directly.

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imminent wrote

I gave my thoughts on this more than once: to fight the Nazis online you should increase their hosting costs. For hooktube that means actually using it (for non-technical people) and DDoSing it by countering Cloudflare and their increasing the load on their API until it breaks up (for technical people).

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jadedctrl wrote

For most sites, increasing hosting costs by actually using it is good for them. It shows the sysadmin that people appreciate it at least, and at most (on some sites) can bring in some revenue. Besides, the cost of actually using a site like hooktube really won't vary too much even if we all started using it regularly-- unless we all become heavy users. But that's not very likely at all.

DDoSing it would work, though.

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imminent wrote

DDoSing it would work, though.

Unfortunately he's behind Cloudflare and even if I bypass it I'm sure he'll backlist my IP from which the attack will come or will fix that by only allowing Cloudflare's and Youtube's IP addresses. As you may now DDoSing a website behind Cloudflare is certainly not possible with the current resources at our disposal. But, flooding his API certainly works as it's not done on the Cloudflare side but on his server.

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DissidentRage wrote

Also just using it normally they can run scripts or make calls to other services from the back end to track you.

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imminent wrote

Also just using it normally they can run scripts or make calls to other services from the back end to track you.

As I said somewhere else,

It's not just nazis that are trying to violate your privacy, so use the Tor Browser with everything as much as possible.

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imminent wrote

For most sites, increasing hosting costs by actually using it is good for them

Yes, but for Hooktube in particular since (please understand the following point as it's very crucial) Youtube has rate limiting, that means the number of requests that Hooktube can make is limited, and if there are too much requests to hooktube's API then Youtube may block its server or rate limiting thereby altering performance for everyone, in which case its main sysadmin will have to setup not only one backend but more this time raising his costs.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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imminent wrote

You do realize that his service doesn't scale well? (Which is another crucial point) At one point 1000 requests/s, or heck just 100 searches/s, it will require dozens of instances to run. And I'm sure when it explodes we won't be seeing him anytime soon.

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