Yet another Hacker News

239 points joering2 4 hours ago 77 comments

On a newest version, I attempted to download newest yt-dlp only to be warned of "Suspicious Download". No explanation what that means was provided.

ompogUe 4 hours ago | parent

So, Google's browser says downloading a tool to download files from Google's servers is "Suspicious"? Not surprising.

schiffern 3 hours ago | parent

By the same standard, Chrome itself is "a tool to download files from Google's servers." Chrome doesn't only download from Google's servers, but the same thing applies to yt-dlp.

I'm equally not "surprised" by their bad behavior, but that shouldn't stop us from condemning Google for unethically misleading people and engaging in browser monopoly abuse.

---

EDIT: holding up (hilariously) RIAA lawyers as ethical role models only proves my point, thanks.

waffletower 3 hours ago | parent

I am sure that RIAA lawyers would rofl at this yt-dlp labelling being an example of Google "... unethically misleading people and (committing) browser monopoly abuse". I want to live in that fantasy world with you though.

ddtaylor 2 hours ago | parent

Come to our fantasy Linux land anytime you want. We circumvent all of the strange things both RIAA, MPAA, Google and many other companies do to attempt to lock information into a box with only one hole they allow you to look through.

Our fantasy land gets better every time your reality gets worse.

dryarzeg 3 hours ago | parent

> Chrome itself is "a tool to download files from Google's servers."

...legitimately. While Google (I will reinforce: Google, not everyone) sees downloading of the videos and other content from the YouTube by third-party services as illegitimate because of YouTube's ToS. After all, they're making money from the YouTube Premium and "Download" option provided by it, so things like that are kinda expected to happen.

And no, I don't agree that it's right. While I can understand the position of Google, the method they (allegedly) used here... Well... I don't even know what to say. That's plainly wrong, in my opinion. After all, "download" is defined as "To transfer (data or a program) from a central computer or website to a peripheral computer or device." by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th Edition), so when you just watch videos, you download them already, don't you? What about watching them in browser, somewhere in embed on some website? Does that constitute a legitimate client (I guess so, because most of embeds still use YouTube Player after all)? That just makes me laugh : )

Habgdnv 3 hours ago | parent

Actually that is what they want you to believe. Behind the scenes, secretly Chrome is mostly "a tool to upload files to Google's servers" but because it does not require any actions from the user to do that, many people miss that part.

ddtaylor 2 hours ago | parent

Oops we accidentally stole, indexed and resold all your data. Sorry.

rdevilla 3 hours ago | parent

It's over. The internet culture of the 20th and early 21st century has been appropriated for profit.

josteink 3 hours ago | parent

We built it on enthusiasm for enthusiasts and for that reason alone, it became something great.

Then they stole it all for profit.

Probably not the first time in history this has happened.

recursive 3 hours ago | parent

And hopefully not the last

izzydata 3 hours ago | parent

The amounts of times someone invented something that was important to them and then never make any money from it only for some other entity to make tons of money from it is way too high.

thesuitonym 3 hours ago | parent

No it's not, and no it hasn't. That old Internet is still there, you just stopped going to it.

jddecker 3 hours ago | parent

The binaries they offer are complied using PyInstaller, which can give false positives in anti virus software.

TheSkyHasEyes 3 hours ago | parent

Why would a browser(be designed to) care about this?

g947o 3 hours ago | parent

You could also ask why Android care about banning side loading to "prevent scams and spyware", and I honestly don't have an answer at all.

reactordev 3 hours ago | parent

To protect the normies from harmful malware… not on their approved vendor list.

exe34 2 hours ago | parent

it's to protect shareholder value.

gruez 3 hours ago | parent

Because people download viruses from the internet all the time? "Common sense antivirus" might work fine if you're technically inclined, but that's not the case for everyone.

mrob 2 hours ago | parent

The growing prevalence of so-called "supply-chain attacks" (a bad name because it implies a commercial relationship that doesn't usually exist) shows that "common sense antivirus" isn't working so well even among the technically inclined.

rcakebread 2 hours ago | parent

Because Google owns Youtube.

thebeardredis 2 hours ago | parent

Because Google does no evol.

ddtaylor 3 hours ago | parent

Google has been anti yt-dlp before it was forked. They also have rules that carve out tools like this from their extension store and at Android, except enforcement is lacking sometimes.

Google is terrified of users having access users control to their video content.

nslsm 2 hours ago | parent

yt-dlp breaks YouTube’s DRM. They could easily get the repo removed under the DMCA. They don’t.

exe34 2 hours ago | parent

it'll just cause a lot more people to become aware of it and cause mirrors to pop up everywhere.

kivle 51 minutes ago | parent

RIAA already tried to take down the Github repo for youtube-dl (basically the original yt-dlp was forked from) back in October 2020. But outcry from among others EFF got it reinstated just one month later. Google is probably on the fence about this because they saw how it went last time. The slow killing of adblockers in Chrome seems to be something they are getting away with, so maybe that will make them bolder once things have moved along far enough that there's no way back.

xethos 20 minutes ago | parent

Google's already tried taking down Invidious. If they could use the DMCA for it, I believe they would. Notable, Invidious is still up, and there were fun articles from the response

https://www.vice.com/en/article/youtube-tells-open-source-pr...

eis 3 hours ago | parent

Which link exactly did you try to use? Or what specific version on the Github releases page? I checked both the latest windows and macos versions against Google Safe Browsing and all were fine.

owlninja 3 hours ago | parent

I can't reproduce this either, OP is light on details.

matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent

Which is why I download it from my Linux distribution's package manager. It's available on Termux too.

entropie 1 hour ago | parent

Which in the case of yt-dlp might not be fast enough.

I use a telegram/mqtt/homeassistant wrapper (1) to let my mother download audiobooks which are saved in jellyfin so she can listen or download them from my (home)server.

Keeping yt-dlp up2date (and therefore) working is not that easy, especially since I dont systemupdate every other week. There were a few phases yt-dlp version in nixpkgs-unstable were just not working. I created a little wrapper that updates a venv so I always have the HEAD running for my bot.

[1] https://github.com/entropie/ytdltt

waffletower 3 hours ago | parent

Chrome for work, Safari or Arc for everything else. I envy you if your use of yt-dlp is work related.

iririririr 3 hours ago | parent

you almost got it rigth. safari and arc are as bad as chrome. arc is just stable-chrome (it will have the same nonsense with a custom ui next release)

firefox sadly is still what you should use.

LollipopYakuza 3 hours ago | parent

I started giving a try to Zen (based on firefox) a few days ago. I like it especially while heavily relying on a tiling window manager.

jrajav 3 hours ago | parent

I daily drove Zen for months. The design and implementation are overall fantastic. Unfortunately it still has chronic performance issues, gobbling up CPU randomly - and they don't seem to be too focused on despite it being a commonly reported issue.

I don't want to burn out my battery quicker than usual, so I was forced to switch off. I'm currently trying Orion instead and have been loving it - aside from several poorly implemented websites just not working on it. And the Cloudflare false positives, but that's as much or more an issue on Zen.

johnthedebs 3 hours ago | parent

Agree with sibling comment as someone who used Zen for many months, maybe as long as a year or two. It constantly breaks and often stays broken in small but fundamentally important ways, to the point that I just switched back to FF last week and am glad to be off the roller coaster. Before Zen I had tried Arc and left for a lot of the same reasons.

For all of the (valid) criticism against FF, it's still the best available browser that's not just an experiment IMHO.

Edit to add: part of the switch back is that FF now supports, to some degree, all the features I was using Zen for: vertical tabs (needs customization but works well enough), custom search "engines" (ie, shortcuts), split view, not-Chrome

jrajav 3 hours ago | parent

Why is Safari as bad as Chrome?

bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent

Website compatibility is inconsistent, extension compatibility is a slog, the desktop UI is confusing and nonstandard, WebKit itself is woefully incomplete, and on non-Apple platforms WebKit barely works covers conformance tests even with hardware acceleration disabled.

I don't use macOS anymore, but when I did I used Firefox without missing out on anything Safari would have given me. Now that I've abandoned macOS I don't think I can name one advantage of installing a WebKit browser on my system versus something Chromium-based.

john_strinlai 3 hours ago | parent

for what it is worth, when downloading the latest .exe from github, firefox says "this file is not commonly downloaded" and i have to select "allow download".

scans of it are fine.

probably just a heuristic-based false-positive, and not a news-worthy story of chrome abusing their monopoly or whatever.

miki_oomiri 3 hours ago | parent

Isn’t firefox using Google “safe browsing” database ?

warkdarrior 2 hours ago | parent

Safebrowsing does not provide popularity metrics for downloads, to my knowledge. It only states whether a URL is malicious according to some Google checks. No amount of popularity would turn a malicious URL into a benign one.

ryandrake 1 hour ago | parent

Do these little speed bumps even work? I have to admit I'm so numb to all these popups and to apps warning me this and begging me that, that I just don't read anything anymore. Each app that hits me up with yet another dialog is just another brick in the wall.

The only speed bump that I find super annoying is when your browser tries to prevent you from going to a site with an incorrectly configured certificate (or a self signed certificate). The UX browsers make you navigate in this case is extra-horrible. Apparently, my use of a self-signed certificate for some local machines means I'm about to die.

bahmboo 21 minutes ago | parent

I have been using the internet since before the www. In the last few years I pay attention to every speed bump and evaluate it seriously. I check the url of every financial site I log into. I disable automatic security blocks as a last resort. There's just too much consequence for failure.

dpoloncsak 15 minutes ago | parent

We recently rolled over an SSL cert that is used for RemoteApps. Most of my users rely on these RemoteApps. They all got the 'yellow warning box' that the SSL cert was different, and we got swamped with tickets.

Atleast in a corporate environment, they help

NiloCK 3 hours ago | parent

Interesting to inspect any telemetry on this. Could end up on a list.

alsetmusic 3 hours ago | parent

Reminds me of how Bing search for Google takes people to a page meant to resemble Google.com. Can't trust huge companies.

But as others have pointed out, it's probably a coincidence in this case. But who knows.

ddtaylor 3 hours ago | parent

"Never let a good tragedy go to waste"

jesse23 3 hours ago | parent

`brew install yt-dlp` or `scoop install yt-dlp` :)

bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent

Yep. Never send a web browser to do a package manager's job.

mghackerlady 1 hour ago | parent

I suspect for M$ users you could even use winget (though I am unable to subject myself to Windows right now)

faangguyindia 3 hours ago | parent

It's funny such a big corporations can't let such a small tool live.

Google is such an evil company, it is not even provided anything great anymore.

Anti-gravity paid plans suck, GCP is billing heavy. Today google sucks at most things

Their Android playstore hardly updates statistics once a day, so much for such a big data company with unlimited sources lol

asveikau 3 hours ago | parent

The heuristics powering this, as well as the Windows Defender whitelisting, are terrible.

My understanding is that a specific binary needs to become popular for it to stop being flagged. This creates a chicken and egg problem. Users are not incentivized to use the program with the warning. But removing the warning requires many people to ignore the warning.

This is a big problem for anyone writing Windows software. An indie developer or small open source project is not going to do well with this.

Frotag 2 hours ago | parent

Conveniently M$ lets you buy a signing certificate to fix this.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48946680/how-to-avoid-th...

asveikau 2 hours ago | parent

Last I checked they can still quarantine your binary if it's properly signed and they decided it hasn't gained traction.

pimterry 2 hours ago | parent

EV no longer skips smartscreen either nowadays. I understand that was abused, so it's treated as the same as OV. Having a certificate allows the cert itself to accumulate trust (rather than each binary independently doing so) and provides better UX and I suspect an initial small boost to trust signal, but doesn't bypass the initial distrust. There's no way to avoid that AFAICT and even if you're an established business you hit it at intervals because all these certificates expire and so the whole process resets every few years anyway. What a mess.

gruez 2 hours ago | parent

>There's no way to avoid that AFAICT and even if you're an established business you hit it at intervals because all these certificates expire and so the whole process resets every few years anyway. What a mess.

Maybe have overlapping sets of certificates and dual sign your binaries? That way there's always an "aged" certificate available.

burnte 1 hour ago | parent

> EV no longer skips smartscreen either nowadays. I understand that was abused

EV was always going to be abused. It started out promising to be a human verified, $10k cert that meant you were GUARANTEED to be who it said you were. Now I can get one for a couple hundred bucks.

The solution is to separate identity from encryption. They never should have been linked.

asveikau 36 minutes ago | parent

> EV no longer skips smartscreen either nowadays.

Not sure of the exact number, but the "nowadays" here is more than a decade.

gruez 2 hours ago | parent

>My understanding is that a specific binary needs to become popular for it to stop being flagged. This creates a chicken and egg problem.

Given the recent npm axios compromise this sounds like a pretty smart move?

dqv 2 hours ago | parent

How is it a smart move? Here, Microsoft is training users to ignore a security warning. If the same mechanism were added to NPM (that is, a warning that the package is suspicious and for the user to be extra sure they want it), users would have been trained to ignore any security warning issued for the compromised axios version (just like they had ignored it for all previous "clean" versions) and installed it anyway.

kmeisthax 9 minutes ago | parent

The relevant heuristic in NPM supply-chain compromises would be the age of the specific binary. i.e. a freshly released package is riskier than one that's been around for a few days. So perhaps the policy should be that NPM doesn't install new package versions unless they've been public for 24 hours, or there's a signed override from the package repository itself stating that the update fixes a security issue. Of course, that would also require the NPM team have a separate review process for signing urgent security fixes.

whateverboat 1 hour ago | parent

This is also happening on linux for me.

ddtaylor 3 hours ago | parent

Linux user here unaffected as I get it straight from my command line.

sleepybrett 3 hours ago | parent

break this shit up, break all of this shit up.

Google needs to be at least what four companies.. gcp, youtube, search, workspaces...

Apple needs to be at least two hardware/os, music/tv+

Microsoft, meta, etc, Monopolies are bad and our SEC/FTC/Government is doing a poor job of controlling them. At least as equally trecherous are these businesses that overly vertically integrate... anyways, we're fucked.

nnevatie 2 hours ago | parent

You wouldn't download a downloader.

throwaway85825 2 hours ago | parent

Clear conflict of interest enabled by anti trust not being enforced.

fortran77 2 hours ago | parent

Firefox gives a similar warning.

exe34 2 hours ago | parent

it uses Google's shitlist

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

And only exists because of Google.

cvhc 2 hours ago | parent

I can reproduce when downloading https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2026.03.1.... But it did provide a line of explanation:

Dangerous download blocked yt-dlp_win_x86.zip is not commonly downloaded and may be dangerous. [Discard] [Keep]

uoaei 1 hour ago | parent

Chrome and YouTube are both owned by Google. There's an obvious reason why they want to discourage use of that extension.

socalgal2 1 hour ago | parent

This entire thread it almost entirely proof that HN is now reddit. No facts, no consideration, just accusation and crowd think

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

none of that here

> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

not followed here

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

none of that there

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Lots of that here

The system is clearly automated. As others have pointed out, they've been able to download without incident. As other have also pointed out, Firefox also warns. The warning is reasonable, claiming that something isn't downloaded often is true, until it isn't. A few more downloads and the warning will likely go away.

Nothing to see here except a Google hater mis-interpreting something and the posting ragebait.

whateverboat 1 hour ago | parent

You are wrong. There is at least one collaboration here that I can see. Download any other `.tar.gz`, Chrome says nothing. Do it with `yt-dlp`, chrome says it can harm your computer. Why?

Meekro 54 minutes ago | parent

I tried to reproduce this on their download page for the latest release[1]. Only the windows exe gets the warning, the other releases (macos, linux, etc) all download just fine. That makes me think it's an automated system that messed up, not an attempt at anticompetitive behavior.

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/tag/2026.03.17