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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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EDIT: holding up (hilariously) RIAA lawyers as ethical role models only proves my point, thanks.
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.
> 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 : )
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Where is the incivility? If anything it's coming from those who project their simplistic ideas of others unto the complexity of others' persons to pigeonhole them into their own idiosyncratic mental categories.
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.
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.
Given the recent npm axios compromise this sounds like a pretty smart move?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48946680/how-to-avoid-th...
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.
Google is terrified of users having access users control to their video content.
But as others have pointed out, it's probably a coincidence in this case. But who knows.
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
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.
...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 : )
Our fantasy land gets better every time your reality gets worse.
firefox sadly is still what you should use.
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
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.
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.
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.
Then they stole it all for profit.
Probably not the first time in history this has happened.