Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

174•joering2•2h ago

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.

Comments

ompogUe•2h ago

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

schiffern•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•48m ago

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•1h ago

> 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•1h ago

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•52m ago

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

rdevilla•1h ago

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

josteink•1h ago

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•1h ago

And hopefully not the last

izzydata•1h ago

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•1h ago

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

rdevilla•1h ago

You going to assume my gender and race next? The bulk of my output on the internet is not on port 443.

throwaway_19sz•1h ago

You are not under attack. It’s just someone disagreeing with you. Please keep things civil.

rdevilla•1h ago

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.

jddecker•1h ago

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

TheSkyHasEyes•1h ago

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

g947o•55m ago

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•54m ago

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

exe34•5m ago

it's to protect shareholder value.

gruez•53m ago

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.

rcakebread•51m ago

Because Google owns Youtube.

ddtaylor•53m ago

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•34m ago

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

exe34•5m ago

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

eis•1h ago

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•1h ago

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

matheusmoreira•1h ago

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

waffletower•1h ago

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

iririririr•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

Why is Safari as bad as Chrome?

bigyabai•48m ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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

warkdarrior•7m ago

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.

NiloCK•1h ago

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

alsetmusic•1h ago

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•56m ago

"Never let a good tragedy go to waste"

jesse23•1h ago

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

bigyabai•1h ago

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

faangguyindia•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•42m ago

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

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

asveikau•40m ago

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

pimterry•15m ago

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•5m ago

>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.

gruez•29m ago

>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?

ddtaylor•57m ago

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

sleepybrett•54m ago

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•50m ago

You wouldn't download a downloader.

throwaway85825•48m ago

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

fortran77•35m ago

Firefox gives a similar warning.

exe34•4m ago

it uses Google's shitlist

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Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

Comments

Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

A Love Letter to 'Girl Games'

GitHub Monaspace Case Study

Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

Oracle slashes 30k jobs

Artemis II is not safe to fly

Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry

Combinators

Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

RubyGems Fracture Incident Report

Show HN: Forkrun – NUMA-aware shell parallelizer (50×–400× faster than parallel)

Good code will still win

Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only

Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies Against Quantum Vulnerabilities [pdf]

Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

Show HN: Loreline, narrative language transpiled via Haxe: C++/C#/JS/Java/Py/Lua

Scotty: A beautiful SSH task runner

Multiple Sclerosis

Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

From 300KB to 69KB per Token: How LLM Architectures Solve the KV Cache Problem

Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens

Google's 200M-parameter time-series foundation model with 16k context

Do your own writing

RamAIn (YC W26) Is Hiring

Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

Good CTE, Bad CTE

Show HN: Hyprmoncfg – Terminal-based monitor config manager for Hyprland