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Comment by Wowfunhappy

8 hours ago

> The JS script being downloaded is from the yt-dlp GitHub organization

I meant the challenge that is the reason they need the Javascript in the first place.

You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.

The original point was this:

> > IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain

Which came from a misunderstanding about where the downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org), I was just correcting that misunderstanding.

> You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.

That makes a ton of sense and I agree! I'm not sure how that is related to anything though? I download yt-dlp from Arch repositories, so yes I'm trusting Arch maintainers and of course yt-dlp developers. Then I'm adding a manifest which controls what this application can actually access, which is basically a VM config, where I define that it can access youtube.com (and a bunch of other sites I mirror/archive). This is the part that shouldn't have github.com/* access.

Again as mentioned, not a big issue, plenty of workarounds, so not the end of the world.

  • Restricting or sandboxing software is something I've been looking into recently. Would you mind sharing what you use and possibly an example as well? Perhaps an example for yt-dlp?

  • > Which came from a misunderstanding about where the downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org), I was just correcting that misunderstanding.

    But that script is ultimately running a JS challenge from Youtube, right? That’s why we actually needed a JS runtime in the first place.