Tech Over Tea - YouTube Really Hates Invidious | The Frenchy Ghost

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Whilst the users might be a fan of Invidious YouTube themselves certainly aren't and today we have one of the Project Managers on the show by the name of The Frenchy Ghost to explain all in the ins and outs of the project. =========Guest Links========== Website: https://invidious.io/ Repo: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious Gitea: https://gitea.invidious.io/iv-org Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson, and today we're doing a episode that YouTube... I don't know, they might decide they want to delete this episode. We'll see about that. Today, we have someone from the NVIDIUS project on. Welcome to the show, the Frenchie Ghost. How you doing? Hello, and I'm fine i'm fine you did mention this was your your first uh public appearance so uh it might take a bit to get into it but most people tend to you know get used to it after like five ten minutes or so it's just yeah you need to get like into that flow of a

conversation yeah and i have to tell people that obviously i'm french so my accent is awful i sorry about that no no it's fine i've had i've had some italians on who are like really like really really thick accents and some people that like really struggle with english um so it's nothing new really yeah i just fine with oh go on sorry i i'm fine with english it's just that I barely talk it. Right, okay. So, I haven't talked in English in like four or five years. So, yeah. Okay, you're gonna really- I write English!

Ah, yup. Well, hopefully you don't- you probably won't forget words, but you might forget how to pronounce them, and that should- Yeah. That might give us some fun. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, before we get into sort of why you wanted to do this, just for anyone who doesn't know, what is the NVIDIUS project?

Okay, so NVIDIA is what is named a privacy frontend. It's basically a way to access a bad platform through some kind of a proxy. And it basically takes the content of said platform and For YouTube for example, it's video description Thumbnails and commands and You take this content and you put it in a new, better, ideally, UI that strips all the tracking, all the crap, basically. Invidius is the main YouTube front end, privacy front end. And it's also, if I remember correctly, the first one ever to be actually a privacy front end. ever to be actually a privacy front end. NVIDIA started the trend of making privacy front end.

It wasn't technically the first one. The first one was HookTube, which did things a bit differently because it used the YouTube API, which made it so YouTube had a valid reason to take them down, basically. In our case, we don't use their API. We scrape and use some unofficial API sort of thing that's used by their web UI and application. So rather than accessing the public API they sell, it accesses the API that actually that YouTube itself runs on. Yeah, it's a bit complicated. Basically, this API isn't supposed to be used. It's not supposed to be known to the public.

Like we had to reverse engineer everything to find it, to find how it works. Because it's a really complicated API that works differently between web, Android, and iOS clients. For example, some features are only available on iOS, if I remember correctly. And yeah, basically it's a whole mess of things that go to stuff to YouTube backend and yeah

it's a bit hard to explain I would imagine that leads to things just randomly breaking then yeah especially because YouTube doesn't like us and love to do um what is called uh ab testing uh like for example with uh the recent drama where uh youtube was adding a five-second timer to some people.

So basically, I try to explain what is A-B testing. It's when you serve some content to some people and another content to another people, another group of people. And so, which means, in our case, that some instances of NVIDIA in some countries or in some IP range will work. Will another instance in another range, another country, won't work

because it's getting some other data that in video isn't made for, which cause lots and lots of bug reports by others who don't necessarily understand this. on this it should be noted that um ab testing isn't like so whilst in this case it was used for something like the firefox situation um that negatively affected use the idea of an ab test itself isn't inherently bad like you have a company ab test like a different font for example and they'll be like okay does this font lead to more engagement or this font or should we have the description in this location or that location but when you have a project whose sole purpose is taking what youtube

does and then reverse engineering it any of those little changes can lead to lots of bug reports, as you mentioned. Complete breakage. Yeah. And sometimes only some part of it breaks, sometimes everything breaks. Mm-hmm. It happened earlier this year, I think, where you couldn't access the channel page because something changed. I don't remember the detail but yeah it's complicated to maintain so what is your position in the project

okay so invidious is um a bit of in a bit of a unique situation in the sense that I don't write any code so it's weird because most people have a lead I guess if I can say that I'm a lead not sure

so most projects have a lead that writes code and that basically does everything. In your case, it's a bit different. So officially, I'm a project manager, which is... Yeah, I guess. Basically, I started doing stuff for Invidious almost five years ago, I think. Oh, wow.

Yeah. I've been around it since like six months after its creation originally. So basically, the short version is that I manage stuff, which doesn't really help to explain what I do. So basically, if there's a decision to be made about something, usually I'm the one who gets asked. Basically, I arrange the project and where the project is going.

I also under the documentation, kind of, not really today because life. Right, right. I made the website, the main website, invidious.io. And the main thing I do today is outside of making decision, basically, is that I manage the finance basically because in videos is in a great situation where a lot of people donate to it even so it's just a project made by some people on the internet. Like, for example, I remember a weird evening years ago,

maybe, yeah, three, four years ago, where I was checking the cryptocurrency wallet. Because, yeah, we only use cryptocurrency for taxes reason. And so I was checking them randomly just to see what was up on them. And I noticed that someone had donated

the equivalent of $7,000. Wow! Yeah, that was the first massive donation we got. And it was really weird to see.

And over the years, it wasn't the only massive donation we got. We got someone donating multiple XMR. And yeah. we got someone donating multiple XMR and yeah I recently checked I think

with the current exchange rate which is a bit shit we're at maybe $20,000 which basically makes the project sustainable kinda basically we

don't have a problem with money if we continue to do things this way I think our expenses is like three or four hundred dollars a year, I think. I would assume that's mainly like web hosting. Yeah. So we have three VPS. Three or four. three four i'm not sure uh three or four uh from providers that accept cryptocurrencies and that don't

have a problem with money so i don't try to do everything to save up basically and so yeah there's a domain name, which is expensive because it's dataio and it's on Nyala, the privacy domain registrar. Sorry, which one? Nyala. Yep. Not sure how it's supposed to be pronounced this way. Can you just type that into the chat? Because I've not heard of that one. Yeah. Oh, you're surely about out about them.

Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't know how to pronounce that either. Yeah, I think it's Nyala. That's as good as I would say it. I'm sure some of us know about it. Yeah, it's pretty famous. It was made by the Pyrrhot Bay founder. Ah, okay. That's his registrar after he left the piracy. And basically, it's a weird kind of registrar because domain name officially require to know who is registering the domain. Right, right.

So basically, they register the domain on their name and let you control it. It's a bit weird. And the thing is that it's expensive. I think we pay 45 euros a year for it. You said expensive. I thought it was going to be way worse than that. Okay. No, no, no.

Yeah, the prices are still reasonable. They just take, I think, like 20% more than the normal price. Yeah, that's a... I don't know. Clearly, it's been around for a while, but I have no idea what the legality behind selling domain names like that is. Yeah, it's around, so they're doing something. I mean, officially, there's no law against that.

That's fair. The rule of ICANN is a domain must have an owner. It doesn't say that the person using the domain must be the owner. It can be a middleman. Actually, no, I guess that makes sense, because... No, that... Yeah, no, that does make sense, because it's sort of like sub-leasing a domain. Yeah, kind of.

Huh. Huh. It wouldn't make any sense in any other context to do it like that, but if you're trying to avoid uh like having your detailed attachment i guess in that case that does make sense as a business model yeah so basically yes uh i did not explain the reason why we do think like that so it's explained uh if you want to show it in the team page that's a link six if you want to show it in the team page. That's link six, if you want to show it. So basically, I'm not the only project manager. There's another one whose name is PerfList.

And basically, as is written in the page, the project is a bus factor resistant. Which means, in practice, if I die, the project will go on. Nothing will be lost. So you both have co-ownership of all of this? Yeah. This is why we wanted no KYC. Like all of this. Yeah, this is why we wanted no KYC Because I don't really want to give all my details to someone else of the team

and Yeah, we don't want to see that Yes, doing it this way is the easiest thing to do. Even if it's not ideal, especially for the domain, because the point of having your data in the domain database is in case of a legal issue. Basically, if it's your details, you can say it's mine. So you have to give it back to me. For example, if the registrar bankrupt,

the domain has to be transferred to someone else, to another registrar that still gives it to you. So yeah, it's not necessarily ideal, but I mean it's been working for four years, something like that. Okay, so it's pretty much since the start of the project then. Did the project have a website before that or did it just not have a website at that point? Yeah, so I guess we'll talk about the project have a website before that or did it just not have a website at that point? Yeah, so I guess we'll talk about the project history. So I wasn't the one who originally made the project and no one who works on Invidious today are the person who made it.

So it was originally made in September 2018, I think. The Wikipedia says August. Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure the Wikipedia is correct. I could be wrong, but yeah. It's something like that august september something like something yeah august september and it was made by by a guy named uh omar ross which uh worked on it for a year, a year and a half maybe. And so he was the only one working on it at the beginning. Then he started to get a bit sick of it.

And yeah, I give you a link in it, link 12, if you want to show it. 12, yep. Basically, in August 2020, so basically all of 2020 stopped doing much. And in August, he announced that you would step away and leave the project because the short version is that he was writing the code, managing the project, managing the main instance, which had 35,000 others. I imagine that would be expensive to run. Yeah, I think it used to cost him like $200 a month. A year? That would be a good deal. No, no, a month.

A month. Yeah, he basically couldn't take it anymore with all the fact that he had to do management, development, managing Assault bug reports. Basically he couldn't take it anymore and we're non-dead stopping. Yeah, looking at the GitHub, he's still the top committed to the project. Yeah, basically the project wouldn't be here without him. That's for sure. yeah he made a lot of rare choice

with the project basically so the reason being not necessarily by choice he made those choice because he was learning the language in which in video series so he made a lot of beginner those choices because he was learning the language in which NVIDIA series were written.

So he made a lot of beginner mistakes, I guess? I didn't... Okay, I didn't know NVIDIA was... Okay, that's interesting. So I didn't know it was just... I'm... Let me just put my words together.

Now I'm struggling with English so invidious was him trying to learn how this language worked language being crystal for anyone curious that's interesting and then evolved into what it eventually became yeah it started as, I want to learn a language, to NVIDIA is the biggest privacy front end today. And it has been for years. Does that act as sort of a barrier to entry to get other contributors on the project?

The language does. Yeah. Yeah. The language is a problem. The language does. Yeah. Yeah. The language is... a problem. Because I didn't know about this language until you include it in the document. Yeah, so... Yeah, Crystall is... I think when Invidious was first created, Crystall was considered a proof of concept. I think. Aha!

And so, basically, today, Invidious is the biggest crystal project. By far. You know what? Let's see if I can find other crystal projects. You can go to link 8. Oh, you have other ones? Link 8 is charts.info. Ah, you included other ones. Thank you.

And charts.info is basically a link, Thank you. And chart.info is basically a link, a repository of all the crystal projects sorted by popularity. The biggest one is the language itself. Yeah, then it's in videos. That's always a good sign. Yeah, I mean, a good sign, I'm not sure I would say that. Yeah. Because, I mean, if you look at the website,

so the first one is the language. Then it's in videos. Then it's a web framework. Then it's another web framework. Then it's another web framework. Then it's a code analysis tool. Then it's an analysis tool. Then it's another web framework. Do you see a pattern here?

No, it's not coming to me. Oh, ActivityP Server! That's cool! Uh, which one? Um... Uh, under... 2Undermartin. Ca... yeah, Ca... Catistec? Catis... yeah, whatever that is. Catistec? I don't know.

Yeah. And if you look at the number of stars, because those projects are sorted by number of stars, you can see that things drop quick after the two main web frameworks are passed. So yeah, Christal. past so yeah Christol there is still 300 contributors on the project which is surprising considering the language yeah

yeah yeah so Christol is both a blessing and a curse for us. It's a blessing because it means the people who contribute know what they're doing, but it's a curse because barely anyone contributes. I'm scrolling through the language examples on the homepage. Some of it makes sense to me. I'm like, oh, def function, end at the end. Okay, fine.

Whatever. Type of. Okay, fine. Then I get to the bit where it's making an object. Person.new. It's no brackets. It's a function call without brackets. What am I looking at?

Yeah, it's a mess. Wait, why is there a question mark at the end of this function? What? Yeah, it's complicated. What am I... What? What? Oh, the C bindings.

Okay, sure. Yeah, I... oh the c bindings okay sure yeah i so the only people that basically contribute it sort of filters out everybody who isn't going to like put in the effort to to learn it yeah which is as i said a good thing and a bad thing and the so i was told that as i said i don't write code so i don't know that but i was told by the developers that crystal is basically ruby kind of but different but basically I was told that if you know Ruby you should be able to write in Crystal

I think that's a reasonable comparison I haven't written Ruby in a while let me just have a quick someone give me Ruby examples Ruby in 20 minutes, thank you rubylang.org um okay page 2 okay, i can see that oh okay no that yeah

it also uses puts for printing text yeah it seemed like i had sort of python and ruby inspirations yeah that makes sense no i, I can see that. It's not a... It's a language that has weird syntax, but it's not so... It's not so weird that you couldn't pick it up relatively quickly. And it seems like they have pretty reasonable documentation for, like, the language itself. Oh, it says it's heavily inspired by Ruby

on the first line of the homepage. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I think they talk about their inspiration. I think it's Ruby plus C, or something like that. Yeah, that makes sense. Huh. Okay.

So, the project sort of just stuck with it now you can't really do anything about it we tried so years ago basically I think it was

two or three years ago so we just received a massive donation I talked about so at one So we just received a massive donation I talked about. So at one point... So let's go back to the team. So as I said, I'll talk about the team first, then we'll move to that.

So basically, the team is currently two project managers and three developers, not two. One if you're watching past contributors, it's written that was a CEO, CEO, not sure how to pronounce his name, was the second main developer in the team until we lost complete contact with him He came back Yeah, I think he came back in August, okay this year Basically was gone for two years, I think Basically, he was gone for two years, I think. We had no news from him.

He didn't reply to any of his contact method. So we assumed the worst, but he came back. And he told us that it was for personal reason. Right. Fair enough. So we don't know. But yeah, basically, so NVIDIA has currently three developers. The problem is that, yeah, three years ago, NVIDIA had no developer. Zero.

That's an improvement yeah yeah so at one point basically I was I was a project manager with a path list and we I was more active of the two so basically my policy at this time was if a pull request looks good, I'll merge it. That's it. I can't review the code. So it started this way. Unix Fox, which is the secondary developer. It's not greatly written. Basically, I wrote secondary developer because it's a right list.

Basically, Samantha is the lead developer. And Unix Fox is a developer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So back then, Unix Fox joined. It started to do more and more. Then maybe two months later, Samantha joined. Basically, saved the project.

Mm-hmm. And joined maybe a month or two later. But yeah, just before UnixFox started contributing, because he was involved with the project, he was just not writing code. Just before he started to write code, I was really close to shutting down the project and basically stopping. Yeah, they really saved the project. So that was around when Omar stepped away, yes? If I'm understanding

it correctly. It was six, nine months later, maybe? Okay, okay. Oh, so there was a period where you... Where I merged basically every good pull request. Then there was a period when pull requests stopped completely. Right.

So I tried to ask for help in the matrix room because we were mainly on matrix. And yes, there was no one interested. So we discussed it with Perflist. And yeah, basically a month more and the project would have died I'm assuming I'm assuming during that like bug reports were like getting more and more and more as because you still

would have had what you said 35,000 users on that instance so oh it was just gone yeah the main instance was killed when the original dev left Basically, he stopped his work

and he stopped the instance a month later So the only users left are those who are using the other instances or decide to run their own Yeah And at this point YouTube made a change to run their own. Yeah. And at this point, YouTube made a change.

We think to purposefully break in videos. Because, to be clear, it's something I haven't said before, YouTube knows us. I'm well aware. I have no surprise that they would know you. They knows us. I'm well aware. I have no surprise that they would know you. They know us and we

not recently but for years we suspected that they were reading what happened in the Matrix room. They knew and some changes they made

looked to be directed at us so yeah they knew about us well there were other what was the popular android app that people used that got shut down

um that actually that one was advanced yeah yeah yeah there were things like that around as well um yeah and so i have uh an opinion about advanced what they did was stupid. Yup. They're not around anymore. You can insult them as much as you want. Yeah. So, basically, the reason NVIDIUS is still alive is because

there's one rule. We don't touch their stuff. Vanced was stupid in the sense that they modified the official APK. This was stupid.

You don't do that. And you don't redistribute it. Because they did redistribute it. That's stupid. You don't do that and yeah honestly uh van survived for a long time for what it did yeah i'm i'm impressed what yeah well they said that the because i think the last thing they did was the NFT thing. They said it had nothing to do with it, but I would not be surprised if that was like the tipping point. Where it's like, you know what we have to do? We have to deal with these guys now. Yeah, Van's team kind of lied at the end basically i think the conclusion was

google never contacted us we just decided to end and it's because the nft was badly received now guys it's because you've been infringing us their copyright, on their code for years. But you were small enough to be ignored. Then you grew big. Then Google noticed you. Because basically, at one point, Google only knew about NVIDIA. And New Pipe. New Pipe was kind of in the same boat.

And Vant was small. Then it grew big because... Normies? I use this word. People won't like it, but I use it. So Normies like the official youtube app so an official youtube app without the junk i loved it so once became popular yeah that's it's sort of the same thing with um any of the modified disco clients or modified Spotify clients. The second

you start messing with their official stuff, they don't like you. And if you get a little bit too close to the sun, you are going to get burnt. Yeah, the fact that the Vance team decided hey, let's make an

NFT to make money. Guys, you're stupid. Don't do that. I mean, the reality is that if I want NVIDIA to die, it's simple. I just sell NVIDIA. Hey, if you want, I can install it on your server for 50 bucks. YouTube will take us down in a

week. The rule is simple. You don't make money on someone else's stuff. Even then, you're still on like, questionably thin ice

another thing you did show in the links what number was it that was the takedown yeah which takedown my youtube the email ah here we go 19 Which takedown? My YouTube? The email.

Ah, here we go. Oh, 19. 19, yes. Okay, so that was a weird email to receive. So basically... I'm trying to word it in a way that won't get me sued. Don't sue me, Google, please. Basically, they didn't do their research

and sent us a takedown request request saying that we violated the YouTube API service term of service. In short, we didn't respect their term of service. That's what they said. Because we are using, according to them, the YouTube API. They didn't do the research. We don't use any of their API. We never agreed to any term of service. Therefore, you can't take us down for this reason. If you were using the API API that would be a really

easy thing for them to deal with they could just they would know where the requests were coming from and they could just shut the API account down yeah and they did with YouTube before as I said that's link

10 link 10. Link 10 is the changelog for YouTube in our archiver park because the website is more direct to clickbait I think. And the last changelog country is rest in peace. Oh, your audio is getting really saddicky. Oh? I don't know if that-

Hello? Yeah, you're- um, I don't know if this is your end, my end, Jitsi, it's some- something's happening. Oh, uh, I think it's What? Yeah, it's green now. It looks... okay? Yeah, I just saw, yeah, the connection going to red. Yeah. Yeah, it's green on my end. I don't know what... Yeah, it seems good now.

I think Jitsi's just making things up, but it does sound terrible. Let's just pause for a moment. Can you just hop out of the call and just hop back in? Maybe that'll fix it. Yeah, sure. Hmm. Hello? Hello? Uh, did you see something? Hello, hello? Okay, it's still static.

Maybe I'll jump out for a second. Hello? It's still staticky. Okay, I guess that's just how it's going to be for the rest of the episode. Uh-oh. Hopefully it fixes itself at some point. Um, so we're talking about the, we're talking about the hook tube takedown. Yeah, so basically YouTube did it with hooktube, they took it because they used the API.

Which was, I don't mean, technically it was stupid, but Oksum was the first one. Like, actually the first one. It was the first project to do what it did. It wasn't made for privacy, and it seems they had advertising on the website. But yeah, what they did was... Sorry, what was that? Amateurish. This is cutting out real bad. Oh. Um, just, can you say that one more time? Amateurish, okay, yep yep yep, okay. Basically, they thought they could be smart.

Except they agreed to the YouTube thermal service, which means Valve Cougar don't want you. You're fucked, basically. Well, the way I understood it from the email that I saw you guys receive, they don't like you building basically a... I guess like a clone of their service. Uh, no. Basically, the main thing they complain about is that we're doing LEGO tooled. So we're using the RAPI. Which isn't the case. So by design, the tech ban is implied. Because if the premise is not true. And the rest is irrelevant. So, yeah.

And you guys, so you guys got the email, and if you scroll down, you will see multiple links to news websites, etc. Basically, the Streisand effect started. And in videos went from this obscure project, to being on Vice, to being on Torrent Freak, to being mentioned directly by Tutanota, the email provider. So basically, they helped us. YouTube kind of helped us. So it sort of acted like advertising the project, really.

Yeah. We received the email. I decided, ah, fuck it, let's post it. I posted it. I shared it on Reddit, I think, back then. Blippin Computer. Blippin Computer never did an article, by the way. I don't know why. They asked a lot of questions. I answered the question. And nothing. Okay. But Vice did an article. So Vice, I mean, it's not a great news website, but it's a big news website. That's true. That's true.

So yeah, we just accepted and wrote them some replies. And the article was good they basically they tipped what we what we sent them added some context yeah I'm having a brief scroll through right now it seems like

yeah it seems like they've pretty much just hit the main points not really added any additional nonsense to it yeah it seems like they've pretty much just hit the main point it's not really added any additional nonsense to it which was good yeah and you also have a couple of videos here you got a video from TechLore

Eli the Computer Guy and ah Lil Strassman as well linked here yeah so it did get quite a bit of coverage at the time. Yeah, on YouTube, also. Which was funny. I mean, I'm expecting all those videos to be demonetized, obviously.

Yeah, we're gonna be surprised. Yeah, by the way, I think this episode will be demonetized. Oh, very possibly. Very possibly. Yeah, YouTube does not like it. So yeah, it was pretty funny to see that. Well, we decided to basically not shut up and continue

until as I said until we were forced to quit and they haven't done anything since yeah so I scrolled through the rest of the issue and they just never

contacted you guys again is that no never never okay huh all right sure we won the battle we see what's next. Yeah, I guess, I don't know, maybe you guys got lost in the spam folder or something. No, no, no, I check. We didn't, we never replied to them, by the way. Okay. Oh, so you just didn't even acknowledge it, it's just like, okay, we're just gonna post this publicly. Yeah!

Our acknowledgement was this GitHub issue. Which is basically a, nah, we won't do anything. And all the news articles after that. Which was funny. Maybe they... It wouldn't be the first time I've seen something related to YouTube get pulled down. You probably remember when the RIAA

tried to pull down YouTube DL off of GitHub and then that completely backfired because it got way more popular. I feel like YouTube realized that happened and were like, maybe let's not do that because they could have sent GitHub a DMCA to just pull it down straight away. Yeah, and I was personally expecting that, which is why if you scroll down, there's a link to Githy.

Or in Mirror, there's a repo. Basically, we were ready to move away from GitHub. Ah, yep. So, yeah, they could have, but they didn't. Because, as we explained, we never agreed to a term of service. And Invidious is legal. It's not illegal to do what we do. So they don't have a reason to take us down.

We never agreed to their term of service. It's legal it's not copyright infringement unlike advanced realistically we're good yeah you know I'll let you run with it I'm not a lawyer I'll just I'll let you run with it. I'm not a lawyer. I'll just, I'll let you guys make that assessment.

Yeah, speaking of lawyer, if any French lawyer is listening, contact us. It would be nice to have a lawyer behind us. Mm-hmm. So why do you guys still use GitHub if you have the Giddy? Oh, alright, so... How to explain this simply... Okay.

Basically, I hate GitHub. Personally, I hate GitHub personally I hate it but even my own project I'm still on it so NVIDIUS could move because NVIDIUS is not my project but personally I remain

on it because it's good to get a job sadly yeah that's fair and so the reason because it's good to get a job, sadly. Yeah, that's fair. And so the reason NVIDIA is on it is another reason. So personally, I want it to move. But Samantha, so the main developer, and Unixworks basically told me that it's they don't want it to move because as

I as we said before crystal is an obscure language so we already struggle to get contributor so if we move to our own Github, it will be even harder. That's fair. Okay, that's fair enough. So basically, we're on Github. Because if we get contributors, it's easier to get them on Github. Right, right. Okay.

Even if, yeah, Github is... I mean, it's a good platform technically. But I mean, the funniest thing is that the biggest open source forge is closed source, which is ironic. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. But I mean, yeah, it's what people use. So you got to be on the monopoly, basically.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess people could make an argument for GitLab, but if you're hosting your own, it has the same problem then. Yeah, and Gitlab.com is shit I mean it's beyond Cloudflare for once it's beyond Cloudflare and Cloudflare is set up

in attack mode which is basically you get a capture every time you go there let's go to it right now let's see what happens yeah you should get a captcha i i never go to the main one i always go if i'm ever on git lab it's always on like the gnome git lab or something like that yeah git lab as a software is good but gitlar gitlab the company a gitlab.com

But GitLab, the company, and GitLab.com are shit. I did not get one. Maybe they just don't like you. Not the homepage. You have to go to the repos. I went to the GitLab project. Oh. I didn't get one.

You're lucky. Maybe they change things. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. But yeah, GitLab is shit. Maybe they change things. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. But yeah, GitLab is shit. GitLab is slow. The company is... I mean, I remember reading like the company isn't making any money

and has like 1,000 employees? and has like 1000 employees and they keep recruiting but they don't make money I think they are losing like 20 million a year but they have 1000 employees that's nice management

yeah I'm no finance manager Aha. That's nice management. Yeah. I'm no finance manager, but that doesn't make sense. That does not check out. I think there might be something wrong there. Yeah, I think they're expecting to be bought out. Yeah, that is kind of the Silicon Valley model. Burn money until someone buys you. Yeah.

Except, well, you know, some people like GitLab as a software. I personally don't. But most big companies will pay for a forge will pay for github enterprise so yeah good luck gitlab yeah now github i'm not personally a fan of it because you know all of the uh uh abuse of license stuff but github also has the AI stuff as well now that they're doing, which a lot of companies are enjoying. Yeah, no, it's awful. Fuck Copilot.

What is NVIDIA's licensed under? AGPL v3. Yeah. Huh. AGPL is an interesting one. Like, you don't... You don't see it as, like, that often. But when it comes to something

that's being run on a server separate... Like, from my understanding... I'm not super knowledgeable at AGPL, but my understanding is it has special clauses for code running on a server. Yeah. Basically, the clause is

if you host it on a server, it's considered distribution. So you have to give the source code. It's basically an extension to the GPL. And it's not a great license but there's no great license that's a problem it's the least worth is yeah i was gonna i was gonna ask if you had the

power to just change the license right now is there something else you would choose or is this like the best of what currently exists that currently exists uh it's the best sadly basically and i know a lot of people disagree with me when i talked about it uh basically what i want is thePL, except you disallow commercial use. Okay. So, yeah, I know that, and some people already told me, it makes it so the project is no longer considered FOSS. And I know. The problem is that FOSS doesn't work.

Okay. Because FOSS is mostly today free work for corporations. Well, most of what we consider FOSS is just MIT now. It's MIT and FBSD. Which is basically a gift to a corporation. At least a GPL makes it so a company has to release their change.

Well, there are ways you can structure your code base so you only release changes to that specific component and not the rest of the code. And you know, there's also the... I think it's Gab who was in violation of the AGPL

of Mastodon. Yeah, that was so dumb. Like, oh no, we're not doing that. We can literally look at... Why are you even pretending that this is not what you're doing? And basically, the problem of the...

Didn't that also happen with TrueSocial? Yeah, no, I think it was a different problem. Basically, Gab was... They used a flaw in the AGPL, which is... Gab is a license center of the AGPL. If you want the source code, contact us.

Then they never reply to the people who contact them. Ah, it's that approach. I see. Yeah, and TrueSocial was different. So yes, they've violated the AGPL of Mastodon, but they never said they were a fork of Mastodon. Ah, right, right, right, right. Yep, okay. People have to find out. Yeah, and then they were like,

ah, here's the source code. They just chucked it up there. Yeah, yeah. But that was after everyone got angry. Yeah. I think Gab now published our source code. Not sure. Yeah, but...

I don't care, honestly. I'm pretty sure Gab's also blacklisted by most of the Fediverse, though. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's... Yeah, it's basically blacklisted by everyone, I think.

I think they disabled the Federation recently. Maybe a year ago. Yeah, yeah, I think that sounds familiar. Yeah. Disabled Federation. Yeah, yeah. They

dumped it actually more, maybe like two years ago now. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing. Well, they were blacklisted anyway so yeah it didn't really make any sense for them to keep maintaining that part of the code because yeah the only instances that could connect to them would be like the individual small instances and like you know maybe 20 user instances out there. None of the major ones where the people are. The other are like-minded as instances also.

Which was maybe 10 big ones at most. Yeah. Like with GitHub, pretty much everything tends to centralize. Like Mastodon centralizes on the massive instances and like

i think it's just whilst it would be nice to have you know people people talk about like oh wouldn't it be nice if we go back to you know little little groups that you like hyper specific groups you would get yourself involved with like that's just not what's gonna happen anymore it's most people are going to go to the big places because it's just easier to do stuff in a big group i mean the thing is that um i think fediverse isn't that centralized, honestly. I mean, it could be worse. Sure, it could be a lot worse, yeah. There's a lot of people on the big instance.

But honestly, I mean, I don't follow a lot of people on Mastodon. But I think most people I follow aren't on the big one. And I'm not on the big one. So yeah. Well, that might also just be the bias towards the people that you're interested in following. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, sure. And I think Federation

also works pretty good on Matrix. I'm not sure you use it a lot, but... I do have a Matrix on my Discord server, which the bridge broke, so it's currently sitting there, not

doing anything. Yeah. But, I mean, Matrix is a bit different. Basically, the thing with Matrix is that it's a platform for people who know technology, basically.

So there's a lot of people who have their own server or who are on the bigger instance, but not the official one. So it's not as bad as Masterland. Because it's not as bad as Mastodon? Well, I think what... Because it's more technological. Well, that's where Mastodon was, maybe like a... I don't even know how long Elon's on Twitter for now, but that's what Mastodon was like

before Elon took over Twitter. When that happened, that's when you saw a lot of people blow up the giant instances. A lot of them had to lock their signups because they were just getting too big. They just could not afford to run anymore. Yeah, and six months later, almost everyone was back on Twitter. Yeah.

Which was funny. I mean, it happened again with Reddit. It did, didn't it? I mean, I personally was on Reddit often. I only was in some specific subreddit. And when it happened, I just left. So I started by joining Lemi, So I started by joining LEMI, which is the fourth alternative, basically, in the Fediverse.

Then I discovered that I was better without any of this. So I basically don't use LEMI. And I mean, I saw what happened. Basically, people joined Lemmy. They didn't like it. They came back to Reddit. Exactly like Twitter. But like what you're saying with Matrix,

there is still this very techy subset, I've noticed that the really techy subreddits like r slash Linux, like they are it's not dead, but it's the quality of the content there has just fell off a cliff ever since that happened, like previously you'd get a lot of Linux news

stories, like people posting random things happening in mailing lists. Now it's basically just turned into a help forum. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't checked, but yeah. But I'm sure for some people, it just acted as like a...

How would you say it? Like a reality check. Like, do I actually need to spend all this time on reddit like suddenly i can't so let's do something else personally i planned to leave reddit for years before that but the thing that took me that made me stick to it was the fact that I got... Basically, I was invested in the self-hosted subreddit. Ah, yeah. Because I self-host a lot.

So I used the sub as a way to discover new projects and as a way to discover new ways to do things basically i wasn't a ready to scroll ready just to scroll with it i i was there to get information and i wanted to leave because the quality of information kept going down. Yeah. Yeah. To say the least. Yeah.

Yeah. Basically, out of 100 posts, there was one good one. So, I mean, the good one was good. But, yeah, no. Yeah. good one so i mean the good one was good but yeah no yeah i know i'm good without it i only go to like very specific subreddits at this point solely for the purpose of just like checking if something newsworthy is happening like if people are talking like the firefox situation for example i saw people posting about that but i don't i i don't i don't just scroll through like r slash memes or something like i i have better things to do with my day yeah personally the way i get my tech news is kind of through you, which is funny. Yeah, you're not the first person who's told me that.

Yeah. I mean, the thing is that if it's important enough, I know, basically. And for the same reason, earlier this year, I stopped checking all news about the world. Because it was fucking with my mental health. So I just said, if it's important, I know. If it's not important, I don't have to know. And yeah, I'm better like that. have to know and yeah i'm better like that yeah a lot of people distract themselves from their own problems by getting involved in problems that will never affect them like yeah exactly

i live in australia and there are people that care about u.s politics like yeah what are you doing exactly i mean it's a problem everywhere it's a problem here also basically the u.s is the western uh god kind of so everything they do everything that happens there is important no i don't care about what happened yeah focus on your own life it's probably more important yeah basically yeah so um we'll get back to nvidia's because we kind of got off topic a bit there uh that that tends to happen sometimes um so nvidia's is not the only like front end available like there is other things that are out there. So, yeah. I let you open link 15.

So, as I said, NVIDIUS was the first. I mean, I say it's the first. Technically, Oktube was first. But Oktube did things differently Invidious was the first to do things its way basically then as you can see in the link I sent you

it started and there's no privacy front end for everything It started. And there's no privacy front and fore. Everything, basically. I mean, there's Twitter, Reddit,

TikTok. Oh, jeez. Okay, I scrolled right past that. Yeah. Wait, there's an IMDB one. What? Yeah. Okay. There's not many. Wait, there's an IMDB one. What? Yeah. Okay. There's not many. Okay, there's one of them.

Yeah. There's one for every platform that is shit, kinda. Basically, the platforms that you have to use to get an information or to follow a creator. But the platforms that's usually filled with tracker. So yeah, it just started and dozens follow I with the YouTube ones I'm aware of

Piped but I've not heard of these other ones it seems like I never heard about Pokétube it's getting

updated reasonably quickly last 17 hours ago ClotTube was Pokétube? It's getting updated reasonably quickly. Last 17 hours ago. Cloudtube was... How can I explain it simply? So as I said before, at one point we wanted to rewrite in videos. I didn't finish my sentence.

So basically, we wanted to rewrite it. And we had a developer for that. So the plan was to basically split the backend and frontend. And base the backend and YouTubeend and base the backend and the youtube dl to basically simplify everything right so it didn't work because this developer was too busy with life right right okay But this developer is the person that made Cloudtube. Ah, okay. Basically, Cloudtube used what was done... I think, I'm not sure.

She should be angry if I say shit. But I think she ended up using what was done for NVIDIA's Cloudtube. Yeah, I think, yeah. Yeah. she ended up using what was done for in videos yeah i think yeah uh yeah i looks like it is yeah yeah i mean if you want to dig uh in the source code it's a project named New Leaf. Basically, New Leaf is a YouTube data extractor compatible with NVIDIA SAP AI. Ah, right, right, right. New Leaf uses YTDLP to assist with data extraction. But it also does some extraction itself.

You just read the description. Yeah, basically. So basically, it was what was started. But I mean, basically, Invidious was in such a bad state that things had to go quickly. And things didn't go quickly enough because she was busy with life so we ended up stopping this rewrite when the new developer came. So, since then it's just never really just gone anywhere.

I mean, CloudTab works considered production ready, kind of, because there's a flow in it. We'll talk about it later, maybe. Piped is also production ready. But the others are basically kind of experimental, except FreeTube, which is different. FreeTube is a desktop client. Basically, it's an application you install on your PC.

Oh, I know. I do know this one as well. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a bit different. Yeah, they mix it up in the list. But yeah, wow, there's a lot more than I remember. Well, keep in mind, some of these on here,

like there's InVue.js, which is a Vue.js front-end for InVidius. Yeah, I think it's a video. Some of them are really recent. and a lot of them are just GUIs for YouTube.io yeah yeah it's not the same objective as

NVIDIOS itself it's a way to see YouTube but I mean NVIDIOS has commands which most tools don't because commands is really weird to get In videos, it has commands, which most tools don't. Because commands is really weird to get and to display in a proper way. But yeah, now there's a lot. What is the, if you can explain it,

what is the problem with comments? If you can explain it, what is the problem with comments? The problem is that it's complicated to get from YouTube and to display in a good way because YouTube, you have the comments, but you have the replies. Then you have the likes of each replies. And so from YouTube, you can get them by chunk. Basically, you get, I think it's 20 at once, 15, 20, something like that. You get 15, except to get the next one. So in the YouTube main UI, you just call done. Except what is done is a bit complicated to explain without technical terms.

to explain without technical terms. But basically, you have a string of text in your web request that say, this is where you are in the command tree, basically. And if you want the 15 next commands, you have to request those commands with the places where you are. And it's basically really awkward to do. Then you have to display them properly, get the other profile pictures,

get the name of others. That was a problem recently, by the way. When YouTube changed, basically now you have an ad symbol or something, and you have a display name on top. So YouTube did the change, which made it so in videos only displays the hat symbol. We fixed it, kinda, because now some others have their display name and some others have

their hat name. It's a mess. Yeah, that does sound like a mess. Do you know what would have made it easier? If it was still original YouTube where there wasn't replies. If you wanted to reply to someone, you just wrote at their name. There was no reply trees. That was a nice time. Yeah, yeah. just wrote at their name there was no like reply trees that was a nice time yeah yeah but if you think that youtube back then had its had its own things that i'm sure would have caused

problems if uh nvidia was around um did you i mean did you use youtube back when reply videos existed? I don't think so. Okay, so in the very early days of YouTube, so you know how you have, like, the recommended videos, like, to the right of the... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was also a thing where instead of a comment, you could make a video as a comment to the video effectively. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah about that

yeah so it seems so messy I'm sure it was oh my god the mess that must have been going on in the back end wow yeah but hey it somehow

managed to all work together and then it's now owned by one of the most expensive or most valuable companies in the world yeah sadly honestly

so what is your general take on the recent stuff happening with the YouTube anti-adblock stuff? It's funny. It's funny, okay. Yeah. So, basically it's the logical step. It took them a really really long time. YouTube contacted us earlier this year because I mean the short reason is because we make them lose money basically the thing is that ad blockers

have been a thing for 15 years 20 years maybe I I'm not sure when the first one was around yeah I mean well we go with adblock itself that's been around since 2009 I don't know if there was something before that it did a similar fun yeah but yeah basically yeah 15 years and the thing is that at one point for four years uh ad block ad blockers were a small things something only the people who know about tech used uh so slight correction apparently it i was just being lied to It was 2002 the first one was around. Yeah, so 20 years. Okay.

But yeah, basically ad blockers were a small thing. But for 5 or 10 years, everyone knows about ad blockers now. Yup, yup. So it took them long enough to finally care and I mean if you look at the timing it happened just

after the CEO change which mean policy change inside YouTube. Well, it's not just the ad blockers are known about now. It's also there are browsers that exist who one of the main features is having ad block, whether it's Vivaldi, Brave, Opera GX,

which is really popular because of a bunch of Twitch streamers that have marketed it. Yeah, because of fads. Yeah, I wouldn't run a proprietary web browser, but whatever. It's a gaming browser. Good marketing team.

Really good marketing team. They've also got a really good social media manager. Their social media manager like their their social media um their twitter account is always just like replying under things uh with memes and stuff and they've got like a massive massive social media following companies trying to be cool oh they also have a vtuber yeah yeah companies trying to be cool. I mean, they're not the first one. But yeah, it's funny to see how Opera became big because I used Opera.

I used it. Oh, maybe 15 years ago? Yeah, back when opera was actually a standalone browser not just another yeah basically uh yeah that was a long long time ago uh basically they had uh i'm not even sure it was Android or not. I think it was Android. They had a browser named Opera Mini. And basically, it was the lightest web browser you could get. Ever. There was nothing lighter on Android. On phone.

I'm not sure it was Android. Maybe it was. Yes, there was an Android. It was on windows phone as well yeah maybe that was yeah android was until 2022 the android version was the only version still available yeah so basically uh yes it was yeah 10 15 years ago maybe it was a good browser that was used by people with a cheap phone so like me but that's it opera was nothing then i think they got bought out some years ago

because no one knew about them 2016 by chinese consortium yeah that's it then sets they started to try to be trendy and basically move to chromium added all the gaming junk yeah I would assume that the main Opera has basically no users. Opera GX I know people do care about though. Yeah. I mean it has some useless feature. To be fair I do like the idea

of the RAM limiting. That actually is kind of nice and I wish more browsers did that. I mean yeah but the only reason you need that is because operating systems are and panaging ram yeah i mean i mean logically a web browser is supposed to use the RAM it needs it shouldn't need a limiter yeah but people have this idea that it's going to use

as much RAM as possible so let's add the limiter, doesn't matter that it's going to break things if you limit the amount of ram yeah because it will break things yeah it's obvious yeah but the the marketing campaign's done super well for it like yeah opera gx is a great example of what happens with like i wouldn't it's not grassroots marketing but it really looks

like it but like they make it seem like all of these people just like oh all these cool streamers they're just using Opera GX because they think it's cool and it's marketing to teenagers massively which

sadly I guess follow their role model. So if a streamer say, hey, use that, they'll use that. Yeah, I don't have any interest in using it. I'm sure it's great. I'm sure it's great. Oh, it also has, like, the gamer theme to it. You know, like the red and black thing. Good marketing.

Yeah, yeah. No, it is real good marketing. I was going to segue to something, and then I forgot what I was gonna segue to I don't remember now I mean there's something we haven't talked about and it's something really

that I should maybe talk about sooner it's something really that I should maybe talk about sooner. Yes. It's why. Why does InVideos exist? Did we not talk about that? Why? Not really. You didn't talk about that.

Okay, you know what? Yeah, that's a good thing. Yeah. Okay, you know what? Yeah, that's a good thing. Yeah, I mean, we explained what it does, but we didn't say why it's needed and why all of the other front-end are needed.

So, I mean, try to use any of this platform with or without an ad blocker anyway. It doesn't really matter. It's slow. It's really slow. Especially YouTube. I think they made a change earlier this year

to their UI, or last year. Well, basically, now it's all JavaScript. And it's slow. There is one platform I think that's slower. The Spotify Android app is beyond broken. I thought it was my old phone that was causing the problem. No, it just locks up randomly for no reason. But YouTube is a close second.

I mean, I'm not just talking about YouTube. I'm talking about all of them. All the platforms in the list. Twitter is really slow. Yeah. Reddit is slow. Old Reddit still exists, and that's usable. Yeah, kind of.

I mean, it's not great. That's true. And it's missing features. That's true as well, yeah. So, yeah, the main reason all those front-end exist, one of the main reasons, is that those platforms are slow, require powerful hardware,

and recent hardware. InVIDIA runs on Windows XP. And more than that, we explicitly want to support Windows XP by choice. by choice which I don't think YouTube even loads on Windows XP does anyone I know there's some modern browsers that

like some modern forks of browsers that work on 7. I don't know if anyone's still trying to support XP. Yeah, I'm not sure. I recently found basically we were discussing

browser support recently. And I was looking at what is a browser to use on Windows XP now. And there's a fork of Pelmoon made for Windows XP. I mean, it's made by one person. So use it at your own risk. Is that New Moon?

Yeah, it's new moon. Yeah. And I'm not sure it supports YouTube and all the JavaScript websites. But even if it does,

it will be slow because it's JavaScript. So yeah, I mean, all the frontends that exist are all faster than the original platform. So that's one of the reasons. The other main reason, The other main reason, and people maybe don't understand that, NVIDIA isn't made to block ads at all.

None of the privacy frontends are made to block ads. Blocking ads, I mean, some people asked us to support ads and we would do it if we could the thing is that the ads are not the problem I mean yeah ads are shit but I mean

you have to pay the bill so the main problem with YouTube and the reason Nvidia still exists and the reason I'm still involved is the trackers

the problem is that YouTube is filled with trackers. Just for anyone who's unsure, can you explain what a tracker is and what the problem is? Basically, I'll take the example of you're not connected to YouTube. Because if you're connected, it's a bit different. If you're not connected to YouTube, everything you watch will be tied to a unique identifier.

That's you. You don't have an account. YouTube will track everything you do on the platform. Most platforms, I think YouTube still does that, will track where your mouse is. If you hover over... I don't know, the video title, for example, YouTube will know that you hovered over it, but you didn't click.

And most platforms are like that. They know what you do, when you do it, how you do it, because, yeah, it's easy to distinguish the movement of a mouse and the movement of a touchpad everything you do is tracked everything is written everything is kept The problem with YouTube isn't even the ads. Yeah, ads are shit. But I mean, YouTube is expensive. The problem is that if you watch an ad, you are loading a dozen trackers. So,

NVIDIA loads the video, but it doesn't load any of the trackers. And most platforms are like that. And, so, most people, I think, who don't really get this will tell me, so, pay for YouTube Premium. And I mean, you should do it, realistically, if you use YouTube.

Except the trackers are still here with YouTube Premium. So, you're paying, and you still get tracked? You have slightly less trackers because you don't have ad-retention trackers. No! Uh, yeah? But everything else, all of like the- Kinda? All of the um, well if you're not seeing the ads then there's not really any ad-retention stuff to track there so, if they're still using the ads, then there's not really any ad retention stuff to track there.

So, if they're still using the trackers, I think that's just a problem with their system. They're just collecting data for the sake of it. But, like, the mouse movement stuff, like, whether you click on a video, all that stuff is still, all still there. Yeah. I mean, I was talking about it some months ago on Matrix again. I was talking about it some months ago on Matrix again and I was literally

saying if YouTube didn't have tracker I'd happily pay it would be worth it to me like really the problem is that I refuse to pay to be tracked. And even more than that, all the platforms are like that.

So it's either you use it or you don't if you don't want to be tracked. And most privacy front-ends are not made by choice, kind of. They are made because they are the only solution to check the content without the trackers. So, yeah. content, without the trackers. From the company's perspective, the reason why these exist is data is very valuable. And just with the ad example, knowing if someone is going to click on an ad, knowing if they're paying attention to an ad, knowing if they click away from a video because of an ad. All of that information is incredibly valuable. Yeah, I know.

Yeah. The problem is that even if you pay, you'll still get tracked. Well, yeah, there's other things on the platform that's also, you know. The problem is that your data is a lot more valuable than the money you're going to pay for premium. Yeah. And I mean even more than that. What's Google?

Google is a massive company. But why are they massive? Because they're an advertising company. Their business is ads. because they're an advertising company their business is ads well the business is data and the ads are just the

most convenient way to use that data the data they have they keep it to themselves I think Google doesn't share any data with other companies. I mean, they surely do, but not everything. Well, yeah, like just as someone who uploads videos, I have a lot of data, but there's

a lot of things that don't show me. I don't have any idea how long, or where someone's mouse is on the screen. That's not information that's shared to me. But I do get things like retention time, click-through rates, or things like that. You get aggregated statistics. The problem, I mean, statistics isn't necessarily a problem. The problem is when each part of the tracking is individualized. That's the problem. I remember a story from years ago. Sorry, I won't have all the details but basically there was a story of a family figuring out that their their daughter was pregnant because they got ads for

baby stuff. I do remember this story. Yeah, it's years ago. And I mean, the problem isn't the ads at this point. The problem is that the company knew that she was pregnant. And

that's not necessarily a problem until what you're interested in is illegal. And it may be not illegal today, but it might be tomorrow. I mean, just remember, being gay was illegal in most countries 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And it still is illegal in some countries. Do you want to know how many companies know that someone living in a country where it's illegal, do you want the company to know that? I mean, I'm not sure.

And the problem is, as usual, that all those companies are monopoly. I mean, if I ask you to tell me what's your alternative to YouTube today? Go outside. Yeah. There's Bitchute

if you want white ring stuff. And only American white ring, by the way. There's Odyssey, which just bankrupt and crashed. I think it's still alive until the lawyers refuse to pay the bills, basically. So, yeah, there's no alternative. Same, yeah. There's no alternative.

Same for Twitter. I mean, Mastodon kind of helps. Except you won't find I don't know your politician your favorite musician on Mastodon. And I mean it's the same for everything.

I mean, Discord is another example yeah yeah I mean I'm sure Brody you don't choose Discord by choice I am I am on Discord because people would be like hey why don't you use

this whatever their favorite thing is of the day it's like i am on discord i am on facebook messenger i am on all these platforms because the people that i want to talk to use these platforms exactly that's the only reason exactly you're on discord because it's basically a monopoly yep so yeah and all those frontends, what they're made for is to allow people who refuse to use these platforms for privacy reasons usually, or that they can't use this platform, as I or old computer. It allows them to see what's there. And I mean, of course, it's not the solution.

But it's a way. Yeah. It's a stopgap, I guess. Yeah, that's exactly it. So, you have this other thing you do, the PuzzleCat.org. Yeah.

So what is this? What are we looking at here? So as I said, there's lots and lots of privacy frontends and pushthecat.org provides access to some of them yeah that's as simple it's basically a way to give back to to the community, to everyone who needs privacy, who wants privacy. It's a way, it's a statement to show, hey, it's possible.

And I do this for you. I basically don't get anything from that except some donation which help to cover the cost thanks to the people who donate by the way. And I mean it's there, it's for people. Enjoy it, I guess. I presume also part of the reason why you run them is so that you can use them as well. I mean, yeah, but most of them I don't use them. I mean, I use NVIDIUS. I use Cirx. We should talk about it later, by the way.

I don't use the Reddit one. I use the one for translation. The Imgur, Imgur, Imgur, not sure. I barely use it. I don't use the Odyssey one. I don't use the Odyssey one. I don't use the Tic Tac one. I don't use the Medium one because it's currently broken. Well, that's a good reason not to use it. Yeah. I don't use... Oh yeah, I use the IMDB one once a month at best.

I use IMDB 1, once a month at best. I don't use the Quora 1, and yeah, I use the Fandom 1. But yeah, basically I use three of them, four of them. And I used... Okay, so yeah, the rest of it is just so they exist for other people to use them, I guess. Yeah, basically. That's cool. How popular are the instances that you have? If you scroll down a bit, you have the statistics.

Ah, yep. And you have the number of requests. It's all stats, but... Yeah, basically... millions! Basically, Neater, so the Twitter one, was the most popular and I often did months with 250 million requests. I don't know what that actually works out to in actual uses. I don't really know.

I guess tens of thousands. Wow. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Cause I, I know Twitter, especially previously would have like a bunch of nonsense and I don't know how much of that nonsense knitter needs to bring in to like make the platform actually work. What do you mean? I don't... I mean like just extra API calls for the just thrown in there that no one's really sure what they're actually doing but they kind of need to be there to make the platform work. Yeah so this changed recently after Redone basically. before that it was a lot easier. I Mean I had to shut down my nitter instance

for other reason I Mean you can go on Puzzle cat org slash nitter if you want to read it It was a bad afternoon. Oh, yep, yep, here we go. Contacted our registry. Oh, okay. Yeah. What? So basically, I'll explain quickly. Basically, a UK non-profit made to protect children

had some content reported to them that was linked to an ornithal instance. Uh-huh. Wait, so they had a problem with you? that was links to our native instance. Wait, so they had a problem with you showing content that Twitter had on their website? Yeah. I see. They're not very good at it. Yeah, because that's the problem.

So the problem is that a front-end takes the content and displays it in another way. That's it. There's no processing, basically, except where it's needed. So if there's junk on Twitter, including illegal junk, well, it will be on Twitter. And it was on Netter. So the nonprofit had someone who reported links. I don't know if it was on purpose against me

or if it was just someone who saw that, but it was explicitly reported to them. Then this non-profit had a bot who checked, which is where the problem starts. Because this bot doesn't check what it is. Content is here. Okay, that's it. It doesn't check that.

Oh, it's a way to show what's on Twitter. So the nonprofit automatically contacted the registry of the org. And they automatically contacted the German federal criminal police. That was fun afternoon. So, basically, they... the registry contacted our registrar, but I was in copy. I just replied to both explaining what Netter is, etc.

Which was fine and it's not a problem anymore. The police contacted the server provider. The server provider instantly suspended the server. And I don't blame them. I mean, they were right to do that. So, yeah, that was fun to explain to my server provider, especially because the person from the legal team of the server provider was... I mean, I'm not with them anymore, so they were another complete basically thinking uh i mean basically uh

close to telling me fix that of or shut up basically i mean it was close to that It was close to that. So I could have done things. I replied explaining what niter is, but they didn't care, obviously, because fix that or shut up. So I ended up telling them, okay, that wasn't what I wanted for niter. So I just shot it down. And I shot down Nitor.

I added a message in French at the end. In case things went back to the French police. Which I was expecting, honestly. But nothing happened since oh yeah that's what happened when you asked front-ends for people I assume you could probably like specifically filter out like that just to get them to go away filter out that just to get them to go away, filter out that specific link that they have a problem with? Yeah, I mean, I could. But I mean,

it's not the solution. The content is on Twitter. It's not on my server. Yeah, it would just get them to go away. Yeah, basically, that's what originally... I mean, that's basically what I used to do on some other platform for copyright reasons. Now it's legal according to XX law. Or I tell them, okay, I'll block this.

And by the way, here's the law that tells me I'm allowed to do that. Yeah, because we'll talk about it, but privacy frontend are legal thanks to some laws. Laws used by VPN, by the way. Okay. So yeah, basically I could have done that, but I mean,

my server provider was so hostile that I just said, fuck it, I'll just shut it down and whatever. I don't use it anyway well but we're getting close to when i want to wrap up anyway so what's what's the deal with privacy front ends and like the similar reasoning behind a vpn so basically uh i sent you some links. So 17 and 18. 17 and 18, okay.

Yep. So basically, it's two templates, one for the United States and one for the European Union, depending on where the host of this front-end is based, which is usually US or EU. And basically, each template mentions a law, which is, I don't remember even what the law says in details, but it's basically saying, so I'll read the EU one. Temporary acts of reproduction,

which are transient or incidental, and an integral part of a technological process and whose sole purpose is to enable a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary. Basically, the law is saying, if you are a proxy being a proxy is legal period

so a VPN a proxy well privacy frontend is that just a proxy it's a shiny proxy it takes the content and it put it in another in another block, basically.

Which makes it so, thanks to this law, privacy front-end are legal. And the same law exists in the US. Or something similar. And the same law exists in the US, or something similar. And so this template was used to fight dozens and dozens of takedown requests, almost always copyright, because especially YouTube creators, some of them don't understand what InVideo sees, creators some of them don't understand what NVIDIA is and some of them think oh no you're

reposting my videos no yeah it happens often so I guess some will send them a link to like some NVIDIA instance and they'll be like take this down. No, usually it depends.

Usually it's the creator contacting the instance owners, telling them, hey, I didn't allow you to... No, that's what I mean, sorry. Yeah, like they get a link to a video on an NVIDIA instance and they're like, stop doing that. Yeah. So basically those are simple to deal with. You take the template, you modify it and you send them.

Usually it's enough. Some creator goes through lawyers and law firms. Usually the template is enough. Usually, the template is enough. It's a rule I used to apply. Most people, I think, also do that. And it's basically, if it's a big law firm, basically, they cancel you easily.

You send them the template, and you block the link. Basically. It's not the solution because it doesn't i mean it's the law would say that it's legal but i mean it works the objective isn't to get sued yeah that's a good objective yeah so it kind of works isn't to get sued. Yeah, that's a good objective. Yeah, so... It kind of works. It would be nice if they actually understood what it was.

Yeah. I have had websites repost my content. Go after those. Because those do exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. those do exist yeah yeah yeah those do exist but the problem is that it's too common I guess so

when they see a frontend they just say oh they're reposting which is I mean it's not even a problem anymore I guess just say, oh, they're reposting. Which is, I mean, it's not even a problem anymore, I guess. Well, a couple of seconds of thinking would, I mean, I guess it's

just they don't have that much technical knowledge, but a couple of seconds of thinking where you see, hey, look, the ID in the URL is exactly the same as the ID of the YouTube video. Like, hmm. Maybe there's a reason for that.

And if you scroll down, there's a link to the project website, which explains what it is. Well, it's also not just a repost. On NVIDIA, all of the comments are there. So it's like, did we take all your comments as well? Yeah, yeah. So it's like, did we take all your comments as well? Yeah, yeah. So there's that. There's also some funny takedown requests. I mean, funny because you don't even have to answer to those. And it's takedowns that happen often to to in video instance and that's so it's been happening for a long time and it's Russian government who wanting to block some videos yeah so it Yeah. So it has happened before the war.

There's especially one specific channel, one specific video of a guy who sing in Russian. And I don't know, I guess it's something that's not legal in Russia, and they want it blocked, which is funny when you receive an email by the Russian government. What are they going to do? What are you going to do? Come on. I mean, most instance owners just don't reply and don't do anything,

which means usually at the end, the instance is blocked in Russia. Sadly. I mean, it's kind of a problem for Russians. That's fair. That's fair. I mean, yeah, even with everything that happens,

a person is still a person. So if they want privacy, they should be able to do it but yeah it's kind of a funny takedown there is a lot of clearly a lot of people that don't have any technical knowledge

just sending out takedowns to anything that looks like a problem yeah yeah I mean yeah I guess Just sending out takedowns to anything that looks like a problem. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I guess the... Oh, no. I guess the logic... Well, actually, no.

I was trying to think of, like, some logic that makes sense with the Russian government thing. If the video is... Maybe the video itself is blocked on YouTube in Russia, but the instance... Yeah, I guess it is. Yeah, I'm almost sure it's this.

But I mean, yeah. I don't know. Why do you care about a random music? Yeah, I don't know, Russian. Maybe it's... Maybe there's a reason why they care about it. Yeah, I mean, it's political, but I mean, it's one there's a reason why they care about it i yeah i mean it's political but i mean it's one music guys come on

um anyway i think that's basically where i want to end it because we've just gone over the two hour mark now. Yeah. That was fun. Yeah, I enjoyed that. It was a bit messy, but yeah. Oh yeah, we had the robot issue a while back. It cleared up like five minutes after that, so I don't know what the deal was. Yeah, and we didn't talk about things in great order. Look, I am impressed that we got through most of the thing.

I think we got through everything on the list. Yeah, we did. We did. Just not in order. We didn't talk about applications that make use of NVIDIUS, but everything else. Yeah. I mean, yeah. everything yeah i think i mean yeah um yeah the thing is this podcast i i don't know how to run an interview so always just ends up it ends up just turning into just chaos somewhere along the way yeah rambling basically um but for some reason people watch it i don't know why but

hey i appreciate it because it's honest, I guess. That's fair. That's fair. I've had some people ask me like, oh, where did you get... How do I learn to do a podcast the way you do it? Do you want to know my secret? I just stole Joe Rogan's format.

I'll just do that. I just let the guest talk the entire time. Yeah. I mean, it works. It does. Also means I get to talk less, which is also good. So let people know where they can get involved in videos. Anything else you might want to mention.

I mean, if you want to work in NVIDIA, thank you. Go to the website, everything is there. Come to the GitHub. Come to the Matrix room or IRC. Both are bridged together. And I mean come it's fun you have to learn a language that you won't have any

productive value outside of the project yeah you'll help us be the best crystal project. We can be bigger than crystal itself. Wait, how far are you guys behind?

10,000 stars, I think. 5,000 stars? 5,000? Close. Close. 5,000 stars. 5,000.

Close. Anything else you want to mention? I mean, not really. I mean, I mean, fight for the good, guys. I like that message

I mean yeah fight for the good believe in what you do if it's the good thing and be good people I'll do my outro and then we can actually finish it off

yeah cool so twice a week I stream on my gaming channel that is Brodeon Games we can actually finish it off. Yeah. Cool. So, twice a week I stream on my gaming channel that is Brodeon Games. I don't know what will be on there, because this is... I am doing a bunch of podcasts before the end of the year, because I want to take the end of the year off.

So I don't know when this will come out. I don't know. Whatever's out then I think I'll probably I'll probably finish Armored Core 6 and Kingdom Hearts by then so go to the channel and you'll find whatever I'm streaming

the main channel that is Brody Robinson, I do Linux videos there 6-ish days a week and it's good it's too many yeah And it's good. It's too many. Yeah, but it's useful. Yeah. I'm a Wayland Shills,

so that's my main thing. I mean, yeah. If you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you want to find the audio podcast there is an rss feed it is available on every podcast platform uh search for integrity and

you will find it uh give me the final word how do you want to sign off the show be good see you guys later