YouTube video has its own URL in it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6L__oR1O9A

by ignaloidas • 7 years ago

681 147 7 years ago

qpleple• 7 years ago

Anybody knows how?

My first guess is that new versions of videos can be uploaded if they're similar enough (not sure how it would judge that? visually???) and/or are updated shortly enough after upload.

Edit: Oh, I didn't even see the time travel reference in the ID. Maybe the ID is generated from metadata, and there's some endpoint where he was able to throw random metadata at it in an automated process until it came out looking somewhat like "delorean". Or he was able to get ahold of the algorithm locally for a quicker version of that process. In any case, I doubt he backwards-engineered anything.

figgyc2• 7 years ago

Just a guess but I assume this was done by starting an upload with the API which gave the guy the ID but then not streaming the actual video file until it was recorded. Looking at an example of the API in use ( https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos/insert#... ) that certainly seems plausible although I would imagine that there would be a timeout making it difficult.

edit: after looking at the other guy mentioning the time machine reference, my theory would be that he just spammed this API until he got a plausible URL and only then recorded and uploaded the video, probably would take a while but not forever considering how loose the URL actually is to delorean

Thaxll• 7 years ago

The ID returns once your upload is completed.

Edit: I don't know the answer but I assume from all the APIs I worked with in the past, but if you get the URL before the upload is completed then yeah it's pretty easy to "fake".

tudorw• 7 years ago

Could you start uploading a file then append the video you create before the upload process completes?

rwmj• 7 years ago

Wasn't there some discussion of Youtube allowing videos to be modified recently?

Avamander• 7 years ago

Start uploading a video, pause the upload, you could already get the ID of the vid, render rest of the video and then continue the upload that now contains the ID of the video :D

_nalply• 7 years ago

And then cut away the beginning.

vortico• 7 years ago

This is probably it, I'm going to say Bingo.

techaddict009• 7 years ago

How to pause? and re upload pending part with new video?

nafey• 7 years ago

This looks really interesting. Has YouTube ever published their URL generation technique?

Any one has a guess how this was done? If they use a one way hash over metadata and content if video does this not mean that someone has figured out their secret key.

apocalyptic0n3• 7 years ago

As far as I was aware, the ID is just a hashed version of the actual database id being passed through an algorithm using base64. hashids[0] implements a similar method of obfuscating IDs.

0: https://hashids.org/

blattimwind• 7 years ago

You can also permute your ID space using a block cipher.

tootie• 7 years ago

I'm wondering how this could actually be exploited. Is there any value in knowing your URL ahead of time besides impressing the HN crowd?

henryfjordan• 7 years ago

you can post links all around the web and do some kind of SEO-bomb for the video if you can guess the URL before hand, but that quickly happens organically for popular/viral stuff anyway

soupfordummies• 7 years ago

Interestingly, there's a frame or two at the very beginning that shows a document open that could suggest an exploit of some kind.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/3oTXTDK.png

joshstrange• 7 years ago

Those look like "show notes" for the video creator to cover/notes to themselves.

jakear• 7 years ago

I believe that’s just part of the joke. It’s a mock email from the future, telling him what the URL will be and how to make the video.

sli• 7 years ago

In another comment, someone says the trick here is to do a resumable upload.

The document is covering the sign at the start of the video, so the uploader could have uploaded that section (without any text on the sign in-game), then "resumed" the upload with a different video that contains the URL on the sign and starts after he switches to the Minecraft window.

pavel_lishin• 7 years ago

From: Pi

To: Pi

Subject: Project Time Machine - Test #3

It sounds like someone's trying to create some fun meta-fiction - it looks like a letter from the creator's future self to his past-self, describing future-self's experience going through some iteration of the time-loop ("Don't talk about fate. You did it once and it was cringy.")

lioeters• 7 years ago

Indeed - using the Czech-language version of Word and email client.

dalore2• 7 years ago

Can't you just upload a video, get the url. Make a new video and upload it as an edit?

Matticus_Rex• 7 years ago

No, you can edit a video in YT but you can't reupload a new video with the same URL.

llao• 7 years ago

I am very sure that high profile users can do that.

edit: Yes, sorry for the crappy source though -> https://www.reviewjournal.com/insidetech/youtube-lets-some-u...

dalore2• 7 years ago

So reupload a new video as an edit?

triMichael• 7 years ago

Definitely not the same technique, but at one point I watched a Mario Maker puzzle level someone had uploaded that used part of its own level code as a clue. The trick was that only two characters of the level code were used, which is hexadecimal, so there are 256 combinations of those two characters, allowing the level creator to brute force re-uploading the level until getting the desired combination.

georgespencer• 7 years ago

Reminds me of the brilliant New York Times crossword which "predicted" the winner of the US election in 1996:

http://www.alaricstephen.com/main-featured/2017/7/3/the-clin...

Lammy• 7 years ago

This page seems to have zero text or image content unless I let SquareSpace run Javascript (and ostensibly track me).

vl• 7 years ago

This crossword is available in NYT Crossword app, I just loaded it!

I'm going to try to solve it both ways. :)

dewey• 7 years ago

I think it's most likely done with the API. From what I remember from looking at it a while ago you can create the entry before, then it'll give you the right endpoint where you post your actual file to later on in the process. You just have to do that quickly enough so the endpoint doesn't expire.

iforgotpassword2• 7 years ago

It's apparently even been done before, see here at around the three minute mark: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UMYTSJTU0Vk

sunebeck• 7 years ago

What an odd video!

rebane20017• 7 years ago

Oh hi, creator of the video here!

It's just a fun video of me messing around with Windows 8.1 I made a while back, trying out different "apps" and stuff. I thought it'd be a fun easter egg to download the video itself when I was trying out that strange YouTube MP3 downloader app :D

I didn't do it with the API (even though I tried to at first), just the normal youtube.com/upload site. I used Fiddler (Burpsuite alternative) to achieve this

I am not the first person to do this however, Insane Doll Gallery has made a video demonstrating this [youtu.be/ufq2Eb78kSU] (apparently used the API) and the channel NightFalls Studios has also used this trick in their My Little Pony comic animations [youtu.be/FDLvR9xrCag and youtu.be/7oXsOmqs6R4]

whycombagator• 7 years ago

so: https://youtu.be/UMYTSJTU0Vk?t=175

cloudking2• 7 years ago

Maybe 1) start upload till URL appears 2) go offline 3) replace file 4) go online

agumonkey• 7 years ago

how long until you get the video id ? if you generate a lazy stream of images you can ~self reference

SilasX• 7 years ago

Or:

1) Make an educated guess about what the URL will be and put it in the video.

2) Upload.

3) If you were wrong, delete it and go to 1).

I'm half joking, but that's basically what they did for a git utility that would let you edit histories so that messages could refer (by partial hash) to later commits. I forget the name, though, and couldn't find it on a quick search.

modinfo• 7 years ago

You're right, I did what you said and it works. This is easier than I expected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF37GjdwJvk

cloudking2• 7 years ago

Nice, was a lucky guess!

tonymet• 7 years ago

my guess is the url is a hash of the video upload time, username , video length (is deterministic) so he uploaded 100 (or 1000) and kept the one that worked

tip: if you see something magic it's usually just dilligence in disguise. (like the Prestige)

sbhn• 7 years ago

Live streaming your live stream

iforgotpassword2• 7 years ago

Wouldn't it say streamed instead of published then in the description box?

kerblang• 7 years ago

Done more than once before, this one even has an explanation, which matches some of the guesses people already posted I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufq2Eb78kSU

carusooneliner2• 7 years ago

Excellent, this explains it. The YouTube video you shared says the trick is to create a resumable upload using YouTube API. The steps involved :

1. create a resumable session (here we specify video length in bytes)

2. YouTube returns a session URI which contains the upload ID

3. create a video with the upload ID baked in (edit video to match length from step 1)

4. upload video to the session URI

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/using_resuma...

samstave• 7 years ago

I have not been doing any edits of video for a long time... What are most people editing vids with these days?

frenk4• 7 years ago

The video shows a '0' but the url has an 'O'

lysium• 7 years ago

I thought, '0' (zero) is filled/dashed in that font to distinguish it from 'O'. Or you're trolling. ;-)

TazeTSchnitzel2• 7 years ago

Another way to achieve this would be to make a video which flashes each possible digit of the YouTube video ID alphabet once for each digit, then use YouTube's video editor to cut out all the incorrect digits.

rebane20017• 7 years ago

The video, running at 60fps, would have to be 38996161157 years long for this to be a possibility Even if you predicted the first 3 symbols of the id, you'd still need a 148758 years long video

josinalvo2• 7 years ago

each possible digit, not each possible ID.

You seem to be calculating some combinatorial explosion, where there probably is none

megablast• 7 years ago

What?

38 frames * 8 (or however many possible characters there are.

turdnagel• 7 years ago

C.f. this tweet, which has a link to itself: https://twitter.com/mauritscorneIis/status/99142460340155187...

(And as we all know Twitter has no edit button, no post-upload shenanigans are possible here, just some clever guessing and reverse-engineering Twitter's ID generation algorithm)

vincentchu2• 7 years ago

This tweet (or one like it) caused a massive Twitter outage.

brokensegue• 7 years ago

Citation?

imhoguy• 7 years ago

Yeah, "If you type 'google' into google.. you can breakthe internet, so please no one try it" IT Crowd /s

sdenton4• 7 years ago

Nothing like finding a loop in a simple graph...

Paul-ish• 7 years ago

Is that because some algorithm assumed link cycles weren't possible?

lepht• 7 years ago

There's a decent write-up of how to do this here: https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20090805/

As you said, it largely relies on reverse engineering and bruteforcing Twitter's ID generation.

pomber• 7 years ago

Bot author here. That post was before twitter made changes on the id generation. Now it consists of four parts that you need to guess (the datacenterId, the workerId, a sequence and a timestamp). For more details, the bot repo is here: https://github.com/pomber/escher-bot

_ps6d2• 7 years ago

A somewhat related story about why text posts on reddit are called "self posts" (copy-pasted from a thread from 5 years ago where someone asked why, linked near the top of the explanation):

---

It's actually a bit of a long story, but it's kind of an interesting part of reddit's history. Some of my details are probably off, but this is how I understand it.

A long, long time ago, reddit only supported submitting links. Link submissions were pretty much exactly the same as they still are now, including having a comments page that you could go to with an address like the page we're currently on: http://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/2bmy3l/what_does_the_s...

If you look at that address, one thing to notice is that it includes the submission's ID in base-36, which for this post is "2bmy3l". If you go to http://www.reddit.com/r/all/new and look at the links to the comments pages of the newest posts, you'll notice that their IDs are increasing. For example, at the time I'm writing this, the newest IDs are 2bo3uw, 2bo3ux, 2bo3uy.

Since the IDs are increasing, you can predict which ones are coming up. You know that the next ID after those ones should be 2bo3uz. So some person decided it would be funny if they pre-constructed a link like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/<id>/this_post_w... and then checked which IDs were coming up, filled in the "<id>" spot with one that should be used soon, and submitted it.

If they got their timing right, they'd end up with a link post that actually went nowhere. Clicking it would just take you to its own comments page, since they had managed to predict the url that the comments page would have. This was a "self post", a post that linked to itself.

So this was a pretty neat trick, and when it was successfully pulled off for the first time, it got a whole bunch of attention. Unfortunately, reddit's never been very good at just seeing some new popular thing as a novelty and moving on. No, of course pretty much everybody wanted to get their own "self post". The majority of the new submissions to the site were suddenly just people trying to make a self post, completely drowning out all the real submissions.

It was causing a gigantic mess, so one of the admins at the time decided to get people to stop by taking all the fun out of the game. They made it so that you could just choose to make a self post. You didn't have to guess the ID or anything, you just selected that you wanted to make a self post and automatically got one. It didn't have the option to add additional text or anything yet (that came later), it was just a title that linked to its own comments page.

So that's how self posts came about, and where the name originated. A quick solution to a mess being made by users that eventually turned into one of the most important pieces of reddit.

AdamJacobMuller• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, reddit's never been very good at just seeing some new popular thing as a novelty and moving on.

So very reddit.

Do you know what year that was?

_ps6d2• 7 years ago

January 22, 2008 is when the built-in feature to make self-posts was added: https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/666ne/testing_self/

StavrosK8• 7 years ago

Oh man, I remember trying (and succeeding) to do this with comments, back before you had a 30 second grace period before getting the asterisk. I wrote a comment that linked to itself.

I later became "more" famous for inadvertently DDoSing reddit, and forgot all about it until someone replied to one of my comments saying "aren't you the asshole who brought down reddit as an April fool's joke?". "Huh? No! Oh, wait".

trazire• 7 years ago

How?

Buge• 7 years ago

Vaguely related: I noticed that the old reddit UI would display self posts as "self.subredditname" and link posts to foo.com as "foo.com". I realized there was a potential confusion if your tld is the subreddit name, and the 2nd and only other label is "self". So I registered self.finance and posted a link to it to /r/finance .

https://www.reddit.com/r/finance/comments/3ancv0/selffinance...

raverbashing• 7 years ago

Ok now give me a text file (or some kind of image file) that contains its own md5/sha1/sha256 hash in the text (or in the image)

anderskaseorg• 7 years ago

https://shells.aachen.ccc.de/~spq/md5.gif

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823704

sp332• 7 years ago

  It's a PDF, a ZIP, and an HTML page:
  If you drop it on itself in a browser,
  it can give you a PDF viewer, a video
  and a PNG explaining the whole file structure.
  All these files have the same MD5.

https://twitter.com/angealbertini/status/1111329484647616513

The explanation for how the MD5 trick is achieved is in the PDF, starting on page 21.

Edit: whoops, probably more relevant is this earlier issue, which has the MD5 printed on the cover. https://github.com/angea/pocorgtfo/blob/master/contents/issu... The relevant article in that issue starts on page 46.

mwidell• 7 years ago

For some users, at least for me, it is actually possible to just replace the video file in the upload interface on YouTubes website, within the first hour or so. Using this method this would be easy.

mjevans• 7 years ago

It would be more useful if Google / Youtube's API allowed 'reserving a slot' which would create a video ID endpoint but not finalize the content. Accounts might have a per-account limit of some small number of floating slots which would also timeout after a day or two.

This wouldn't violate the write-once model since the submission wouldn't be completed, it'd just defer finalizing and publishing it for a little.

MichaelApproved• 7 years ago

More useful for what application? Other than a novelty, why would anyone need a reserved spot?

josinalvo2• 7 years ago

To provide a link to next week's video/ the next of a series inside the previous?

amerine• 7 years ago

Some workflows around video production might find it useful to have the actual YouTube URL early in the process.

Doubl• 7 years ago

This reminds me of the holy Grail (for me anyway) of a file containing its own hash

krferriter• 7 years ago

Actually, quantum mechanics allows this

pbhjpbhj3• 7 years ago

How about a comment containing it's own item ID ...? 20456050

brokenmachine• 7 years ago

It's not that difficult to do if you use a weak hash (eg crc32) and bruteforce it.

Also you could pad the file with some extra data, but that feels like cheating.

aasasd• 7 years ago

What do you know, this has been posted in another comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823704

thepiwo• 7 years ago

Reminds me of the gif showing its own hash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823704

userbinator• 7 years ago

I guess this could be referred to as a YouTube quine (as opposed to a YouTube queen.) It'd be even more amusing if the video ID contained something meaningful --- I've seen that happen by coincidence.

mamadontloveme• 7 years ago

Clever way to do it :) And the frames at the start are there, because his solution needed time to get the ID in order to dynamically show it inside Minecraft.

m4632• 7 years ago

Reminds me of the guy that posted this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20456139

haser_au• 7 years ago

Haha, gold.

rohan1024• 7 years ago

Okay, how did you do it?

henkslaaf• 7 years ago

Post first half, then edit? Just a guess.

CamelCaseName• 7 years ago

I thought you were going to link to this thread [0] on HN, which would upvote itself if you clicked on it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902

amenghra• 7 years ago

https://twitter.com/selfrefer/status/3128391843 is a self referencing tweet and more impressive (since there’s no api to “cheat”).

cglong• 7 years ago

Can we add "[video]" to this title?

kentms• 7 years ago

If the video was reading the actual url in real time, then, if I add another query string parameter it should show up on the video. Which is not the case. So I assume it was somehow edited.

frenchman99• 7 years ago

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/using_resuma...

anewguy9000• 7 years ago

i thought this was going to be an infinity mirror. oh well

qhfgva• 7 years ago

Somewhat in the same vein: http://madeofmistake.com/selfrefdata

retpirato• 7 years ago

You know you can edit previously uploaded videos,right? https://spencerdailey.com/2019/06/24/youtube-should-give-use...

YouTube video has its own URL in it

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