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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47588658

by joering2 • 4 months ago

311 98 4 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

On a newest version, I attempted to download newest yt-dlp only to be warned of "Suspicious Download". No explanation what that means was provided.

ompogUe• 4 months ago

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

schiffern• 4 months ago

By the same standard, Chrome itself is "a tool to download files from Google's servers." Chrome doesn't only download from Google's servers, but the same thing applies to yt-dlp.

I'm equally not "surprised" by their bad behavior, but that shouldn't stop us from condemning Google for unethically misleading people and engaging in browser monopoly abuse.

---

EDIT: holding up (hilariously) RIAA lawyers as ethical role models only proves my point, thanks.

waffletower2• 4 months ago

I am sure that RIAA lawyers would rofl at this yt-dlp labelling being an example of Google "... unethically misleading people and (committing) browser monopoly abuse". I want to live in that fantasy world with you though.

dryarzeg• 4 months ago

Chrome itself is "a tool to download files from Google's servers."

...legitimately. While Google (I will reinforce: Google, not everyone) sees downloading of the videos and other content from the YouTube by third-party services as illegitimate because of YouTube's ToS. After all, they're making money from the YouTube Premium and "Download" option provided by it, so things like that are kinda expected to happen.

And no, I don't agree that it's right. While I can understand the position of Google, the method they (allegedly) used here... Well... I don't even know what to say. That's plainly wrong, in my opinion. After all, "download" is defined as "To transfer (data or a program) from a central computer or website to a peripheral computer or device." by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th Edition), so when you just watch videos, you download them already, don't you? What about watching them in browser, somewhere in embed on some website? Does that constitute a legitimate client (I guess so, because most of embeds still use YouTube Player after all)? That just makes me laugh : )

Habgdnv• 4 months ago

Actually that is what they want you to believe. Behind the scenes, secretly Chrome is mostly "a tool to upload files to Google's servers" but because it does not require any actions from the user to do that, many people miss that part.

SturgeonsLaw• 4 months ago

Chrome should be flagged as suspicious

rdevilla• 4 months ago

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

josteink• 4 months ago

We built it on enthusiasm for enthusiasts and for that reason alone, it became something great.

Then they stole it all for profit.

Probably not the first time in history this has happened.

recursive• 4 months ago

And hopefully not the last

izzydata• 4 months ago

The amounts of times someone invented something that was important to them and then never make any money from it only for some other entity to make tons of money from it is way too high.

thesuitonym• 4 months ago

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

jddecker• 4 months ago

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

TheSkyHasEyes• 4 months ago

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

g947o• 4 months ago

You could also ask why Android care about banning side loading to "prevent scams and spyware", and I honestly don't have an answer at all.

reactordev• 4 months ago

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

gruez3• 4 months ago

Because people download viruses from the internet all the time? "Common sense antivirus" might work fine if you're technically inclined, but that's not the case for everyone.

rcakebread• 4 months ago

Because Google owns Youtube.

thebeardredis• 4 months ago

Because Google does no evol.

ddtaylor6• 4 months ago

Google has been anti yt-dlp before it was forked. They also have rules that carve out tools like this from their extension store and at Android, except enforcement is lacking sometimes.

Google is terrified of users having access users control to their video content.

nslsm• 4 months ago

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

eis• 4 months ago

Which link exactly did you try to use? Or what specific version on the Github releases page? I checked both the latest windows and macos versions against Google Safe Browsing and all were fine.

owlninja• 4 months ago

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

matheusmoreira• 4 months ago

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

entropie• 4 months ago

Which in the case of yt-dlp might not be fast enough.

I use a telegram/mqtt/homeassistant wrapper (1) to let my mother download audiobooks which are saved in jellyfin so she can listen or download them from my (home)server.

Keeping yt-dlp up2date (and therefore) working is not that easy, especially since I dont systemupdate every other week. There were a few phases yt-dlp version in nixpkgs-unstable were just not working. I created a little wrapper that updates a venv so I always have the HEAD running for my bot.

[1] https://github.com/entropie/ytdltt

waffletower2• 4 months ago

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

iririririr• 4 months ago

you almost got it rigth. safari and arc are as bad as chrome. arc is just stable-chrome (it will have the same nonsense with a custom ui next release)

firefox sadly is still what you should use.

LollipopYakuza• 4 months ago

I started giving a try to Zen (based on firefox) a few days ago. I like it especially while heavily relying on a tiling window manager.

jrajav2• 4 months ago

Why is Safari as bad as Chrome?

apparent• 4 months ago

Why use Chrome when there's Brave? I can't remember the last time I opened Chrome.

a96• 4 months ago

Brave is a series scam company. Always has been, always will be.

john_strinlai• 4 months ago

for what it is worth, when downloading the latest .exe from github, firefox says "this file is not commonly downloaded" and i have to select "allow download".

scans of it are fine.

probably just a heuristic-based false-positive, and not a news-worthy story of chrome abusing their monopoly or whatever.

miki_oomiri• 4 months ago

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

warkdarrior• 4 months ago

Safebrowsing does not provide popularity metrics for downloads, to my knowledge. It only states whether a URL is malicious according to some Google checks. No amount of popularity would turn a malicious URL into a benign one.

ryandrake• 4 months ago

Do these little speed bumps even work? I have to admit I'm so numb to all these popups and to apps warning me this and begging me that, that I just don't read anything anymore. Each app that hits me up with yet another dialog is just another brick in the wall.

The only speed bump that I find super annoying is when your browser tries to prevent you from going to a site with an incorrectly configured certificate (or a self signed certificate). The UX browsers make you navigate in this case is extra-horrible. Apparently, my use of a self-signed certificate for some local machines means I'm about to die.

bahmboo• 4 months ago

I have been using the internet since before the www. In the last few years I pay attention to every speed bump and evaluate it seriously. I check the url of every financial site I log into. I disable automatic security blocks as a last resort. There's just too much consequence for failure.

dpoloncsak• 4 months ago

We recently rolled over an SSL cert that is used for RemoteApps. Most of my users rely on these RemoteApps. They all got the 'yellow warning box' that the SSL cert was different, and we got swamped with tickets.

Atleast in a corporate environment, they help

jfoster2• 3 months ago

These are speed bumps for you but they make it nearly impossible for something to go mainstream, so rest assured they work extremely well on others.

whateverboat3• 4 months ago

This is also happening with `.tar.gz` file on chrome for yt-dlp. Doesn't happen for other `.tar.gz`

NiloCK• 4 months ago

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

alsetmusic• 4 months ago

Reminds me of how Bing search for Google takes people to a page meant to resemble Google.com. Can't trust huge companies.

But as others have pointed out, it's probably a coincidence in this case. But who knows.

ddtaylor6• 4 months ago

"Never let a good tragedy go to waste"

frollogaston2• 4 months ago

Google did flag the Ad Nauseam Chrome extension as malware, so that was a definite abuse of power. This one is unclear.

jesse23• 4 months ago

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

bigyabai2• 4 months ago

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

mghackerlady• 4 months ago

I suspect for M$ users you could even use winget (though I am unable to subject myself to Windows right now)

faangguyindia• 4 months ago

It's funny such a big corporations can't let such a small tool live.

Google is such an evil company, it is not even provided anything great anymore.

Anti-gravity paid plans suck, GCP is billing heavy. Today google sucks at most things

Their Android playstore hardly updates statistics once a day, so much for such a big data company with unlimited sources lol

cess11• 4 months ago

It's a tool used to build other tools, some of which have non-trivial amounts of users.

It's also a tool used by e.g. journalists and government agencies that dabble in stuff like research and evidence, and it would probably be more cumbersome for everyone involved if Google instead had to process requests and provide copies of material for these purposes.

Otherwise they'd probably have made life much harder for the yt-dlp-developers already. Not that I think they're nice in any way, but I don't think they're seriously trying to fully eradicate yt-dlp or related software.

asveikau3• 4 months ago

The heuristics powering this, as well as the Windows Defender whitelisting, are terrible.

My understanding is that a specific binary needs to become popular for it to stop being flagged. This creates a chicken and egg problem. Users are not incentivized to use the program with the warning. But removing the warning requires many people to ignore the warning.

This is a big problem for anyone writing Windows software. An indie developer or small open source project is not going to do well with this.

Frotag• 4 months ago

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

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

asveikau3• 4 months ago

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

pimterry• 4 months ago

EV no longer skips smartscreen either nowadays. I understand that was abused, so it's treated as the same as OV. Having a certificate allows the cert itself to accumulate trust (rather than each binary independently doing so) and provides better UX and I suspect an initial small boost to trust signal, but doesn't bypass the initial distrust. There's no way to avoid that AFAICT and even if you're an established business you hit it at intervals because all these certificates expire and so the whole process resets every few years anyway. What a mess.

gruez3• 4 months ago

My understanding is that a specific binary needs to become popular for it to stop being flagged. This creates a chicken and egg problem.

Given the recent npm axios compromise this sounds like a pretty smart move?

dqv• 4 months ago

How is it a smart move? Here, Microsoft is training users to ignore a security warning. If the same mechanism were added to NPM (that is, a warning that the package is suspicious and for the user to be extra sure they want it), users would have been trained to ignore any security warning issued for the compromised axios version (just like they had ignored it for all previous "clean" versions) and installed it anyway.

kmeisthax2• 4 months ago

The relevant heuristic in NPM supply-chain compromises would be the age of the specific binary. i.e. a freshly released package is riskier than one that's been around for a few days. So perhaps the policy should be that NPM doesn't install new package versions unless they've been public for 24 hours, or there's a signed override from the package repository itself stating that the update fixes a security issue. Of course, that would also require the NPM team have a separate review process for signing urgent security fixes.

whateverboat3• 4 months ago

This is also happening on linux for me.

kencausey• 4 months ago

Don't make statements like this without more explanation. In what way is this happening to you specifically? What distribution and platform are you using? Did you explicitly install something to warn you about 'side-loading' executables?

csomar• 4 months ago

I found out a similar thing with my website being blocked by corporate firewalls. You need to create profiles at these cyber companies and then wait for whitelisting so that they can drop the ban.

raxxorraxor• 4 months ago

This is also what I call bullshit security. These mechanisms are designed to chain developers to infrastructure of the OS provider. Apple does the same shit for that matter.

jasomill• 4 months ago

Does Microsoft get kickbacks from code signing certificate vendors?

Because AFAIK SmartScreen only applies to software downloaded outside the Microsoft Store.

Come to think of it, I suppose it does incentivize distribution through the Store, so you make a good point.

ddtaylor6• 4 months ago

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

sleepybrett• 4 months ago

break this shit up, break all of this shit up.

Google needs to be at least what four companies.. gcp, youtube, search, workspaces...

Apple needs to be at least two hardware/os, music/tv+

Microsoft, meta, etc, Monopolies are bad and our SEC/FTC/Government is doing a poor job of controlling them. At least as equally trecherous are these businesses that overly vertically integrate... anyways, we're fucked.

nnevatie• 4 months ago

You wouldn't download a downloader.

throwaway85825• 4 months ago

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

fortran77• 4 months ago

Firefox gives a similar warning.

exe344• 4 months ago

it uses Google's shitlist

cvhc• 4 months ago

I can reproduce when downloading https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2026.03.1.... But it did provide a line of explanation:

Dangerous download blocked yt-dlp_win_x86.zip is not commonly downloaded and may be dangerous. [Discard] [Keep]

tremon• 4 months ago

How useful is that explanation, though? All new software releases (even Chrome itself) are not commonly downloaded, until they are.

uoaei• 4 months ago

Chrome and YouTube are both owned by Google. There's an obvious reason why they want to discourage use of that extension.

socalgal2• 4 months ago

This entire thread it almost entirely proof that HN is now reddit. No facts, no consideration, just accusation and crowd think

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

none of that here

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

not followed here

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

none of that there

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Lots of that here

The system is clearly automated. As others have pointed out, they've been able to download without incident. As other have also pointed out, Firefox also warns. The warning is reasonable, claiming that something isn't downloaded often is true, until it isn't. A few more downloads and the warning will likely go away.

Nothing to see here except a Google hater mis-interpreting something and the posting ragebait.

whateverboat3• 4 months ago

You are wrong. There is at least one collaboration here that I can see. Download any other `.tar.gz`, Chrome says nothing. Do it with `yt-dlp`, chrome says it can harm your computer. Why?

rjh29• 4 months ago

"a Google hater mis-interpreting something and the posting ragebait." Isn't exactly a thoughtful comment either. It's exactly the kind of no facts baseless accusation that you claim to be tired of seeing.

frollogaston2• 4 months ago

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

Meekro• 4 months ago

I tried to reproduce this on their download page for the latest release[1]. Only the windows exe gets the warning, the other releases (macos, linux, etc) all download just fine. That makes me think it's an automated system that messed up, not an attempt at anticompetitive behavior.

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/tag/2026.03.17

lofaszvanitt• 4 months ago

Chrome is just ridiculous. It pretends you are mentally handicapped

Ooooh, this is an executable, THAT'S VERY DANGEROUS! Are you sure you want to download it? Hmmmph?

pacifika• 4 months ago

Flagged for this particular description. Could have said stupid.

simon-b• 4 months ago

As an aside, yt-dlp presents a perfect use-case for uvx (part of uv):

  uvx yt-dlp <yt_url>

No manual download/install required.

mediumsmart• 4 months ago

Nothing new here. Chrome has always been a suspicious download.

closetkantian• 4 months ago

I find the "unverified download" thing in Chrome so annoying, too. Remember when computers used to treat us like adults? I miss those days.

jfoster2• 3 months ago

Suspicion is in the eye of the beholder.

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

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