20 ms·
Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp
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.
- ryguz 6mo ago[dead]
- ompogUe 6mo agoSo, Google's browser says downloading a tool to download files from Google's servers is "Suspicious"? Not surprising.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- schiffern 6mo agoBy the same standard, Chrome itself is "a tool to download files from Google's servers." Chrome doesn't only download from Google's servers, but the same thing applies to yt-dlp. I'm equally not "surprised" by their bad behavior, but that shouldn't stop us from condemning Google for unethically misleading people and engaging in browser monopoly abuse. --- EDIT: holding up (hilariously) RIAA lawyers as ethical role models only proves my point, thanks.
- waffletower 6mo agoI am sure that RIAA lawyers would rofl at this yt-dlp labelling being an example of Google "... unethically misleading people and (committing) browser monopoly abuse". I want to live in that fantasy world with you though.
- ddtaylor 6mo agoCome to our fantasy Linux land anytime you want. We circumvent all of the strange things both RIAA, MPAA, Google and many other companies do to attempt to lock information into a box with only one hole they allow you to look through. Our fantasy land gets better every time your reality gets worse.
- dryarzeg 6mo 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 6mo agoActually that is what they want you to believe. Behind the scenes, secretly Chrome is mostly "a tool to upload files to Google's servers" but because it does not require any actions from the user to do that, many people miss that part.
- ddtaylor 6mo agoOops we accidentally stole, indexed and resold all your data. Sorry.
- SturgeonsLaw 6mo agoChrome should be flagged as suspicious
- rdevilla 6mo agoIt's over. The internet culture of the 20th and early 21st century has been appropriated for profit.
- josteink 6mo agoWe 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.
- thesuitonym 6mo agoNo it's not, and no it hasn't. That old Internet is still there, you just stopped going to it.
- rdevilla 6mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway_19sz 6mo agoYou are not under attack. It’s just someone disagreeing with you. Please keep things civil.
- rdevilla 6mo agoWhere is the incivility? If anything it's coming from those who project their simplistic ideas of others unto the complexity of others' persons to pigeonhole them into their own idiosyncratic mental categories.
- jddecker 6mo agoThe binaries they offer are complied using PyInstaller, which can give false positives in anti virus software.
- TheSkyHasEyes 6mo agoWhy would a browser(be designed to) care about this?
- g947o 6mo agoYou 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 6mo agoTo protect the normies from harmful malware… not on their approved vendor list.
- exe34 6mo agoit's to protect shareholder value.
- gruez 6mo agoBecause 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.
- mrob 6mo agoThe growing prevalence of so-called "supply-chain attacks" (a bad name because it implies a commercial relationship that doesn't usually exist) shows that "common sense antivirus" isn't working so well even among the technically inclined.
- rcakebread 6mo agoBecause Google owns Youtube.
- eis 6mo agoWhich 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 6mo agoI can't reproduce this either, OP is light on details.
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoWhich is why I download it from my Linux distribution's package manager. It's available on Termux too.
- entropie 6mo agoWhich 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 https://github.com/entropie/ytdltt
- waffletower 6mo agoChrome for work, Safari or Arc for everything else. I envy you if your use of yt-dlp is work related.
- iririririr 6mo agoyou 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 6mo agoI started giving a try to Zen (based on firefox) a few days ago. I like it especially while heavily relying on a tiling window manager.
- jrajav 6mo agoI daily drove Zen for months. The design and implementation are overall fantastic. Unfortunately it still has chronic performance issues, gobbling up CPU randomly - and they don't seem to be too focused on despite it being a commonly reported issue. I don't want to burn out my battery quicker than usual, so I was forced to switch off. I'm currently trying Orion instead and have been loving it - aside from several poorly implemented websites just not working on it. And the Cloudflare false positives, but that's as much or more an issue on Zen.
- johnthedebs 6mo agoAgree with sibling comment as someone who used Zen for many months, maybe as long as a year or two. It constantly breaks and often stays broken in small but fundamentally important ways, to the point that I just switched back to FF last week and am glad to be off the roller coaster. Before Zen I had tried Arc and left for a lot of the same reasons. For all of the (valid) criticism against FF, it's still the best available browser that's not just an experiment IMHO. Edit to add: part of the switch back is that FF now supports, to some degree, all the features I was using Zen for: vertical tabs (needs customization but works well enough), custom search "engines" (ie, shortcuts), split view, not-Chrome
- john_strinlai 6mo agofor 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.
- whateverboat 6mo agoThis is also happening with `.tar.gz` file on chrome for yt-dlp. Doesn't happen for other `.tar.gz`
- miki_oomiri 6mo agoIsn’t firefox using Google “safe browsing” database ?
- warkdarrior 6mo agoSafebrowsing 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 6mo agoDo 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.
- jfoster 5mo agoThese 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.
- NiloCK 6mo agoInteresting to inspect any telemetry on this. Could end up on a list.
- alsetmusic 6mo agoReminds me of how Bing search for Google takes people to a page meant to resemble Google.com. Can't trust huge companies. But as others have pointed out, it's probably a coincidence in this case. But who knows.
- ddtaylor 6mo ago"Never let a good tragedy go to waste"
- frollogaston 6mo agoGoogle did flag the Ad Nauseam Chrome extension as malware, so that was a definite abuse of power. This one is unclear.
- jesse23 6mo ago`brew install yt-dlp` or `scoop install yt-dlp` :)
- bigyabai 6mo agoYep. Never send a web browser to do a package manager's job.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoI suspect for M$ users you could even use winget (though I am unable to subject myself to Windows right now)
- faangguyindia 6mo agoIt'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 6mo agoIt'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.
- asveikau 6mo agoThe 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.
- raxxorraxor 6mo agoThis 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 6mo agoDoes 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.
- Frotag 6mo agoConveniently M$ lets you buy a signing certificate to fix this. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48946680/how-to-avoid-the-windows-defender-smartscreen-prevented-an-unrecognized-app-fro/66582477#66582477 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48946680/how-to-avoid-th...
- asveikau 6mo agoLast I checked they can still quarantine your binary if it's properly signed and they decided it hasn't gained traction.
- pimterry 6mo agoEV 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.
- ddtaylor 6mo agoLinux user here unaffected as I get it straight from my command line.
- sleepybrett 6mo agobreak 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 6mo agoYou wouldn't download a downloader.
- throwaway85825 6mo agoClear conflict of interest enabled by anti trust not being enforced.
- cvhc 6mo agoI can reproduce when downloading https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2026.03.17/yt-dlp_win_x86.zip 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 6mo agoHow useful is that explanation, though? All new software releases (even Chrome itself) are not commonly downloaded, until they are.
- uoaei 6mo agoChrome and YouTube are both owned by Google. There's an obvious reason why they want to discourage use of that extension.
- socalgal2 6mo agoThis 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.
- frollogaston 6mo ago"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
- whateverboat 6mo agoYou 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 6mo 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.
- Meekro 6mo agoI 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 https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/tag/2026.03.17
- lofaszvanitt 6mo agoChrome 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 6mo agoFlagged for this particular description. Could have said stupid.
- simon-b 6mo agoAs an aside, yt-dlp presents a perfect use-case for uvx (part of uv): uvx yt-dlp <yt_url> No manual download/install required.
- MarcelinoGMX3C 6mo ago[dead]
- mediumsmart 6mo agoNothing new here. Chrome has always been a suspicious download.
- unmayx 6mo ago[dead]
- closetkantian 6mo agoI find the "unverified download" thing in Chrome so annoying, too. Remember when computers used to treat us like adults? I miss those days.
- jfoster 5mo agoSuspicion is in the eye of the beholder.