Nice Work YouTube: Salacious Accident?
October 31, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb humanoid. No smart software required.
Oops. If this piece from Bang Premier is to be believed, “YouTube Accidentally Allows Users to Upload Unremovable Adult Content.” Of course YouTube doesn’t normally allow porn on the site. However, according to reporting by 404 Media, hidden tags enabled some users to upload it. Permanently. The write-up states:
“A user explained to the outlet: ‘The way the bug worked was by using something called a newline, which YouTube very rarely counts as an actual character. It’s basically what is written when you type the return key on your keyboard. By spamming millions of these characters in the videos tags, using a proxy, it would prevent visibility changes on the video, such as setting it from public to private, or deleting it all together. [I] initially discovered the bug by just messing around with new lines video settings. It’s been well known inside of the little YouTube community we have—not the porn one in [404 Media’s] article, that type of crap is vile and weird—that new lines could be used for getting certain things over the character limit, such as channel descriptions and sometimes names. I tried video descriptions titles and it didn’t work. But for video tags, it did.’”
When contacted, Google said it was working to fix the bug and to expel the content. Can it catch it all? Exciting stuff.
Cynthia Murrell, October 31, 2023
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
