Invidious developers have received an email from YouTube asking them to stop offering the program. According to YouTube's legal team, they are in violation of YouTube API terms of use, which is impossible, as Invidious does not use YouTube API.

They also claim that Invidious “is being offered on invidious.io”, which is also untrue, because that website does not host any instance of Invidious. As of today there are 40 websites hosting public instances of Invidious, over which the Invidious team has no control, as Invidious uses the free AGPL license. Even if Invidious were illegal in the United States, it is hosted on the Tor network, the I2P network and in many countries, making it virtually impossible to make Invidious disappear. In addition, its code can be found on several development platforms and is on lots of computers.

Invidious has neither agreed to YouTube's API terms of service nor YouTube's terms of service. YouTube allows access to content hosted on its servers via the HTTP protocol, so Invidious is not committing a computer crime; it is simply safeguarding the right to privacy and freedom.

Google (the company that controls YouTube), on the other hand, does not respect privacy, censors, requires the use of proprietary software, exploits its users, develops artificial intelligence software for military purposes, has a huge ecological impact, to name just a few examples. That's why there are people who think that Google should be destroyed.

Fortunately, even if Invidious were to disappear, there are other free projects such as Piped, NewPipe and youtube-dl. Will Google also threaten the developers of these projects and their millions of users?

Just like Invidious, Piped offers a free and privacy-friendly to YouTube.

The advantage of Piped is that it works with SponsorBlock, so you don't waste time putting up with sponsored parts of videos. I've only mentioned the features I find most useful; a more detailed list is available on the project page.

Some disadvantages compared to Invidious are that it does not allow you to sort the videos of a channel according to age or popularity, but simply shows the latest videos of the channel; there is no button to download videos and audio; you do not see a thumbnail of the frame when hovering the mouse over the timeline; the thumbnail of the video does not appear when sharing a link...

Keep reading YouTube privately with Piped

The Google business model is based on collecting personal data from users, selling it to third parties and serving ads. The company also enganges in surveillance programs, develops artificial intelligence programs for military purposes and exploits its users, among other things.

It is one of the most powerful companies on the planet. However, Google is a giant with feet of clay that can be annihilated.

Finish off its ad revenue

Google makes money by serving personalised ads based on the information it collects from its users. If people don't see ads, Google doesn't make money. Blocking ads is a way to prevent tracking and make Google lose money, but if you visit Google's pages, Google will still get information it can sell to advertisers. So the easiest thing to do is to block ads and avoid Google sites.

Another idea is to click on all ads with the AdNauseam extension, which also hides them from us so that we don't find them annoying. This method means that Google makes less money from ad clicks and that Google's servers have a little more workload (minimal, but it does add to their costs).

Filling Google's servers with crap

Google lets you upload almost anything to their servers (videos, files, etc.). If the content uploaded to its servers takes up a lot of space and is junk that scares people away from its services (videos with robot voices speaking nonsense, hundreds of videos with noise that take up gigabytes upon gigabytes), the cost of maintaining the servers increases and the company's profit is reduced.

If this is a globally coordinated effort by multiple users, Google would have to start restricting uploads, hiring people to find junk videos, blocking people and IP addresses, etc., which would increase its losses and reduce its profits.

For example, I can create 15-minute videos every hour and upload them to YouTube automatically or semi-automatically. The videos should take up a lot of space. The more resolution, the more colours, the more sound variety, the more frames per second, the more money YouTube will spend to keep those videos on its servers.

The video I show below was generated automatically with ffmpeg. It is only two seconds long, but it takes up 136 MB. A similar 15-minute video would take 61.2 GB.

Keep reading How to destroy Google

As it is already well known, Youtube isn't free software and it doesn't respects your privacy, but unfortunately some videos are only found there. In this article I present you Invidious, a simple way to watch YouTube videos without executing proprietary software from Google.

Invidious is a free and lightweight interface for YouTube that is made with software freedom in mind. These are some of its features:

• No ads
• It's free software, source code under the AGPLv3 license
• It has a search engine
• Doesn't need a Google account to save subscriptions
• Supports captions
• Very customizable
• Allows embedding videos from Invidious in your page, like the following...

Keep reading YouTube with privacy: with Invidious

Google has recently partnered with the Pentagon to help it develop artificial intelligence. The project, called Maven, involves the development of a system to identify objects through drone imagery.

This means that Google's power over people around the world will be used by the US empire for its dark interests. Now completing a Google reCAPTCHA not only involves ethical dangers related to economic exploitation and the use of proprietary software, but also close collaboration in the murder of human beings. Deaths that seem dehumanised, but in the end it is unconscious (and conscious) people who train machines to kill.