Who's trying to break the internet today?

[Pocket]

I don't know if this belongs here or in the AI thread, honestly, but it finally happened. YouTube has locked the entire site off to anonymous traffic. You have to sign in to watch anything at all. Allegedly to prevent bot traffic.

Welp, it had a good run, this internet of ours. Time to go back to the trees.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

I haven't gotten this update yet.

 

[NovaSaber]

I don't know if this belongs here or in the AI thread, honestly, but it finally happened. YouTube has locked the entire site off to anonymous traffic. You have to sign in to watch anything at all. Allegedly to prevent bot traffic.

Welp, it had a good run, this internet of ours. Time to go back to the trees.

Are you sure? It's showing videos on the main page for me and letting me watch them without logging in.

Every once in a while it seems to "forget" that it has anything to recommend there and says to search, but even then, after searching it turns "normal" again.

 

[NovaSaber]

By coincidence(?) it just happened to me again, on logging out, and I didn't even have to search to fix it, I just opened YouTube again in a new tab and it had videos again.

 

[Dekafox]

I ran into that login-only thing before, but only when I was in my workplace's office(before that got shut down). I don't know if it flags the IP, or the hardware fingerprint, but it takes a while to go away once flagged, and persists across browsers when it happens IIRC.

 

[NovaSaber]

Cyber attacks now targetting blood banks:

 

[Pocket]

Yeah, I did some digging into the YouTube thing, and it's been randomly affecting some people for at least two years now. I've been having issues with Reddit lately too, where it just stops being able to connect to their asset server unless I Ctrl+F5 every ten minutes or something, so there's probably something weird that Spectrum is doing with IP addresses that's making YouTube suspicious.

 

[Rhinox]

I miss the internet when it was a library. It kind of sucks as a store.

 

[Pocket]

Oh hey, Reddit is now blocking me from looking at things and demanding I "get the app"... on my computer.

I clicked the button just out of flabbergasted curiosity to know where on earth it was going to take me. The Windows Store? Another page on their own site with a download link for a standalone installer? Google Play because they've misinterpreted my Linux user agent as Android? ...It was the iPhone App Store's website.

What the hell is going on with stuff??? I feel like I'm Vashti watching the Machine break down in real time.