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Comments (65)

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  asveikau
  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.
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  john_strinlai
  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.
• cvhc
  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]
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  jddecker
  The binaries they offer are complied using PyInstaller, which can give false positives in anti virus software.
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  alsetmusic
  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.
• faangguyindia
  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 thingsTheir Android playstore hardly updates statistics once a day, so much for such a big data company with unlimited sources lol
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  throwaway85825
  Clear conflict of interest enabled by anti trust not being enforced.
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  ompogUe
  So, Google's browser says downloading a tool to download files from Google's servers is "Suspicious"? Not surprising.
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  matheusmoreira
  Which is why I download it from my Linux distribution's package manager. It's available on Termux too.
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  jesse23
  `brew install yt-dlp` or `scoop install yt-dlp` :)
• ddtaylor
  Linux user here unaffected as I get it straight from my command line.
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  eis
  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.
• uoaei
  Chrome and YouTube are both owned by Google. There's an obvious reason why they want to discourage use of that extension.
• NiloCK
  Interesting to inspect any telemetry on this. Could end up on a list.
• nnevatie
  You wouldn't download a downloader.
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  waffletower
  Chrome for work, Safari or Arc for everything else. I envy you if your use of yt-dlp is work related.
• sleepybrett
  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.
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  rdevilla
  It's over. The internet culture of the 20th and early 21st century has been appropriated for profit.