To me, the historical reconstruction aspect of this is at least as interesting as the attack. One of my more obscure hobbies is studying the history of ancient texts, and it is fascinating to watch the process of losing primary historical sources play out in front of my eyes:

> However, in 1995, Usenet poster Jay Ashworth, citing personal communications with Ken Thompson, provided strong evidence of the existence of a real-world experiment of this attack. Unfortunately, the full Usenet message is missing on the web. There are only quoted snippets of this Usenet post circulated around various blogs, reducing its authenticity.

> In 2021, I’ve rediscovered the full Usenet message after a search effort in multiple Usenet archives. My success was partial - it was still a repost by someone else, and I was unable to find the original message. However, this repost contains the full Usenet message, including complete headers and message body, with the poster name and its Message-ID, establishing the authenticity of the post beyond reasonable doubts.

> studying the history of ancient texts, and it is fascinating to watch the process of losing primary historical sources play out in front of my eyes

I just want to further call attention to this. We have the unspoken notion, an assumption that digital materials, once 'written' will remain forever.

And, for a short-term 'forever' this is true. Not so for longer 'forever', as the loss of the original Usenet post, despite replicated across many systems, demonstrates.

This replication that was possible earlier, will also not happen in the future thanks to closed proprietary systems. YouTube is wonderful library of knowledge that we are legally prevented from making a copy of.

There needs to be bottom-up and top-down pressure for open data standards and also a re-thinking of digital ownership rather than digital licensing. We think people don't care, but the engineers who build these systems are a tiny minority, we only need to convince them to refuse to build walled gardens.

Nobody needs legal permission to grab all the YouTube content they want to keep. Just dedication, youtube-dlp, and a ginormous RAID array full of empty drives. This is surprisingly affordable as a hobby.

As I understand it, yt-dlp is considerably faster.