Also, don’t use YouTube directly, use Invidious or Piped, and this particular issue would be gone.

It’s the convenience. If you want to run a channel, you’re kind of damned to sell your soul. 🙃 The question is for how much you’d sell yourself out completely.

Not sure, if these apps run on a desktop computer, though, which is my main workhorse.

So I may try out Firefox’s sandboxing capabilities. That should take care of cookies, but I am not sure about fingerprinting.

Do you have the Amazon app installed on the same device

Linux pc. There is no Amazon nor YouTube app for that, that I know of.

what prompted you to look up the horses stuff?

Nothing really. I am more interested in dogs, but wanted to know how other animals are trained and possibly learn something new from their techniques.

I could try Firefox’s sandboxing, maybe.

My oldest “security camera” of this type has been online 24/7 since June 2019 and permanently connected to a charger of the smallest type I could find at that time. The battery still holds a charge when I take the phone down for cleaning. Not sure how old the phone itself is (a small Kyocera), probably a 2014 or 2015 model. So, for my requirements, I’d say, it’s reasonably reliable.

OTOH, you may be right, and they don’t make them like they used to in the olden days, haha.

My cheap and cheerful, but not very secure homebrew solution is a used smartphone, then load any of the motion-detection apps onto it, plus an FTP server app. Then place the phone anywhere within Wi-Fi reach. Run a script once a day on my home server that downloads and deletes the videos from the phone via FTP, and also deletes that footage after 30 days. So the “system” can run indefinitely without running out of memory. The old phones just need to be rebooted once in a while for some odd reason.

Thre could be two other things that I can think of:

Permissions maybe: Try “sudo chmod +x /path/yourscript.sh” to make your script explicitly executable.

Also, the environment of cron doing something may be different from when you do it as root or user. So you should always use the full path to every command in your script; like “/bin/tar” instead of just “tar”. To find out, where things are, you can use “whereis tar”, and it will tell you, whether it’s in /bin, /usr/bin or elsewhere.

I switched two of our boxes over to Debian “Bookworm”. And so far, I am completely happy with the change. On desktop, it’s still a little rough around the edges, and a few oddities need to be ironed out here and there, but that’s nothing compared with the ocean of pain that were snaps for me and my company.

Still a little nostalgic, though, after 17 years of Ubuntu 🫠