On December 4th, for a few hours, scammers stole my YouTube channel and used it to broadcast their nefarious schemes. But how did they manage this dastardly act and what can be learned from this?
Hackers, posing as representatives from Duolingo, offered me a brand deal for one of my videos. But when they sent me the contract it turned out to not be a contract at all, but a backdoor into my youtube channel and they took over from there. However, thanks to the efforts of google and YouTube, everything is back now.
One lesson learned from this is that those little yellow flag issues I ran into when talking to the fake rep are definitely red flags now. Or at the very least, I won’t move forward with contracts until I have confirmation from the company they’re pretending to represent.
While this whole thing was happening, getting screenshots of the various stages of things was not a huge priority for me. Consequently, this video is lacking a lot of the visual variety that it could have while telling the story. This video is 16 minutes of my head and a story and nothing else. However, many people watch YouTube in the background, so hopefully my skills as a raconteur will carry this video. (It’s doomed.)
In preparation for this video I did quite a bit of research on crypto. I’ve long held the position that crypto can not survive mass adoption, mostly because of that 3 blue 1 brown video. But I figured if I was going to put all of crypto on blast, I had better hear the other side first. And all of the counter arguments, the ones that acknowledge the flaws in the system at least, were tainted with a sense of “I’m sure they’ll figure it out when we get there.” They’re in a bus speeding towards a cliff edge, and they’re going “I’m sure someone will figure out how to put breaks on this thing before we get there.” The one cryptobro I spoke to who did seem to understand the problem suggested that if crypto ever achieves mass adopted that it’ll just switch over to a centralized verification system to fix it, literally becoming the thing that it was created to not be. If that doesn’t betray a huge problem with the system at it’s core, I don’t know what does.
I don’t know why this video had so many P-pops in it. P-Pops are those audio artifacts when you puff breath into the mic. I didn’t notice them until I was editing, but it was really bad in this video. I have a pop filter, essentially a piece of fabric you speak through to stop them, but I stopped using it because it didn’t seem like I needed it. Most of my videos are fine. But now suddenly in this video I definitely needed it. I guess I learned another lesson. You never know when you’ll need the pop filter.
