I’m a little late on this one – everyone else has already had their say. And, quite honestly, I don’t have much to add.
LTT, and some of its sister channels, were hacked late last week by actor(s?) who transformed them into “Tesla” outposts, featuring Elon Musk giving away free crypto.
I found the attack vector interesting – something I’m more used to hearing about on Security Now, than seeing actually happen. tl;dr: someone opened an infected PDF with a tool that grabbed browser cookies, allowing session hijack attacks for logged-in accounts. I guess it’s not the most sophisticated attack, but it seems like it would require some reasonably intermediate skill.
The WAN Show is one of my favorite podcasts, and I appreciate its growing duration – four-hour WAN shows are becoming the norm! Last week’s1 was great; it was interesting hearing Luke and Linus discuss the damage of and their response to the attack.
The community support was nice to see – it’s nice to feel like a part of it – and Floatplane subscribers soared – finally passed 40k!
I’ve been somewhat in the market for a metal reusable water bottle for some time – plastic gets annoying2 – but indifference and inertia for using single-use plastic bottles stalled me.
Linus and Luke mentioned they thought the best way to give the attackers the metaphorical finger was to make as much out of the incident as they could – Luke even mentioned thoroughly enjoying the excitement and long hours – and made a “Gone Phishin'” shirt to commemorate it. It’s filled with subtle details, like the cookie basket, a floatplane, and a “2FA” heart. I’ve never tried one of their shirts, but the reviews seem overwhelmingly positive. And indigo looks nice.
I upgraded my LTT Floatplane subscription to the 4K tier – the softness of 1080p often drove me to watch the videos on YouTube instead3, if I was using a 4K display or TV – and finally ordered a water bottle and T-Shirt from LTTStore.
And it seems like LTT is back in full swing, and Friday’s WAN show was another record.
These sorts of businesses, communities and creators are one of the wonderful things about the internet.
I’ll write about some of my favorite blogs, podcasts, books, other internet things later.
1Relative time in this post is a little weird because of when I started and finished it.
2Cleaning metal bottles can be annoying, too, but this doesn’t seem like much of a problem when you, like me, drink ~only water. They’re not generally dishwasher safe, spawning a market for Shark Tank products like this one.
3And the app doesn’t support background play, which rules out The WAN Show. And downloads are broken so I can’t push it to my podcast app. The audio quality seems (to me, but this might be total placebo) noticeably higher fidelity on Floatplane, which is why that version is worth mentioning. It also includes the pre-show.