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Youtube’s Bitcoin Scam Problem Appears To Be Getting Worse

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a Youtube live stream that was clearly faked. It claimed Elon Musk was giving away 5000 BTC (roughly $47 million as of June 16, 2020). I flagged it as a Bitcoin scam and I assume the feed went down once a moderator saw the flag.

Then the weird part happened.

Youtube’s algorithm, knowing my interest in blockchain technology and my brush with a “giveaway” now recommends subsequent scams as they go live.

Tonight I reported four of them running simultaneously on Youtube. Two of them had been running for four hours and thousands of people had been watching.

Here’s the typical anatomy of these scams:

The video is always a prerecorded stream of a real event, sometimes involving a tech or crypto celebrity or a SpaceX launch. The title is deliberately something not related to the giveaway in order to evade immediate detection by Youtube’s scam detection.

Once the video is reported and taken down, these scammers (who by my research appear to be operating from Russia) just create a new channel, stuff the channel with fake followers so the channel is annotated with something like “30K Followers”, name the channel something like “Thomas Lee” or “Elon Musk”, and continue to operate with impunity.

Given the increasing number of these streams running simultaneously right now and the perceived growth in viewers and growing length of runtime, it would appear that Youtube is either unaware of this trend, even though these videos are getting reported, or else Youtube hasn’t been able to implement a comprehensive strategy yet to stop these scammers without unintentionally punishing the legitimate channels.

Perhaps if they could work the algorithm to keep recommending the scams to admins the same way Youtube is recommending 4 simultaneously streaming scams to me tonight?

Until then, Bitcoin enthusiasts with a lower IQ will be paying an unexpected price from their lack of knowledge or wisdom, and the majority of tech enthusiasts like myself will continue to get annoyed and keep reporting the videos and sometimes the advertised domain names.

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The Chicago Riots, Day One

Content warning: elements photographed for my story below contain profanity and crudeness.

This post has been thoughtfully revised for factual correctness as subsequent investigations confirmed new details.

2020 will be remembered as a dark chapter in American history. Never in many of our lifetimes have we seen lawlessness become so rampant, both with police breaking the law and a host of hurting people, anarchists, and opportunists using such grievous lawlessness as an excuse to commit crimes en masse.

Today I saw democracy morph into anarchy. I saw protesting morph into violence.

As I write I can still hear sirens, honking, fireworks, and intermittent yelling outside my apartment. The tone is tense. It is rumored that the Walgreens and CVS just down the street have been looted. I’ll find out tomorrow morning if my wife’s car survived the rampant vandalism.

Update: it did, thank God! Many people in a much poorer economic state did not have their cars and businesses survive the onslaught, sadly.

This is my photo and video story of what I observed while strolling from the Gold Coast to the Magnificent Mile.

Gold Coast

DOT trucks blocking southbound traffic to Lake Shore Drive
Graffiti in Gold Coast long before the main body of protestors would arrive there
Joe and the Juice vandalized
Policemen in protective gear walking towards The Drake to their next assignment

The Magnificent Mile

Stores being boarded up along the Magnificent Mile
Graffiti. “1312” is an anti-police message.
More anti-police messages
The downtown protestors split into two groups, one that stays near the raised bridge and one that starts walking towards me at Michigan and Ontario
Drone capturing the event above us, and the speck to the lower right of the drone is a chopper also capturing the event

At about this point, the body of protestors is pretty much behind me now. That body mostly comprised of peaceful protestors expressing their beliefs. One of them even gave a homeless man his water bottle.

The more aggressive participants from within the crowd begin to loiter, harassing the police and commencing the looting shortly after they leave.

Foul gestures as police leave to keep with the main group; moments later many of the lingering rioters will plunder this AT&T store, including ANTIFA and other opportunists
The group of ambulances lined up along one side begin to leave
Anti-police and anti-Facebook messages scrawled on a news van with the passenger window punched out
Trump Tower standing defiantly – still one of the most sleek and modern-looking buildings in Chicago
Police SUV scratched and with the message “they don’t care about us” painted in green graffiti
A firefighter approaches the huddle while cautiously watching the loiterers
Things were crazier on the other side of the raised bridge, according to eyewitness testimonies
“Eat the Rich” and anti-police graffiti on a bank
To the left is a crowd verbally harassing a group of police. Slightly to the right of the light pole is a communist symbol found among the graffiti on the wall.
News chopper meekly peeks from behind a building
Police fixing a tire that rioters damaged
Verbally abusive man riding a tall bike; the business on the right includes the graffiti “an eye for an eye”.

This is around the time the looting began, which I captured while heading for home.

I took my leave, dumbstruck by what I just encountered.

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Thoughts on Floyd’s Death

Something’s terribly wrong when a journalist can be arrested on the spur of the moment without explanation, charges, or a warrant but it takes days (like in Minneapolis) or even a year (like in Chicago) for an officer to be placed into custody to be tried for killing someone in front of a rolling camera.

Something’s terribly wrong if Christians are complaining more about the destruction and theft of property than about the snuffing out of a human made in God’s image.

This isn’t Democrat vs. Republican politics here. I despise CNN’s dishonest and clearly biased “journalism”. I would even categorize some of their work as fake news and hit pieces. But this morning’s arrest was a flagrant abuse of the reporting team’s constitutional rights, in my opinion.

Thanks be to God that no injustice, be it murder or abuse or theft, can slip past His notice, and how terrible a judgment awaits all those whose sins are not covered by the blood of Jesus! Realizing this truth should make even the most passionate advocates for social justice shudder at what fate the unrepentant face.

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Nonviolent No More

May 1, 2020. Trees in Rogers Park, Chicago are heralding the imminent arrival of summer with the white and green of maturing buds and tiny leaves.

Protestors rally today yet again at one of several housing facilities for immigrant children operated by Heartland Alliance. These protests, founded on the premise of the lie that Heartland’s facilities are “jails”, happen with enough frequency that some of the employees of Heartland have grown accustomed to it. On this day, however, the protesting takes a startling turn.

Fireworks, colored smoke, people climbing fences, police officers, flying paper, graffiti.

Within moments an unassuming home in the midst of Chicago’s north side is smothered with spray paint, smoke, and forceful virtue signalers.

This is no longer a peaceful march. This is vandalism and violence against the place that immigrant children had called home.

With triumph reminiscent of an epic prank being performed by a popular college fraternity, an individual appears on the rooftop and drapes a canvas over the top of the house with the words “CLOSE THE JAILS OPEN THE HOUSES!”

Cue more fireworks.

The rooftop trespasser poses, in hopes of this being an iconic moment, on a house for immigrant youth as the protestors demand in unison for houses for immigrant youth.

As if this isn’t anticlimactic enough, footage emerges of a child being endangered at the event.

Behind the Smoke of Violence

“Join us 4 some troublemaking and fun”

It would appear the Little Village Solidarity Network group may be a primary group behind the organizing of the violent event, as per the video that has been distributed in multiple accounts, including local activist Aldo Reyes’ Instagram:

However, a look at the Facebook event revealed that this event was considered a group effort:

None of these groups have condemned the violence or dissociated from this event after the fact. Some of these groups (especially the Little Village Solidarity Network) were praising the violence.

Research into several of these groups uncovers a recurring thread of Anarchist philosophies promoted by some of its members if not by the organization itself.

Here is a screenshot from one of the protestors’ Instagram:

For the history buffs, this tune sounds familiar.

History Repeating Itself

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

Literally a century ago people were doing things like this, albeit with deadlier results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_violence

Not all Anarchists are violent, mind you (in fact, the Wikipedia article linked above references how some Anarchists pushed for pacifism), but the concept of violent Anarchism appears to be rebirthing in the United States, as can be seen by the repeated violent behaviors of Antifa and the behaviors of grassroots organizations that allegedly have no hierarchy.

Free Scare Heartland Kids!

Did these protests help free the allegedly jailed children? No. Did they open houses? No, they vandalized a house. Did the children, who these organizations claim to love, experience distress from other protests like this one? Yes!

To even the casual observer, these acts of violence and agitation are counter-productive. These activist groups are demonstrating how blind and ignorant the modern strain of anarchy is making the far left. It’s no longer about truth but rather about feeling good about one’s self for following through with a false tale of saving the good people from the evil greedy bad people. A generation from now this will be all but forgotten.

And then it will happen again.

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How can we make the web better?

“Cancel Culture” is all the rage, and rage is a currency on Twitter. It’s getting so out of hand that this joke (from Twitter, no less) hits a little too close to home.

I believe many content creators, digital natives, and developers would be willing to admit that web experiences became notably more hostile between 2016 to 2019. In a recent example, Stack Overflow treated one of their most valuable Jewish community members with undeserved hostility, doing so on a Jewish holiday, admitting to it, then dragging their feet to reinstate her. As of October 19th, she is still not reinstated. Other community moderators have now stepped down because they don’t trust the company.

It’s not only hostility (not to mention the outright garbage) that is making web experiences ugly. The economics of social networks are causing frustrating user experiences. Also, companies and developers are imposing system constraints on their Internet products too quickly without first considering basics like security and the necessity to constantly change the system based on ongoing needs. Consequently, privacy leaks, broken trust, and lawsuits abound.

After being in web development in both full time and part time roles for 8 years, in observing both delightful and ugly experiences as both a user and a builder, these are some personal opinions on how we can make the web a better experience for everybody.

Be Nice

Did someone behave offensively on a website or on social media? If you know them, address it personally with them and with grace. If you don’t know them well enough to address the issue well, just stop following them and move on. No need to give them any more of your time, and no need to publicly vent. I’ve made that mistake before and it didn’t serve any redeeming purpose.

Name calling should also have no place on our websites or social feeds. Even if the other person is legitimately wrong. Politically-charged terms such as “libtard”, “nazi”, and “racist” have almost never solved a problem or changed someone’s mind. They have almost always fed unnecessary conflict.

If you are a Christian, then this step is not optional:

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

Romans 12:18, ESV

Increase Decentralization

Web users should ideally have a “home base” for their web presence. That home base must be 100% self-owned. Right now, we’ve become too dependent on social media platforms to own our home bases for us. While social media has its place to be something of a “bullhorn” to market our ideas and products, we should work harder to decentralize the content of the World Wide Web by running our own websites based on personal interests.

Are you not coding-savvy but want to build a digital home base of your own? I recommend either Squarespace or WordPress.com.

Are you coding savvy or at least IT savvy? Try self-hosting WordPress. I currently use Digital Ocean but aspire to host it from a Raspberry Pi at home later next year. Don’t like WordPress’ templates? Roll your own with Gatsby or a custom front-end consuming WordPress’ data. Don’t like WordPress at all? Use another solid Content Management System such as Drupal. For nerds, the possibilities are myriad!

Abandon Truly Bad Digital Products

If a product is truly bad, stop using it. They don’t deserve your business and the majority of the time there are good alternatives. For example, are you done with Twitter but want a microblog? Roll your own by writing short form content on any blog platform of your choice or join a Mastodon server.

Don’t post on social media about how much you hate a product or dislike a product’s CEO. Especially if you intend to still use that product. If you are saying you hate something but still use it (such as Facebook or Uber) then you don’t actually hate it.

Stop virtue signaling. It’s gross.

Simplify and Strengthen Web Engineering

Warning: this section gets a bit nerdy

Businesses tend to focus first on delivering features within unrealistic deadlines and with overly engineered systems. Right now, it is trendy to break apart systems into a bunch of smaller running systems, known as a Microservice Architecture. While there are many excellent uses for this architecture when it comes to scaling systems to meet high demand, there are costs as well. A major data aggregation company has written a blog post about why they have moved away from this architecture in their specific use case. Monolithic systems could become all the rage again for many use cases!

Another trend I’ve encountered is to use a framework for no reason. While frameworks can simplify code and make life easier, I’ve also seen developers adopt a large framework without proper coding conventions. It resulted in a tar-pit of writing more (and buggier) code than if they had adopted no framework! If the team doesn’t know why they’re using something and doesn’t know how to leverage what they’re using, that is not a good sign.

Another key issue to avoid is too much dependence on the individual knowledge of a developer or architect. If your team cannot operate with a key team member missing, including the team lead, your project is already in serious trouble.

Conclusion

The World Wide Web has some excellent and delightful things, and has lowered the barrier to fun and thoughtful creativity. It’s also overdue for an overhaul in many places. Users and developers alike have both the relational means to do this as well as the tools.

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How to avoid posting fake news on social media in 3 easy steps!

If you value truth, then you know as well as I do that it is important to curb sharing lies. Even partial ones! Fake or sensational news is possibly more engaging on social media than clickbait ads used to be. They are usually making money off of you from website ads or else they are trying to manipulate your beliefs.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Exodus 20:16 (ESV)

Here are 3 easy steps to avoid posting fake or sensational news on your social media accounts:

  1. STOP. Don’t post something simply because it confirms your personal beliefs. Just stop. The fancy term for this is “confirmation bias”. We all have done this (I’m guilty as charged!) and it’s so easy to click that share button or to copy and paste something. It requires self control to stop ourselves.
  2. VERIFY. Check if you can verify it from a primary source. Then corroborate it by checking for a second primary source that confirms the verified source’s claim. Then do due diligence by checking against any claims made to the contrary.
  3. DISCARD. If you cannot verify the source, discard the post automatically. If you cannot corroborate the source, use careful language to indicate you are quoting a primary source (and not making a statement of fact, since a fact has not been established). There is a difference between saying “he/she says this is X” and saying “this is X”, but even then, if the source is not truthful, you run the risk of spreading something not truthful.

Primary Sources

What is a primary source? News sites and social media posts are not primary sources, unless a primary source directly posts on one of those platforms. For example, a YouTube video saying a politician wasn’t bullied is not a primary source. However, if that politician writes a guest article or a Twitter thread about their experience of being bullied, that is a primary source. At this point, it is up to your discretion of whether or not the primary source is truthful, because primary sources can still lie. This is why corroboration is also important.

Corroboration

What is corroboration? In short, it is someone reputable who was there or who read the information being claimed and is saying “I saw it too.”

For example, a Fox News or CNN article including a video snippet of Donald Trump saying something is not corroboration. Videos can be selectively edited by either of these news outlets to fit their respective agenda. Seeing an unedited video on C-SPAN, however, is a way to personally corroborate something Donald Trump said at a speech.

Another example is if a friend or news site says something is or is not healthy for you. There are medical journals that document scientific studies in detail. If the claim has been verified by means of a double-blind study (which means there was an unbiased oversight of the test, thus a primary source plus corroboration) with a large study group, it is possibly a valid observation, but not inherently proven because science doesn’t prove anything. It observes. If the study in question was not double blind and/or the study group is small or the study was short term, it is highly likely to be error prone. A library with database access to these studies is your friend.

How about you?

How much do you value the truth? Has a news source tried to fool you before? How about a meme page or a YouTube video? Did you find primary sources to the contrary? How did those you know who fell for Fake News respond when shown evidence to the contrary? Did they dig their heels in? Apologize but keep the fake post up? Remove the post? How much do they value the truth?

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Social Media Outlook

Mark Zuckerberg has made what appears to be an about-face on his stance for user privacy. Given his company’s rather bold project to spy on users, this seems a surprising move to the casual observer. However, not losing more users would be a good reason to ambitiously change your company’s business model.

Regardless, I have several personal predictions about how social media will shift in the next 2-4 years. Many of these predictions assume that Mark is telling the truth:

  • I thought Twitter was going to die by 2016 or 2017. I was wrong. Twitter appears to have a second wind thanks to Donald Trump, artists, and software developers. However, if Twitter doesn’t add an edit button and enforce their own rules, their second wind may not last.
  • Instagram and WhatsApp will continue to grow.
  • Facebook is the new MySpace. It’s messy, convoluted, and low-EQ people have dumped a huge mess into this platform. Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp will be receiving more attention by Facebook going forward and will have cross-network messaging enabled in the next 2 years. WhatsApp users can talk to Instagram users, for example.
  • Social Media ads will become less effective for most vendors on Facebook proper. However, in-line ads and bot suggestions will continue to thrive on Messenger, and may expand to WhatsApp.
  • Ad targeting may become restrictive. I would be surprised if the strategy and algorithms didn’t dramatically change.
  • Blogging software and platforms, such as WordPress, will grow in popularity as people find ways to own their platform and data.
  • Search engine ads may see a resurgence.
  • A blockchain will arrive for rapid international money transfers over social media. It won’t stop there. Hopefully it will build on what the Brave browser is trying to do. It will reward users for seeing ads on social media platforms. Users will use awarded blockchain tokens to buy things and reward content creators directly. These tokens will be convertible to fungible money and/or Bitcoin.
  • Badguys will still find creative ways to do badguy things. Fake news will still spread because low-EQ or low-IQ people will still repost them. Foolish journalists and politicians alike will still blame Facebook for those problems.

What do you think? You think social media will be taking some interesting steps forward, or not? Will we truly see positive changes for privacy on social media?

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Hello, WordPress.

For the last two and a half years WordPress has been my go-to platform when making websites for others. After holding off all this time I’ve finally decided to make my own website.

I’m excited! WordPress has new features that I’ve been wanting to take for a spin, and social media is simply not the place for long-form, thoughtful content.

The main theme of my blog is exploration. You can expect to see my explorations in programming, photography, Christian theology, Zionism, and other personal reflections deposited here. I hope that it may be helpful as a resource or inspiration.

Can’t wait to get writing!