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YouTube's 'instructional hacking' ban threatens computer security teachers
Earlier this year, YouTube added hacking and phishing tutorials to its examples of banned video content — and that ban has been publicized thanks to an apparent crackdown on an ethical "white hat" hacking and computer security channel.
Kody Kinzie is a co-founder of Hacker Interchange, which describes itself as an organization dedicated to teaching beginners about computer science and security. Hacker Interchange produces the Cyber Weapons Lab series on YouTube, but yesterday, Kinzie reported that they were unable to upload new videos because of a content strike. "Our existing content is being flagged and pulled, just got a strike too," noted Kinzie.
We made a video about launching fireworks over Wi-Fi for the 4th of July only to find out @YouTube gave us a strike because we teach about hacking, so we can't upload it.
YouTube now bans: "Instructional hacking and phishing: Showing users how to bypass secure computer systems"
— Kody (@KodyKinzie) July 2, 2019
The rule is laid out on YouTube's "harmful or dangerous content" page, which bans "instructional hacking and phishing," i.e. "showing users how to bypass secure computer systems or steal user credentials and personal data." As Kinzieandothers on Twitter pointed out, even if that could stop some illegal behavior, it's potentially terrible news for anybody studying computer security — as well as people interested in countering hacking and phishing tricks. Hacking techniques are often used illegally, but they're not necessarily illegal. They're practiced by many legitimate researchers and computer system testers. YouTube has a similar ban for teaching theft techniques, but that's a much less popular (and expansive) pastime than learning about computers.
YouTube says the rule isn't new
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @07:53PM (1 child)
Their problem is piss poor customer service. It took an embarrassing headline for them to do anything. The second problem is exactly what you said. They think they can code their way out of a human problem. "Hey your program fucked up and locked me out". Crickets. Yeah that's a good look. You need someone to intervene and fix the data issue. Then issue a bug to fix it. Then ride that until that bug is fixed in production so it does not happen again. The problem is no one is advocating for their end users. They seem to be arguing over who has the most virtue. Instead of taking care of their customers. They have one of the best technical systems ever built to spy.... uh manipulate.... uh serve us ads. But they can not grasp that if you drive the cool kids away the rest will follow. Facebook is learning this lesson. It is not going well for them. MS learned it in the early 2000s (they never got it back).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @12:35AM
You're referring to the Microsoft whose share price keeps hitting record highs? I think they learned a lesson but not the one you thought...