On Saturday night I stumbled onto a YouTube channel that made me think, “How can someone be so cool?” It features someone who is not only incredibly talented, but also absurdly skilled at finding bugs in Google and YouTube, and clearly very comfortable with Kali Linux too. All of that knowledge could be used to exploit the platform, but he uses it to report issues responsibly and gets a ridiculously small bounty in return, especially considering it comes from Google. Five thousand dollars for a bug that, in the wrong hands, could have caused a lot of damage and exposed very sensitive data. Ridiculous.

While I was writing this, I went back to the channel to grab the link and found out that YouTube had banned him. Mr. Google, once again. Tough times.

I took a screenshot while I was watching the video on Saturday so I could write this post. Good thing I did it before the ban.

I was also embarrassingly late in noticing another wizard-level trick: this person had also manipulated YouTube recommendations, that right-hand column that suggests videos while you are watching one. Notice how he managed to make it recommend only his own videos and nothing from any other channel. Unreal. People in the comments were losing it. I had never seen anything like that before. It is probably also a good reason to get banned, but Google should hire this person immediately.

Hopefully he or she comes back soon.