Recently I wanted to create a live status page for wikibase.cloud, that also tracking the status of the various services and response times, so that people in the Telegram group might be able to try and correlate their experiences (possibly slow behaviour) with what was seen by others in other locations on other sites, without needing to message in the Telegram group.
I initially chose to experiment with Cloudflare Workers to do the minutely checks, after looking around at the current offerings for free online code running (thinking Heroku style etc).
Back in August, I uploaded a new Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL file to both Cloudflare and the Internet Archive. 4 months on, it is time for me to remove the R2 version of this file, which is costing me around 18 USD per month to store, and fall back to the Internet Archive version … Read more
Back in April 2022 I got annoyed by how prevalent cryptocurrency scams were still on YouTube years after I had first seen them. I spent a few minutes going through the scams that I easily found with a search for live streams including either “ETH” to “BTC” and reporting them via the YouTube flag / report system. Many hours later there were eventually taken down, but not before more scam live streams were already running to take their place.
Really I wanted (and still want) YouTube to do a better job… They have all of the information that should make shutting these down in the first seconds of them being live. But I figured I’d see how easy this would be to automate as a system using only the public APIs etc.
This post covers the initial prototype, followed by the scam-hunter web app which ran for some months before I sunset it last week. TLDR; lots of money was stolen while I was looking at these scam streams.
Example of the scam
When running, these streams are very easy to find by just searching for them (Live streams that mention “BTC” or “ETH”. You’ll either end up with streams displaying charts of the values compared with other crypto assets, or scam streams.
The scam streams take a variety of different forms, but not of them make use of pre-recorded videos of conversations with folks such as Elon Musk talking about cryptocurrencies, while also promoting a website such as MuskLiveNow.Tech (I made this one up) which claims to be running a giveaway event.
Screenshot of a crypto scan on YouTube from April 2022
During May of 2015 Orain was the target of a DDoS attack. The attack ended up lasting roughly 9 days and bringing the service to its knees repeatedly. The ‘official’ timeline of events and write up can be found here. Below I will discuss why the details of the DDoS as well as how it … Read more
