The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster And No One Knew on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2026.
documentary · evergreen
Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.
Cited as an accessible, documentary-style account of the XZ backdoor in supply chain security discussions.
“which was just fascinating to watch/listen”
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Reminded me of a similar story at openSSH, wonderfully documented in a "Veritasium" episode , which was just fascinating to watch/listen. ▶ this video
in “Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised” · View on HN
Agreed. However, I often wonder if people like that are deliberately (or inadvertently) being a psyop seeking to burn out people ala how "Jia Tan" tried to become maintainer of xz [0]. [0] ▶ this video
in “Nvim-treesitter (13K+ Stars) is Archived” · View on HN
Just to mention the original was cited in the most recent Veritasium video: "The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew" ▶ this video (at about the 9:50 mark)
in “The Xkcd thing, now interactive” · View on HN
Still no smoking gun, but possibly Russia. From the video ▶ this video : > A lot of the aliases, like Jia Tan, they sound like Asian names, and the published changes are all timestamped in UTC+8, Beijing time. So the signs point to China. And that's why it's probably not China. I mean, why would they make it that obvious? Every other part of the operation has been so meticulous, so cautious. > And they also worked on Chinese New Year, but not on Christmas. And over the years, there were nine changes that fall outside of the Beijing time into UTC+2, which is a time zone that includes Israel and parts of Western Russia. That's why some experts have speculated that this could be the work of APT29, a Russian-state-backed hacker group also known as Cozy Bear. But again, do we know? No, of course we don't know who it is, and we likely will never know.
in “Story of XZ Backdoor [video]” · View on HN