*Update: *Youtube has revived my video. you can now watch Webcam Clickjacking as much as you like. —
Remember ClickJacking? The generic flaw in web browsers and HTML. Remember Webcam Clickjacking? My PoC showing how this flaw can be used to take control over a victim webcam and mic.
Well, my PoC, to my surprise, created a lot of buzz when I published it and the related youtube video got 1,220,966 views – most of it from its first day.
Yesterday I got an email from youtube titled “Video removed – Copyright Infringement”. At first I thought it’s just another spam mail, but looking inside it and than trying to watch my video gave me an alarming red webpage, with the bold text “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Adam Smith.
WTF, what copyright shmopiright, my video has no sound and barley a screen capture of my mouse. In-fact I sometime claim it to be the most dull video with the most views.
My immediate suspect was Adobe, but it made no sense, if they wanted to, they should have done it when it was hot. Than again sense and Adobe legal dept’ doesn’t always go together. flashObject anyone?
Googleing for such a generic name as “Adam Smith” gives about 3,570,000 results, apparently it’s more generic than “John Doe”. Googleing for “Professor Adam Smith” from adobe gives some possible options but it’s still not informative enough and too vague.
So who is this MR. Generic claiming I’ve stole his precious copyrights. Maybe he’s just a fake dude trying to annoy. Even if he’s real, I guess when you have such a generic name you don’t care to be hated, nobody is gonna correlate your face with your name anyway.
Anyhow, I’ve filed a counter-notification and hopefully the video will be up again soon. Even if it won’t, I’m sure it’ll appear in some other places.
There is a lot of info regarding “my video was removed from youtube” just google it, if you need to.
There is a lesson to be learned here, one should never trust google, and alike with their important assets. It can get shut-down in an instance. Personally I don’t care much about this video, I didn’t get a dime out of it and its heydays are long gone. But, there are cases where people lost all of their income one day since google removed their blogspot hosted blog, for example.
If you want full control over your videos and such, you should be hosting it yourself, and on some remote island. Than again, they still be able to cut your cable.
I just wonder where the hell is the decentralized web?! Too few people are controlling too much stuff.