Latest Veritasium video covers the XZ package hack1 that would have allowed (probably) a nation state actor to access nearly all of the computer systems which power the internet today without detection. Of the content I consume, Veritasium is certainly a more mainstream option and for them to cover this is a nice surprise.

Without spoiling the ending, the world was saved by a person who saw ~500ms of latency and thought “this CANNOT stand.”

  1. While the current video title is somewhat fantastical “The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew” – weeks, sure, but certainly many people knew – the story really is about how fragile the open source ecosystems that power some of the biggest technologies on the planet truly are. ↩︎