Hack the Universe on YouTube

I was surfing around YouTube today and came across some interesting category of videos: Morally-Hazy How-To's.

Do this search on YouTube and you get about half a dozen videos showing you how to hack BOTS (yeah, that game with which I have some history). Do this search and you get many more on how to hack an Xbox. The list goes on.

This kind of stuff makes me wonder. How much tolerance would we have if someone showed you how to steal something tangible? Apparently, about the same. Search for "hack vending machine" and you get yourself a nice set of tutorials. You know, I'm sure if I sat down and thought of a few more things of an illegal nature, I'd find a video or two on YouTube showing me how to do it.

When we're talking about the threats to society from YouTube, how important is copyright infringement vs. software & hardware hacking vs. real world illegal stealing? Granted, the copyright issue has big pockets and thus a louder voice but clearly there are things we should probably address that is of a much more deviant nature. Scary shit out there folks.