streaming Tag

Someone on 4chan posted a 125 GB leak of Twitch’s source code, creator payout information, account info (including encrypted passwords), and code from from Amazon’s unreleased Steam competitor called Vapor. From the post:

We bring to you today an extremely poggers leak:

Twitch is an American video live streaming service that focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competitions, operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.

Their community is also a disgusting toxic cesspool, so to foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space, we have completely pwned them, and in part one, are releasing the source code from almost 6,000 internal Git repositories, including:

> Entirety of twitch.tv, with commit history going back to its early beginnings
> Mobile, desktop and video game console Twitch clients
> Various proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch
> Every other property that Twitch owns including IGDB and CurseForge
> An unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios
> Twitch SOC internal red teaming tools (lol)

AND: Creator payout reports from 2019 until now. Find out how much your favorite streamer is really making!

The Twitter user @KnowS0mething posted some screenshots of the list of highest paid streamers earlier today.

Note that the torrent name is “twitch-leaks-part-one” so I’m assuming there’s more to come soon.

More articles about the leak:

Kotaku: Report: Twitch Is Hacked And Its Source Code Is In The Wild
VGC: The entirety of Twitch has reportedly been leaked
The Verge: Twitch source code and creator payouts part of massive leak
TechCrunch: Twitch source code and creator payout data leaks online
IGN: Twitch Reportedly Hit By Huge Leak Including Source Code, Payouts and More

I wrote about the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag last week. Yesterday, Twitch sued two alleged hate raiders for violating its terms of service. Cecilia D’Anastasio from Wired writes:

Since early August, Twitch has been wrestling with an epidemic of harassment against marginalized streamers known as “hate raids.” These attacks spam streamers' chats with hateful and bigoted language, amplified dozens of times a minute by bots. On Thursday, after a month trying and failing to combat the tactic, Twitch resorted to the legal system, suing two alleged hate raiders for “targeting black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist and other harassing content” in violation of its terms of service.

It’s good to see Twitch taking more action on this.

Ari Notis from Kotaku on today’s Twitch boycott:

Earlier this month, streamers rallied around the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag on social media, where reports of awful user experiences on the platform proliferated. Many of the posts revolved around how Twitch has offered tepid protections against sustained harassment. In particular, hate raids – in which bad-faith viewers use the platform’s “raid” feature to flood a channel en masse with slurs and vile language – are not only possible, but becoming a daily nightmare for folks using the livestreaming service. And since it’s nearly effortless to create an account on Twitch, trolls are able to sign up for a bunch of accounts. It’s absurdly easy to circumvent any bans, at least until measures like account verification via phone numbers are implemented.

I’ve done some streaming on Twitch before, and was lucky enough to have decent experiences with it. I was “raided” once, but it was a good one, not the hate raids that seem like the thing for racists and trolls to do these days. But while my the streams I hosted went okay (I never had enough viewers to attract a lot of negative attention), I’ve seen just how toxic the platform can be while watching other Black streamers. I hope Twitch ends up doing something meaningful here.

The #ADayOffTwitch campaign – organized by Raven alongside streamers LuciaEverblack and ShineyPen – is scheduled for September 1. Essentially, it’ll be a 24-hour-long total blackout: no streaming, no watching streams, no logging on to chat. Viewers are encouraged to participate, as well.

Thomas Wilde from an article about Twitch’s growth and the rise of “sleep streaming”:

One peculiar blip on Twitch’s radar in March came from the sudden rise of “sleep streaming,” where popular streamers film themselves while they’re napping. Two streamers in particular, Ludwig Ahgren and Matthew “Mizkif” Rinaudo, clocked in about 2 million hours watched in March where neither of them were actually conscious at the time.

I saw Amouranth sleeping on stream when I was browsing the popular page on Twitch the other day and thought it was weird. I didn’t realize it was actually a thing though.

Bloomberg just published an article about Google’s struggles with Stadia. Things really haven’t been going well.

From Jason Schreier:

Players also didn’t like Stadia’s business model, which required customers to buy games individually rather than subscribe to an all-you-can-play service à la Netflix or the Xbox’s Game Pass. Paying as much as $60 for a single game, for it only to exist on Google’s servers rather than on your own PC, seemed a stretch to some. After all the hype, gamers were disappointed. Stadia missed its targets for sales of controllers and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

There’s something deeply embedded in Google’s DNA that makes it great at solving huge (like exabytes of data huge) technical problems, but consistently struggle at creating actual products. If you need to manage lists of data (photos, documents, search results, messages), Google’s got you covered, but good luck getting an actual product that you’re happy holding onto for years from them.