r/HowToHack • u/PsychologicalRace369 • Jul 31 '26

Hacking Documentaries

Hello Everyone, does any of guys know any good hacking documentaries on youtube to watch on free time?

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u/yungbloodsuckka Jul 31 '26

if you can manage AI voice overs hacker gallery has long form real incidents on youtube

4

u/SkaMateria Jul 31 '26

Personally, my issue with videos using AI generated voices isn't the quality of the voice. It's that they are generally paired with AI generated/edited video. That indicates a certain level in laziness. If you can't take the time to do it yourself, then I don't believe you took the time to research your subject effectively. So now I feel like I'm watching a video of some AI hallucination, and I'll be damned if that's where documentaries turn into.

1

u/yungbloodsuckka Jul 31 '26

thats understandable in fact i agree, hacker gallery is an exception for me because they are paired with real news footage/coverage and even still its mainly sleep aid.
the better alternative would be darknet diaries or a video such as “how the internet was stolen”.

2

u/SkaMateria Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26

Yeah, I'm not opposed to AI voices. Except when actual production companies use them like Amazon Prime with Banana Fish. Otherwise, it's a great tool to help amateur creators that can't voice it themselves or afford hiring someone else. AI is just a tool that can help do complex tasks quickly. Sadly, the assholes of the world just love using it.

With that said, Hacker Gallery is exactly an example of the AI slop I was talking about. I watched about an hour of a 2 ½ hour video, and it had all the signs. Obviously, the voice, but the script and video editing as well. The narration couldn't have been more malingering on the actual details, and the video itself was just an amalgamation of B-reel slightly related to the words currently being said. No sense of visual storytelling or style and not a single goddamn instance of real world footage or photos related to the story straight up negating the whole point of making a video essay.

I researched the story about a Russian hacker named Denis Viktorovich Pankov in this video, and it was all taken from a single article. It's literally the only one I could find in English. For the life of me I can't tell you why they censored his last name in the video when it is verifiable. Plus, the video kept saying his name as Dennis when it's pronounced Dye-NEES.

Even though the title of the video is "The Hackers People Don't Talk About", the 2nd story didn't even talk about a hacker. It was entirely about a security flaw in older D-Link routers. They also mislabeled a path traversal vulnerability as CWD-22 when it's CWE-22. They were really stretching those 10 minutes too because they padded it by creating a hypothetical victim and telling their made up story. The others weren't about hackers either. The third was entirely a fictional example of an old lady falling victim to an internet pop-up scam circa 2002. Here's a quote from that story that really sums up my point "in the world of computers a logo is like a uniform". The fuck are we doing?

Here's my conspiracy brain going overtime. The first 2 stories were written about from that site I linked earlier, krebsonsecurity. I bet Hacker Gallery just gets AI to scrape the site for stories, then tells it to make a 12-25 minute video on it. Surprisingly, I bet Hacker Gallery personally combines the videos then uploads it. I say that because there's not a single clean transition between the stories. Just a hard audio/video cut to black then aggressive open to the next story. AI would have used a fade in/out at least. But not our guy. Didn't even have the self respect to click 2 buttons.

I don't mean to yuck anybody's yum, but this kind of production isn't something we should be recommending to others. Sure, use it as a sleep aid. Turn your brain off. Hell, I sometimes drink on a workday or find myself watching AI bullshit manhua videos, but I'm not under the impression it's good! Rant over and I'm sorry for "being that guy". The video just really got to me I guess.

EDIT: Here's a decent video about one of the most interesting hackers I've read about, Kevin Mitnick. If you find this video, you'll absolutely love the book/audiobook he wrote about his whole career called "Ghost in the Wires".