This One Word Kills Your Steam Account

[@Elektrobear]

I spend every day in awe at the fact that you somehow turned bug reporting into a highly successful career path

[@EEEEEEEE]

E‎‎‎‎‎

[@mijo7855]

Life is perfectly balanced with no exploits at all

[@Roger44477]

You jest, but a lot of large software companies have bounties for major bugs or exploits, and they usually are good about keeping in mind how much money a malicious actor could possibly make or cause in damages with said exploit when it comes to how big the payouts are, so 5, or even occasionally 6 figure payouts aren't unheard of. They just generally require that you sign an agreement to not talk about the vulnerability until they'd have time to fix it, with 90 days being the most common to my understanding. Spiff ignores that for the sake of content but also voids any protections by doing so, hence the time Steam got Paypal to ban him.

[@kran27_]

@@Roger44477 yep, bug bounty platforms such as intigriti or hackerone are possible to basically live off of if you can find enough exploits.

[@thechugg4372]

Literally a lot of people could report this bug and nothing would be done, but the brit with an army, oh they don't want the bug to stay like this when the army arrives.

[@gagecameron5672]

“Get banned on steam with just one word” Is Spiff about to have a “gamer moment”?

[@IDESTROYER236]

NI-caragua moment.

[@YukaTakeuchiFan]

Don't be Contra-rian.

[@alexisbagacina6401]

Ni----cotine

[@LaEmporoar]

@@alexisbagacina6401 you forgot the "e". Nicotine

[@alexisbagacina6401]

@@LaEmporoar thanks mate ♥️😁

[@xanthirus]

The proper way to get this fixed is to trick streamers and esports players into doing it, they will get valve to show a little hussle

[@someguy4915]

Doubt that Valve can force Akamai to do anything really, Valve is not that important to a company such as Akamai.

[@thearpox7873]

@@someguy4915 You sure about that? Wanna bet what service Akamai's executives kids have running on their computers?

[@someguy4915]

@@thearpox7873 Wanna bet how little that matters in a large company?... This is the other side of the XBOX Live 'my dad owns XBOX he can ban u' argument you yell when you start to lose a game of CoD :P Akamai has many more customers than just Valve, many of them much larger than Valve too. Just because the kids of some Akamai employees might have Steam doesn't mean they understand how their parent(s) job at Akamai has anything to do with that nor does it mean that those kids can convince their parents that Akamai should change their system so that they can have a weird name on Steam...

[@youtubeuniversity3638]

​@@someguy4915 And when those kids start grabbing the kitchen knives and making some threats? Or when Valve starts suing?

[@uploadsnstuff8902]

Developers around the world shitting bricks every time Spiff drops a new video, in case it means they have to pull an all-nighter.

[@LavaCreeperPeople]

Lol

[@benedict6962]

uhh, do they use those bricks to patch the exploits?

[@EEEEEEEE]

‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎E

[@whoareyouyouareclearlylost323]

E

[@Insertnamehere58]

Naw, as someone who's used akamai I can say this is a steam only issue. My best guess is a Dev picked antidisestablishblablahblah as a test word to make sure the firewall was working properly. Most likely forgot to turn it off after.

[@damienmcgirl3577]

it raises the bigger point, how many secret account bombs are there? like what if theres a word in a specific language that does the same thing but no one uses it?

[@shytendeakatamanoir9740]

I'd like to know if anticonstitutionally works, since it's somewhat similar in meaning

[@Alblaka]

@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 99% certain the reason is technical, not linguistical. Aka, the word and it's meaning are irrelevant, but there's something WITHIN that word that causes a technical glitch, likely because some part of it is a keyword parsed differently, with Steam's 'set custom URL' function not escaping the keyword properly.

[@FromMyXP]

@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 I don't think anticonstitutionally would cause problem, however I'd wager that "anticonstitutionnellement" (longest French word, like antidis... is for English) does.

[@krofgninut5984]

I think in the cyber security field, its called a "day zero attack" when someone uses a vulnerability that was not previously known about, and thus nobody has countermeasures to it.

[@MartinFinnerup]

@@Alblaka Nah, this is way too convenient to not be some kind of censorship.

[@IAm18PercentCarbon]

This is 100% someone's test string from a long time ago, hardcoded into the Akamai CDN software, to prove that string-blocking worked

[@raimondthefool1411]

Damn Spiffing Brit is apparently a Level 17 Wizard and found the real life version of Power Word Kill.

[@burp2019]

banished to the shadow realm

[@thefinalboss4471]

​@@burp2019 Banished to Britain

[@morepenguins6247]

And used the wish spell to exploit infinite boons of high magic.

[@PEPigeon02]

@@thefinalboss4471 same difference

[@Skelatox]

Glad I'm not the only one who thought of this.

[@samvimes9510]

I guess this means the people who run Akamai are hardcore Anglicans who support a theocracy

[@ivantheterrified2922]

other way around: disestablishment = less power to church, anti- = keep church power, ban "antidisestablishmentarianism" = secular

[@EEEEEEEE]

E

[@KJaxDragon]

antidisestablishmentarianism

[@halofreak1990]

Isn't Akamai an Asian company? Maybe their Chinese overlords don't like the word for obvious reasons?

[@monkoosbob0]

@@halofreak1990 Nope, they're American. Headquartered in Massachusetts. Akamai is a Hawaiian word.

[@sqocks8254]

I don't know how you find this kind of stuff, but I'm very impressed.

[@Skilliard]

As a dev I was almost certain it would be some sort of reserved word like "NULL", I'm speechless as how this word could break an account

[@immortalnub]

ikr? This makes literally no sense.

[@LividImp]

There is no reason Valve would have suspected Akamai (or anyone) would ban this word. But now that they do fixing it will be as easy as adding an input mask.

[@kholdanstaalstorm6881]

Ah, like the American family Null that got dropped from every electronic registry because of that surname?

[@LividImp]

@@remove_the_at_sign Nah, if that was the case then any set of characters of that length or longer would cause a problem. Sounds more like it is actually a blacklist, although I can't imagine why they would blacklist such a word. It's bizarre.

[@PotionsmasterDyne]

Yeah. My money would have been on "void".

[@Jason-fv4rg]

As a software engineer for over 20 years, I know it's common to use metasyntactic words ("foo", "baz" etc) and other absurdities when creating test data, testing configurations and that kind of thing. I've used antidisestablishmentarianism myself a few times as a test route or config value. I'm guessing one of Akamai's engineers had deployed some new packet filter and used anti23m somewhere, forgot to remove their test configuration and this happened.

[@zilvarro5766]

I approve of calling it anti23m 😂

[@Jason-fv4rg]

@@zilvarro5766 typing it out was giving me arthritis lol

[@jonisalmela2399]

makes sense..

[@sandwich5344]

​@@Jason-fv4rg definitely adding this to my engineering toolbox, seems like a funky bit of goob to use in all sorts of implementations

[@jaxjax2011]

​@@zilvarro5766 why 23m? 22 + 1? 2 - 3 m?

[@NotiTzCosmic]

"Hmm what a goofy video. It will probably not work" The 0.0127$ in my inventory: 🗿

[@niziggz]

Antidisestablishmentarianism is a perfectly balanced word with no exploits.

[@Shitposting_IHMN]

Im gonna test if this works for example in valorant, so... If someone is interested, i will say when its uploaded Update: the Word is too long for ubi, for riot, even f*cking roblox, so I cant even record anything worthy of your time

[@codename_nons1141]

Antisidestalishmentarianism is fair and balanced

[@fireninja8250]

​@@Shitposting_IHMN do it

[@LavaCreeperPeople]

Agree

[@innocentbystander3317]

Wonder what happens when this is commented on someone's profile...

[@YingwuUsagiri]

Well damn. Spiff found the option in the settings to turn Steam into the Epic launcher.

[@Fantastic_Mr_Fox]

I use epic to play all my free games and frankly it's not as bad as everyone says, i mean don't get me wrong it's nowhere near as good as steam, but it's perfectly usable. Although it is much slower than it ought to be, ngl

[@rempster87]

More like EA orgin tbh

[@dagbroad]

@@Fantastic_Mr_Fox ehh, it's not that it's bad. It's average. Like, absurdly so. No community features, can't really check news about the game without going through hoops, etc. I feel like devs forget that the biggest reason everyone uses Steam is because it's extremely open and you can easily see game information, news, and updates, AND having the community features like reviews, groups, WORKSHOP, and profiles. You can compare it to stores in real life - other platforms are closer to those Amazon no cashier stores. Kinda neat but nobody cares about them because you can't really just go there and hang out. Steam is a whole shopping mall. You can go there to buy stuff, but also go there to hit the arcade, do some bowling, buy some sushi in a small restaurant in the corner, and just generally hang about **with friends**.

[@EEEEEEEE]

E

[@nadarith1044]

@@Fantastic_Mr_Fox It was worse

[@DJdoppIer]

This reminds me of the story where a guy used a banking app, changed one of his account names to an emoji, and then got a call from his bank saying that he had crashed the bank's entire server system.

[@SingerDuce]

Tf😂😂 got a link or something 😂😂

[@tuisapo]

@@SingerDuce its just a screenshot from a message app. probably fake

[@EdmondDantèsDE]

doubt it. there's no reason for the bank to tell him that.

[@tuisapo]

@@EdmondDantèsDE exactly

[@asseenontv247]

It's likely that you can be kicked from matches, but many games utilize your steam profile to enforce bans, so you may be immune to being banned.

[@diridibindy5704]

they utilize steamid, not the cosmetic url. steamid cant even be changed

[@thespiffingbrit]

@@diridibindy5704 yup steam ID is fixed upon account creation. Other Services using Akamai might not be so smart

[@EnjoyCocaColaLight]

@@thespiffingbrit So.. put the banned word as steamID on new profile?

[@RainOrigami]

@@EnjoyCocaColaLight the steamid is a number generated by valve upon account creation and can not be set or modified by the user.

[@TheGurke1995]

@@EnjoyCocaColaLight witch would lead to you not being able to buy the game you don´t want to get banned at right?

[@BrianComradovichRadovich]

I like how the smoke effect at 6:48 when Spiff is discussing the Steam Marketplace almost looks like the Spiff avatar is laying down a massive fart. It's probably the best possible review of the Steam Marketplace itself.

[@theREALdingusMD]

That’s some impressive crop dusting.

[@Charmywoo]

i’m dead 💀💀💀💀💀💀😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆

[@SenileOtaku]

My guess is it was a "test" name for software development, something they **thought** would be obscure and long enough that no one would actually use it. Something they could use to trigger a function under test. And here you went and broke it for them. Now they're going to have to change it to something harder to type like "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (which would become a problem if someone were quoting the lyrics from Mitchie M's "Ai Dee").

[@thatbachus]

Why not just make it a long line of random text? Then it would really reduce the number of people who would reasonably find this out or have it done accidentally

[@thespiffingbrit]

*Hey trust me bro setting your ID To antidisestablishmentarianism69 is an Easter egg* Yes I say server when I mean database sorry not sorry

[@mhamohammed8546]

yes sirrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[@KeGGH]

any boob lovers?

[@HPsawus]

There’s a dead body in the dumpster behind the dominos I work ar

[@daKRAZI]

I agree nothing happens

[@lypreila7913]

We have the faith

[@halofreak1990]

This reminds me of an old, text-based online war game I played more than a decade ago. Things like account deletion only had a warning when accessed via your profile settings, but if you accessed the link directly, your account would be deleted on the spot, with no way back. Some clever user made his user name a link to this URL, meaning that if you clicked on their profile to view it, your account would be deleted. Also, for similar reasons, making your user name a single space or any invisible character would make it so nobody could view your profile. Really weird how that site worked

[@ChaoticNeutralMatt]

Terrifying

[@My_Old_YT_Account]

That reminds me of the rare people with a space in their Minecraft username as they basically can't get banned (example: doing "/ban help me" would ban the user "help" for the reason "me" rather than ban the user "help me")

[@carcharoclesmegalodon6904]

@@My_Old_YT_Account I know nothing about Minecraft server commands, but I'd be very surprised if this really makes people unbannable. I'm willing to guess something like putting the username in quotes should work.

[@apache937]

@@carcharoclesmegalodon6904 or using the uuid would definitely work with a proper punishment plugin. however vanilla minecraft banning is trash and may or may not work

[@apache937]

even nowaydays some sites have these kind of issues. CSRF!

[@maksiksq]

I love how Brit makes videos on KZbin about these instead of taking 1000$ bug bounties right away

[@atomanni-k5m]

yes because 1k is nothing.

[@KenrilZ]

It's also worth noting that this means anyone with other words in their profiles that Akamai decides they don't like could end up in the same situation later.

[@crypto1upteam750]

its so nice to have a big centralized internet on massive corporation servers.

[@ThatOliveMrT]

Smells like a good way to get lawsuit

[@T-West]

We had a bug once in Age of Empires II where if you placed %n in your Steam name, then the game would attempt to display a message to your opponent "You are being attacked by %n," but that would cause their game to crash and you would automatically win.

[@EdKolis]

The Nintendo DS version of that game would literally brick itself if you try to save and resume a skirmish match when your DS username is less than 4 characters. And my name is Ed...

[@KongraDNB]

It's really weird that I spent all day yesterday trying to think of this exact word and now I've just come across your video

[@BamassacreGaming]

Ever since the summer sale steam glitch, whenever I see a spiff steam video I click asap

[@LavaCreeperPeople]

While there are many talented KZbinrs out there, it's hard to deny that The Spiffing Brit is one of the best. With his infectious personality, engaging content, and unwavering dedication to his craft, he has amassed a loyal following of fans who can't get enough of his videos. What sets The Spiffing Brit apart from other KZbinrs is his ability to connect with his audience on a personal level. He is always open and honest with his fans, sharing his thoughts and feelings in a way that makes you feel like you're right there with him. Whether he's playing video games, sharing his experiences, or just chatting with his viewers, The Spiffing Brit has a way of making you feel like you're part of the conversation. Another thing that makes The Spiffing Brit so great is his dedication to his craft. He puts in countless hours of work each week to create high-quality content that his fans will love. He's always looking for ways to improve his videos, whether it's through better editing, more engaging topics, or higher production values. This level of dedication is rare in the world of KZbin, and it's what sets The Spiffing Brit apart from the rest. Of course, we can't forget about the content itself. The Spiffing Brit's videos are always entertaining, informative, and engaging. Whether you're a fan of video games, pop culture, or just great storytelling, there's something for everyone in his videos. He has a way of making even the most mundane topics interesting, and his infectious enthusiasm is impossible to resist. In conclusion, it's clear that The Spiffing Brit is one of the best KZbinrs out there. With his engaging personality, unwavering dedication, and high-quality content, he has won the hearts of millions of fans around the world. If you're not already a fan, it's time to check out his channel and see for yourself what all the fuss is about

[@thespiffingbrit]

@@LavaCreeperPeople this is either an unexpectedly wonderful essay or a stellar use of chat gpt :D

[@TechnoMinarchist]

@@thespiffingbrit It's definitely GPT. The "in conclusion" part at the end is a dead give away.

[@hartraiser]

​@Jacen Solo have you ever met a stressed high-school English student?

[@LuisSoto-fw3if]

@@hartraiser yes. In conclusion, yes.

[@asureaskie]

I do appreciate that Spiff is man enough to credit the people who discovered this mess while signal-boosting the issue! It's a small thing, but it speaks loudly and well of Spiff's integrity.

[@Puschit1]

Well, his "signal-boosting" included an actual encouragement to actively trick other users into disabling their accounts which isn't exactly a white hat thing to do. In book that makes the situation worse. I mean before this video only 5 or so users would experience this. Now it will be hundreds or more

[@asureaskie]

@@Puschit1 Except the problem was resolved mere hours after Valve started getting spammed with links to this video.

[@Pugkin5405]

Not really a man enough thing when at some point, people would call him out for it It's a "small thing" to avoid controversy

[@chriskelso723]

I love this guys humor though.

[@MarkPentler]

His hat is very grey

[@lisastormo5803]

The fact that you apparently did this on your(or an at least) actual steam account, instead of a new one you could have made: commitment level 100

[@heartbeat4atinman]

The "Henry VIII wants a divorce" to "saying this word bricks your Steam account" pipeline

[@benhaggerty3945]

This dude needs to make his own game, full of intentional bugs. I'd love to hear this voice pop up when I go out of bounds, calling me a bad little nugget and telling me to drink Yorkshire tea. I'd pay full price for that game.

[@timmorton8918]

I think there actually is a game like that!

[@Seriously_Unserious]

And I'd pay it again to have a Nerd review of said game. He won't need to take us back to the past to play THIS shitty game that sucks ass! 🤣🤓

[@cat1554]

@Slow_riding what?

[@Something_Disgusting]

​@Slow_riding your mom.

[@cozytong]

stanley parable type game

[@NaudVanDalen]

This is quite easy to fix. Just prevent people from updating their username if it has antidisestablishmentarianism in it. Fixing existing accounts is harder, but the fix I described takes a few minutes including writing down details and the GIT commit message and whatever else they need to do.

[@DeadlyGrim]

As software QA, my guess is that "antidisestablishmentarianism" either contains a banned word in it (aka "The Scunthorpe Problem") or it was chosen as a special word in order to test that blocking works properly in the developer environment and it accidentally made it's way into production code. Either way, fun! EDIT: 5:33 The fears of Y2K were actually completely justified. It would have been an absolute disaster with the failure of many critical systems, if people in the software industry didn't spend thousands of hours fixing it. Luckily, people in the software industry did spend thousands of hours fixing it! (Also, there's a similar Y2K38 problem where systems will start failing in 2038. So, we'll get to have another chance at hard work outracing disaster in a decade or so)

[@jonnunn4196]

However, the industry that the press and government was most worried about (banking and finance) ran into the Y2K bug early in 1970 within their mortgage departments and had to fix it way back then. Basically these incorrectly printed the year for 2000 in the last page of the report that gets printed out when you get a mortgage that details how much is interest and how much is principal for each month of the lifetime of the mortgage. Even those banks that didn't service mortgages had still had to deal with any bugs the moment they issued their first CD with a maturation date in 2000 or car loan whose final payment was due in 2000. A much more significant problem will be on January 19, 2038 (just after 3:14 UTC) if there's any remaining 32 bit servers running Linux by then. But even here, there has already been at least one company affected. Back in 2006 AOL had set a cookie's time out value for a cookie intended never to do so by adding a billion seconds to the current timestamp. (They had to adjust it to a lower value to fix.)

[@ArabianShark]

It contains the word "Arian", which is often associated with that popular ideology from 1930's Germany. It also contains "stab", which isn't a very nice thing to do. And also "tidis", but I suspect that won't be a problem...

[@Animo81]

​@@ArabianShark Incorrect. That would be spelled Aryan, if referring to the so-called Aryan race.

[@captvimes]

​@@jonnunn4196 No we didnt we hacked it to check < 50 yy and only in places where it broke at the time. They werent properly fixed and dates increased from yy to yyyy till the millenium fixes. Still pisses me off that we werent given credit for doing a good job. If there were still lots of bugs we would have been targetted for sure.

[@lennymclennington]

It's not that it has a bad word as a substring -- if you remove the first or last character of the word, then it's not blocked. It's only blocked when it's the full word antidisestablishmentarianism, so I guess it's the second one.

[@Telamont]

The Y2K bug was a massive concern, the reason why it didn't cause everything to fail was because IT people spent the months before hand trying to get things changed and updated so it wouldn't happen. I am not old enough to have been working back then but a few of the guys I work with did work in IT back then and the amount of shit they had to do and fix was a nightmare. On Jan 19 in 2038 we are going to have a similar issue with any Unix system still signed 32-bit integers. And the big concern with that one is the large number of IOT devices that you can't upgrade.

[@apache937]

That's over 10 year away, if companies are still using old crap from before 2010 then they deserve the problems

[@Telamont]

@@apache937 you realize companies still need to use fax machines in certain sectors due to laws right? It wouldn't surprise me if people have ancient stuff running production parts given the people that knew how to manage it left 5-10 years ago.

[@crashniels]

I've seen cash registers use MS-DOS before but they are slowly fading out. Now the most popular ones I've seen are windows 7 and windows 10.

[@King_Flippy_Nips]

@@Telamont quantum computers will likely be readily available by then which means everything will have to update since quantum computers will make any kind of encryption and security obsolete.

[@Telamont]

@@King_Flippy_Nips if I had a nickel for every time I heard something along those lines I'd have a lot more steam games lol.

[@DerpLvIAsian]

as of now, the antidisestablishmentarianism bug seems to be fixed. maybe steam bonked akamai enough to remove it from the banned words list

[@gemsimov]

I like how you mentioned, as a simple "by the way", that most launchers are essentially malware. Astoundingly important thing that is problematic but, hey, no way to apparently fix it, aside from not using the services. Unfortunate. Still, that's a great video!

[@apache937]

pirated games dont use the launchers

[@Z38_US]

@@apache937 true but pirated games by themselves often include much more malicious malware

[@puppergump4117]

@@apache937 Tlauncher is probably one of the best piracy things I've seen. It not only includes all versions of Minecraft but also versions with fabric, sodium, forge and optifine, all without any ads or malware. And it's a launcher, so.

[@gemsimov]

@@apache937 based comment

[@Z38_US]

@kiwikemist the "how to" part is easy. I'm unsure how anyone could mess that up. However back when I did used to pirate alot of my games I also got a lot of malware with it (granted I was like 7 when I did this so yeah) so like even when you know how you can still get infected if you don't notice it.

[@jacksonwages]

I know it was just a one-off joke. But, the Y2K thing was HUGE. The only reason most people didn't notice issues is because of MILLIONS of dollars being pumped into development ahead of time to make sure it would be a non-event.

[@Fuzy2K]

It reminds me of the saying "People don't know what I do until I don't do it"

[@mostevil1082]

We got very handsomely over paid for a few months to usually find out nothing happens when you roll the system clock forward a bit. There's definitely a 2050 bug standing by in some of those systems though.

[@SianaGearz]

@@mostevil1082 Yeah but the validation that there is NO bug is vital as well.

[@justinwhite2725]

Having friends who were recipients of part of that millions of dollars - no. They knew that there was nothing wrong with the system but they were handed money by panicked CEOs to thoroughly check everything anyway. Here's a hint - numbers in computers aren't decimal. They are binary. There is no conceivable reason why it would roll over at 99. There might possibly have been a problem at 2028, but more likely 2156 (because 128 is 7 bits and 256 is 8 and 7 bit numbers are odd. Literally)

[@justinwhite2725]

​@@mostevil1082first hand answer better than my second hand answer. Thanks.

[@mechanicalmonk2020]

Comments: oh look the spiffing brit figured out a new bug and reason Spif: literally just read a forum post

[@TheFrantic5]

Good to know the whole "the internet is a *distributed* network" paradigm is working out.

[@RobotronSage]

Brother if that's not sarcasm i swear to god we're fuc*ed

[@hydra3693]

it used to be

[@electricindigoball1244]

I think this showcases a much bigger issue which is how so many services (even large ones like Steam) depend on a relatively small number of large hosting providers. It's the reason why if AWS has an issue it can cause a large number of websites to go down. Seeing as this was discovered I hope Steam will add a check when setting your username to make sure that it is not blocked by their hosting provider before actually changing it. Like you said I can see lots of people being tricked into changing their username to this unfortunately.

[@xLeiZzex]

You are right, services like netflix, disney+ and basically everything that uses a lot of servers, space and bandwith uses aws. The issue however is that consumers want cheap products and services and this is how you get them. It's always been that way, as an example even back in 1900 when electricity kicked off, companies swapped from creating their own electricity to landlines from electric companies because it was cheaper. Its nothing new, on the big market there are only a few players.

[@MmntechCa]

Centralization can be more efficient/cost effective, but it can certainly makes things a lot more fragile. It also inevitably ties you into the whims of fickle providers. Lot of companies have learned that the hard way. It's why I like the core concept of the Web 3.0 stuff, minus the NFT scams. Building a decentralized, more resilient, censorship resistant web versus relying on a few large players. Of course that can be tricky if you have high bandwidth needs.

[@resneptacle]

@@xLeiZzex Netflix doesn't only use CDNs on AWS, they also host their own nodes on ISP networks in conjunction with said ISPs

[@Bozebo]

Literally every time AWS had an issue and sites went down, it's because the sites were lazy and stuck everything (or one critical service) in one AWS location which you're not meant to do. But if they had that level of skills and knowledge, they wouldn't be using AWS anyway (edit: wouldn't be vendor locked into aws specific services at their core, could still use some general iaas e.g. s3 abstracted, vpl, ec2 video transcoding abstracted).

[@tonyth9240]

Good thing Cloudflare is stable

[@Grimrapings]

The quit smoking thing reminded me of earlier ID engine games. You could colour your text in game. You could trick people by saying you did it by typing disco in console. This would then disconnect the users, as it would auto fill to the word disconnect. There was also when Cs:s launched and in beta, f10 was a quit bind by default, so you'd tell users to press F10.

[@PastaManTheFirst]

"I can't access friends" relatable.

[@slackamacgaming6721]

What are these 'friends' you speak of...

[@Timbo_1]

The quit smoking part is almost as good as "Press ALT F4 to activate cheats" end 90s early 2000s xD

[@joostfloot5279]

My then 12 year old ass fell for the good old alt+f4 trick in 2012 too. Hope gamers will continue with the joke till the ends of time.

[@kholdanstaalstorm6881]

Current Stream fails say that the Alt+F4 trick is alive and kicking unaware hindquarters to this day. With the added bonus of Streamers looking for an internet speed hack and they're shown how to remove their internet access, ending their stream...

[@darkstars101]

It's not Akamai blocking it. They don't block things by default. But the Akamai customer (Valve in this case) has configured a blocklist for their Akamai traffic.

[@attilavs2]

Perfectly balanced as Gaben intended.

[@morgan3625]

perfectly based

[@DanorDave]

Spiff out at it again, messing with steam and exploiting the hell out of it

[@DanorDave]

Good luck to anyone who chooses to be a manace and block peoples accounts by being a silver fox😂😂

[@LavaCreeperPeople]

Lol I love exploits

[@dankyei]

I love how Spiff pronounced Roblox as "Rob Locks" and not "Row Blocks" 😅 He is a true rebel 😎

[@Flippirino]

Spiff has talked about antidisestablishmentarianism Glad he's still getting his daily use out of it Practically a normal thing for conversations, especially nowadays

[@TheSkyRender]

Aye, but only a little. Really he was discussing it quasiantidisestablishmentarianistically.

[@SianaGearz]

I used to like casually sneaking "startkeylogger" into conversations and seeing whether the person still has Internet access.

[@Slava_Ukraini1991]

i dont get it @@SianaGearz

[@SianaGearz]

@@Slava_Ukraini1991 Norton Antivirus had an Internet Security module which when encountering this in plaintext, and chat protocols didn't tend to be encrypted back in the day, would drop your internet connection. A more advanced attack was to say DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0 over IRC to also crash various home routers. Mind you, you don't have to have any keylogger vulnerability per se for this attack to work; overprotective measures against possible keyloggers as well as text parser implementation bugs are what would lead to denial of service.

[@IstasPumaNevada]

As I understand it, the y2k rollover was smooth not because it wasn't a big deal, but because companies, governments, organizations, etc. all took a BUNCH of effort to fix the problem before it happened. There may have been exaggeration by media about how bad things would actually get and the public may not have needed to know about it at all, but there WOULD have been serious problems if no steps had been taken.

[@kelvin1316]

When i think back to the amount of work my partner done running around the country patching thousands of servers, its really annoying when people say about how uneventful it was. THAT WAS THE POINT 🤣

[@Khorvalar]

I heard about a guy that returned a movie to Blockbuster Video and got charged over $1,000 because their computer didn't get updated lol.

[@jasonhilts2661]

y2k was solved by years of programmers world wide losing their collective minds going we have until 11:59 pm on dec31st of 1999 to fix this problem or 1000 years of interest will be removed from every bank account world wide because the idiots who originally designed our banking systems for some reason didnt think they would last from the mid 1980's until the 2000's and therefore programmed the thing to reset to 1000 after hitting 1999. Dumbest design ever, but was a SERIOUS SERIOUS potential disaster.

[@phutureproof]

@@Khorvalar sounds like urban bullshit

[@dekeonus]

@@Khorvalar Despite the media hype the big IT service providers didn't give a rat's arse about small - medium business. Those large IT contractors cared about infrastructure problems; an example: In my country there was a municipal water treatment plant with industrial control systems. One critical piece was the controller in charge of the chlorine feed mix. That unit would boot loop (not exactly - but a close analogy), moving the valves a tiny bit each cycle, to point that the valves could be full open or full closed within about 15 minutes. The unit was externally unresponsive. This would lead to one of two disaster scenarios (both resulting in no potable water): either the water had significant microbial growth and made the water unsafe or it dumped 6 months worth of chorine salt into the water in a span of around 6 hours - which would make the water exceptionally dangerous to drink (and could lead to chemical burns if one were to shower in it).

[@Unknown-Number]

Sims 4 is perfectly balanced: Glutons are an infinite source of "normal" quality food. Every time you throw out something (like trash, glass cups, plates, etc.), you can look for food in that trash bin. Most of the time, it'll make a trash pile, so you can easily dive back into the trash bin. (Bam! I just jumped into the middle of the comment, when you least expected me! For the first thousand people, who like this comment, will get a fresh serving of meal from our glutonous chef! And furthermore, for the first two thousand people (who are currently not subbed), who subscribe to spiff's channel will get their own glutonous chef! [WARNING! The chef may cause some dirt and is also lazy. We do not owe any money for the property damage the chef does. Furthermore, we do not accept refunds, so you may stay forever subbed to spiff. You have been warned.]) And when it's full, you can just take out the trash to the trash can, and continue the work there. Therefore, you don't need to have a chef, neither a stove/fridge and it's completely free! Also, if the food gets spoiled, the gluton can still eat it. After this simple exploit, you'll have gluTONs of food! Edit: I realized you don't need to refill the trash to get so many food. You just need to stack up the stuff, so you can have this more efficient

[@SuperNuketown2025]

I remember getting people to do the “quit smoking” thing back in 2016. I had a bind for it for a while, but I’d say it’d give you the achievement “Bad Habits.” It worked a little too well sometimes because I accidentally made my own teammates leave with it a couple of times lol.

[@suraii32]

it was fun to do in gmod rp servers that had an item or model that had you smoking a cigarette

[@ffgfdg123]

@@economicprisoner nah ppl would put it in their names or emblems, when the xbox 1 first released, ppl would read it, and then their headset or kinect would take that as a command and turn itself off

[@8stormy5]

When I was 14 I fell for the "unbindall" trick

[@thejhonnie]

@@ffgfdg123 Xbox 360 not original xbox

[@lord_razur]

@@thejhonnie Nah the console called the Xbox One, not the original Xbox (that everybody probably called the Xbox 1 up until that point). Because Microsoft makes unbelievably stupid naming decisions with their hardware.

[@MattariOnline]

Oh my gosh, I literally know of this specific word. Antidisestablishmentarianism is legitimately one of my favorite words, and could've very legitimately called myself this out of mild humor. I'm glad I watched this video. I could've found this bug naturally.

[@theprecipiceofreason]

Someone at that service provider lost a 5th grade spelling bee and made it their mission to destroy the word

[@ChloeHartzog]

"Country Bumpkin Yutaka" is actually a legit game. Played it a few years back, the gameplay is so interractive and simple, so simple that I only need to use one hand to play it.

[@thespiffingbrit]

Oh no...

[@TheKazragore]

Oh, I think I see where this is going.

[@StylishPlushie]

Hat off to you and your immense "culture", sir. 🎩

[@uteriel282]

too bad the steam version is cut down to the point where its not much of a game anymore. around 80% of the content and most characters arent included cause its 18+.

[@ChloeHartzog]

@@uteriel282 There is always a patch somewhere out there, official or unofficial. Such is the norm for 'spicy' steam games

[@WompWompWoooomp]

Steam: "He can't keep getting away with it!"

[@TigerPlaysSoT]

"It's going to be quite awhile before it's fixed" > me watching this video 10 days later and it's fixed.

[@evokerzz]

in this video we learn to give Steam the functionality of the Epic launcher

[@realtimestatic]

Imagine parents naming their kids accounts this because they don't want them to have any of the social features

[@cheesusgaming1769]

They also can't buy games so sadly this doesn't work

[@The1stImmortal]

I was literally just considering doing that for my kids accts heh (I wont)

[@JuddMan03]

@@The1stImmortal there is family mode where you can lock away your choice of the store, friends or community tabs behind a PIN. You can also whitelist games if you want. Useful for family sharing with a child so they can play games you bought but get their own cloud saves separate from yours.

[@The1stImmortal]

@@JuddMan03 I know. I use it :) a bit clunky but passable

[@edwinkoster6052]

Ah yes, XKCD 327 ! Good times…

[@oSpoken]

I like how I have post notifications yet I literally never get notified about your videos.

[@ksevio]

My guess is it's a feature Akamai provides that the user (Valve) can customize, so Valve could fix it. As for why antidisestablishmentarianism is banned, maybe it was an example word to show how it could work that was accidentally enabled?

[@Insertnamehere58]

I've used akamai, I'm 95% certain you are correct. Akamai has firewall features and and an easy way of tested is just create a page that throws 403 or something. Dev probably picked a long word just to make it harder to do accidentally. As for why it's live, they probably just forgot to remove it. Large company means they probably don't even know it's causing an issue.

[@apache937]

@@Insertnamehere58 also means that someone will eventually find

[@LtShifty]

@@Insertnamehere58 I use Akamai, this is 100% customer error, Akamai themselves leave full control of routing, firewall, DDOS, malware, DNS, WAF (etc) to the customer. Given the size of Steam though, I'd expect the setup is a mixture of in-house network and security teams, third party support, Akamai support, and one of them isn't working very well.

[@mikicerise6250]

So basically it took this long for someone to stumble on antidisestablishmentarianism. 😅

[@Ylyrra]

@@LtShifty No CDN provides FULL control of routing to the customer. They work hard to give the APPEARANCE of transparent control, but behind the scenes they're doing a bunch of stuff just to provide their core service. Any mistake in those routing rules can produce something like this, as found out by Cloudflare a few years back with a dodgy regexp. As it stands, with the information provided, there's no clear sign whether it's an error on the Akamai side, accidentally deploying a rule they didn't mean to, or whether it's Steam that have done it. It could still manifest as looking like an error on the Akamai server in either case. Either way, it's probably not a big deal to fix, it's almost certainly a test rule deployed by mistake, and it's just that if it's in Akamai's global rules it will take time to deploy and propagate because of the scale of the change.

[@CR7Prod7]

R.I.P. To all the people who lost their Steam accounts by pure curiosity.

[@storymaster21]

Spiff, I should mention that thanks to your "ea play on xbox live" video exploit I now own like 60 games on my xbox that I LITERALLY DO NOT OWN.

[@JimBob4233]

Kinda want to clarify that Y2K _wasn't_ not a problem - it was a massive problem, although smaller than reported by people who don't understand computers, it just happened during the time when people who knew the simple solution to massive problems were allowed to go and fix them. Remember those days? They were nice.

[@kingmasterlord]

I know the simple solution to most of the world's problems but I'm not allowed to go and fix them

[@RobotronSage]

Man i remember the days for sure. I don't know what the f**k we've all woken up to but this ain't it. I can't live like this. Do you guys remember gamespy? Things were good back then.

[@Kevin-jb2pv]

Yeah, it always bugs me that people act like that was a fake apocalypse scare, when in reality it was a serious, system-breaking bug for a ton of important computer systems that could have had _major_ impacts on a lot of important government and commercial operations. The only reason it didn't break everything was because of the massive effort of a lot of programmers who went out and fixed a lot of archaic code. It almost certainly wouldn't have led to all the crazy scenarios that the media was pushing, like causing a nuclear war or for planes to just fall out of the sky, but it could have seriously fucked up a lot of stuff like financial transactions and records, billing systems for utilities and telecom, telecom systems in general, military computer systems, weather tracking, air traffic control systems, etc... The danger wasn't that everything would go down and cause the apocalypse, but that it could cause a lot of really important systems to all stop talking to each other and/ or stop working correctly (or at all) _all at the same time,_ which would have caused massive disruptions and economic chaos in many parts of (then) modern society.

[@the_motherfucker]

When exactly was no one allowed to fix a problem with a simple solution? Unless I missed something, I'm pretty sure it's still allowed

[@GreyMaria]

@@the_motherfucker See also: literally anything created after 2010

[@firockfinion3326]

"Little Timmy can't play Country Bumpkin Yutaka anymore." Little Timmy probably shouldn't be playing it in the first place...

[@madcatlady]

this was actually a word I wrote a lot practicing cursive styles back in the 70's, solely because of it's length along with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

[@Jayan_TM]

My biggest take away is that Spiffing Brit is literally charging people to speak to him. I am waiting for the "Patreon is a perfectly balanced social networking platform"

[@coryv5679]

Welcome to what ShillTubers become over time.

[@GoldenEDM_2018]

If you don't want to talk to them then you don't have any problems really. It's a person's choice to blindly hand them the money. No one's forcing anyone to subscribe to their Patreon.

[@shikkarasuthethird9295]

My biggest take is that random people on the internet are more willing to pay workers than actual employers.

[@Jez4prez1]

@@shikkarasuthethird9295 ya, because they're consumers. It's consumers who pay all workers lol. Unless it's gov wokers, then it's tax.

[@Jayan_TM]

This turned dark really fast 😅

[@sonicfactory-uk]

I appreciate Spiff for asking people to "quit smoking". It's a bad habit, and ultimately will help people in the long run.

[@tomjones2056]

Don’t be bigoted to the smoking community. We have long been discriminated against unfairly!

[@bezerkoid]

​@tomjones2056 are you being serious?

[@skroowi8105]

Ever notice how telling people to quit smoking is socially acceptable, yet telling a fatty to go on a diet makes you a monster?

[@Rynjinivar]

@@skroowi8105 Because being fat only hurts you, not the people around you.

[@tappajaav]

@@skroowi8105 Might have to do with the numbers. Western societies in large have reduced smoking, but the weight of population has gone up

[@jeffyp2483]

Steam preventing it to be set to that to begin with would be easy, and at least a good temporary band-aid

[@HKlink]

6:07 back in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy online, there was a popular mod going around that gave you a grappling hook, letting you grapple to places. This sorta worked if it was installed serverside, and fully worked if it was installed on the client as well. So even if you did not install the mod, you could just use it, and it would show up as a blaster shot coming out of your hand and then pulling you somewhere. I had countless people ask me how to get it to work. I had a lot of fun telling people to type "bind w qui gon gun" into their console. Bind w would bind something to w and then it would bind qui to their w button and ignore the rest of the command. Qui would autocomplete to quit. Congratulations, now pressing W quits your game instantly! Naturally, anyone who asked n i c e l y and did not accuse me of cheating would get the proper command. But it was a great way of telling people... well... whatever they learned from that lesson.

[@novemberserpent263]

Am I alone in having had this as a class spelling bee gag word in like grade 2? Madly struck by nostalgia and burst out laughing at the reveal... Spiff you're astounding, thanks for the entertainment!

[@Dead_Goat]

Its actually a common word to use for testing blacklists.

[@blazen123]

@@Dead_Goat considering nobody will use it ever

[@TankTheDragon]

"And see if you can even spell the word in the comments below" Oh no, I'm not falling for that spiff. You made a whole video explaining why I should keep not remembering this word exists

[@tomunderhill8037]

Oh my ..Spiff now how has a “Power Word - Kill” for steam -what Tea god for a perfect balanced world

[@Zirnike]

Well, doesn't kill the account, stops you from seeing it... So power word - blind. 😃

[@point-five-oh6249]

@@Zirnike Power Word - Stun 🤣

[@matheusjahnke8643]

​@@Zirnike it just stops it from accessing it. So it's Power Word - [[REDACTED]]

[@thatunknownfella]

This man is working for both sides, our ultimate hero and villain

[@glennthisfieldisblank838]

When I was in school, my teacher told the class that antidisestablishmentarianism was the longest word. I raised my hand and asked "What about antidisestablishmentarianistically?"

[@beastlytunic5296]

The Spiffing Brit is the QA Tester we all need and deserve!

[@mattgibbia2692]

How to stop yourself from buying games you will never play because of the steam sale in one easy step

[@Coxis67]

You should do a follow-up video where you contact support and see if they can recover your account. Maybe ask them for an explanation of what happened and see what they tell you.

[@nahiankarimkhan4660]

I watch your videos all the time, waiting for the summer sale exploit hehe, love you

[@danielhale1]

Power Word: Kill Goblin King: "Nyahahaha! You'll never defeat me!" Wizard: "Disestablishmentarianism" Goblin King: *explodes*

[@SianaGearz]

DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0

[@-yeetus]

Little Timmy also doesn't have his kidney privileges anymore either.

[@kade402]

The original user who put this as his ID is called "Lotus". I'm good friends with him so hopefully it gets fixed soon!

[@legalizeallnukes]

hi kade cutie

[@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece]

We are already in a dystopian future where hosters actually ban words.

[@kitsunekaze93]

hopefully its just a missed test word, the devs used the word because its long and never really used, then forgot/didnt think about removing the test code

[@EstanBulLoFre]

They ban this word because the servers are hosted in China and that's one of the words that gets you thrown into prison.

[@CottonHill91]

Babe wake up. Spiff broke steam with his favorite weapon: English.

[@EnderReaper64]

Theoretically, you could still do things using the Steam API, so you can manage stuff related to your profile using that if you know how to send API requests

[@Surr3alD3sign]

Nope... bc that also requires going through the server...

[@FiNiTe_weeb]

the mobile app would have prob still worked then, at least the non direct web content stuff

[@1Maklak]

"I can end your account with a single word" sounds like something from Doctor Who.

[@DJAvren]

Thank you for making public service announcements a bit more entertaining

[@devolutionparpaing9855]

spiff about to name his kids "kevin"); drop table students

[@WINH4X]

Hearing you mispronounce the word 20+ times was about the funniest thing in this video. Good content, though, thanks for the chuckle and information!

[@henriquedominguesjocas599]

You mentioned that it would potentially work on other games/services that use akamai servers, but should be pointed out that some games have a character limit for usernames, and Antidisestablishmentarianism is a pretty damn long word and would probably go over many of those

[@Bebop79]

It appears this has already been fixed but 1 way that users who ran into this bug may have been able to fix this issue was by getting their SteamID by typing status into the console of any source game then using a SteamID lookup to get the normal URL. Potentially force their browser to not follow redirects and you should be able to edit your profile from there.

[@MsHojat]

In practice that doesn't work. You can't override what the server wants to show you. Not redirecting just doesn't show the page.

[@amahlaka]

Sounds like the akamai WAF (web application firewall) has been configured to block url’s with that word, maybe for testing purposes, or maybe because it somehow matches with some obscure IOC.

[@CrashOzzy1223]

It sends your profile to the shadow realm

[@fishman501]

If Spiff has Airships:Conquer The Skies, maybe he could try and find an exploit or two in it?

[@realah3001]

Wait I recognise you

[@fishman501]

@@realah3001 I don't recognise you

[@vitaliikocherga3954]

Ah, the nicest example of ‘just a test’ data weaselling it’s way into production code

[@Turglayfopa]

"We're been antidisestablishmentarianismed!" "That's not even a word and I agree with you"

[@yellowcrescent]

Looks like they already fixed it, nice! My guess is that it was not due to Akamai, but rather to some kind of ModSecurity rule or other stupid server-side filtering thing that Steam has setup.

[@FinalFrantasy]

Country Bumpkin Yutaka is a classic. She's always getting tricked into doing wacky things!

[@Pest789]

Someone at Akamai who thought their little Easter egg thing was just harmless fun is going to be very fired.

[@rukitomikutochi8764]

Blacklisted most likely.

[@n0xure]

Or was already fired and now they have to bring him back because nobody can figure out how he stored the blacklist...

[@mr.hellsy]

If he was a timelord, he would be the master, but he would win.

[@notkevin7]

Oh geez, I thought he was referring to the gamer word

[@Ameszillas]

Me: Fight the man! Down with the government! Antidisestablishmentarianism! Steam: Bet *Thanos snaps your account*

[@elifia]

Antidisestablishmentarianism means that you are opposed to the disestablishment of the Church of England, so that actually means you're pro-government. It's a double negative, basically. Dunno why they'd ban a word like that though.

[@kholdanstaalstorm6881]

It makes one wonder what other words have magical effects in Steam's databases... Could removing the dis in AntiDISestablishmentarianism have similar effects? That's not the double negative. Could it be one or more rules regarding Anti + Establishment or could it be some part of the full word contains something banned?

[@SianaGearz]

@@elifia It's known as a rare, useless, extra long word. It's often used to test text fields for potential behavioural flaws with long words. To my taste it's not quite long enough, not even reaching 32 bytes.