Squatters sniped his accounts in seconds during the rename

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 34:14

   Again, friendly, but also just adding more stress to my situation already. So at this point, I was just like, sorry, that's not a word, fuck it. and i just i just renamed it to moltbot because that was the set of domains i had i was not really happy but i thought it'll be fine and i tell you everything that could go wrong everything that could go wrong did go wrong it's incredible i i i thought i i had mapped the space out and reserved the important things can you give some details of the stuff that got wrong because it's interesting from like an engineering perspective? Well, the interesting stuff is that none of these services have a squatter protection. So I had two browser windows open. One was like an empty account ready to be renamed to CloudBot. And the other one I renamed to MaltBot. So I pressed rename

2. 35:13

   there. I pressed rename there. And in those five seconds, they stole the account name. literally the five seconds of dragging the mouse over there and pressing rename there was too long because there's no those systems i mean you would expect that they have some protection or like an automatic forwarding but there's nothing like that and i didn't know that they're not just good at harassment they're also really good at using scripts and tools yeah so yeah so suddenly like the old account was um promoting new tokens and serving malware and i was like okay let's move over to github and i pressed rename on github and the github renaming thing is slightly confusing so i renamed my personal account and in those i guess it took me 30 seconds to realize my mistake Like, they sniped my account, serving malware from my account.

3. 36:18

   So I was like, okay, let's at least do the NPM stuff. But that takes, like, a minute to upload. They sniped the NPM package. Because I could reserve the account, but I didn't reserve the root package. So, like, everything that could go wrong went wrong. Can I just ask a curious question? in that moment you're sitting there like how shitty do you feel that's a pretty helpless feeling right yeah because all i wanted was like having fun with that project and keep building on it and yet here i am like days into researching names picking a name i didn't like and having people that claim they helped me making my life miserable in every possible way and honestly i was that close of just deleting it i was like i did show you the future you build it yeah i that was a big part of me i got a lot of joy

4. 37:27

   out of that idea and then i thought about all the people that already contributed to it and i couldn't do it because they had plans with it and they put time in it and it just didn't feel right well i think a lot of people listening to this are deeply grateful that you persevered but i can tell i can tell it's a low point it's the first time you hit a wall