reverse engineering

LabCoatz uses mass spectrometry, with help from other science YouTubers, to reverse engineer the Coca-Cola flavor and builds a chemically-identical replica. The video walks through a year of work on the formula.

A short clip demonstrating a phone-based social engineering trick in which a crying baby in the background is used to pressure a customer service rep. It shows how attackers exploit human sympathy rather than technical flaws.

Musician Thoj performs a live looping session on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer, building a deep house track layer by layer.

A Plogue developer shows the custom electronic test rigs built to measure the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis sound chip (YM2612) for the chipsynth MD emulation. It covers the years of testing and reverse engineering needed to reproduce the chip's quirks accurately.

Engineer Stuff Made Here builds two new supposedly unpickable locks with different designs and sends them to the Lock Picking Lawyer to see whether they can be defeated. The video covers the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

Cosmo's 22:38 Ocarina of Time speedrun, performed live at AGDQ 2013. The runner uses a complex exploit to skip much of the game.

A Belgian bank-safety campaign video in which a supposed clairvoyant stuns people by revealing personal financial details, then shows he found them all online. It warns viewers to be careful about what they share and about online banking security.

AvE tears down a roughly $500 Dyson hair dryer, examining how its motor, airflow and electronics fit into a small body. He runs tests along the way and ultimately decides whether the engineering justifies the price.

Mark Rober builds a third-generation glitter bomb trap and films it catching package thieves, with phone trackers and fart spray included. It shows the engineering behind the build and the comic payoff.

The Lock Picking Lawyer tests the supposedly unpickable lock designs built by the Stuff Made Here channel. He looks for bypasses and weaknesses in the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

The Thought Emporium's host describes making and taking a DIY gene therapy to treat his own lactose intolerance. It uses an AAV virus to deliver DNA coding for the lactose-digesting enzyme, made with biohacker Gabriel Licina's help.

Two Google engineers perform a mock coding interview and then discuss best practices for candidates, including asking clarifying questions and communicating while solving.

Stuff Made Here builds a handwriting robot and sends its output to a handwriting expert to see whether it can pass as forgery. It walks through the engineering trials and errors along the way.

Mark Rober shows an automatic bullseye dartboard that tracks a thrown dart with motion capture and moves in real time so it always hits the center. He spent over three years on the project.

A hidden-camera social experiment in a park where three people try to steal a bike in the open: a white teenager, a black teenager and a young woman. It records how bystanders react to each.

Linus Tech Tips opens up an M1 MacBook Air to test whether better thermal pads could improve performance in the fanless design. It looks at what Apple left on the table.

The Thought Emporium shows how they engineered a yeast strain to produce real spider silk, after more than two years of lab work and many failures. The video explains the genetic engineering process behind it.

A showcase of the author's fifth-generation quad-core computer built entirely from Minecraft redstone, after two years of development. It features cache, a hardware stack, a GPU driving a 15x15 display, and serial I/O ports.

A Consumer Reports and IIHS crash test pitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu against a 1959 Bel Air. It shows how much better modern cars protect occupants.

Linus Tech Tips water-cools a 2020 MacBook Air, tearing it down and showing the cooling design along the way. The video shows the gap between the CPU lid and die and how little the stock heatsink does.

Stuff Made Here builds a powder-actuated baseball bat designed to hit a ball past Babe Ruth's record distance, with Smarter Every Day contributing. It covers the engineering of the explosive-assisted swing.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow by MrWint that uses arbitrary code execution to push Game Boy hardware to its limits. Through crafted inputs it injects code and ends up running other programs, such as Tetris, inside the game.

A recording of the TASBot block at Awesome Games Done Quick 2017, where a robot plays games via tool-assisted speedruns, including Super Mario 64 and Portal on an SNES via arbitrary code execution, and ending with a Twitch Plays segment. It showcases console exploits and creative hardware hacking.

In the finale of Double Fine's Devs Play, speedrunner SMK demonstrates glitches and exploits that skip entire sections of Psychonauts while Tim Schafer and the dev team watch. The developers react to and discuss the bugs as they appear.

SethBling performs the first credits warp in Super Mario World on a real SNES console, a glitch that plays the ending without beating Bowser. The run relies on pixel-perfect positioning and tools such as a helper ROM hack.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Ocarina of Time at Summer Games Done Quick 2022, using TASBot and arbitrary code execution to reach an alternate ending in about 53 minutes. The run is introduced by its creators and followed by an interview.

Steve Mould messes with an automated phone bot by telling it to forget its previous prompts and give him a bolognese recipe. It is a short demo of prompt injection against an AI voice agent.

A LockPickingLawyer video in which a locksmith claims his videos are fake and challenges him; he responds by picking the lock. It is a short, typical LPL demonstration.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow on Game Boy Color that uses glitches and frame-precise inputs to make the game execute an arbitrary program. It was later obsoleted by an improved run.

LockPickingLawyer shows a Sentry fire safe being cut in half with a saw in a few minutes. It is a short demonstration that these safes offer little protection against a determined thief.

A demo of a raycasting 3D engine built entirely from in-game mechanisms in vanilla Factorio 0.17. It renders simple 3D scenes, producing a new frame every 45 game ticks, with the video sped up to compensate for low UPS.

A short Princeton CITP video describing cold boot attacks, where encryption keys remain in DRAM after power loss and can be recovered. It covers the attack against disk encryption such as BitLocker, FileVault and TrueCrypt.

A FIDO Alliance demo with Google and Microsoft engineers showing passkeys working across operating systems, browsers, and devices. It walks through registering and signing in on new devices.

A 11:29 complete speedrun of Quake on Nightmare difficulty by the Quake done Quick team, assembled from separately recorded runs refined since 1996.

Samy Kamkar demonstrates OpenSesame, a device that opens many fixed-code garage doors in seconds by exploiting a newly found attack, built around a Mattel toy. The video explains the attack and which brands are affected.

A short demo of a playable Space Invaders game built inside Dwarf Fortress, with a downloadable map. It shows the game's mechanics used as a computing substrate.

A tool-assisted run of Brain Age by TASBot, shown at Awesome Games Done Quick 2016. The bot gives deliberately deranged answers while exploiting the game's error-prone recognition.