Hello Reader,
A few years ago there was a common scam on YouTube where people would create fake accounts with the same profile picture as creators, but use a WhatsApp number as the name on the account, and then they'd use a bot to mass-reply to people saying to give them a call.
It was a big problem, and I would actually get replies to those comments, as well as DMs and emails from people who tried to contact the number.
As with most scams, most people don't fall for it, but it's a numbers game, and even if one person falls for it, it was worth it to them.
YouTube took an embarrassing amount of time to address that issue (to the point where another creator made a 3rd party tool to help us deal with it that I was using for at least 6 months), but they finally did.
Bot spamming replies is one thing, but now, I've been deepfaked.
Sometime last year YouTube put a Likeness Detection feature in place. I was hesitant to turn it on, because you have to scan your face and it keeps that in the system, but I decided to do it anyway. Then, this week, they flagged a video, and lo and behold, there was a fake me telling people, of all things, not to fall for crypto schemes.
The video wasn't half bad, though if you watched it closely you would notice a few things. My wife laughed at the voice because it was clearly based on my voice, but both of us didn't think it sounded like me.
Some people have told me they thought it sounded like me though, so it probably depends if you listen to me for 10 minutes every now and then, or all the time 😅.
Once again, the purpose of the scam is to get people to contact them, but obviously this is another level over a bot account using my profile picture.
It's more invasive in a big way, but that hasn't bothered me as much as I thought it would.
My main concern is just over the amount of content that can be thrown out there now, and while YouTube has a likeness detection, it hasn't helped me get the videos off from TikTok (where there are three of them), and keeping track of this type of thing across multiple platforms seems like an impossible task.
(I've already reported the content and channel, as have a number of other people, but if you want to add to that, I won't say no. You can find the channel here).
I'm not all that concerned about it for myself, but as these types of things improve and are used with more well-known people and in more subtle, long-term scams and misinformation campaigns, I can't help but think that the impacts could be pretty big.
There's also the concern that as these get better and need less data to do a good job, more personalized scams could quickly become an issue.
And I wish I had a more positive way to end this off, other than as obvious as a lot of these things seem at the moment, just be careful with what you see out there... and if I'm talking about something other than CSS, it's probably not me 😆.
🙋♂️ What I’ve been up to this week
📺 Nobody told me CSS could do this
 Animating things in as they scroll into view used to mean an IntersectionObserver. Now that we have scroll-driven animations, we can flip the value of a custom property to create a scroll-triggered animation!
The part I had the most fun with is the staggering. Staggering is easy when you know how many columns you have. It gets a lot more interesting when you’re using auto-fit and the column count changes.
A few people in the comments of this one asked about using sibling-index(), but we need to target elements not by their count, but by what column they are in. If you’re keeping track of the column count in a different way, you could then use that.
To do that, I used container queries, but Temani Afif has a cool solution that doesn’t require them.
And the title isn't as misleading as you might think, because somehow I completely missed it, but Chromium browsers now support animation-trigger, but the solution I look at here will be cross browser shortly as Firefox is shipping support for animation-timeline.
⚡ I wish this had always been so easy
 A quick look at anchor positioning, and how much simpler it makes something that used to take a lot more work than it should have.
You can find the full video here.
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🔗 Other awesome stuff from around the web
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📝 Quiz time!
An element has transform: translateX(2rem). You add an animation with @keyframes spin { to { rotate: 360deg; } }. What happens to the translate while it spins?
- It stays translated and spins
- It's overwritten, so the element snaps back while spinning
- The rotation is ignored because of the translation
- It's invalid, so nothing happens
As per usual, you'll have to head on over to YouTube to take a stab at the quiz, and once you answer, you'll see if you were right or not.
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🏁
Have a fantastic week!
Kevin
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