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A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
- mjard 4y agoThere were lessons to learn here for all the parties involved. The author seems to have chosen to ignore theirs while wanting to pat themselves on the back for fooling news sites. The news sites learned nothing, they got what they wanted out of the deal. Reddit.. Reddit cannot learn, too many people involved.
- JadeNB 4y agoThe author seems explicitly to indicate that they're not chiding anyone, nor defending themselves: > It's not meant to bash news outlets over journalistic integrity. The internet is a difficult thing to document. It's not meant to justify my joke. If you don't think it was funny... OK. Depending on the day I'm sure I'd agree with you.
- mjard 4y agoIt's self congratulatory not defensive. If I claim that I am not chiding you, but then write an entire blog post on how I was able to pull one over on you, one of those should speak louder than the other.
- inwit 4y agoThink what we're all learning here is that you have neither a sense of humour nor a sense of perspective. What actual bad thing happened here? It's just a fun whimsical incident. I actually think it says more about your self esteem than anything else that you read this as self-congratulatory
- pvg 4y agoWhat lesson is the author supposed to learn here? Don't post jokes on a joke subreddit?
- renewiltord 4y agoSome people just don’t get jokes. /r/yourjokebutworse has one category but there is also that entire category of comments that go “I hope that’s satire” to what is obviously satirical.
- mjard 4y agoJokes on the internet are great when people are in on them. Positioning yourself as someone that has inside information when it's false falls closer to "it was just a prank bro". The author should be able to say whatever they want, though the ability doesn't make the action not shitty.
- pessimizer 4y agoNo jokes are great when people are in on them. That's why the punchline doesn't come first.
- blowski 4y agoThat’s a different type of joke. It’s why we laugh at “it’s behind you” in a pantomime. We’re in on the joke that the actor knows it’s behind them.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Asooka 4y ago"Everything on the internet is false, unless proven otherwise" - Abraham Lincoln.
- tomrod 4y agoIncorrect. It's the journalists' job to verify.
- throwthere 4y agoI think the oddest bit of this is the author “doxing” their trolling on Reddit with their actual identity on the blog.
- astrea 4y agoMan if this is a joke then my whole software career is a comedy
- mdoms 4y agoThis doesn't seem like a joke, it seems like a guy outright spreading misinformation. Not sure what was the point of the UUID preamble, his "joke" has nothing to say about UUIDs.
- rootusrootus 4y agoOnly if people take seriously the posts random anonymous strangers make on r/programmerhumor. The real source of disinformation here is whomever decided to repeat the dry humor without the context of it coming from a joke subreddit.
- pessimizer 4y agoSome people will believe everything they read, and they are friends with people who will believe everything they heard from a friend.
- TheDudeMan 4y agoAnd his link to the Google collision was not an accidental collision, like the rest of his ramblings were discussing.
- jameshart 4y agoRight - that’s a SHA1 collision, which has nothing to do with the possibility of a UUID collision. I worry that some people might take away from this that UUID collisions are actually something to worry about (nonsensical kindergarten cubby analogies and so on). Really, truly, UUIDs can be assumed unique. We’re not relying on luck.
- zamadatix 4y agoUUIDs can be assumed unique because we are relying on luck, not the other way around. The cubby example is actually a pretty good example of why the luck is on your side to the point you should never worry about it. The SHA1 collision not as much.
- 4y ago
- captainmuon 4y agoSo, was the true cause of the problem ever published?
- zamadatix 4y agoI think Roku just issued a patch, no fancy blog post detailing the low level bits or anything. That said it wouldn't be anything more than "crappy protocol parser" just not because it conflicts with the signing key like the joke goes. (also I think it may have actually been a different port number).
- bombcar 4y agoThe amount of “news” reporting that is simply reporting that something was said on Twitter or Reddit is getting out of co trol.
- pessimizer 4y agoThe worst are the articles that consist almost entirely a series of tweets with 3-12 likes each, just repeating a headline that aligns perfectly with the editorial slant of the outlet.
- bombcar 4y agoIt’s bad enough when it’s an ad (the “Bob on Twitter says JIRA sucks” seems a common ad these days) but the laziness to make that actual reporting? Or perhaps reporting has been in decline for decades and were just finally seeing it.
- rtb 4y agoPretty weird "joke" or "a slightly funny hypothetical". It's a plausible but false explanation for an event people were trying to understand, posted to a programming forum. It feels more like disinformation to me. I think it was a bit unethical to not mark it as fictional.
- mypastself 4y agoIt does feel more like a hoax/prank than a joke, but I’m not sure I’d call /r/programmerhumor a “programming forum”.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bastawhiz 4y agoThis has been a problem for a long time. Almost ten years ago, I maintained a joke Twitter inspired by the Atherton police blotter: @mvpoliceblotter. It was just silly nonsense, until one of the tweets about someone walking into and breaking a store window while watching YouTube on their Google Glass got retweeted by an ABC 7 reporter. SJ Mercury wrote a story (later retracted). It got a ton of attention, even though your can't even watch YouTube on a Google Glass. There was no broken window. The was zero evidence except for two sentences on Twitter. Nobody did any fact checking whatsoever. It's not a new problem, but it definitely feels like it's gotten worse.
- chrisseaton 4y agoDo you feel responsible for generating misinformation? You say there was zero evidence behind the article, but the evidence was your Tweet, and it was really your Tweet that had zero evidence behind it.
- bastawhiz 4y agoAbsolutely not. Should The Onion be considered fake news? It was a parody account, which was labeled as such. Journalists who can't even be bothered to tap through to the profile don't get my sympathy.
- chrisseaton 4y agoI kind of think that in the mess we’re in ‘it was just a prank bro’ doesn’t cut it any more as an excuse for something that causes harm. But maybe that’s extremist of me.
- derekp7 4y agoYes, it is extremely extremist to call for canceling all works of fiction.
- dzikimarian 4y ago
- mc4ndr3 4y agoIs there no registry of common network ports, protocols, and packet leading bytes? Similar to mimetypes...
- kbenson 4y agoPoe's law is in full effect, so I'll just leave this here. https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zamadatix 4y ago> Is there no registry of common network ports, protocols Ethernet protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/ieee-802-numbers/ieee-802-numbers.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/ieee-802-numbers/ieee-802-n... IP protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-numbers.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-n... Transport protocol ports: https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/... > and packet leading bytes No registry for this past the transport layer, standard protocols will tell you in their standards though. That said I don't think having a registry solves the problem you're implying it does, there are only 65k ports but >65k protocols wanting to use ports so dealing with overlap is a requirement if things want to operate at that layer. Not to mention it's better practice to handle invalid data gracefully anyways.
- femto113 4y agoOn *nix systems there's a file (usually /etc/services) that maps protocol/service names to ports. Back in the 90s I was working as a solutions architect for a Bay Area software company and among other duties I occasionally would help install the software at client sites (think big telcos). One component of the system relied on a service name to identify a port to talk to another component (I think to do a licensing check). For some reason there was no direct way to just specify a port number, so the standard method of installation included editing /etc/services to add the mapping. Editing that file requires root permissions, which at most customers meant I had to get a sysadmin to actually do that step, but it's a simple text file (much like /etc/hosts) so it only takes them a minute to do it once I could get their attention. At one customer I ran into a sysadmin who simply refused, and said if we wanted to be in /etc/services we needed to get the IANA to allocate us a port and then we needed to get the Unix vendor (I think Sun in this particular case) to update their distribution. If even possible this process would take months at best. After wasting almost $20,000 of my time on this (what the client paid my employer, not what I got paid sadly) someone in the org finally arranged for that one particular machine to no longer be that sysadmin's responsibility, and found someone else to make the edit. His final passive aggressive act was to change the motd of that machine to something like "This machine is not managed by the sysadmin team and should not be used for any business critical operations".
- pvg 4y agoThe crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that the original 'explanation' was posted in /r/ProgrammerHumor so it said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of people's senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a number of commenters very invested in the notion that it wasn't really a joke. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566921
- mdoms 4y agoI don't think something presented as fact in the comments to a joke is always going to be taken as a joke. Lots of people post their (supposedly) factual war stories in the comments of The Daily WTF and similar websites.
- pvg 4y agoRight but this is called 'programmer humor'. Plus it's obviously not serious if you think about it for more than 60 seconds.
- mdoms 4y agoI just took a very quick look at the subreddit (absolutely awful stuff BTW, who finds this crap funny?) and already found 2 instances of people sharing "real" stories in the comments to joke posts. Should both of these be taken as jokes? They are not presented as such. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0elnq/comment/i45dvh8/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0elnq/com... > I completely forget the example problem we were doing, but back when I was learning C, we were given sample code to fix. Everything was perfectly formatted, and the program ran without issue like be 99% of the time, but every once in a while, it’d give a totally incorrect value, or throw an error, and it was to teach us all about concurrency and race conditions and how even when we know we have done everything right, there might be something wrong that takes a deeper understanding to idntify. My professor was awesome. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0ibli/comment/i46vaik/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0ibli/com... > In my old team, every line above 400 was considered an error. 2000 lines was a cause to put the development on hold until the end of refactoring.
- iso1210 4y agoI read through that and I still wasn't sure if he was being serious or not.
- bagels 4y agoSame. I didn't see a joke. Were Roku devices rebooting? Was it being caused by a Pokemon game? No idea what is going on here.
- zamadatix 4y agoThe part in "the joke" contains the joke, all of the other sections are not. Pokemon Sword/Shield was really causing Roku devices to boot until Roku issued a patch as the "background" section details. The joke was this involved a collision with some signed Roku command and that's the fluke our universe gets over a planet of Justin Timberlake clones. It's not a "2 guys and a priest walk into the bar" type joke, it was on /r/programminghumor after all.
- iso1210 4y agoSo the media circus was about a real bug? Sounds like a legitimate media story.
- SixDouble5321 4y agoIt's a very loose interpretation of the word joke. It was more of an apocryphal explanation for a Roku bug.
- jrochkind1 4y agoThe lesson is mainly that few news sources these days do anything like fact checking, with bothering to care at all if what they are reporting may be true or not. If you can accidentally plant a false, story imagine doing so intentionally. Or just imagine all the things you see shared on social media that didn't start from a made-up story exactly, but still get important things wrong just through the game of telephone and becaues media outlets don't bother trying to ensure they mostly report true things. We really do live in a post-fact society.
- blowski 4y agoI don’t know how true that is. I look at old news from the Victorian era and there was a lot of bullshit then too. The difference now is the distributed nature of both the bullshit generation and fact-checking.
- Nasrudith 4y agoYep. People confuse detection related correlations with causation all of the time.
- sacrosancty 4y agoIt doesn't even matter. The facts of a news story aren't very relevant to the opinions people form. Instead, news largely leads people to get emotional hostile feelings about outgroups. It doesn't matter if mother Theresa saved a dying beggar or a terrorist bombed a hospital. Whatever the story, and whatever the facts, people will go away hating whoever the news hijacked their minds into hating. If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
- jrochkind1 4y agoYou're suggesting the right way to deal with the "real problem" of hate-inducing news is... to be unconcerned with whether facts are true? Really? Like, being concerned about whether facts are true in an article about a software bug harms your ability to deal with this real problem? What's the way you recommend to handle this problem, that is based on being unconcerned with whether facts are true? I'm not totally sure it's relevant to this particular story, but now I'm curious, are you suggesting this story about a joke bug report is an example of that real problem of hate-inducing news? (I mean, it might be).
- possiblydrunk 4y agoSense of humor is replaced by sensitivity-derived outrage.
- ack210 4y agoSomething similar seemed to happen recently during the NCAA tournament, when the St Peters Peacocks won a major upset over Purdue on March 25. News outlets from NBC to the WSJ all reported that March 25 was "National Peacock Day", and a Google search for "When is national peacock day" seems to confirm this with a knowledge panel. If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first reference to it other than a Draft Kings blog post was a Peacock Day event being held at the LA Arboretum years back. Obviously such a trivial story has no real impact on the world, but it was eye-opening to see how a "fact" could essentially be brought to life out of nowhere.
- mdoms 4y agoThis kind of thing is why I think Google's answers (not search results, the snippets with big bolded answers to questions) are dangerous. They're automatically generated from some pretty naive parsing of text from sources of dubious quality. I have found several pretty serious errors in these snippets when Googling for gardening advice.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoThis all reminds me of Stephen Colbert having a field day with "truthiness" already 17 (!) years ago. And "wikiality", when the population of elephants suddenly tripled thanks to his Wikipedia-editing efforts. (And much later, "Trumpiness".)
- zamadatix 4y agoI think the thing Google is falsely keying in on is actualy "Everyday Angels: national Day Journal" by Linda Finstad published in late 2020. She made a Pinterest post about the March 25th page being national peacock day which is what Google picked up which someone somehow noticed resulting in the coverage. Of course nationally peacock day isn't actually a thing, even in Canada where Linda seems to be from, so I wonder where she got the idea! She has a website with a contact form so I sent her a short backstory on how I came to be contacting her and asked if she knew where she got March 25th as national peacock day. At the very least she'll probably be amused.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ThrustVectoring 4y agoSpeaking of unique identifiers: when I was like 13, my parents bought new ethernet cards so that all the kids would have their own computer. Two adjacent ones on the shelf that happened to have the same MAC address. Not sure how they figured it out (probably just looking for anything wrong and noticing the MAC addresses were identical), but the network behavior was interesting. Basically if you mashed F5 on a webpage the router would think you were the proper owner of all the network traffic for both computers, and it would disconnect your sibling from whatever they were playing at the time.
- zamadatix 4y agoThe company was just lazy and/or cheap as MACs aren't even supposed to be randomly assigned or hard to come by. You can get a block of 16,777,216 globally unique MACs for a one time fee, currently just $3,180 dollars or 1/50th a penny per MAC. Duplicate MACs were (well, still are) a huge problem in places with multiple on prem VM pods with shared networks. It's one of those things that seems automatically handled until you realize it's not ALL automatically handled for you.
- Tronno 4y agoTruth and fiction are indistinguishable on social media. The medium itself encourages this. Falsehood is built-in and inseparable. Of course "journalists" sometimes spread "stories" based on random social media posts. What is really interesting is that the posts were there first, and the internet amplifies them on its own. To any reader who's not in on it, the original comment about the Roku crashes sounds plausible enough by itself. It is then upvoted organically to a broader audience. The author didn't write misinformation for ad views, sponsorships, or even Reddit karma. He just released it for his own pleasure, as an "obvious" joke. Millions of similarly motivated posts are being blasted out every minute, with content such as: memes with humorous but false descriptions of the content, selfies painting false pictures of people's lives, anecdotes with implied messages, creative writing of what-if scenarios or "head canon", compelling but baseless theories about complex topics, true statements cherry-picked to make false points, etc. These are created not for sales, propaganda, or even internet points, but simply to share half-formed idle thoughts. That is: jokes, guesses, hot takes, wishful fantasy. It may be obvious bullshit to the authors, but the medium presents it all as fact. None of us are capable of passing careful judgement on the sheer volume of content, so most is absorbed at face value. This environment is also a fertile breeding ground for deliberate, malicious misinformation, but that's beside the point. Ultimately, the only solutions are to stop consuming social media altogether, or accept that falsehood is now inseparable from actual facts.
- ThunderSizzle 4y agoWhile social media has caused muxh more people to spread misinformation farther and faster, more traditional mediums aren't free from misinformation. Your solution of stopping to consume social media doesn't work, as other mediums have been just as bad at being unbiased truthseekers.
- WalterBright 4y agoAn April Fools Day prank played by Seattle's local satire show, Almost Live, was repeated as actual news. This is despite the gag had "April Fools Day" text overlaying the joke. https://www.king5.com/article/features/the-april-fools-day-prank-that-sent-seattle-into-a-panic/281-114304789 https://www.king5.com/article/features/the-april-fools-day-p... Looks like KING5 removed the video again. Sigh.
- userbinator 4y agoThis article just makes me more curious to know what the truth was.
- bitwize 4y agoDon't joke too hard on the internet. 4chan once decided to promote the idea that the "a-ok sign" (making a circle with your thumb and finger) is a white supremacist coded symbol, basically as a test of how easily gulled the press is about such issues. Well, the press got gulled, and today displaying the symbol can get you fired, or banned from certain locations. The ADL considers it a hate symbol.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- snakke 4y agoWhile it is true that it started as a 4-chan hoax, and the ADL considers it a hate symbol, that's not the entire story. The page of the ADL[0] explicitly mention that in the vast majority of cases it just means ok. Much like how 14 and 88 are perfectly normal numbers, but when someone uses a personalised numberplate Adolf1488 they probably didn't choose those numbers at random. It's also that symbols and gestures evolve in a social context, people, language, customs and culture changes. It's not unthinkable for symbols to get a worse connotation over time because a group used them a lot. So the question then becomes, do actual white supremacists consistently use the symbol as a way to identify themselves? Eh, I don't think that's the case anymore or in meaningful quantities. But after the populairty of the hoax white supremacists did co-opt it for a while. Is it still completely meaningless if a racist mass-murderer flashes the symbol? So yeah, indeed it started as a hoax, but the implication that the ADL only included it because they were somehow gulled by a hoax is incorrect. (As an aside, the OK-gesture is quite culturally different and dependent on context in the first place. Had a mate who while drunk almost started a fight with some Turkish dudes by flashing it, since apparently it mimics the asshole and basically means "you're an asshole". And in France it apparently means that you're a zero, since it looks like a zero.) [0]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-hand-gesture https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...
- irisman 4y agoShow a poll that people don't associate it like how it's always been
- phendrenad2 4y agoThis is validating my decision to mute tech twitter hype accounts like TylerGlaiel and SwiftOnSoftware many months ago.
- xwdv 4y agoThis joke got me thinking, is there a way to calculate the number of times events of a certain improbability could have possibly occurred in the current time the universe has existed? What do the odds look like for an event so improbable it could have possibly only occurred once so far??
- Dylan16807 4y ago> If someone reports about the most improbable thing in the universe happening, then you ought to check on sources. Except that part was clearly an exaggeration and it's very easy for a few bytes to overlap, or for many many byte sequences to cause a reboot. Even if the post wasn't meant to be plausible, it is a plausible off-the-cuff explanation, and I wish the author would realize that before making criticisms like this.
- pvg 4y agoYou're picking one little detail that might in some sort of circumstances be plausible from a story in which almost all of the details are implausible or nonsensical after the first cursory glance. That's a very... ineffective way to assess plausibility.
- Dylan16807 4y agoWhat parts are implausible? The port is obviously fine. Lan communication between rokus makes sense. And it might have updates or other things, but it's just a reboot so that doesn't even matter. "exact same bytes" sounds harder than it is. Then a silly probability joke. And that's about it for the original post, it was only a couple sentences. It's entirely believable as someone who mostly knows what the problem is, but doesn't have a perfect understanding, tossing it into a quick reddit post.
- pvg 4y agoMost of it is implausible. Are fleets of 100s of Rokus used in commercial settings? A quick google suggests no. Do fleets of commercial network devices typically implement some weird peer-to-peer leader election thing to... save some bandwidth on updates? Also no, centralized management service/console is both way easier to implement and a desirable feature to boot. Chances are that's how device fleets are managed in places you've worked. Then what is 'a quarter mil in CDN fees'? Once? Per update? Per month or year? Oddly specific details like this are often a hallmark of a tall tale and this one is both oddly specific and oddly nonsensical. We also have to believe a billion dollar revenue company did this much more convoluted, complicated and highly atypical thing to save $250k and then just left it completely vulnerable to trivial replay attacks. Could one or some of these things, plausibly, happen? Maybe. Taken together, though, it's a house of cards and every card is a joker.
- at_a_remove 4y agoThis is called the Woozle Effect. Some of the things you believe may even be Woozles.
- c3534l 4y agoI've learned long ago: always read the original source material. Its amazing how, not just a game of telephone develops, but groupthink when people are taking their cues from others instead of their own experiences. A lot of people will even read the original source and then force it to mean what some smarter dude or "everyone" already knows. Meaning is so rapidly lost when its second-hand.
- numlock86 4y agoIt's not just news articles. We've come to a point where such jokes manipulate entire generations and create social movements ...
- Asooka 4y agoA similar thing that's been bothering me is the meme about "The difference between poisonous and venomous is if you eat it and you die, it's poisonous, if it bites you and you die, it's venomous", with endless discussions about how it's wrong to call snakes poisonous. In reality, if you check the dictionary, poison is "any harmful substance", while venom is "a poison synthesized by an animal, usually for hunting or self-defence". The etymology of the words kind of sort of supports the meme, but I never managed to find historical evidence of the difference in meaning being as outlined. Both come from Latin, so it's not the case like cow vs beef where the Germanic word gets a new meaning because the language adopts a French word alongside it. Additionally no other European language makes that distinction and it's extremely rare for a concept to exist only in English. I've tried to hunt down where this confusion started and it seems to be some meme English teachers repeat, like "i before e except after c". Australians in particular are very invested in it.
- cxr 4y agoBlindly repeating the misinformed comment "it's not assault, it's battery" is virtually guaranteed to garner dozens of upvotes from the types of people who live for that kind of pedantry (which is, on Reddit, a lot).