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A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

kiwiziti.com

11–20 of 177 posts

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#11
post #7

Pretty 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.

It does feel more like a hoax/prank than a joke, but I’m not sure I’d call /r/programmerhumor a “programming forum”.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#12
post #8

This 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.

And his link to the Google collision was not an accidental collision, like the rest of his ramblings were discussing.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#14
This 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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#15
post #7

Pretty 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.

[deleted]

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#17

So, was the true cause of the problem ever published?

I 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).

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#18
post #3

There 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.

The 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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#20
The 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

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