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.
A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
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Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#12This 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.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#13Man if this is a joke then my whole software career is a comedy
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#14Almost 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
#15Pretty 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.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#16Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#17So, was the true cause of the problem ever published?
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#18There 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.
> 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
#19Is there no registry of common network ports, protocols, and packet leading bytes? Similar to mimetypes...
https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...