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A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

kiwiziti.com

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Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#21

Post by jameshart »

TheDudeMan wrote: post #12
mdoms wrote: 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.

Right - 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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#22

Post by chrisseaton »

bastawhiz wrote: post #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…

Do 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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#23

Post by politelemon »

bastawhiz wrote: post #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…

There's a popular myth that Windows 10 was named so because there's tons of proprietary code checking for '95' and '98' by looking for just the '9', and that would have caused applications to break.

There was no evidence of this except the Reddit comment by a user pretending to work at MS - their post history very quickly showed that was a lie. But that was taken at face value and it become part of news cycles and eventually a commonly repeated statement.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#24

Post by pvg »

mjard wrote: 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.

What lesson is the author supposed to learn here? Don't post jokes on a joke subreddit?

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#26

Post by bastawhiz »

chrisseaton wrote: post #22
bastawhiz wrote: post #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…

Do 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.

Absolutely 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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#27

Post by zamadatix »

mc4ndr3 wrote: post #16

Is there no registry of common network ports, protocols, and packet leading bytes? Similar to mimetypes...

> Is there no registry of common network ports, protocols

Ethernet protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/ieee-802-numbers/ieee-802-n...

IP protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-n...

Transport protocol ports: 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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#28

Post by jrochkind1 »

The 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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#29

Post by mjard »

JadeNB wrote: post #18
mjard wrote: 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.

It'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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#30

Post by chrisseaton »

bastawhiz wrote: post #26
chrisseaton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do 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.

Absolutely 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.

I 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.
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