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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

#111

Post by zamadatix »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #99

Speaking 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 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.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#112

Post by WalterBright »

An 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-p...

Looks like KING5 removed the video again. Sigh.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#113

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#115

Post by can16358p »

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…

Some similar thing happened to be once: years ago I made a fun fake image, photoshopping some text into a place in a very realistic manner, and posted to Facebook (which was popular those times). It was in one of my albums, me and a few friends had a laugh, then we've forgotten about it, as usual.

Then a few years later I started seeing the image I created as "real" in various forums to legitimate publishers and major newspaper websites. Everyone believed in the image, taking it as a fact (which is fair as it looked legitimate and was posted from a "reputable" source), commented under it with various levels of confusion.

I still Google that time to time to giggle a bit, but it also shows how Internet people tend to copy stuff from random places (e.g. My Facebook album) and post in various places and things go viral exponentially without almost anyone questioning it.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#116

Post by sofixa »

politelemon wrote: post #23
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 ev…

In the absence of a more credible theory, many people roll with that explanation. It does kind of make sense.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#117

Post by thaumasiotes »

Nition wrote: post #95
politelemon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

Another similar one was the "Nuclear Gandhi" thing[1]. Just believable enough for programmers to think it must be true. My theory on Windows 10 would be wanting version number parity with Mac OS. Don't make a news story out of this though. Evidence: - Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox 360 instead of calling it Xbox 2. "360" cleverly aligned it with both competing consoles of the same generation, the PlayStat…

> Microsoft implied that they might stay on Windows 10 indefinitely[2].

Sure, "implied" in the sense that the article quotes a spokesman saying "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows".

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#118

Post by dzikimarian »

derekp7 wrote: post #43
chrisseaton wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it is extremely extremist to call for canceling all works of fiction.

Most works of fiction is labeled as such. I don't see anything against them in this comment.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#119

Post by dzikimarian »

bitcharmer wrote: post #54
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.

> Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation? This is a bizarre stance to take. Social media was always filled with false information. It's entirely on news outlets to verify what they decide to publish.

Why should it be socially acceptable to generate misinformation? It's in the end harmful for everyone. (I don't mean obvious parody and fiction, clearly labeled as such).

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#120

Post by bitwize »

Don'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.

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