5 ms·

The clock is fully intended to accept visitors, if you check out the site longnow.org/clock/ you'll see there are certain "features" for people visiting the clo

The clock is fully intended to accept visitors, if you check out the site longnow.org/clock/ you'll see there are certain "features" for people visiting the clock. The 4chan CTF was truly epic and hilarious though.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> The 4chan CTF was truly epic and hilarious though. I looked up the story expecting "epic and hilarious", and got "/pol/ Neo-Nazis harass a bunch of people for not liking Trump and steal an anti-Trump flag. But look how clever they were about stealing it!" Is there some other, similar story that I'm missing?
- y4mi 9y ago
  It was a video stream with only the flag and the sky visible. You have to admit, the actual achievement is quite impressive. Despite their ... Dubious intent.
  - kombucha2 9y ago
    I don't think it's all that amazing they just used some pretty standard tools/techniqies and available info..some learned about parallax in high school. I ask: how many of them id'd the Tsarnaev brothers??
    - kombucha2 9y ago
      Edit: *someone. either way- to those downvoting me: Please tell me how it's even remotely novel what they did?
      - kombucha2 9y ago
        Here's what they did: 1. watched live streams of the flag 2. studyied the flight patterns and contrails of the airplanes passing overhead 3. mapped out what they saw and took their findings to flight radars to try and pinpoint a general area. 4. Using the knowledge gleaned from the flight patterns they found that the location was near Greeneville, Tennessee 5. users studied the star patterns and their movements and with that, plus a tweet that Labeouf sent out in a Tennessee diner, the trolls were able to narrow the area even further—to a small patch of land between a house and a river. 6. Drove around and honked their car horn until picked up by the live stream This is not hard to do and hardly novel. Also done using all public information and the target used poor opsec.
        grzm 9y ago
        Personally, I think it's pretty cool, for pretty much all of the reasons you list. Clearly it's not to you, and that's okay. I suspect you were down voted perhaps because your comment comes off the same way as when someone comes up with a new app or service and someone else says "oh, I could whip that up in a weekend", particularly as you didn't provide any support for it initially. The fact that someone put all of these things together to solve the problem in and of itself makes it interesting to me. A pretty successful hack, in my opinion.
        kombucha2 9y ago
        Fair enough. The lengths they went to in order to accomplish the task despite its mundanity is, admittedly, cool. Maybe I should've said their methods weren't interesting or novel. Thanks for clarifying.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Sure, but "reprehensible though technically impressive" is a far cry from "epic and hilarious."
    - cypherpunks01 9y ago
      Yeah, I didn't mean to elevate the action in that way - I struggled in finding the words to convey the amount of work put into the task but at the same time explaining the stupidity surrounding it. Looking back I think technically impressive while highly antisocial and pathological would have made better descriptions.
- vim_wannabe 9y ago
  A bunch of people saw an A-list celebrity do a publicity stunt and wanted to have fun with it. As far as the "Nazis!" claim goes you need to be able to read between the lines if you want to read an imageboard as trollish as 4chan. And if you want to see who really is behind the posts you can look up the first "He will not divide us" event at a New York museum. Spoiler alert: It's not nazis. ;)
  - jquery 9y ago
    4chan doesn’t have natural defenses against “normie” invaders that other sites have (moderation, identity), so it developed a potent meta-defense. Anyone who takes the site literally will find themselves extremely confused and upset like your parent post. In the old days it used to be gore posting to make newbies flee. It’s defenses are constantly evolving as paid online agitators try to control the message there (as they have successfully done on other more straightforward platforms that limit free speech yet supposedly have far more resources to prevent shilling). Turns out free speech is very powerful indeed.
    - simias 9y ago
      That's a romantic way to look at it I suppose. As somebody on 4chan for a little more than a decade now I'd say that it slowly moved from an anarcho-libertarian community who loved gratuitous provocation to an alt-right echo chamber, at least as far as the big boards are concerned. "Hitler did nothing wrong" went from a provocative joke to a political stamement. 4chan is the embodiment of "any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company". That puts modern 4chan in the somewhat ironic position of being actually on the side of the American government for the most part something I couldn't really imagine 2007 ever endorsing, regardless of the who's in charge.
      - Kattywumpus 9y ago
        > "Hitler did nothing wrong" went from a provocative joke to a political statement. I'm sort of fascinated by the phenomenon, which I think of as "LOLgical argument". You start off with a joke where the humor is based in an extreme and socially transgressive statement. It could be "Hitler did nothing wrong," or "The Earth is flat," or any number of similarly absurd ideas. The original users are trolls who privately do not actually believe what they are saying, but enjoy "rustling jimmies" and the increased status their daring obtains. But as more members of the community join in, the original statement loses its edge, and even more transgressive poses are needed to continue the joke. Often this means doubling-down, and telling others that you do indeed believe the thing that they had, at some level, still been treating as a punchline. This meta-joke involves finding "proof" that the shocking thing you said before was actually true, and demonstrating your commitment, by creating memes and other "evidence"-based arguments for it. In doing so, you begin to create a community that becomes indistinguishable from a community that actually believes the original statement. As these arguments pile up, even trolls who started off disbelieving their original statement find themselves surrounded by "evidence" they were right all along. There is a swell of camaraderie as those who were bold enough to question the official version of reality begin to support each other. The community pressure, the ego boost of having discovered some secret suppressed knowledge, and the psychological difficulty of abandoning their previous position all contribute to the complete conversion of a troll into an earnest believer. I find this fascinating because it works in such opposition to the ways we normally talk about convincing people of new ideas. It's not the logic of the argument here that leads people to a new conclusion but rather the logic of the joke, the idea that the funniest punchline to an absurd joke is to actually believe it. When enough individuals in a community feel that way, they can actually end up convincing each other. So it's not so much that the community becomes "flooded by actual idiots" as it is the original trolls who become believers themselves. Vonnegut once wrote, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." He was probably more right here than he knew.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

> The 4chan CTF was truly epic and hilarious though. I looked up the story expecting "epic and hilarious", and got "/pol/ Neo-Nazis harass a bunch of people for not liking Trump and steal an anti-Trump flag. But look how clever they were about stealing it!" Is there some other, similar story that I'm missing?

y4mi 9y ago
It was a video stream with only the flag and the sky visible. You have to admit, the actual achievement is quite impressive. Despite their ... Dubious intent.
- kombucha2 9y ago
  I don't think it's all that amazing they just used some pretty standard tools/techniqies and available info..some learned about parallax in high school. I ask: how many of them id'd the Tsarnaev brothers??
  - kombucha2 9y ago
    Edit: *someone. either way- to those downvoting me: Please tell me how it's even remotely novel what they did?
    - kombucha2 9y ago
      Here's what they did: 1. watched live streams of the flag 2. studyied the flight patterns and contrails of the airplanes passing overhead 3. mapped out what they saw and took their findings to flight radars to try and pinpoint a general area. 4. Using the knowledge gleaned from the flight patterns they found that the location was near Greeneville, Tennessee 5. users studied the star patterns and their movements and with that, plus a tweet that Labeouf sent out in a Tennessee diner, the trolls were able to narrow the area even further—to a small patch of land between a house and a river. 6. Drove around and honked their car horn until picked up by the live stream This is not hard to do and hardly novel. Also done using all public information and the target used poor opsec.
      - grzm 9y ago
        Personally, I think it's pretty cool, for pretty much all of the reasons you list. Clearly it's not to you, and that's okay. I suspect you were down voted perhaps because your comment comes off the same way as when someone comes up with a new app or service and someone else says "oh, I could whip that up in a weekend", particularly as you didn't provide any support for it initially. The fact that someone put all of these things together to solve the problem in and of itself makes it interesting to me. A pretty successful hack, in my opinion.
        kombucha2 9y ago
        Fair enough. The lengths they went to in order to accomplish the task despite its mundanity is, admittedly, cool. Maybe I should've said their methods weren't interesting or novel. Thanks for clarifying.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Sure, but "reprehensible though technically impressive" is a far cry from "epic and hilarious."
  - cypherpunks01 9y ago
    Yeah, I didn't mean to elevate the action in that way - I struggled in finding the words to convey the amount of work put into the task but at the same time explaining the stupidity surrounding it. Looking back I think technically impressive while highly antisocial and pathological would have made better descriptions.
vim_wannabe 9y ago
A bunch of people saw an A-list celebrity do a publicity stunt and wanted to have fun with it. As far as the "Nazis!" claim goes you need to be able to read between the lines if you want to read an imageboard as trollish as 4chan. And if you want to see who really is behind the posts you can look up the first "He will not divide us" event at a New York museum. Spoiler alert: It's not nazis. ;)
- jquery 9y ago
  4chan doesn’t have natural defenses against “normie” invaders that other sites have (moderation, identity), so it developed a potent meta-defense. Anyone who takes the site literally will find themselves extremely confused and upset like your parent post. In the old days it used to be gore posting to make newbies flee. It’s defenses are constantly evolving as paid online agitators try to control the message there (as they have successfully done on other more straightforward platforms that limit free speech yet supposedly have far more resources to prevent shilling). Turns out free speech is very powerful indeed.
  - simias 9y ago
    That's a romantic way to look at it I suppose. As somebody on 4chan for a little more than a decade now I'd say that it slowly moved from an anarcho-libertarian community who loved gratuitous provocation to an alt-right echo chamber, at least as far as the big boards are concerned. "Hitler did nothing wrong" went from a provocative joke to a political stamement. 4chan is the embodiment of "any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company". That puts modern 4chan in the somewhat ironic position of being actually on the side of the American government for the most part something I couldn't really imagine 2007 ever endorsing, regardless of the who's in charge.
    - Kattywumpus 9y ago
      > "Hitler did nothing wrong" went from a provocative joke to a political statement. I'm sort of fascinated by the phenomenon, which I think of as "LOLgical argument". You start off with a joke where the humor is based in an extreme and socially transgressive statement. It could be "Hitler did nothing wrong," or "The Earth is flat," or any number of similarly absurd ideas. The original users are trolls who privately do not actually believe what they are saying, but enjoy "rustling jimmies" and the increased status their daring obtains. But as more members of the community join in, the original statement loses its edge, and even more transgressive poses are needed to continue the joke. Often this means doubling-down, and telling others that you do indeed believe the thing that they had, at some level, still been treating as a punchline. This meta-joke involves finding "proof" that the shocking thing you said before was actually true, and demonstrating your commitment, by creating memes and other "evidence"-based arguments for it. In doing so, you begin to create a community that becomes indistinguishable from a community that actually believes the original statement. As these arguments pile up, even trolls who started off disbelieving their original statement find themselves surrounded by "evidence" they were right all along. There is a swell of camaraderie as those who were bold enough to question the official version of reality begin to support each other. The community pressure, the ego boost of having discovered some secret suppressed knowledge, and the psychological difficulty of abandoning their previous position all contribute to the complete conversion of a troll into an earnest believer. I find this fascinating because it works in such opposition to the ways we normally talk about convincing people of new ideas. It's not the logic of the argument here that leads people to a new conclusion but rather the logic of the joke, the idea that the funniest punchline to an absurd joke is to actually believe it. When enough individuals in a community feel that way, they can actually end up convincing each other. So it's not so much that the community becomes "flooded by actual idiots" as it is the original trolls who become believers themselves. Vonnegut once wrote, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." He was probably more right here than he knew.